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His headshake coincided with the woman running out of steam and she finally slumped her head against Nik’s chest, weeping in a way that hurt to listen to.
After a moment Nik lifted a tentative hand to her head, smoothing the tangles of hair down in a gentle stroking motion.
‘I’ll take her.’
Her focus totally on the tableau before her, Chloe hadn’t heard the approach of a man wearing a harassed expression. ‘Come on, honey, that’s it. I didn’t know where you’d got to.’ The woman lifted her head slightly at the sound of his voice.
‘The bastard should be dead!’
For all the reaction Nik showed to this venomous declaration he might as well have been, the skin drawn tight across the prominent bones on his face giving them the appearance of stone.
The stranger took the weeping woman, who reminded Chloe of a puppet whose strings had been severed, and pulled her against him, wrapping a supportive arm around her ribs as he half dragged, half lifted her away from Nik. ‘Sorry, you know she doesn’t mean it; she doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ The woman continued to weep uncontrollably as she slumped up against him.
The stranger looked from the woman he held to Nik with an expression that brought a lump to Chloe’s throat. ‘It’s not always this bad, but it’s particularly hard today...’
Nik nodded, his face still granite.
‘She’s been drinking all morning. I thought maybe being here with family would help.’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Bad idea. I stopped for gas and she must have seen you... I had no idea that you’d be here.’
‘Neither did I. It was an unexpected visit. Is there anything I can do...?’
The woman’s head lifted at that. ‘Haven’t you done enough already?’ she slurred, before pressing her face back into the man’s shoulder as he turned and began to walk away down the road.
Nik watched for a few moments before he looked at Chloe. Some of the rigidity had gone from his tense posture, but not the lines of tension bracketing his mouth or the shadow in his eyes. ‘Have you seen enough now?’
She flinched, but didn’t react to the unspoken accusation, which was both harsh and unjust, that she had taken some voyeuristic pleasure at the scene she had witnessed.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, wincing inside at the crassness of her words, and she wasn’t surprised when he just flashed her a look.
The muscles along his taut jaw tensed as he turned away. He didn’t want or deserve Chloe’s sympathy.
Are you all right? she’d asked. Well, he was certainly more all right than the man who would have been thirty-five today if he’d lived. An image floated in his head, of Charlie grinning as he delivered the punchline of one of his terrible jokes, Charlie looking guilty when he explained this would be the last time they worked together because he was letting his lovely Helena finally make an honest man of him.
Nik remembered feeling pleased that he’d managed to guilt Charlie into one last assignment, though he hadn’t succeeded in planting a seed of doubt in his friend’s mind when he’d predicted that Charlie wouldn’t be able to live without the adrenaline buzz.
You know when it’s time to quit,Charlie had said.
