Goodie glanced at her watch and tucked her phone between her ear and her shoulder as she walked to the wardrobe. ‘Is there any security around the house?’ She grabbed a pair of faded jeans and started pulling them on.
‘Well, it’s in St John’s Wood so there’s a patrol anyway in the area,’ Sam told her. ‘The house itself has an alarm system but I doubt it will be activated.’ Goodie frowned.
‘We can negotiate that. Once the guests are all there, and they’re inside and we’re out, they could activate the system. They’d just have to tell everyone not to open any windows or leave the house without deactivating.’
‘Nick wants you inside.’
Goodie snorted. ‘Tough.’
‘He says it’s non negotiable. He says he’s worried about a threat in the house.’
‘He’s not fucking worried about a threat in the house. He’s never worried about any threats full stop.’
‘Well,’ Sam said carefully. ‘We work for him, Goodie. We probably should to do as he asks for a change.’
‘He’s up to something.’
Sam sighed. ‘I expect so.’
‘Well, I’m not changing.’
‘He said it’s casual anyway. He specifically told me you didn’t have to dress up. It was important to him that you knew that.’ Goodie rubbed her chest absently against the sudden constriction she was feeling.
Nick noticed things. He knew she didn’t like wearing that stuff.
She pushed her hair back with the hand not holding the phone and stared up at the ceiling. It was this kind of thing that was getting to her, that was burrowing underneath her reserve. The small stuff he did to make her that bit more comfortable; that bit … happier. She knew he phoned ahead about Salem everywhere they went. She wasn’t stupid, dogs would not be allowed in most executive buildings in the city; somehow he could tell she needed Salem in the lifts. How he knew about her claustrophobia she wasn’t sure, but she suspected he had read her body language. This in itself was impressive; Goodie knew that she didn’t give much away.
She pushed open the door of her flat, coming face to face with Sam and shoving her mobile into the pocket of her jeans. Sam watched as she sighed and pulled on her leather jacket, zipping it up to her chin. She swept her blonde fringe out of her eyes before putting her hands on her hips. ‘Right then, you coming?’ There was annoyance threaded through her voice, but also just a hint of what may have been excitement. Her blue eyes caught his, and she raised her eyebrows. Sam had always known Goodie was beautiful, but over the last few weeks her features had become more animated, her eyes held more sparkle, he had even caught a couple of half smiles. As a result her beauty was more pronounced than he’d ever seen. It was almost blinding. He cared about Goodie; he just hoped Nick knew what he was doing … and who he was dealing with.
*****
Goodie stayed two steps behind Nick as they approached the house. There had been some battles about this way of doing things over the last two weeks: she rarely walked at his side; depending on where the far guard was she was either a few steps behind or in front. Nick had gone through a stage of slowing down to try and fall in step with her or power-walking to catch her up. Only the threat of her switching with Sam had made him back off. She scanned the drive and her mouth hitched up at the side when she saw a Porsche parked up next to an Aston Martin and blocked in by a large Range Rover. Rich, entitled and arrogant was not her brand of vodka. When she looked back towards the front door she nearly ran into Nick, who had stopped and was watching her, smiling enough for the dimple to make an appearance.
‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You think the whole house is full of wankers and I don’t blame you; but not all my mates are like Clive.’
Since Clive left the house that day he had been keeping a low profile. He never came to the office any more and mainly coordinated the project with Nick via email. Nick, Ed and Bertie had just presumed that he was keeping his distance after the split with Tilly, and, given the way Clive had been treating his sister, Nick seemed to be relieved.
Nick stepped forward and closed the distance between them, shocking her by grabbing her hand. She shook him off but he just grabbed it again.
‘You want to lose your arm?’ she asked through her teeth as he tugged her forward.
‘Now, I thought the idea was to get me inside safe spaces as quickly as possible,’ he said, still smiling as he tugged her up the steps to the front door of the large Edwardian house, ‘so I’m guessing that fighting with me out in the open over petty stuff like a spot of hand-holding is a bit of a no-no.’ When they reached the top step he grinned at her and dropped her hand, only to wrap his arm around her shoulders after ringing the doorbell.
