about three or four years old. A gorgeous little boy grinning happily into the camera lens. A little boy, with Nick’s dark hair and blue eyes…
Nick moved forcefully across the room to snatch the photograph out of her hands, those blue eyes glacially cold as he glared at her through narrowed lids.
She swallowed hard. ‘I’m sorry. I—he’s very beautiful.’
A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched jaw. ‘Yes, he was,’ he ground out harshly.
Was. It was his son, then.
Hebe felt a tightening of her chest at the thought of all that life and boyish happiness no longer existing.
How much worse was that realisation for Nick…!
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
Nick put the photograph carefully back on the table before giving her a sharp glance. ‘You know who he is?’
‘I—yes,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘One of the other girls told me that you had a son.’
‘Luke,’ he bit out harshly. ‘His name was Luke.’
Luke…Four years old. His death simply too much for his parents to deal with together, driving them irrevocably apart.
‘I really am sorry,’ Hebe repeated huskily. ‘I shouldn’t have—Please believe me when I tell you I never meant to—’
‘To what?’ he challenged with a lift of that arrogant jaw. ‘Pry? Stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong?’ He gave a disgusted shake of his head, his face set in grim lines.
Hebe flinched at his obvious fury. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested softly. ‘I just saw his photograph, and—’And what? Hadn’t she been prying, after all? Well…yes. But not with any intention of annoying or upsetting Nick. She had just been curious, that was all.
And in being so she had turned Nick’s undoubted anger on her once again.
So what was new?
But surely he knew she hadn’t deliberately set out to cause him pain in this way? Even though it seemed that was exactly what she had done.
‘I really am sorry,’ she said again firmly, before moving past him to walk into the kitchen, feeling it best to give him a few minutes’ privacy.
It seemed to be an afternoon for upsets. Nick where his son was concerned and her own puzzlement and curiosity about the woman in the portrait and the man who had painted it.
But she would possibly be able to find answers to her own questions, whereas Nick would probably never understand why his son, a little boy of four, had had to die.
It probably all came down to a matter of faith. And the death of a four year old child certainly tested that to the limits!
She looked up nervously a few minutes later as Nick came back into the kitchen, thankfully with some of the colour back in his cheeks, his expression less grim.
‘I got eggs and milk out of the fridge.’ She shrugged, pointing to where she had placed them on the worktop. ‘I wasn’t sure what else you needed.’
Nick slipped off the jacket of his suit and hung it on the back of one of the bar stools before taking down one of the frying pans from a display of them hanging from a rack above the work table in the middle of the kitchen. ‘Cheese or mushrooms?’ he bit out economically as he cracked the eggs into a bowl.
Hebe had to swallow down the nausea at the thought of either filling. ‘Plain, if that’s okay?’ It still felt decidedly strange to be up here in Nick’s apartment again, let alone having him cook for her.
Kate, having witnessed their departure, was going to be more than a little curious when Hebe finally returned downstairs to the gallery!
Nick’s impatience was all inward as he warmed the oil in the pan while beating the eggs, before adding the milk. He was regretting now that he had made the offer to cook for Hebe in the first place.
He never talked to anyone about Luke. He couldn’t. Still, three years later, he found his son’s death too painful to discuss with any degree of emotional normality. It was because the subject had been too painful that he and his now ex-wife Sally had stopped talking to each other—neither of them able to think of anything else when they were together, but unable to put those thoughts into words, the whole thing being just too painful.
So he certainly didn’t intend discussing Luke with Hebe, a woman he had spent a single night of passion with!
He dropped the egg mixture into the frying pan and let it cook before turning to speak to Hebe. ‘You’ll find a knife and fork—What the hell—!’ he rasped, as a white-faced Hebe ran past him out of the kitchen, her hand pressed tightly to her mouth.
She barely made it to the bathroom that adjoined the master bedroom—ironically, the only bathroom she knew the location of—before she was well and truly sick.
It had been the smell of the eggs cooking in the frying pan that had done it, tipping her sensitive stomach over the edge, the nausea just too much to control any longer.
‘Here you go,’ Nick murmured behind her seconds later, and he placed a damp cloth on her forehead.
This was so humiliating!
Not quite as bad as that morning six weeks ago when, the night over, Nick hadn’t been able to wait for her to leave, but pretty close.
She sat back on her heels, holding the cloth to her forehead herself now, the nausea seeming to have passed. Although quite what she had found to be sick with, considering she hadn’t eaten anything today except the chocolate Nick had insisted on giving her a short time ago, was a mystery!
‘Feeling better now?’ Nick prompted abruptly.
‘A little—thank you.’ She nodded, not quite able to look at him.
She had caused nothing but trouble this morning—trouble she was sure Nick couldn’t wait to be rid of.
‘I’ll just give my face a wash, and then I think I would like to leave, after all.’ She could probably quite happily eat the omelette now that she had got rid of whatever had upset her stomach, but in the circumstances it was probably better if she didn’t stay.
‘I don’t think so, Hebe.’
She looked up at him sharply. Only to find him staring at her with cold, glittering blue eyes, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
‘What do you mean?’ she prompted warily.
‘I mean I don’t think that you’re going to be leaving here any time soon,’ Nick bit out tautly.
Hebe’s eyes widened. ‘But I can assure you that I feel absolutely fine now.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ he ground out harshly. ‘It’s a curious fact, but women in your condition usually do feel better once they’ve actually been sick,’ he added forcefully.
