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‘Fine. Tired out. They spent ages arranging all the furniture in the doll’s house after they’d decided where they wanted it in their bedroom. Big decision between on the floor next to the bookcase so they could lie on the carpet and play with it, or on the dressing table so they could sit on the stool. Georgia wanted the floor, Emily wanted the dressing table. I let them sort it out.’
‘I bet I know who won,’ he said wryly.
‘No prizes, it was Georgia,’ Kay admitted.
‘She’s nearly as strong-willed as her mother.’ The smile in his voice softened any sting in the words.
Nevertheless, Kay felt compelled to protest, ‘Strong will isn’t a bad thing, surely?’
‘No, unless…’
‘Unless what?’
‘It stops someone seeing what’s under their nose.’
She blinked, completely taken aback.
‘Goodnight, Kay,’ he said smokily. ‘Dream of me.’
This time she couldn’t come back with the sarcasm she’d used the last time he had said the same words. She swallowed hard. ‘Goodnight, Mitchell.’
She stood staring across the room with the telephone in her hands for some time after the line had gone dead, until it bleeped loudly at her. She replaced it slowly, her head spinning, and then reached for the glass of wine and drank the whole glassful straight down, whereupon she walked into the kitchen and poured herself another.
After reseating herself in front of the fire with the book on her lap again, she took another hefty sip of wine. If ever she needed a drink it was tonight, she thought ruefully. What was she going to do? Every time she made a conscious decision to withdraw it was as though he reached out and pulled her closer to him.
What did he want? Really want? With his strange, grim background and meteoric success, which had brought him wealth and power, what did he really want? Did he know himself? He had set the boundaries of their relationship in concrete at the beginning of it all, and he hadn’t said anything specific to indicate he had changed. She would be crazy to hope that a few shrouded words and the odd glance might suggest she meant more to him than all the others. It wasn’t even as if she had the sexual skills, the worldly knowledge, the sheer ‘it’ factor of his exes—not to mention the women he met socially and in business all the time.
Jealousy streaked through her and she clenched her stomach against it, telling herself not to be so stupid. She shut her eyes, relaxing into the plumpy back of the sofa. He was in some anonymous hotel room right now—probably very luxurious, with everything he wanted at his fingertips, but characterless none the less. She wished she were with him; she wished it so much it was a physical ache in the essence of her.
CHAPTER TEN
MITCHELL wasn’t due back until Monday some time, but he phoned Kay on Friday and Saturday night. Not for anything would she have admitted to a living soul that she was on tenterhooks all day long, every nerve and fibre in her body longing to hear his voice.
She’d got it bad, she told herself helplessly when, at three o’clock on Sunday morning, she still hadn’t been able to drift off to sleep. And it scared her to death. Scared her witless, in fact. Which was what she was—witless, crazy, off her trolley, stark, staring and completely mad.
She sat up in bed, brushing her hair out of her eyes before throwing the duvet to one side and swinging her legs onto the floor. After reaching for her robe she slid her feet into her slippers and silently left the bedroom. Her mother was fast asleep; Leonora had spent the day with Henry and hadn’t arrived home until gone eleven o’clock, whereupon Kay had noticed she was flushed and happy with the kind of rosy glow that suggested the day had gone extremely well.
Once downstairs she fixed herself a mug of hot milk sweetened with honey and carried it through into the sitting room, not bothering to turn on the light. There was a full moon slanting in through the windows and, with the glow of the dying fire in the grate, she could see enough.
She curled up on the sofa, cradling the warm mug as she sipped at the drink, and when it was finished she snuggled down, pulling her robe about her. Maybe she could sleep down here? she thought drowsily. She was tired, exhausted in fact, but for some reason the bedroom she had shared with her mother for the last few years had become claustrophobic the last day or two. Or perhaps it was just the fact that she had always been asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow in the past?
She must have fallen asleep because when the noise awoke her she was conscious of spiralling up from a deep, warm place where she’d been dreaming of Mitchell.
She was curled up in a little ball on the sofa in front of the now-dead fire and it still wasn’t light, the moonlight causing dancing shadows to flicker across the room from the bare branches of the tree outside. Kay raised her head, peering over the back of the sofa towards the window as the noise—a kind of scratchy, fumbling sound—came again.
Afterwards she could never explain why she hadn’t been frightened up to that point, but she hadn’t. Maybe because the cat from across the way of
ten prowled into their garden at night, or because she was still more asleep than awake, she didn’t know, but in the same moment that a swirl of icy cold air met her face she saw the outlines of two men at the now-open window.
In the few seconds that she remained frozen with fear one of the men levered himself up onto the window sill, putting one leg into the room, and all the movements as silent as a cat.
The shrillness of Kay’s scream, when it came, surprised even her, and after that several things seemed to happen all at the same time. She was aware of ducking down on the sofa and reaching for the poker in the grate, at the same time as she heard one of the men—the one inside the room, she thought—swear profusely and the other one say something urgently, although she couldn’t work out what it was.
There was the sound of breaking glass, noise and scurry, but as the landing light went on and Leonora called, ‘Kay? Kay, what’s happening?’ in a voice filled with terror, Kay knew they had gone.
‘Stay with the girls,’ she called urgently to her mother, rushing across to the light switch. ‘I’m going to call the police. We’ve had some intruders.’
‘Intruders? Oh, Kay, Kay! Are you hurt?’ It sounded as though her mother was going into hysterics, but when the twins called from their bedroom Leonora’s voice was more controlled as she answered, ‘I’m coming, dears, don’t worry. Everything’s all right.’
