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Simmering with anger he walked over and grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Get a hold of yourself, Lizzie,’ he told her tersely. ‘This will all blow over.’
‘Easy for you to say. You don’t earn a living from your face.’
He’d never hated her job more. ‘You’re worth more than just your face,’ he snapped. ‘Even if this ruins your career, so what? There are other things you can do. Jobs that use your brain instead of your looks.’
‘Like what, Nick? If you can think of another job for a woman like me, with no qualifications and no experience other than smiling in front of a camera, that can earn me what I’m earning now, don’t keep it to yourself. Spit it out.’
Great. Now he’d managed to make her angry. Still, better angry than feeling sorry for herself. He rubbed at his eyes. Crikey, he was tired. The time difference was finally catching up with him. ‘Okay, I’m sorry. It won’t come to that, anyway. For the time being you need to talk to your agent and get her to issue a statement that puts your side of things. We also need to talk to the police.’ He saw her look of horror, but didn’t back down. ‘Charles drugged you, raped you, then tried to blackmail you. Yes, the police need to know.’
‘I don’t want them involved.’
Her shoulders set in a stubborn line but he ignored them. ‘Tough. We’re calling them. And then I’m taking you back to England for a while.’
At that casually dropped bombshell, she gasped. ‘Oh, you are, are you? Who on earth suddenly made you my keeper?’
‘I’m not your keeper, but I am going to take care of you.’
‘Thanks, but I can take care of myself.’
He thought about retorting that on current evidence she wasn’t doing a great job of it, but held his tongue. She was no longer the young girl he’d dreamt of protecting. She was a grown woman, capable of making her own choices. Still, she needed to face the truth. ‘You’re a mess,’ he told her bluntly. ‘You’re not sleeping or eating properly, which means you’re also not thinking clearly. I’m taking you back to give you time to recover, both mentally and physically. The press won’t know you’re there. It will give you some breathing space.’
‘And if I don’t want to go?’ The stubborn glint that he knew of old was back in her eyes.
‘I can’t force you. It’s your decision.’ Then he fixed her with a glare of his own. ‘But make sure whatever you decide, you do it for the right reason and not because you don’t like being told what to do by me.’
Lizzie took a long, hard look at Nick’s strong profile. When she’d been young, she’d had him wrapped round her little finger. As soon as she’d grown up, that had stopped. Evident the moment she’d asked him to make love to her and he hadn’t. Now he was glaring at her, daring her not to do as he’d said. ‘I want to tell you to butt out,’ she admitted, surprised by the tremor in her voice. ‘I know I’ve made a spectacular mess of things right now, but up to this point I’ve done pretty well, actually. I’ve made it to the top of my profession in one of the toughest cities in the world. Without your or anyone else’s help.’
‘I know that. You’re strong and determined. Always have been. But admitting you need help doesn’t make you less capable. It simply makes you sensible.’
She acknowledged his comment with a small smile. ‘Low blow.’
‘I can fight dirty if the outcome is important to me.’
Beneath her chest, her heart fluttered a little. The thought of leaning on someone else for a while, especially if that someone was Nick, was making her feel almost giddy with relief. ‘Okay, I’ll come back with you, but because I want to, not because you’re telling me to.’
‘Good.’ His dark brown eyes warmed with amusement, as if he knew exactly how much it had cost her to say that. ‘First things first though. Call the agency.’
‘They’re going to kill me,’ she muttered as she plugged the phone back in. ‘My career has been built on a squeaky clean, ice maiden, butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth image. It doesn’t exactly fit with lurid newspaper photographs showing me engaged in three in the bed sexual romps. I’ll probably never work again.’
‘Bollocks,’ Nick cut in tersely. ‘You will. Charles isn’t going to win this one. If the police don’t have enough evidence to lock him away, we’ll attack from another direction. By the time we’ve finished with him, it will be Charles that nobody will want to work with again, not you.’
As she dialled the agency number, Lizzie wondered if she’d ever seen Nick this angry. He was the calm, mild-mannered one. As a child she’d soon learnt not to bother winding him up; he never rose to the bait. Robert, on the other hand, she’d been able to wind up like a top, getting him to flare into anger at the slightest provocation. What she wouldn’t give to have her brother do that again. ‘I don’t expect you to help me with this, Nick,’ she asserted, waiting for the agency to pick up. ‘I’ve got money. I’ll find an attorney to handle it.’ The last thing she needed was to be indebted to him even further.
‘I know you’ve got money,’ he replied tightly. ‘But I’ve got connections. I know a good lawyer, or attorney as you Yanks call them, and he happens to be based in LA. If anyone can get you justice, Dan Rutherford can.’
Just then the receptionist answered. Figuring now was the time to put her effort into saving her career, rather than arguing with Nick, she turned away and asked to speak to Maria. Agent and friend. At least she had been before this mess had hit the headlines.
Chapter Three
Several hours later Lizzie’s external face was back in the right sort of direction. Maria, bless her, had been amazingly supportive. Between her and the PR agency they used, plus a few corrections from her newly-acquired attorney, courtesy of Nick, they drafted out a statement saying simply that Lizzie was horrified by the leaked photographs and had no recollection of what had happened that night. The matter was now in the hands of her attorney and she would not be making any further comment except through him.
Now was the tougher part — talking to the police. Bad enough recounting the sordid details to Nick. At least he’d been a sympathetic ear. The hard-faced cop was something else. Maybe she was being paranoid, but the officer seemed to be going through the motions. Oh, he made a show of taking down her story, and asking lots of questions, but she sensed he was doing it only because it was expected of him. Not a flicker of sympathy crossed his stony face, not a hint that he believed what she was saying.
‘Somewhere at the newspaper office there will be an envelope with Charles’s fingerprints on it,’ Nick insisted. ‘Or at least CCTV evidence of him leaving the package there. That’ll help prove he wasn’t an innocent bystander in all this. And what about the other guy? Maybe he’ll talk. Or the staff at the bar? They had to have noticed Lizzie going from having two drinks, to suddenly falling off her chair, paralytic.’
‘We’ll follow up every lead,’ the officer reassured him wearily. ‘But you have to understand all this happened several days ago. Any evidence there might have been is likely to have been lost by now, and eyewitnesses are unlikely to remember a lady appearing drunk in the bar. It’s hardly an unusual occurrence.’
Lizzie’s hackles rose, but Nick’s clearly rose faster. ‘Are you taking this seriously?’ he asked coldly. ‘If not, you damn well should be. We’re not talking about a petty dispute between lovers, here. This lady has been raped and blackmailed. She needs to trust you’ll do everything in your power to make sure the man who did this is punished.’
