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I tense at the mention of Jared Rush. I met the charming, good-looking artist around the same time I met Nick. The two men are friends, which I find interesting considering Jared intimated he had something more than a strictly platonic relationship with Kathryn. Jared also allowed that there was a time when Kathryn was practically family to Nick. Whatever he meant by that, I don’t know, because Nick refused to elaborate.
Kathryn lifts her chin, still regal even under Nick’s withering animosity. “I’ve heard about the rec center plans. It’s a good thing you’re doing. For the kids, and for you.”
He glances up at her now, almost in afterthought. His eyes are steely. Cold with something I want to say is disregard, but it’s not. Its edge is too sharp to be apathy.
Nick is seething.
“Is there something you want, Kathryn?”
His animosity toward this woman is obvious, if only to me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve spent these past months studying him with almost worshipful interest. I know him. I like to think I know him better than most anyone else. But now that I’m feeling the glacial force of his reaction to Kathryn, I have my doubts.
“I only wanted to tell you that if you need my help at any point. If you need my backing—”
“I don’t.”
The clipped reply silences her. For a long moment, she just stands there, although I hesitate to call her defeated. “All right, Dominic. I understand.” She reaches up to smooth a nonexistent flaw in her perfectly coiffed hair. Light, mottled spots speckle the back of her slender, bejeweled hand, another small betrayal of her age. “Pardon me for interrupting your lunch.”
She glances at me, and I wonder if there is anything she would say to me if Nick weren’t sitting here, vibrating with leashed rage. Would she warn me away from him the way Margot, my friend who works at Nick’s gallery, had? Or would Kathryn take greater pleasure in watching me crash and burn once Nick tires of me the way he apparently had with her?
I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until it rushes out of me in the wake of her departure. She glides fluidly away to join her chattering companions, while a pall settles over the corner I share with Nick.
“I’m sorry about that.” He releases my hand, his own retreating smoothly, even casually, back to his side of the table. I feel the absence like a gust of cold air has just swept through the room. In fact, it has.
The chill that exists between Nick and Kathryn has now expanded to engulf me too.
We finish our meal in an awful, uncomfortable silence. As soon as the waiter appears to remove our plates, Nick requests the check.
I’m desperate for him to talk to me, to explain what just happened and why this woman still seems to have such a disturbingly strong hold on his emotions. It’s all I can do to keep my questions to myself as we get up from the table and head out to meet Nick’s limo at the curb.
Patrick is waiting at the back passenger door for us as we step toward him, Nick’s palm settled at the small of my spine. I’m relieved by the contact, and by the small kiss he places on my cheek as the driver opens the door for us.
I climb in first, waiting for Nick to slide in behind me.
Instead he pauses outside the car. “Patrick, please take Avery back to Park Place. I’ve got a few things to finish up at the office. I’ll catch a cab from here.”
“What?” I peer out at him, confused. I don’t doubt he’s got plenty of work waiting for him at his office, but I know damn well that
this is a brush off. An evasion. He doesn’t want to deal the questions he must know I’ll have, so he’s shutting me out as surely as he did Kathryn. “Nick—”
“Patrick will make sure you get home safely. I’ll see you later tonight.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to argue or respond. Closing the door, he nods to his driver, then steps away to hail a taxi while the limo eases into traffic and speeds me off without him.
Chapter 6
The doorman at the Park Place building meets me at the limo with his usual cheerfulness as Patrick drives under the glass-roofed porte cochère. Thick and barrel-chested, he’s dressed in a dark suit with twin ribands of silver piping at the wrists, despite the August heat. “Good afternoon, Ms. Ross.”
“Hello, Manny.”
The big, middle-aged man with the quick smile and warm hazel eyes has been nothing but kind to me from the first night I showed up here. I’d come with Tasha in tow, the two of us eager to check out the apartment I’d been hired to housesit for another of the building’s residents, Claire Prentice, an actress I’d met while working at Vendange.
That was also the same night I first laid eyes on Nick, after nearly crashing right into him in the elevator. Four and a half months ago seems like yesterday sometimes. It seems like forever too.
He’s become a part of my life, and there are days when I can’t imagine what it would be like without him. When Nick looks at me sometimes, I want to think he feels the same inexorable connection to me. I believe he does.
Yet after today—after his almost visceral reaction to a woman from his past, followed by his abrupt dismissal of me—I wonder if I know anything about him at all. I wonder if he’ll ever truly allow me in.
“Do you have any other packages with you today, Ms. Ross—er, Avery?”
