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She shoved her phone in her back pocket and ran the tap, frowning as her kitchen sink began to fill with dirty water.
Only it wasn’t coming from the tap, it was surging back up the drain.
That wasn’t good.
Sybella removed her gloves and opened her laptop, which was sitting on the bench where she’d been doing a little Internet surfing earlier this morning. She’d put ‘Nikolai Voronov’ into the search engine and up had come a few images of him in a suit at various glamorous functions with equally glamorous women clinging to him, and even more of him in hi-vis gear on mine sites. He did know how to rock a hard hat.
Irritably she wiped the screen of Nik Voronov and tapped the more prosaic ‘blocked kitchen sink’ into the search engine. The reality of her life restored.
She began rifling through the bottom odds-and-ends drawer, pulling out the shiny spanner her father-in-law had given her for just these emergencies.
Why pay a plumber you couldn’t afford when you had videos on the Internet?
Inserting herself under the sink, she focused on fitting the head of the spanner to the grip on the pipe joint.
No, she certainly wouldn’t be using those numbers he’d programmed into her phone again.
Frankly she didn’t need a man in her life. She was a confident, independent woman. Able to clear drains with just a spanner and a bucket.
She repositioned the bucket.
But she didn’t have the upper-body strength to turn the wrench.
‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Fleur’s high, sweet voice came floating into the kitchen.
Sybella adjusted her face into something approximating calm and stuck her head up over the bench.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘Mummy, the giant is standing in our garden again.’
I wish.
‘Is he really? What do you think he wants?’
‘Come and see!’ Fleur urged.
Another time Sybella would have indulged her and played the game, but the man on the screen had moved on to unclogging your bath in the next video, she still hadn’t loosened the pipe grip, and she had to meet Catherine in forty minutes.
‘It’s very cold outside. I think you’d be warmer in your jeans.’
Fleur hitched up her skirt to reveal she was, indeed, wearing her jeans.
Sybella’s tension dissolved into a big smile. ‘Excellent fashion choice. Now, I need you to go upstairs and make up your backpack. Do you know what you’re taking to Gran’s?’
‘Ebby.’
Ebby was her much sucked-upon cloth doll.
‘We’re making a dress for her and fixing her eyes.’
Bless Catherine. ‘Pack your jumper—the green one. Do you remember which one that is?’
Fleur nodded confidently, which meant anything could end up in there.
‘Off you go. I’ll be up in a minute to help. Mummy needs to beat a pipe into submission.’
Sybella crawled forward, angling the wrench at a better angle. She could hear the guy on the online instructional video telling her that sometimes a simple plunger would do the job.
She knew where she wanted to stick that plunger…
‘You’ll break it,’ said a deep voice, testosterone wrapped in velvet, that had Sybella’s head snapping back and hitting the top of the sink cavity.
‘Ouch!’
She crawled out, her heart pounding in an attempt to escape through her chest, and angled a look up…and up.
Oh, blast.
Fleur had been right. There was a giant. Only he’d migrated into her kitchen.
CHAPTER TEN
SYBELLA WAS HOLDING a spanner, dressed much as she had been when he’d come here the last time, casually but this time in jeans and a jumper.
But the spanner in her hand, the brown water in her sink, the harried expression on her face gave him the feeling he was seeing Sybella as she really was, those little duck legs she’d spoken about churning around.
He took in the mess and began shedding his jacket.
‘What are you doing?’
He took the spanner out of her hand and tossed his jacket onto a chair. ‘I’ll fix this. You go fix yourself up.’
Sybella just stood there. Had she missed something? Some lost text where he explained why he’d made no contact for a week? Although the ground shifted under her there, because she could surely have texted him something better than a line about the Hall.
