This morning Dominic had come by to see it for himself and he had been shocked to see the scale of the damage. And once again she had been unable to venture inside because the warehouse was still cordoned off.
Her brother had left a short while ago after she had turned down his offer of lunch and ‘to get away from here’ for a while. She wanted to be by herself.
Just as Nico had said, Dominic also reassured her that Leo would be the best person to deal with this. He was good at going into companies which had fallen in to hard times and he was able to turn them around.
Her company hadn’t been in that kind of trouble and she wondered what the draw had been for him? Hers wasn’t a sexy business by any means. It wasn’t a hot new start-up such as the one he was involved in. She was a supplier who specialized in selling children’s products. It was hardly the type of business to interest a man like him. He must have seen something in it that had made him think that it would be worth his while.
Now she needed him more than ever and she willed him to get better quickly. Walking away, she headed for the familiar coffee shop, desperate for something warm to make her feel better.
Giuseppe nodded at her as soon as she walked in and much to her relief the place was empty. She started to walk towards the counter to place her order.
“Take a seat, Andrea,” said Giuseppe. “This one’s on me.”
She thanked him and did as she was told, getting out her cell phone as she sat down. She’d left Riley at the apartment today. The last few days had been draining for both of them. He claimed he was fine and that the smoke inhalation he’d suffered had been mild but he still looked the worse for wear. Yet he was still being overly attentive towards her. This morning she’d left him hovering over his laptop, eyeing his three screens as though his life depended on it.
“Here you go,” said Giuseppe, placing a large cup of coffee on the table along with her favorite Danish pastry.
“Thank you,” she said, genuinely touched by the words of kindness and small acts of help that her peers offered so willingly.
The coffee shop owner hovered around the table. “It looks bad, but it will be new again.”
“I know,” she said. “It will take time.”
“There are other units on the other side, did you know that? You should look at those until your place is fixed.”
She nodded, agreeing with him. She knew that she would have to do something quickly and she was well aware that she’d been lost in a strange limbo these past few days. What she needed to do was to get herself together and move on. If anything, she was most anxious about Leo’s recovery. His short-term memory loss worried her and this weighed more heavily on her mind than anything else.
“It’s a good thing that you found Riley’s small screen,” she said, wanting to make small talk that was unrelated to the fire. “He can’t live without his mobile setup.”
“Screen?”
She wasn’t sure he understood her clearly and so she gesticulated with her hands. “The small monitor? The screen Riley lost but you found?” The man looked perplexed.
She was about to shake her head and tell him that it didn’t matter, since she was only trying to make small talk, when he suddenly nodded his head enthusiastically.
“Si, si! The small screen he connects to his laptop for his work, yes? He showed it to me when I didn’t understand what his job was.” Giuseppe was obviously more computer savvy than she had him down for. “That was a long time ago.”
Andrea nearly coughed up her pastry. “A long time ago? When?”
“Last month.”
“Last month? Are you sure? Not last week? Not on the day of the fire?”
Giuseppe was adamant. “Si, last month. But he was here on Thursday—the day of the fire. He was here all afternoon.”
The Danish pastry sat between her fingers, sticky and sweet and its appeal vanished.
“He was here the whole afternoon?” She whispered weakly. The coffee shop didn’t even have Wi-Fi.
“Doing what?”
“He was reading.”
“Reading?” Andrea’s mind whirred like the wheels on a bicycle. Why would he lie?
Giuseppe nodded and made a sign of the cross. “It is good that he was here. He saved Leo’s life.”
Another customer walked in and Giuseppe returned to the desk leaving a nasty feeling to settle in the base of her stomach. As her mouth dried up, the palpitations in her heart restarted.
He’d been here and reading on the day of the fire? It didn’t make sense. Riley didn’t do things like that. He was either in her apartment staring at his screens, or passing by after work to meet her.
He never had time to sit in one place and do nothing. So how had he found time during that particular afternoon? And why lie about the screen? She thought back to the other recent incidents: the sudden illness on the day of the wedding, the fire in warehouse, Leo unconscious and Riley to the rescue.
And now lies that seemed pointless. Lies about a monitor screen?
Wherever Riley went, action followed. Could this be mere coincidence? Before the warehouse fire doubts had begun to creep into her mind but had recently begun to evaporate because of the way he’d been with her lately. Now, on hearing this latest news from Giuseppe, the same doubts had started to wriggle around under her skin again.
There had been no plausible reason to lie about his being here—unless.
Unless he was trying to cover something up. And then she remembered the words of the insurance company’s claims investigators. There was a suspicion that the fire had been started deliberately.
38
“You should be able to go home today,” said the doctor. “The scan shows there hasn’t been any lasting damage and your retrograde amnesia should start to go within a few days. Do you recall anything at all about the fire?”
Leo considered it. He remembered the warehouse, knew Andrea and Riley, just as he knew Gianna and Dominic when they had come to visit him. His long-term memory was fine. But he couldn’t remember the details of what had happened on the day of the fire. He didn’t even remember the fire. “Not a thing, Doctor.”
