by Laura Carter
“Oh, gosh, Amy, you shouldn’t have.”
“You don’t know what it is yet,” she sings, bouncing forward to hit the button on the wall and keep the lift doors from closing, her blond ponytail swinging. “Go on. Go on.”
As she skips into the lift, my heart rate returns to normal.
I close the door behind me in the apartment and ditch my bags on the rosewood flooring, trying to push dark thoughts from my mind. Gregory walks down the staircase into the lounge rustling a towel over his freshly showered hair, his black T-shirt displaying the muscles of his lean chest above his indigo low-rise jeans. Laid back Gregory. My heart rate begins to rise again, this time in a good way.
“Hey baby.” He drops his lips to my brow. “You look tired. Is everything okay?”
I shrug, feeling defeated by my day. “Just life.”
“Well, just life, Amy has gone all out and made us a three course congratulations meal. She’s set the table, too. Do you want to grab a shower first or are you good to go?”
“I’ll shower. But do you know what I’d love?”
He wraps his towel around my neck and pulls me towards him. “What?”
“If we ate on the sofa, watched trash TV and snuggled.”
“You want to pig out with me on the sofa, baby?”
“More than anything.”
“If that’s what the lady wants, that’s what the lady shall have.” He bites the tip of my nose then clips my arse cheeks with his towel so I move upstairs to shower.
When I come back down I’m dressed in a pair of leggings and an oversized white shirt, my damp hair towel dried. Gregory has shuffled the sofa to be directly facing the large flat screen and lit two candles on the coffee table. Two wine glasses are filled with a chilled white of some variety and two small plates host goat cheese and roasted vegetable salad.
He sits up from his position laid out on the sofa and selects a movie channel playing The Bourne Identity.
I sit down and pull my knees up to my chest, resting sideways against Gregory. “This is exactly the medicine for today.”
He strokes my hair from my brow. “Rough day?”
“Oh, you know, handed my notice in, found out the registration of my client’s new software is going to shit, been told to clear out my dad’s home. Regular day I’d say.”
“When do you have to clear out the house?”
“This weekend. Sandy’s going to help me.”
“I can help, too.”
I hug my knees tighter as I ask, “Would you be offended if I asked you not to?”
His jaw rolls and I can see his mind working in overdrive. “Not if that’s what you want.”
I really don’t want to get into my dad’s things being too personal for a stranger. There’s no way of saying that so he’ll understand. More than that, I can’t tell him about the part of me that doesn’t want him there because it doesn’t feel right. My father was murdered and he was alone when he died. That’s something I’m still coming to terms with. I’ve accepted, most days, that helping Gregory take over his father’s company was at least something I did for the right reasons. But I’m not ready to put side by side my father’s death and the role that the man I love played in my father being taken before his time.
The way Gregory fusses, shuffling on the sofa, adjusting the volume of the TV and dimming the lights in the room, sipping his wine and handing me my plate without meeting my eye, it all tells me he’s not okay with the idea. He knows how my mind works, he knows my thoughts, he knows my body, but saying it out loud won’t help either of us. So I accept my plate, sip my cool Sancerre and remark on the opening scene of The Bourne Identity until Gregory’s shoulders relax and he lifts one knee onto the sofa, pulling my feet across his straight leg.
“Are you ready for main?” he asks, taking my empty plate from my lap.
“I can get it. What are we having?”
“No, Amy has left strict instructions as to how I pan fry our duck and heat through her special plum sauce.”
I follow him to the breakfast bar with our wine glasses. “What makes it so special?”
After discarding our plates in the dishwasher, he shrugs. “Amy made it?” he says with a short laugh. He’s back.
We eat duck then Amy’s Special Chocolate Orange Cheesecake—special because Amy made it. I’m stuffed to the point of waddling by the time we’re done.
“I can’t remember when I last ate like that,” I say, placing my empty dessert plate on the coffee table then leaning back to hold my triplet belly. “I feel like a female Bruce Bogtrotter.”
“Bruce who now?”
“Bogtrotter. From Matilda. You have seen Matilda? Come on!”
Leaning across him, I grab his iPhone from the opposite arm of the sofa and Google Bruce, chocolate cake all around his mouth, a sadistic grin on his face.
