face. ‘I’m joking?’
‘Right,’ he said. Awkwardness filled the room, making it feel heavy and tense. He had to get out of here.
‘I was going to wake you,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t have the heart.’
‘Oh, really?’ He zeroed in on that comment. Was this some kind of sympathy vote because she’d seen his awful scars? Or worse, because he’d cried out in his sleep? He didn’t do sympathy. And he didn’t do bursts of emotion either. Nearly thirty years in the stiff-upper-lip environment of his military-obsessed family did that for a person. Stoicism was essential. His father had made that pretty damn clear when Alex was just a kid, an attitude later reinforced at boarding school and then in the army. Emotion was something you stamped on, definitely not something to be expressed among strangers.
‘You looked so peaceful,’ she went on. ‘And you’ve clearly been getting hardly any sleep if your noise pollution is anything to go by.’
There was an edge to her voice that told him she was still narked about that. He didn’t let it penetrate, there was no need to, since he had absolutely no intention of running into her again after today.
‘Cup of tea?’ she asked him. ‘Your last one got cold. Are you sure you’re OK?’
He shook his head, automatically folding the enormous throw and placing it neatly at the side of the sofa. He had no idea how she could live in such a cluttered room without going mad. It jarred his military sense of order.
‘I am perfectly fine,’ he snapped. ‘And I’ve taken up enough of your time. Now I know Poppy’s back I’ll get out of your way.’
He headed for the door as she watched him, a bemused expression on the pretty face.
‘Bye, then,’ he heard her call after him as he pulled the door shut.
A thank-you might have been nice.
Then again, she didn’t have time for niceties. Neither did she give a stuff as long as Alex curbed the disruptive noise from upstairs.
Forty-eight hours had now passed with a definite reduction in noise levels although she’d seen no corresponding drop in the stream of disposable girls visiting. That was the thing about working from home for all waking hours—the comings and goings of other residents in the building amounted to distractions, and she couldn’t fail to notice them. He must have moved his bed away from the radiator because the endless clanking had ceased. Not, of course, that she was dwelling on Alex Spencer’s bedroom activities.
What mattered was that normal sleep quality had been resumed and thank goodness, because the launch of the shop was only a week away now. Just time to fit in a quick shower this morning and then she would head over there to add a few more finishing touches to the décor before she began to move stock in. She’d managed to track down a beautiful French-style dressing screen, the kind you might find in a lady’s bedroom, gorgeously romantic. No run-of-the-mill changing cubicles for her little shop. Still, she wanted to try it out in different positions until she found the perfect location for it.
She rubbed shampoo into her hair, closing her eyes against the soap bubbles and running through a mental list of the hundred-plus things she needed to get done today. A full-length gilt-framed mirror had been delivered the previous day; it would provide the perfect vintage centrepiece for the small shop floor, and she needed to decide where best to put that too. Then there were garlands of silk flowers to hang and some tiny white pin lights to add to the girly atmosphere she wanted to achieve.
The torrent of water rinsing through her hair seemed to be losing its force. She opened one eye and squinted through the bubbles up at the shower head. Yep. The usual nice flow was definitely diminishing. And without the sound of the running water she was suddenly able to hear a monstrous clanking noise coming from behind the wall and above her head.
‘What the hell …?’ she said aloud as the water reduced to little more than a trickle. The clanking built to a crescendo.
Oh, just bloody perfect. Naked, covered in bubbles and with her hair a bird’s nest of shampoo, she climbed out of the shower unit and wrapped a towel around her. A quick twist of the sink tap gave a loud clanking spurt of water followed by nothing. She grabbed her kimono from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and shrugged it on as she took the few paces to the kitchen to check the water pressure there.
She didn’t make it as far as the sink. Horrified shock stopped her in her tracks as she took in the torrent of water pouring down the wall of the living room, pooling into a flood and soaking merrily into a pile of silk camisoles she’d left in a stack on the floor.
‘No-o-o!’ she squawked, dashing across the floor, picking up armfuls of her lovingly made garments and moving them to safety on the other side of the room. She kicked the metal clothes rail out of the way as she passed it, the few garments hanging at one end already splashed by the ensuing torrent of water.
She rushed to the cabinet under the sink, found the stopcock and turned off the water supply as she tried madly to rationalise what could have happened, then she stood, hand plastered to her forehead as her mind worked through the implications of all this. Some of her garments had been soaked through—there went hours of work down the drain. The water continued to spread across the floor in a slow-moving pool. She knew instinctively from the clanking in the pipes that this wasn’t going to be some five-minute do-it-yourself quick-fix job. The building was ancient. Behind the glossy makeover of the flat conversion was interlinked original pipework. That much was obvious from the racket they made when the love god upstairs was entertaining.
She had absolutely no money to spare for a plumber. She wondered if any of the rest of the building was affected. Surely it wasn’t just her? In a panic she opened the flat door with the intention of knocking on the door opposite and instead ran smack into Poppy, who was on her way up to her own flat with a chocolate croissant in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other. Poppy’s mouth fell open at her insane appearance.
‘What the hell happened to you?’
‘My flat’s flooded,’ Lara gabbled. ‘It’s like the deck of the sodding Titanic in there. I’ve got a shedload of stock in the room, my shop launches next week and I’ve got no hot water.’
Poppy didn’t so much as flinch. She exuded utter calm. Maybe it was a side-effect of medical training that you simply became good in any crisis. Lara shifted from one foot to the other while she leaned around her to see into the living room.
‘Have you turned off the water?’
Lara nodded.
‘It seems to have stopped it getting any worse. But just look at the mess.’
Poppy walked into the room and put her coffee down on the trestle table.
‘I see what you mean,’ she said, peering at the enormous spreading puddle on the floor and the piles of silk and velvet clothing now strewn haphazardly on the other side of the room.
‘I need this room to work in and now I’ll be behind with my stock levels,’ Lara wailed.
The full implications of the situation began to sink in. She’d been running at her absolute limit to get the pop-up shop off the ground in so many ways, working all hours, hocked to the eyeballs financially, using her living accommodation as workspace. She had absolutely no back-up plan. Despair made her stomach churn
