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‘Well…when your mother rang the doorbell I was in the shower…’
Theo frowned and tried to make sense of this random statement. He couldn’t, so he waited patiently for her to continue. Given sufficient time, Heather’s ramblings usually led to a fairly coherent place.
‘I know you’re probably thinking that it was a pretty odd time to have a shower, in the middle of the afternoon, but I’d decided to climb the stairs with some shopping…Anyway…Yes, I was in the shower and I went to answer the door in my bathrobe…’
‘Do you plan on getting to the point any time this year?’
‘Forget about the bathrobe…it doesn’t matter. The point is…and I know you’re going to be angry at this but it wasn’t my fault…your mother wasn’t expecting to see me.’
‘Why didn’t she ask Hal to let her up if she wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the apartment?’
‘Because Hal told her that someone would be here…she just expected that someone to be you…’
‘At four-thirty in the afternoon?’
Heather ignored this rhetorical question and fixed him with a pleading stare which immediately sent alarm bells clanging in his head.
‘I’m afraid she got the wrong impression…’
‘Got the wrong impression? What impression did she get?’
‘That I was…somehow involved with you…’
‘You are involved with me. You’re my housekeeper, amongst other things.’
‘Not that kind of involved, Theo. Involved, involved. On a romantic level involved. As in your girlfriend.’
Theo’s reaction was unexpected. He burst out laughing.
‘I know it’s incredible,’ Heather said tightly. ‘I know I’m not the sort of woman you would glance at twice…’
Theo stopped laughing and looked at her narrowly, faintly uneasy about her tone of voice, but she had already progressed to the main body of the story and he was now getting the picture loud and clear.
He had kept his mother in the dark about his frequent liaisons—half to protect her, half to spare himself the inevitable disappointment he knew he would read on her face—and now she had walked in on a woman in a bathrobe, sharing his apartment, and had jumped to all the wrong conclusions.
‘But you told her the truth, didn’t you?’ he interrupted.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t? Run that by me, Heather. My mother starts telling you how pleased she is that her son has finally found himself a good woman and you don’t find it possible to point her in the right direction?’ He was beginning to wonder how a day at the office could end up going so monstrously wrong.
‘She didn’t let me get a word in edgeways, Theo, and then she just sort of…lost all her steam—as though energy had been drained out of her—and I just didn’t have the heart to shake her and tell her that she’d made a mistake…’
‘Well, I’ll sort that out.’ He took a sip of his coffee and regarded Heather over the rim of his cup. Heather? Girlfriend? Ridiculous notion. His eyes drifted over her face, with its finely defined features and expressive eyes, then downwards to the striped tee shirt that did absolutely nothing for her and seemed to belong to a range of clothing specifically chosen for that purpose.
Yes, sure, she might have a personality—quite a bit of a personality, as he had discovered over time—but personality wasn’t high on Theo’s list of desirable qualities in a woman.
‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ he continued.
‘You mean because no one in their right mind would ever think that I might be attractive?’ Heather heard the words come out of her with a start of surprise, and she carried on quickly, not giving him time to latch onto their significance. ‘Perhaps you ought to go and check on her…she seems to have been asleep for a while…’
‘Where did that come from?’ Theo asked with a frown. Heather might not be a candidate for a modelling contract, but then again he had never once seen her succumb to any real insecurities about her appearance. She joked about her figure now and again, and always seemed to be on some diet or another, but that was as far as it went. ‘Has some man insulted you?’ He felt a flare of sudden overpowering rage.
‘Don’t be silly, Theo. I’m just…in a weird mood. Must be your mother showing up…’
Which brought him back to what his mother was doing here, and he nodded and stood up. ‘I’m going to go and check on her.’
