‘How are you going to manage if you go back there?’ he demanded, ignoring her refutation. ‘Who are you going to turn to when you need help? The drug dealers in the apartment next door?’
‘They’re not drug dealers.’
‘No, I’m sure they’re upstanding citizens who just happen to be cultivating their own cannabis farm. They don’t even try to disguise the smell. And have your landlords bothered to fix the elevators or are you going to drag your depleted body up eight flights of stairs to reach your apartment?’ Her jaw clenched, proving he’d hit the mark with that one, and he continued pressing his point. ‘And what about food? How are you going to nourish yourself the times you can’t get out of bed, and let’s consider, too, the nursing staff tasked with home visits to you—how do you think they’ll feel making visits to a neighbourhood where they’ll be lucky not to have the tyres of their cars stolen?’
Anger slashed her cheeks. ‘What gives you the right to be so judgmental?’ she said tremulously. ‘That’s myhomeyou’re talking about.’
‘Stating facts is not making judgments. Your condition is serious, Marnie, and you’re approaching the point where it’s going to get worse before it gets better.’
Marnie turned her face away and closed her eyes. There was no point asking if he’d researched her condition. Domenico researched everything. When he took on a new client, he would research them to the nth degree along with every aspect of their case from every angle and permutation. Everything he researched, he retained in the file he kept in his brain. No other lawyer was better prepared, able to pluck seemingly fatuous knowledge from nowhere and able to think more quickly on his feet. It was one of the reasons he was so wildly successful in his chosen career that governments begged him to represent them, and this thirst for knowledge wasn’t restricted to the law. Domenico was curious about everything, and she had no doubt he was now as knowledgeable as the consultant about her condition. If he said it was going to get worse before it got better, then she believed him.
‘If you come home with me, you’ll be looked after twenty-four-seven,’ he said into the silence. ‘You know this.’
She did know it. Dom’s household staff were good people. She’d known most of them for years, from her time as his PA when she’d been on the same staff divide as them.
She knew his suggestion made perfect sense. She knew she would struggle to take care of herself the way she currently felt. On a list of pros and cons, there would be a good fifty pros for moving back in with Domenico for a while and only one con. But that one con was a massive con. It meant being back under Domenico’s roof.
And then he uttered the killer line that made her accept defeat. ‘You know this is the best thing all round, for youandfor the baby.’
Swallowing hard, she turned her face back to him. ‘If I come home with you, it’s on the strict proviso that it’s only until I feel better.’
She caught the flash of triumph in his eyes. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘It is.’
‘But I have a proviso of my own, which is that you reserve the right to change your mind whenever you please and stay forever.’
‘That’s my second proviso.’
He leaned his face a little closer. ‘That you’ll stay forever?’
‘No, that you accept it’s only a temporary situation and that I’m not coming back to you. I want you to promise you won’t even mention making it permanent or us remarrying.’
‘I can agree to that.’
‘Promise me. No talk of any kind of a future where you and I get back together. Promise it or I go back to my flat.’
He sighed and shook his head with the air of a man making an indulgent concession. ‘I promise.’
Chapter Four
THE ELEVATORS INMarnie’s tower block were working. However, the stench that wafted out of the nearest when the door slid open was so revolting that Domenico gagged and opted to climb the eight flights of stairs.
Why the hell would any sane person choose to live somewhere like this, he wondered as he neared a group of young adolescents openly smoking cannabis at the top of the seventh flight. They barely looked old enough to have pimples, never mind the bullish swagger they all adopted at his approach.
He gave a nod of acknowledgement as he passed and wondered how much of the stench in this place they’d contributed towards. Then he wondered where the hell their parents were.
Aware of their stares following him and the rude catcalls being aimed at him, he didn’t break stride as he continued up the final flight, rightly judging they were more intimidated of him than they wanted him to be of them, and not for the first time wondered why the hell Marnie had chosen to live in a dangerous shithole like this. He got that it was cheap, but, hell, surely there were safer cheap places a young woman would choose to live in the capital? Whatever her reasons, he was damned if his child would ever set foot within two hundred metres of it. He’d sooner raze it to the ground than let that happen.
Using the key she’d given him, he let himself into Marnie’s flat. It was like entering an oven. Even so, he took a welcome breath of the clean, albeit baking, air inside it.
Despite its godawful location, there was something very soothing about the interior. The walls in the small living/dining room were plain white, the furniture generic simplicity at its best, but it was in all the soft furnishing and accents that she’d made her quiet mark with soothing pastel shades for the cushions and curtains and an abundance of framed photos, books and scented candles neatly crammed on the plentiful shelves of the living room walls.
The tiny kitchen, he guessed from its style, had last been modernised before Marnie was born, but she’d made her peaceful mark in there too. All the cupboard doors had been painted a soft, dusky pink, the worktops overlaid with a fake white marble surface. Everything was immaculate.
Unable to resist his one chance to observe her in the wild, so to speak, he opened the cupboards and found a surprising variety of tins and jars and packets and baking ingredients, and an equally surprising array of gadgets, the kind of gadgets only people who loved to cook bought. Neatly stacked on the top of a cupboard were flatpack silver boxes, and he suddenly thought of the cakes she used to bring in if they were in London when a member of the team celebrated a birthday. Domenico had been born without a sweet tooth, but even he’d been unable to resist those moreish treats she always presented in a silver box. He’d assumed she bought them at a bakery on her way to the office, remembered once, years back, telling her to give him the bill so he could reimburse her and Marnie shrugging it off with a smile and saying it was her pleasure to do it. He’d never guessed she made them herself, was certain she’d never told anyone she baked the cakes they all devoured like locusts.
His throat feeling weirdly tight, he looked in the fridge. It was stocked with an abundance of fruit and vegetables that would never be eaten. On the kitchen windowsill sat two cherry tomato plants, ripe with fruit, but their stems withered from not being watered in four days. After filling a plastic box he found with the bounty of the tomatoes Marnie had lovingly grown and cared for, he finally set off to do the job she’d entrusted him with.
