voice was so close to her that for a few seconds Rose didn’t believe that she had actually heard him. He was standing right behind them. She turned around slowly and hoped that she was more composed than she felt. At any rate more composed than Maggie, who had launched into an awkward introduction followed by some stuttering apologies about having to dash, simultaneously backing away from Nick’s unsmiling figure. Rose longed to do the same.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ Attack, she decided, was the best form of defence. ‘Is Lily with you?’
‘No. Should she be?’
‘Why are you here? Sneaking around?’ He had obviously come straight from work and he looked amazing, unfairly sexy considering he had probably spent his day at a desk somewhere. Wherever it was that very rich people spent their days. At the end of a tiring working day, she always seemed to look like something the cat dragged in. Rumpled hair that had spent the day progressively rebelling against clips and elastic bands, lip gloss that had disappeared some time between her morning snack and lunch-time baguette, face that was shiny under the fluorescent lighting.
‘We need to…have a chat about your sister…’
‘Why?’ Panic slammed into her. From experience, whenever someone had said to her that they needed to have a little chat, the little chat had never heralded good news. When she was growing up, Tony and Flora had always preceded their next, big, new adventure with a little chat. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Shall we take this conversation somewhere else?’ He would return to those insults of hers later. For the moment, he would see to it that they leave the bustling confines of her office. He didn’t have to glance around to know that he was attracting some very curious stares and, while this didn’t bother him in the slightest, he suspected it would give her ample ammunition to attack him for disrupting her life.
He wondered what he was doing here. In fact, he wondered how his highly ordered existence had become so embroiled, in such a short space of time, with two sisters whom he had not known from Adam a month ago. The one, yes, he could understand. Lily was beautiful, sweet-natured and helping her had been a balm for him after the annoyance of his last relationship.
But her sister?
‘No. I don’t want to go with you anywhere. Whatever you have to say can be said right here.’ Drugs? Debt? Pregnancy? Lord, what if Lily was pregnant with his child and too embarrassed to break the news herself? Rose tried to remember just how long Nick had been on the scene.
‘Come on.’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
‘Right. In that case, I’ll just stroll out and leave you to stew in your own stubborn stupidity, shall I? You would rather make a point than listen to anything I have to say.’
‘That’s not true. It’s just that I…can’t leave yet. I still have heaps of work to do.’
‘Wearing your coat? With your computer switched off?’
Rose flushed and looked away. The more she argued with the man, the more she sensed a lively interest from the dwindling number of her colleagues still around. ‘Why didn’t Lily come herself? Is she in trouble?’
‘She…just seemed reluctant to tell you…this herself so I volunteered to do it on her behalf…Now, let’s get out of here.’
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