was trying to work enough fur out of her mouth to answer, conscious of his arrested survey of her vodka-touting T-shirt and bilious leggings, when he added, ‘Miss Nora Lang?’
There was a hint of amusement in his tone which rubbed at her raw nerves. ‘Who wants to know?’ she said with uncharacteristic rudeness.
‘These are for you.’
He held up the sheaf of red roses he had been carrying half-concealed at his side, and Nora was startled into feeling a momentary lift of her spirits.
Her mouth began to curve into an involuntary smile. ‘For me? Are you sure?’
‘If you’re Eleanor Lang from apartment 1A.’
‘Yes, that’s me.’ Her elation died and her smile inverted itself. Only one person she knew had any reason to send her flowers. She recoiled as if they were plague-ridden. ‘I don’t want them!’
He seemed taken aback at the heated response. ‘Look—I’m just making a delivery, OK?’
She glared. Any colour would have been unacceptable, but red was rubbing added salt in the wound. They were even more offensive considering that Ryan had never bothered to send her flowers before.
‘Then you can just deliver them right back where they came from,’ she declared, her contempt recharging her dwindling stores of energy. ‘And you can tell that—that snake who sent them that he’s a moron if he thinks he can bribe me with a measly bunch of flowers! He’s never going to get back what he lost. And when this goes public I’m going to make sure that everyone knows how it went down. Maybe people won’t be so quick to trust him in future, if they know his personal morality stinks!’
She stumped up the steps, feeling slightly better for having vented her spleen, even if only at an innocent bystander. The poor guy had looked quite stunned by her outburst. She glanced back as she went into the building and saw him walking back to his van with the rejected roses, cell-phone plastered to his ear…reporting his aborted mission, no doubt, she thought with a bitter sense of satisfaction.
Entering the flat, Nora felt none of her usual welcome sense of homecoming. To her dismay she felt alien in her own environment, tense and resentful of all the signs of Kelly’s occupation—the open fashion magazine left on the couch, the unwashed dishes in the sink, the pile of ironing draped over a chair, the drips of nail varnish on the coffee table. Usually Nora was tolerant of her flatmate’s habitual untidiness, but now her thoughtlessness seemed insultingly close to contempt.
It had been too much to hope for that Kelly had already started to pack up her things, Nora brooded as she switched on the coffee-maker, but surely she must have realised that she would have to move out? Until she did, the atmosphere in the flat would be hideously strained and uncomfortable.
A prowl around showed no evidence that Ryan had ever been there, but venturing into the bathroom made Nora’s gorge rise and she hastily snatched up her toothbrush and retreated. For the sake of personal hygiene she knew she’d have to get over her atavistic horror at the sight of her bath. Maybe she should get the place ritually exorcised!
A quick brush of her aching teeth and an ingestion of freshly brewed coffee made Nora feel a trifle less like dying. Anxious to change out of the tacky clothes, she paused to look at herself in her bedroom mirror and grimaced. Her eyes looked glassy and sunken and the stubborn remnants of her mascara deepened the bruised shadows that surrounded them. She had washed her hair at the motel, using the meagre courtesy sachet of shampoo, but the establishment hadn’t run to hair-dryers and now her curls were an uncontrollable tumble around her pale face, her bleached complexion accentuating the ginger freckles and the faint whisker burns glowing on her cheek as well as on the skin above the drooping neckline of the baggy hip-length T-shirt.
She looked like a woman who had been used and abused, she thought bitterly—which was pretty much the truth.
Only…she had done her share of using, too, Nora reminded herself in a smothering of guilt. She had shamelessly courted danger and almost been consumed by it.
She kicked off her shoes and hooked her fingers into the waistband of the bright green leggings. Perhaps once she was back in her own clothes she would feel more like herself.
She tensed at the sound of the doorbell, and then relaxed as she told herself that it couldn’t be Kelly—and Ryan also had his own key, although he had never given Nora similar free access to his apartment.
Nora’s mood swung from brooding self-doubt to angry anticipation as she walked to the door. If it was that flower delivery man back again he was going to get himself a fresh ear-blistering.
She whipped open the door, eyes sparkling with challenge.
‘Hello, Nora.’
For an instant she gaped, paralysed with shock and embarrassment. ‘Blake! W-what are you doing here?’
He bared his teeth in a lethally unpleasant smile. ‘Guess.’
She didn’t like the sound of the sibilant threat and instinctively tried to whip the door closed, but that first instant of unwariness had given him all the edge he needed.
A muscular hand slapped against the wood and slowly applied the pressure to widen the gap to a full body-width.
‘I—I’m just about to go to work,’ she lied, struggling to resist the inexorable pressure.
His eyelids flickered downwards. ‘Dressed like that? I doubt if it’ll meet the Maitlands dress code.’
‘How do you know where I work?’ she croaked, the muscles of her arm straining against the losing battle with the door.
‘I asked around.’
She wasn’t fooled by the laconic drawl. Repressed fury oozed from his every pore.
‘Where have you been all night?’ he demanded, as if he had every right to know.
She tried to gather her defences. ‘Look, I’m sorry I left the way I did, but I really don’t have time to discuss it right now—’
‘Make time,’ he said, leaning more heavily on the door. ‘I have something that belongs to you.’
Yes—her innocence. Before she had gone off with Blake MacLeod she had quaintly imagined that she could handle the kind of risk he represented. But she had never dreamed that danger would turn up on her own doorstep!
‘I thought you might want it back…’
He was dangling something from his other hand, distracting her from his savage expression. Her wildly expensive new shoe. Shades of a fairy-tale romance…he had tracked her down to return her lost shoe!
A rush of relief weakened her grip on the door and, before she could register the unlikelihood of him performing such an extreme act of altruism he rammed through it, kicking it shut behind him with his polished heel. His head swivelled as he made a scowling survey of the room, seemingly unimpressed with the serenely comfortable decor which reflected Nora’s unfussy taste. This was certainly no gallant Prince Charming come looking for his Cinderella. In a dark blue pinstriped suit and navy shirt and tie he looked ominously like a storm cloud looking for somewhere to pitch his lightning and thunder.
He