“I find it hard to believe that a bookshelf fell on you. Your injury is consistent with a sharp blow to the head but…” The doctor scratched his chin and paused.
Leo examined the doctor’s lined face closely. He felt as if he was sitting in a dark room in a straitjacket—he couldn’t get a sense of anything from that episode in his life. The last thing he remembered was saying goodbye to Andrea and then he woke up in hospital.
“Was it a standing bookshelf or hanging on the wall?”
This was easy to remember. “It was wall mounted but it wasn’t very sturdy. We’d been meaning to take it down.”
“Hmm,” said the doctor, nodding his head. “In that case I’d expect it to fall straight to the floor because of gravity and unless you were sitting directly under it, you wouldn’t have been hit.”
Leo thought about it. He never sat directly under it and the doctor was right in his assumption. He didn’t sit close enough for any part of the shelf to have hit him.
“It doesn’t make much sense, I agree.”
“We’ll leave that to the investigators. The main thing is you have recovered enough from your injuries so that I can discharge you.”
Leo smiled gratefully. He couldn’t wait to get out of this place. He was eager to return to the warehouse and work out a plan to get things up and running as fast as possible. He’d seen Andrea’s face and knew she was worried and he didn’t want her to feel as though she was going to have to deal with this alone.
He felt better now and his lungs were clear; the effects of the smoke inhalation had disappeared. The stitches still made his scalp feel tight but it was nothing compared to how he looked; like an idiot, he concluded. The shaved patch on his scalp looked unsightly and he’d have to get a haircut before he returned to the warehouse and saw Andrea again.
Days of sitti
ng in the hospital had made his mind even more numb and he was anxious to remember things. He remembered the wedding and meeting Andrea in the supermarket. Every now and then he sensed the feeling of seeing her again in the office but he couldn’t place the exact time when that had happened. He had fleeting memories of seeing Riley too but Riley didn’t come to the warehouse much. Not as he remembered it. So he was confused and wondered if this was the point at which his memories started to glitch.
If he returned to the warehouse it might help him to remember. He needed to see the damage with his own eyes because he still couldn’t believe it even though both Gianna and Dominic had told him.
* * *
Andrea walked into her apartment feeling odd and out of sorts and when she saw Riley at the table, hunched over his laptop and screens, she felt her muscles harden. Her hopes that he might have gone to one of the internet cafes and she would have the apartment to herself were dashed. She raised her fingers to her temples and massaged them gently; she wasn’t going to get any quiet time or the apartment all to herself today.
“Hey,” he said, getting up from his chair as she walked into the living room.
“Hi.” She stared at the screens placed on either side of his laptop and was reminded of a partition, the way the three devices were all lined up, side-by-side, like a wall that he could hide behind. The screens showed moving graphs and numbers and it might as well have been a foreign language for all that it meant to her.
“I didn’t hear you get up this morning,” he said, taking her hands gently in his.
“That’s because you were completely out of it by the time I got up. How come you were up most of the night again?” She’d lain in bed alone thinking about things. Trying to figure out how the fire could have started and why anybody would have wanted to burn her place down.
“I’m on a roll now and, knock on wood,” he leaned to the side and knocked on the table. “I’m having better luck with the markets so I need to keep an eye on things. You know how it is.”
“I don’t know how it is. You hardly ever talk about it. Isn’t it risky, counting on luck to make things work?”
He frowned, gazing at her intently. “I was joking. There’s an art to what I do. It’s more like a science, a system, if you will. It’s not random guessing. There’s a lot of data I have to analyze in order to determine my movements. The markets change in real-time. It’s tricky; a second could cost thousands of dollars.”
“It still sounds incredibly risky to me, system, science or whatever.”
“What is it?” He asked, taking her face between his hands. “What’s wrong?” His voice was soft but he made her feel claustrophobic by his touch. She exhaled loudly and moved away from him, needing to break free from his touch. Scratching her head as she walked around the room, she wondered how to bring up the news that Giuseppe had given her. Each passing second made it harder to keep it all in.
“What happened to your plans?” She asked him, attempting to broach the subject. “To travel and look for new business ideas? This,” she waved her hand at his mobile setup behind her, “this is what made you ill that day. You’re up most nights and you look worried nearly all the time. I thought you wanted to try something new?”
He interlaced his hands and placed them on the top of his head. “You’re right. I do want to stop this. It’s getting too hard, trading and traveling, and I’m getting sick of it. I can’t live with the stress anymore. It gets harder all the time.”
“Yet you’ve been doing this for years. How much longer will you carry on?” She slipped her handbag off her shoulders and didn’t care that she was hitting him with so many questions.
Riley’s face hardened and she wondered what lies he was thinking up next. “It’s why I was hoping to settle down,” he said, slowly. “It’s why I was hoping to find something else to do. Something that was more stable. But I’ve suffered losses and I need to turn them around.”
