‘Hello, boys,’ Goodie said, and she pushed her way into the conference room. Bertie, ever the gentleman, shot from his seat to pull out a chair for her as she hobbled over to them. She had been at the house for four weeks and was down to one crutch. The discomfort in her chest was now something she could ignore and her shoulder was much stronger; all that was letting her down was her leg. The plaster was finally off but it remained weak and, without the hated crutch, would give way.
However, Goodie was stronger, she was independent again; she no longer needed looking after. What she needed to do was to leave, to get back to her old life. Staying in this house was dangerous.
She spent most of her mornings playing chess with Monty in the library, or reading. She had then started going down to the kitchen, as this was where she would invariably find Salem (he was a big fan of the Aga), and she’d help Claire, Mrs B. and sometimes Tilly (when she wasn’t out with the horses) with the day’s cooking (basically doing all the chopping – Mrs B. was constantly amazed by the way Goodie handled a knife, she reckoned Goodie was better than any KitchenAid you could buy). Then when Arabella came home from school Goodie would go out with her and Salem; she couldn’t run and muck about with them, but she could walk out to the woods and at least be with them.
Then there was her physiotherapist: a tall, strapping Australian man called Bruce, who cycled everywhere, then proceeded to wear his lycra in his sessions with Goodie. Goodie had always had a dry sense of humour. She knew she could make people laugh if she wanted, but the urge to do it had been rare in times past. Now she found that she practically lived for making the Chambers family laugh, since she had said to Tilly, Mrs B. and Nick’s mum that she felt ‘a terrifying mixture of reluctant arousal and abject horror’ at the amount of time she had to spend close to his lycra-outlined, obnoxiously large manhood.
Now whenever he came into the kitchen to fetch her for her sessions, all the ladies had to stop themselves looking down at his crotch, and couldn’t even speak to him through their suppressed laughter. Luckily he seemed happy to put it down to posh eccentricity rather than an obsession with his meat and two veg.
So she’d fallen into this comfortable routine and so far had managed to push aside her fear. But now that she was stronger the fear was growing. She wouldn’t need rehab forever. She couldn’t afford to get closer to these people. Even if she wanted to stay, she doubted that her past would let her.
‘Congratulations,’ she told Ed. ‘I hear your little idea actually works.’
Ed smiled and nodded his head enthusiastically.
‘My poor grandad would be turning over in his grave,’ he said happily. ‘He was a miner, see; not all that into alternative energy.’
‘He would be proud,’ Goodie told him. ‘You – you will change the world now.’
Ed blushed and smoothed down the front of his ‘Kiss a Geek’ T-shirt. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he muttered.
‘Not daft,’ Goodie told him firmly, and when he shook his head she let Nick take her crutch and guide her down onto one of the chairs. ‘When I was a child in Russia I was cold … all the time. So cold. There is no happiness when you are that cold. You cannot take joy from anything. Being cold turns you cold, in here,’ Goodie said as she pressed a hand to her chest. ‘Makes you a different person. You … you will bring warmth to these people, I think. Energy without limits – without harm to the environment. That is why you will change lives.’
‘Jolly well said,’ Bertie put in, clapping Ed on the back a few times for good measure. Goodie smiled. She was pleased Ed was happy. The success of the project meant more to her than she had ever let on before. In the beginning, before she had started to care for Nick, it was the only reason she’d agreed to protect them. Their lives were important. They would make a difference. That was still true now and that was part of the reason she had to leave.
‘I came here to speak to you all,’ she said as she felt Nick’s arm drape across the back of her chair and his body move closer to hers. ‘I cannot stay here any longer. I am recovered. Natasha is picking me up today.’ The atmosphere in the room changed from happy to alert in an instant. She felt Nick’s body next to hers go tight and her chair move as he gripped the back of it.
‘But Goodie, old girl … don’t you think –’
*****
‘Bert, Ed could you leave us a moment? Get a cup of tea or something?’ Nick was trying to keep his voice level and light, but the words came out as somewhat of a growl.
‘Of course, mate,’ Ed said, jumping up and nearly tripping over his chair in his efforts to get out of the room and away from the thick atmosphere. ‘Come on, Bertie,’ Ed said as he pushed the door open. Bertie had got to his feet but was standing his ground.
‘I … well, that’s to say, I …’ Bertie took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. ‘I think it would be a blasted shame if you were to just … well … vanish into thin bloody air again. I think you’re a damn fine girl and a good sport and, well …’
‘Thank you, Bertie,’ Goodie said. He gave her a quick nod, gave Nick a significant look as if to say ‘sort this out, you moron’, and stalked out of the room.