‘Don’t wake her up if she’s still asleep,’ Heather urged. ‘She looked as though she needed the rest. Perhaps she came over here to relax.’ That made no sense at all, but she couldn’t bear to see the sudden lines of strain etched on his darkly handsome features. It was funny how successfully he had always managed to promote his own invincibility. To see him vulnerable hurt her in ways she couldn’t define. Nor could she express how she felt, because he would have rejected her sympathy as fiercely as if she had offered him a cup of arsenic.
‘You don’t have to patronise me,’ Theo said dryly, but at least, Heather thought, he wasn’t angry, and she smiled.
‘I do if it stops you worrying so much.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…’ She felt terra firma begin to shift worryingly under her feet. ‘Because I would do it for anyone.’ Which was a version of the truth at any rate. ‘I can’t bear to see anyone hurting.’
‘A good Samaritan?’ Theo said, still looking at her intently. ‘Well, now I’m going to see my mother, and I shall end up being the bad Samaritan when I inform her that her notions about us are a load of rubbish.’ He laughed and shook his head, as if still incredulous that such an error of judgement might have been made in the first place.
It left Heather thinking how important it was now to leave. She couldn’t blame Theo for the fact that he found any idea of them being connected romantically a complete joke. The joke, she miserably pondered, was on her. She had harboured a ridiculous unfounded infatuation with him virtually from the very first moment she had clapped eyes on him, sitting behind his desk, brow furrowed in concentration, barely aware of her existence as she cleaned around him. And that had eventually led her here, to his apartment, entrenched in feelings that would never be reciprocated. Beth had been right all along. She needed to control her life and set it in the direction she wanted to take—instead of passively allowing her emotions to dictate to her.
It all made perfect sense to her in the forty-five minutes she spent in the kitchen, waiting for Theo to emerge and wondering whether it was appropriate for her to wait at all.
When he eventually did come out, she knew from his expression that the news wasn’t going to be good.
‘I need something stronger than coffee,’ was the first thing he said as he sat at the kitchen table and wearily pressed his thumbs on his eyes. ‘And I suggest,’ he added, ‘that you have something as well.’
Occasionally Heather had wine with Theo when she happened to have cooked for him, but actually she was on an alcohol-free diet, guaranteed to shed several pounds in combination with rigorous exercise—which she planned on getting down to very soon. The look on his face put paid to that. She poured them both a glass and sat down facing him.
‘She did not want to worry me,’ Theo said at last. ‘The chest pains began a while ago, but she put it down to old age, wear and tear. Eventually, she made an appointment with her doctor, who referred her to his colleague in London, a specialist in heart surgery.’
Heather gasped. ‘And you had no idea…?’
‘If I had, do you think that I would have allowed her to carry that burden on her own?’ Theo snapped irritably. She had tapped into his own dark guilt—guilt that he had been so wrapped up in his own fast-moving life that he barely surfaced to see what was going on around him. ‘She took the private jet over to London, visited with the doctor, who did a few tests, and she was then told that flying back to Greece was not a realistic option. Which was when she decided to come here, to my flat. Which was when she met you…’
CHAPTER FOUR
HEATHER waited for an improvement on this flatly spoken statement, which had carried just a hint of accusation with it. None was forthcoming.
‘Look,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath, ‘I’ve been thinking…and…’ The prospect of saying goodbye loomed ahead of her like a yawning Black Hole, but she ducked down and ploughed on. ‘And now your mother’s here…and, well…especially as she seemed to get the wrong impression of me…it wouldn’t be appropriate…for me to stay on here…’ She could feel her cheeks reddening under his silent watchful gaze, and the wrenching in her gut as she absorbed the enormity of what she was doing. Not that it wasn’t the right thing to do—because it absolutely was!
‘I’ve finished my course now, and it’s time I moved on…with a proper job. Not that it hasn’t been great being here…Well, Beth has a flat in mind for me, actually…it’s in the same block as hers. Just small, of course, because I won’t be able to afford that much to start with…’ As usual she could hear herself turning one small statement of fact into several bewildering thousands, and she forced herself to shut up and smile.