‘What are you –?’
‘Darlings!’ Goodie stopped short as the door was flung open and a small blonde woman flew at them. She kissed Nick on the cheek, practically strangling him in the process, then she threw herself at Goodie, giving her the same treatment. ‘We’re all so excited that Flopsy brought his new girlfriend.’ The blonde was now bouncing up and down on her alarmingly high heels. She was wearing a strange combination of ripped tights, netting skirt and multiple T-shirts, with even more scarves around her neck. To top it off she had a furry headband sitting across her forehead and her blonde hair was piled in a haphazard fashion on top of her head. In Goodie’s opinion she looked mentally ill.
‘Flopsy!’ a large man shouted from behind the blonde, coming forward to slap Nick on the back repeatedly. ‘Good to see you, old man.’ Goodie recognized this man’s standard ‘posh bloke’ uniform: red trousers, shirt with colour turned up, sheepish grin and messy hair. ‘Hi there,’ he boomed at Goodie, giving her a slightly gentler back slap. ‘I’m Giles, a.k.a. Cottontail. Good to meet you finally. Flopsy’s been banging on about you for long enough. Got a glimpse of you at that charity ball last month but you were on the job; sticking to the shadows and all that business.’
‘I am on job now,’ Goodie told him, and he frowned.
‘Not tonight, beautiful,’ he said smoothly. ‘Tonight’s a party.’
Salem barked once and Goodie glanced behind her. ‘Can we move inside?’ she said.
‘Oh of course!’ said the blonde, bouncing out of their way and waving them to follow her in. ‘I’m such a terrible dunderhead. Please, come in. I love your dog.’
‘What is a dunderhead?’ Goodie asked Nick under her breath as he followed her inside. ‘Sounds painful.’
As the door closed behind them Nick started chuckling and pulled Goodie into his side, kissing her temple and giving her shoulders a firm squeeze. Goodie felt the familiar hollowing out in her stomach and tightening in her chest at Nick’s laughter. She smiled up at him, and then froze. Turning her head slowly, she took in her surroundings. Usually the first thing she did on entering any space was scan it for its occupants, exits, possible threats; she was allowing Nick to scramble her mind. There were about fifteen people crowding the large hallway, all smiling and all looking ridiculously curious. In amongst them she could see Bertie, Tilly, and Ed. Most of the men were wearing either red or mustard-yellow trousers, Tilly looked like she still had her jodhpurs on, and Ed of course was in his standard garb of ripped jeans and a T-shirt (this one with two test tubes on the front, one telling the other it was ‘overreacting’).
‘What ho!’ Bertie boomed, striding forward through the small crowd to do his share of back-slapping for Nick and a brief hug for Goodie. Tilly was next with a far more exuberant-slash-bone-crushing hug for Goodie. As she watched all the beaming, curious faces, Goodie felt a strange sense of hopelessness. She had a feeling that her plan to stick to the outskirts and remain very much in employee mode for the evening was unlikely to happen.
*****
‘Do you know if Nick did any sort of Big Brother routine with Clive?’ Tilly asked.
They had just finished the meal. The whole evening had been totally bizarre to Goodie. It was obvious that these people were Nick’s best friends; apart from the fact they all called him ‘Flopsy’ (Cottontail, Mopsy and Peter were also in attendance), there was also the easy, casual affection and teasing that came with years, if not decades, of friendship. You would have thought, considering how long they’d all known each other, that it would have been tricky to include obvious outsiders like Ed and Goodie, but it proved to be quite the opposite. It was as if they all found both Ed and Goodie the most fascinating human beings to walk the earth. They even listened to Ed’s cold fusion explanation with rapt attention, and the scant information they were able to extract from Goodie seemed to hold them all completely spellbound.
She fiddled with the stem of her wineglass, then grabbed her water and took a large swallow. Nick might want to deny it but she was actually on the job. ‘I don’t know,’ she told Tilly. ‘Would it be so bad if he had?’