‘I think I want to adopt your cousin,’ Goodie told Nick through a chuckle as the door slammed after him.
‘Not sure you can adopt a thirty-seven-year-old man, Goodie,’ Nick said, relaxing as he saw her smile. ‘But I guess if the authorities were going to arrange it for anyone, Bertie would be the most likely to qualify.’
He turned his chair towards Goodie’s and pulled hers into him so that her legs were between his, with both his hands resting on her armrests and him leaning into her. Goodie had noticed this about Nick, he used his proximity to his advantage. If he wanted to convince her of something he would always find a way to occupy her personal space. He knew the impact being close to him had on her; she rather thought that with the right training he would have made a fairly lethal operative in the field. He was certainly manipulative enough.
‘Now, what’s all this about leaving?’ he asked.
Goodie leaned back into her chair but she could still smell him, still make out every detail of his beautiful face, focused intensely on hers. ‘I can’t stay here, Nick. You don’t –’ she took a deep breath and tried to push her chair away from his, but his hands gripped her arm rests more firmly ‘– you don’t know me,’ she finished on a whisper. He slowly leaned in further until she could feel his breath on her cheek, and his hand came up to push her now shoulder-length blonde hair behind her ear.
‘I know you, baby,’ he said, his voice low, and Goodie fought back a shiver, remembering just how well he did know her, at least in that sense.
‘Nick, I –’ She was cut off as his mouth closed over hers. She froze for a moment but the feel of him and her need for him drowned out the voice of reason in her head, and when both his warm, large, strong hands wound into her hair she lost control. Pushing him backwards with her hands to his chest and her mouth still fastened to his, they both moved until she had left her chair and was straddling him on his. The kiss became desperate and her hands slid down to pull his shirt out of his trousers so that she could touch the skin of his stomach and move up to the hard planes of his chest. She pulled her mouth from his and moaned low in her throat at the feel of him, resting her forehead on his.
And that was when it happened.
His arms slid around her back, under her T-shirt, and his breath left him in a loud exhale before he whispered: ‘Anya,’ into her ear.
Goodie froze.
‘What did you say?’ she asked slowly, jerking her head away from his.
Nick’s eyes widened and his body went rigid with tension. ‘Goodie, I …’ Acting on impulse, she wrenched away from him and stumbled to her feet, wincing as her leg almost gave way with the sudden weight through it, and grabbing onto the table for support.
‘Goodie, listen to me …’ Nick had risen from the chair and lifted his hand to support her elbow, but she pulled away from him violently, causing another tearing pain through her leg, but at this point she was beyond caring. The room actually felt like it was spinning as she backed away from him, using the chairs for support because her crutch was on Nick’s other side. She hadn’t been called that name for twenty years.
Nick held his hands up, palm down. ‘Goodie,’ he said, low and even, as if approaching a wounded animal, ‘baby, you’re going to hurt yourself. Please calm down and let me explain.’
‘How do you know that name?’ she asked, moving to the other side of the conference table and ignoring the throbbing ache in her leg.
‘You’ll take this the wrong way, honey, but I had to know more about you. It was driving me nuts and I … I’m not good with being in the dark.’
‘Who told you that name?’ Her voice was now cold, completely devoid of expression, as were her eyes. Her quick mind was processing everything at lightning speed. She had thought her past was buried, but if anyone had the resources to dig it up it was of course Nick. The deception and betrayal cut deep, but what really chilled her was that this knowledge was dangerous. This stupid, stubborn mule of a man had put himself in danger to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about her.
Nick sighed. ‘I found out the bloody name by myself. You told me that much.’ Goodie frowned at him and he continued. ‘You reacted. You flinched when her name was called. It was small, nobody else but me would have ever noticed but … God, Goodie, I watch you all the time. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I just wanted to know more about you … to have something –’
‘You have everything,’ she said. To her horror her voice broke and the shame of that weakness made her anger grow even more. ‘Everything. Why would you go digging when I had already given you all I had.’
‘I’m sorry, Goodie, I just –’
‘Look,’ Goodie cut him off, her gaze shearing away from him as she considered her options. It was obvious that he was not going to tell her his source. She had no way of extracting the information she needed like this. ‘Natasha will be here soon. I can’t talk about this now. I need to lie down, get the weight off my leg and take something for the pain.’