She could tell he wanted a response from her but she had nothing to give him. She had other questions for him.
“I saw Giuseppe today. I passed by for a coffee.”
“Yeah?” Riley walked back to the table and sat down, facing away from her as he stared at his screens.
“Yes,” she said, slowly, walking over to the table so that she stood by his side. “I told him it was good that you found your screen.”
He looked up slowly as the color drained from his face and his expression reminded her of how he’d looked when he’d been sick in the toilet the other day. She waited for him to say something but he stared back at her with a vacant look on his face.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked. “Like the fact that you did find your screen but that incident took place last month?”
The muscles on the side of his jaw twitched and then he folded his arms together. “What do you want me to say?”
Outrage threatened to hurl out of her body. “I want you to tell me why you lied about the screen?” Her voice raised higher at the end and the combination of fear and anger made her sound almost hysterical.
“I was taking some time out for a change and it was lucky that I was there because I saved Leo’s life.”
She felt her heart beginning to thump wildly. “It’s strange that you were there at the exact same time that he needed saving.” Come to think of it, it was even stranger that he’d been there at the same time as the fire.
Riley shot up from his chair, indignation painting his face red. “What are you saying?”
She backed away. “I don’t know. You tell me, Riley.” The fire hadn’t been caused by accident. Her heart raced and fear fled through her veins. She was suddenly afraid and the desire to run had never been stronger.
He stared at the floor. “You think I had a hand in Leo getting hurt? Is that it? You think I had something to do with the fire?”
“The fire was an accident, wasn’t it?” she asked, wanting to see his response.
“Say it,” he shot back. “Say what you think, for a change.”
“As if you do.”
He pursed his lips together. “I didn’t do any of those things and I can’t believe you would think that I could be capable of them.”
“You lied to me, Riley. For all I know you’ve probably lied in the past as well. You might even be lying to me now. How would I know?”
He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his Levis and walked into the middle of the living room.
“I didn’t want it to come out this way.”
She cocked her head. What now? She was almost too afraid to listen. “You didn’t want what to come out this way?”
“I wanted to talk to Leo—man to man—while you weren’t around. He and I have this…rift, this friction between us. I know it makes things difficult for you. When you went to Milan I thought it would be the perfect chance to have words with him. Maybe the two of us could get on better if we tried and it would make things easier for you. You work with him, you live with me. It can’t be easy for you.”
“I work with him and you live with me.”
“Thanks for spelling that out.”
She looked at him as though he was a complete stranger. A small part of her had almost been tempted to fall for his lies but her intuition, that feeling in the base of her stomach, told her that all sorts of things didn’t add up. She’d been blind for a long time. Her body reacted to him because he was good at the way he got her all heated up but things were not right.
He walked towards her and she swallowed, folding her arms as he stood in front of her.
“You were in the coffee shop all afternoon—reading? That doesn’t sound like you at all. I thought you had to keep your face glued to your screens? Isn’t that what you just told me?”
“I’m stressed out, Andrea. My trades have been a disaster. This stuff is stressful. I lost a connection in one of the coffee shops last week and it cost me thousands.”
She didn’t believe him. “And all of a sudden t
his week things are fine and you take time out to read?”
“I managed to reverse the situation. My losses aren’t so bad now and I’m trying to recover all of them. I wasn’t reading a book. I was looking through these.” He walked over to his backpack and pulled out a couple of the magazines she recognized. They were the business franchise magazines she had bought for him.
“I want to start over. I want to quit this stuff. It’s too hard on me and I can’t take the highs and lows as easily anymore.”
She clenched her teeth together.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why lie?” She paused, interested to hear his answer. “Because it seems to me that lying comes to you easily…”
His brows snapped together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
It would sound petty now, tit for tat, if she spelled it out for him. It wasn’t only the questions he’d evaded but things that hadn’t added up: the girl in the nightclub, the odd way in which he’d implied he’d yet to visit Verona when he’d already been there. And there were inconsistencies in his story, small things which over time had become a bigger monster. She dreaded to think what more there was that she didn’t know about.
Perhaps Leo, being more astute than her, had picked up on these things while she had been blind. Maybe Leo had been trying to nudge her into opening her eyes and she’d been doubting him. Wrongly now, she could see that.
“What were you doing in Bellagio that weekend?”
He looked startled. “Taking time out for myself. Why?”
“You said you were at a wedding.”
“I was. Like I said, and I was taking time out.”
“You met someone on your travels and they just happened to invite you to a wedding?”
“I made friends with you and got invited to your friend’s wedding. Is it so impossible? Why the twenty questions all of a sudden?”
She looked away. It was no use interrogating him because he was way too clever for her. She had other matters to tend to; chasing up with the insurance company being her main priority. After her conversation with Nico she knew she had to get in touch with her suppliers and re-order the stock that had burned down. But maybe the first thing she needed to do was to find out about the availability of other units in Montova.
Hearts on Fire: Romance Multi-Author Box Set Anthology Page 93