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‘Where are you going?’
‘Dunno…the roof first, then no one’s saying. A distant galaxy far, far away is my guess.’
‘The roof!’ Kalera hurried down to her office, which was in equal chaos, but not because of any moving.
‘What’s going on, Bettina?’
‘I don’t know; no one tells me anything,’ the young woman complained, rummaging in the files, yelping when she almost broke a nail. ‘Hey, have you seen the Bredon disk? I was sure I put it somewhere in here on Friday.’
‘Have you checked under B?’
Bettina looked at her blankly and Kalera left before she gave in to the overwhelming desire to fire her on the spot. Her feet slowing, she headed towards Duncan’s door. There was no sense in putting off this confrontation any longer.
Duncan was pacing up and down insulting someone over his mobile phone, darting over every now and then to punch an addition into the open laptop on his desk. His light grey suit would have been numbingly plain but for the effect of the lime-green shirt and an electrifying fluorescent green tie sprinkled with little orange lightning bolts. When he looked up and saw Kalera something flared in his eyes and he hastily ended his call and slammed the phone down on the desk.
‘You’re late!’ he barked.
It was not the manner of greeting she had expected, and it immediately put her on familiar ground.
‘I had trouble with my car,’ she said mildly.
‘I thought you weren’t going to turn up at all,’ he growled, explaining his ill humour, his eyes running over her as if to make sure she was all there. She had her neat, practical office garb on again and looked a world away from the woman she had been on Saturday night. His world, he thought, with a gloating surge of satisfaction.
He gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Not the twins again?’
She sighed. He probably wouldn’t give up until he had dragged it out of her. ‘I ran out of petrol.’
His eyes widened. ‘On the way to work? You? Mrs Organisation herself?’
‘I used the car a lot over the weekend,’ she said unsmilingly, ‘and I had other things on my mind.’
His frown was swift to reappear. ‘Yes, where were you yesterday? I tried you at home, and at your parents’. I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
Shades of Stephen! ‘I was fine,’ she said, with a little tilt of her chin that told him it was a lie. ‘I went for a drive.’
‘All day and night?’ His scowl deepened. ‘I even rang Steve’s place but I never got anything but the answering machine. I thought you and he might have been meeting somewhere…?’
‘Well, we weren’t. I drove lots of places, and I stopped at a motel for the night.’ As an anonymous traveller—out of reach of people or telephones, and free of sympathy, advice or any kind of pressure. ‘I just wanted some time on my own.’
His dark brows lifted. ‘So…’ He moved towards her, tense with expectancy. ‘Have you and Steve settled things between you?’
She shook her head and gestured helplessly with her hands, bringing him to a halt as his eyes zeroed in on what Anna had seen.
‘We hardly had a chance for more than a few words, when I went to pick up my car.’ And those composed of futile counter-recriminations, with Stephen even suggesting that she was the one who had overreacted on Saturday night. ‘Stephen was rushing out to the hospital because apparently Michael fell down some stairs early yesterday morning, and got a slight concussion and a badly broken arm. Maybe Stephen spent all day at the hospital; I don’t know.’ Perhaps the trauma had succeeded in jolting him into recognising the unbreakable emotional bond he shared with his son. For both their sakes, Kalera hoped so.
Duncan picked up her right hand, thumbing the ostentatious ring. ‘He never did get to make that announcement, did he? So you could say you’re not formally engaged at all…’
‘We’re not formally disengaged either,’ she said warily.
His grip tightened. ‘But you will be soon?’ he insisted.
A familiar look of stubbornness entered her grey eyes as she resisted his coercion. She had no intention of telling him that the ring was on her finger simply because it was the safest place to keep it. She didn’t
want to make herself any more vulnerable than she was already.
‘I can’t say,’ she prevaricated, firmly extracting her hand. ‘I need to see Stephen first. In fact, I’m going to go over there this evening,’ she decided.
‘You can’t!’ he rapped out.