‘Listen, I –’
‘I’m in pain, Nick.’ Goodie watched as he ran his hands through his hair and let out a long sigh.
‘Okay,’ he said, reaching back for her crutch and then moving to her. He followed after as she hobbled to the stairs, and as was normal for them now she allowed him to lift her to climb them, but instead of breathing him in and clutching around his neck as she normally would, she let her arms settle loosely in her lap and turned her head away. He laid her down in his bed; she rolled onto her side, facing the window, and closed her eyes.
A good few minutes passed, but once she heard the door softly close behind him her eyes popped open. He would be going back to his office but his laptop was in the bedroom. Observation was one of Goodie’s particular skills. As well as a photographic memory when it came to written pages, she had almost perfect recall of the layout of a room and the items inside it. She’d noticed Nick leave his laptop in the room this morning when he came to bring her a cup of tea. The bank of computers in his office meant he rarely had to use it during the day and he often left it lying around. Goodie had had no need to hack it before. She had studied Nick well before she started working for him. This, however, was different. This was about her.
She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, grabbed her crutch and pushed to her feet. Once she was sitting at the small desk near the window she opened the lid of the laptop and then entered the password. She knew all of Nick’s passwords, just like she knew everything else about him: from his shoe size, to his GCSE results, to the names of every woman he’d ever slept with (that knowledge had proved painful on occasion, especially when she was forced to watch him dance with one of the women he’d shagged on a semi-regular basis over the years).
It took a few minutes to hack every corner of his hard drive until she found what she was looking for. Before she opened the file, she paused to look at the private investigator’s name and contact details, then took a deep breath. Something was stopping her from making the last few key-strokes she needed, and she found herself just staring at the screen as the seconds ticked by. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and a cold feeling of foreboding swept over her as she forced her fingers to move.
The screen changed as a scanned document filled it: she took in her name, her mother’s name, her date of birth (something she hadn’t acknowledged in over twenty years). A few more key-strokes, and instead of more documents an image filled the screen. Goodie wasn’t shocked by the blood or the hollow emptiness in the blue eyes staring back at her, but she was surprised by how young she looked: even younger than Arabella. An image of Arabella going through what Goodie had at the same age went through her mind, and she was swamped by a sick feeling of horror.
I was just a child, she thought as she dragged her consciousness away from that image. She frowned. Had she ever been a child in the true sense of the word? Closing her eyes for a moment, she drew in a breath and her fingers flew back to the keys. At the next image she froze. The image of a blonde woman with a small, equally blonde child in her lap appeared, another dark-haired child standing at their sides and leaning into them both. Their arms were around each other, the blonde child was smiling a wide smile into the camera, and the dark-haired child’s head was thrown back in laughter. But the woman’s eyes were on the blonde child’s face; her smile was smaller than her children’s and her blue eyes were soft. Goodie reached out a finger and traced the woman’s beautiful face on the screen as the memories started invading.
‘Mama,’ Anya said into her mother’s soft hair in Russian, ‘throat sore. Make me better.’
‘Ugh, you’ve got a cold, Anya,’ groaned Tasha from her position on the ratty sofa, rolling her eyes.
‘Don’t worry, myshka, I can make better,’ Anya heard her mother murmur, and felt the arms around her give her a squeeze as she was carried through to the tiny kitchen. She was sat at the small table as her mother moved to the stove, pouring the white mixture into Anya’s mug. She then placed the mug in front of Anya and stroked her hair as Anya drank the warm liquid, easing the pain in her throat and lessening the shivers that wracked her body. She took Anya’s hand when she had finished, and guided her to the bedroom they shared. They lay down together and Anya’s eyes closed as her mother stroked her hair. She heard the bedroom door open but was buried so far into her mother’s chest that she couldn’t make out Tasha’s words.
‘She’s fine, kotyonok,’* Anya heard her mother say. Then she felt heat at her back as Tasha came in behind her to wrap her arms around both of them. Anya had drifted off to sleep, warm and surrounded by love.
Goodie blinked at the screen but was unable to tear her eyes away. She was wrong when she thought she’d never been looked after before. She’d been loved, totally and unconditionally. After the horror of what happened to her mother and the nightmare of everything that happened after that night, she’d blocked out those memories. That way she could deal with being separated from Tasha. She could deal with anything because she no longer felt pain or loss; but in turn she no longer really ever felt happiness or joy.
Not until him.
Not until Nick.
* kotyonok – kitten
