doing him a favour here, letting him stay. It’s my flat, after all.’ She tossed her hair back. ‘Do you want a hand moving in?’
HEADING TOWARDS MIDNIGHT, and the landing and stairs were customarily dark as Alex propelled his latest evening companion towards the top flat—Name: Susie; Age: Twenty-six; Occupation: Medical Secretary; Favourite Drink: Strawberry Daiquiri … whatever the hell that was. He’d need to ask Isaac—although he’d bought a few this evening.
He opened the front door and ushered Susie down the dimly lit hallway to his bedroom. The rest of the flat was quiet. Poppy could sleep for England and Isaac was still out of the country. This last week after his encounter with the quiet freak downstairs, Alex had found himself grudgingly attempting to keep the noise down and so he skipped his usual stop-off in the kitchen for a nightcap. Not that it had anything to do with any personal regard for Lara Connor, of course, although he had to admit to a nod of admiration for her business drive. It was more a desire to keep her off his back and live an easy life. And after the embarrassment of sleeping the day away in her flat, he’d done his best to avoid bumping into her again. To that end, he’d also shifted his bed away from the wall a little. Apparently it had worked, since he hadn’t heard a word from her since.
As he opened his bedroom door it was the scent that hit him first. It assaulted him even before he flipped the light switch and it put him immediately on edge. Sweet floral notes that took him right back to the rose garden at his family home in the country. The memory wasn’t a particularly welcome one. Then again there were precious few childhood memories that were. Susie hung on to his arm and stifled a tipsy giggle, which trailed away as light flooded the room.
‘This is your room?’ Her voice registered shocked disgust, and the fun tone was completely gone, as if he’d lobbed a jug of cold water over her for perfect instant sobriety. She let go of his arm. ‘Oh, my God, you live with someone,’ she wailed. ‘I knew it was too good to be true. Where is she—out somewhere? Working?’
The perfect order by which he’d lived his life since he was just a small kid at boarding school, reinforced first by the cadets and then by the army, had been completely in evidence when he’d left the flat some six hours ago for his usual Friday night out. A place for everything and everything squarely in its place. In his absence the room had been inexplicably turned into what looked like a bordello. Clothes racks full of silk and satin nightwear stood alongside the wall; the floor space to one side of the room was stacked with baskets of frilly knickers and lacy bras; there was an overflowing box full of bars of ladies’ French soap from which the cloying girly smell was emanating and, most unbelievably, there was a padded clothes hanger over the door of his wardrobe on which hung a long and flowing peacock-blue silk dressing-gown thing trimmed with matching marabou feathers. He felt as if he’d stumbled into some insane dream world.
He suddenly remembered Susie standing next to him and shook his head lightly as if to clear it.
‘I’m not with anyone,’ he said. ‘I’m single.’
Her tone now shifted to sickened.
‘You mean this stuff is yours? I should have listened to my friends, all those warnings about one-night stands and weirdos. Where’s my phone?’ She opened her handbag and began to paw through it. ‘What are you, some kind of cross-dresser?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, exasperated. ‘For Pete’s sake, do I look like I might enjoy wearing women’s clothing?’
‘They never do,’ she said, pulling out her phone and scrolling through it. ‘I’ve watched enough reality TV to know that the ones to watch out for are the masculine types. And they never choose the kind of clothes that blend in either, oh, no. It’s always a bloody prom dress.’ She pointed an emphatic finger at him. ‘Or a silk negligee.’
The situation was careering way out of control. He held up placating hands.
‘There’s obviously been some kind of a mix-up,’ he said.
‘Too right there has.’ She turned away from him. ‘Taxi, please,’ she snapped into the phone. ‘I’ll be waiting outside Ignite, Lancaster Road, Notting Hill.’
‘It’s probably something to do with my sister,’ he called after her as she marched back down the hallway to the front door.
‘Yeah, yeah. I bet that’s what they all say!’ she yelled back over her shoulder.
He heard her high-heeled shoes clattering down the stairs as she made a swift exit. He turned back to his room, took in the clutter of girly clothing and breathed in the head-reeling scent of roses.
He’d had enough trouble sleeping when the room was the epitome of calm and orderliness. How the hell was he meant to manage now?
Lara woke to the muffled banging of knuckles on a door and floundered for a moment to get her bearings in the dark. She felt vaguely closed in.
It came slowly back to her overtired brain.
Flooded studio. Damaged stock. Poppy’s boxroom.
The knocking continued and she wondered vaguely if it was the front door. Sex-god Alex must have locked himself out again. There was a hint of self-righteous satisfaction in that thought, especially after what she’d learned this afternoon from the emergency plumber who’d investigated the root cause of her flooded flat. A ten-minute conversation had made it clear the flood problem went a lot deeper than a need for a new washer. The old fire station might have had a modern makeover when it was converted to flats but it turned out the glossy living space papered over some serious cracks in the original pipe network. It all made perfect sense now. The pipes servicing her flat were clearly linked to those above and below, hence the insane racket from Alex’s bedroom activities travelling down so effectively to her bedroom underneath.
In fact, according to the plumber, the pipework showed signs of recent stress—clearly this was what had caused the plumbing to give up the ghost. So not only was her lack of sleep down to Poppy’s sex-crazed brother, but now the flooding of her flat could be attributed to him too. He was fast becoming her least favourite person and therefore any initial guilt she might have felt about imposing on him by using his bedroom to store her stuff had been very easily suppressed.
The brief temptation to just let him knock all night was trumped by the desire to tell him exactly what she thought of his nocturnal activities, the damage of which had now surpassed simple noise pollution. She threw the covers back and grabbed her robe from the back of the door.
Turned out the knocking was coming from inside the flat. She’d been right about one thing though: it was Alex again.
‘Is no disruption too inconsiderate for you?’ she snapped. He jumped and turned to look at her. She had a mad sense of déjà vu at the sight of him with upraised knuckles hammering on Poppy’s bedroom door. Except that this time he was fully dressed. The dark blue shirt made his eyes look almost slate in the dim hallway light and her stomach gave an unexpected flip.
The ability to speak momentarily disappeared because it felt as if his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Lara’s soft blond hair lay in messy bed-head waves over her shoulders. She wore a pink silk dressing gown, with wide sleeves, that ended a good couple of inches above her knees. His eyes dipped to her legs before he could stop them. The slight sheen of the silk against her skin seemed to give it a porcelain
