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CHAPTER TWELVE
ITWASNEARLY one in the morning when Chloe got back to her flat.
She rarely received a call on her landline these days, but the red light on her answer machine was flashing, showing her it was full of messages.
She ignored it, as she had already spoken to everyone who mattered, and her mobile phone lay switched off in her bag. She massaged her temples with her fingers to alleviate the tension she could feel gathering behind her eyes.
She could feel the exhaustion bearing down on her like a lead weight, but her mind remained active, not in a productive, problem-solving way, but more of a febrile, hamster-on-a-wheel way.
She kicked off her heels, conscious of a sense of anticlimax. She had been building up to tonight for days, not quite admitting how nervous she was about it, and now it was over and it couldn’t have gone better, she should be feeling elated. But instead she felt...oddly flat, and not at all the inspiring figure that people had lined up to tell her she was this evening.
Easing the beautiful cape off her shoulders, she walked through to her bedroom, where she hung it on a hanger before covering it in a protective bag. Hopefully a few people would bid for it at the charity auction her sister had planned for next month.
When Chloe had suggested the timing might not be good for Sabrina to organise an auction, she had quipped, ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor. I’ll be feeling fine by then.’
As she stripped off the beautiful red gown and ran a bath for herself, she debated having a nightcap, but on balance decided against it, worried it might compete with the champagne she’d drunk earlier that evening.
Lighting the scented candles around the bath, she eased herself into the sweet-smelling water and lay there drifting, feeling deliciously decadent. Slowly the tension began to ease out of her shoulders.
Then the doorbell rang.
Her eyes peered through the open bathroom doorway to the clock on her bedroom wall, and she squinted to make out the time. Who on earth could that be in the middle of the night?
Everyone had warned her to expect some press intrusion after tonight and she thought that was realistic but this was ridiculous. It was getting on for two a.m.!
She decided to ignore it.
But her late-night caller was not giving up, and Chloe lay there, teeth gritted as the tension climbed back into her shoulders. And then the answer to her earlier question popped into her head.
Who did knock on doors at this time of night? The police with bad news.
Leaping out of the water, her pulse racing in panic and still dripping wet, she fought her way into a thick towelling robe and ran to the front door, leaving a trail of wet footprints in her wake. By the time she reached the door her imagination was cranked up to full volume and she was on her fourth awful possible scenario!
Cinching the belt a little tighter, she checked the safety chain was fastened and, as an extra precaution, picked up a heavy pale wood Dala horse from the console table and opened the door a crack.
Her late-night callers weren’t wearing uniform and it was one visitor, singular, although she couldn’t make out who it was.
Caution replaced dread, though on the plus side if this was a homicidal maniac standing there the walls were very thin in the apartments. Someone would be bound to hear her being murdered, and hopefully report it to the police.
‘My neighbour is a black belt in karate!’ she called through the crack.
She could only see a sliver of the man standing outside her door in the communal hallway, but as he stepped closer the partial view was more than sufficient to make the colour in her face recede, leaving her dramatically pale, and then return as quickly, dusting her cheeks with rose pink as she stood there frozen.
Her first thought was that she had fallen asleep and this was a new version of her recurring dream. In all the other versions, Nik had been wearing black swimming shorts and nothing else, not a dinner jacket that hung open and a white dress shirt that was pulled open at the neck and seemed to have several buttons missing. There were the remains of a bow tie sticking out of his breast pocket too; he really did not look his usual immaculate self.
‘Hello.’
This Nik, with dark shadows under his eyes and stubble on his chin, still looked more sexy than any man had a right to be.
‘I need to lie down,’ she mumbled, thinking, And then I need to wake up!
‘Can I come in first?’ His mild tone was at stark variance to the glitter in his eyes as he stared at her.
‘I thought you were the police! I thought Sabrina had lost the baby or my mum had fallen and broken her hip, or my dad had—’
‘Sorry I scared you.’
‘You can’t really be here because you don’t know where I live. I moved.’ She’d rented out her old place as part of the entire new change she had decided to adopt on her return from Greece.