Tilly grimaced. ‘You noticed as well, did you? He turned out to be a nasty piece of work in the end; didn’t take my ending things very well at all – to be honest I thought he was going to make a bit of a nuisance of himself. Nick denies warning him off, but even if he did, I guess it was for the best. He, um …’ Tilly’s hand went up to her cheek automatically before she realized what she was doing and tucked it back in her lap, ‘… he wasn’t very nice actually. I suppose I could have given him another chance but Arabella … she …’
Goodie turned more towards her and caught her eyes.
‘People do not change,’ she told Tilly firmly. Tilly nodded slowly, and then managed a weak smile.
‘I wish I hadn’t been so frightfully stupid though,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that … well, I’ve bumbled along since the divorce, no real job, no real direction, kid in tow. I’m not exactly the catch of the century.’
‘Don’t ever let someone who does not know your value dictate your worth,’ Goodie told her. ‘You and your daughter are worth ten of him.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ Tilly said, her voice a little choked. ‘I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.’
‘I did not say it to be nice,’ Goodie told her. ‘I am not nice: I only speak the truth.’
‘Thank you,’ Tilly whispered, and to Goodie’s horror her eyes filled with tears.
‘Hey, you.’ Ed had reached across the table to Tilly, laying his hand over her arm. ‘Alright?’
Tilly blinked rapidly as Ed caught Goodie’s eye and she shook her head once.
‘I’m fine, Ed,’ Tilly said, her eyes still wet but a wide smile now dominating her face as she turned to him. ‘Must be off in a jiffy though, babysitter and all that.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Ed told her, and Goodie was surprised to hear how firm his voice was. She wouldn’t have thought that Ed did firm, not really.
‘Oh …’ Tilly blushed, her eyes sparkling and tears now very much a thing of the past, ‘well, I don’t want to put you out or anything. I know what a bore it is to have to leave early from things, Clive was always saying that –’
‘Clive,’ Ed cut her off, his voice harder than Goodie had ever heard it, ‘is a dickhead. No argument: I’m taking you home.’ He ran his hand down her forearm to her hand and held it possessively. Tilly looked down at their linked hands and blinked, then nodded with a small, pleased smile on her face.
‘No one’s going anywhere until we’ve played the hat game,’ the small blonde hostess piped up from her end of the table, bouncing up and down in her seat. ‘Boys against girls!’
Goodie was not aware that people still played games like this. She had never, even as a child, had a chance to do anything even remotely like charades, and that strange feeling of helplessness enveloped her as she was squashed onto the ‘girls’ sofa’ in the vast living room opposite the boys, and was instructed to write down famous names to put in a hat.
You had to first describe, then act out, then use one word to describe the names in the hat to your team in three different rounds. At first the game seemed simple but the rules grew more convoluted and seemed to change as the rounds progressed. Also, cheating appeared to be acceptable practice (hiding names behind your back was fine as long as nobody saw – but if you were caught a violent struggle with one of the opposing team would invariably occur to restore the name to the hat).
The girls won by a ridiculous margin. Goodie had a crazily accurate ability to retain information. The boys didn’t stand a chance. And it was the strangest thing. She started laughing when she watched Nick act out ‘the arse end of nowhere’ (apparently places were allowed in hat also – a rule change which only emerged halfway through the game), and for the rest of the game she just couldn’t stop. In her twenty-nine years Goodie could count on one hand the number of times she’d actually laughed; in one evening she’d managed to smash all previous records to pieces. The evening finished off with ‘Fungal Bum Candle’ – a game which involved having a mushroom dangling from a piece of string attached to the back of your trousers and attempting to put out a candle on the floor with it.
It was the most ridiculous, utterly bonkers endeavour Goodie had ever witnessed. By the end of the evening her cheeks were actually wet with tears of laughter. Nick had done his fair share of laughing too, but she had noticed that more often that not he was happy to watch her, and nearly always had her in his immediate radius: his hand on her back before they sat for dinner, his arm around the back of her chair during dinner, holding her hand on the sofa when he extracted her from the girls’ sofa after the hat game had finally concluded. She allowed it. She was coming to realize that when it came to this man she would allow pretty much anything.
No, Goodie hadn’t felt fear in a good long while, but when it came to him she was terrified.