Gregory takes the phone from me and holds it next to my face. “Jesus, you’re right. Such a likeness. You’re just a fat boy trapped in a skinny-lady body.”
“Hey,” I protest, slapping his arm with a giggle. “You just ate what I did.”
“Yes, and I’m about six inches taller than you and twice as wide as you. Plus, I fill up from my nose.”
“Huh?”
He scrunches his face. “I fill up from my nose.”
Giggling, I ask, “Does that really make sense to you?”
“Sure. You fill your nose first, so your stomach doesn’t get as full.”
“Poor baby. It’s toes. You fill up from your toes.”
He leans his head to one side, turning the words in his mind. “Maybe that makes more sense.”
We watch the rest of the movie curled around each other on the sofa, my feet tucked between his legs, his arm wrapped around my waist. Sometime later, I feel him lift me from the sofa and carry me to bed.
Chapter Eighteen
I watch my feet as I step out of the lift. My black heels click on the marble tiles of the sixty-fourth floor of the Shard. I fasten the belt of my black mac tighter around my waist for comfort. My body shivers, wet from standing at my father’s graveside as he was lowered into the ground and cold from the air and eerie silence of the vestibule.
In my hand, I carry a white rose. I watch as my fingers and the rose reach out to the door of the apartment. Ajar. Blackness creeping out through the small gap.
I don’t want to go inside. I’m afraid.
My legs keep moving without conscious instruction. The door creaks as I step inside. Blue floor lighting dimly glows on the rosewood under my feet. The open lounge is otherwise dark, illuminated only by the moon and the lights of the city beyond the windows.
He’s here.
The top of his head sits two inches above the back of the black leather chair as he faces the silent streets of London.
The white rose falls from my hand and bounces on the ground as if time in the world has been slowed, almost to stillness.
“You came alone.” Kevin Pearson’s voice is low and husky. “You love him that much. You’d give your life for his.”
“What do you want?”
He revolves in the chair until he’s facing me, his black suit jacket open, his white shirt unbuttoned by three. As the moon’s light catches his face, I see it’s not Kevin Pearson at all. It’s his body, his eyes. But the face is Stuart Culliton.
“You can’t save him, Scarlett.”
He raises a hand, pointing a Glock straight ahead. Only it’s not aimed at me. Gregory is beside me, holding me to one side with an outstretched arm, his body tall and strong, waiting for the bullet.
The safety clicks off.
“No. No. Nooooo...”
Pushing away his arm, I dive across Gregory’s body as the force of the metal leaving the barrel of
the Glock thuds and echoes in the open space.
A searing pain burns through my abdomen before I crash against the cold wood floor.
“Gregory!”
“Shhh, baby, I’m here. I’m here.” He sits up in bed and takes control of my shaking shoulders. “Jesus, you’re crying. Come here.”
I know the nightmare is over. He’s here. He’s alive. But I still check my body for a wound before I relax into his chest and sob, letting him take me back to the mattress in his embrace.
He holds me, kissing my forehead, stroking my hair and the skin of my back until my breathing calms, then he slips back into sleep. I fight it. Afraid. I can’t give myself over. I won’t let it come back. I can’t see that again.
I don’t want to be here, in this apartment, anymore.
As the black sky shifts to charcoal behind the bedroom blind, I slip out of Gregory’s hold and downstairs to the gym.
* * *
Jackson warily pushes open the gym door and I stop pounding the bag with a combination of gloved punches and sidekicks. “Everything alright?”
Hugging the bag and rolling my wet forehead across the short sleeve of my aqua Climacool top, I let him answer his own question, my mouth open only to drag air into my lungs.
It must be five thirty. Jackson tends to come into the gym whilst Gregory goes out to road run. He fits in his own workout before he acts as Gregory’s PT.
“Want to talk, or want to kick the shit out of that thing together?” His face is perfectly serious.
“The latter,” I say, pulling back from the bag.
“Alright, give me a right hook, left uppercut, right jab, then do the same starting on the left.”
Grunting through each move, I hit the bag six times.
“Through it, Scarlett. Don’t hit the bag, punch through it, like I’ve told you.”
Repeating the sequence, I elongate each of my moves and feel a damn sight better for the beating I’m giving the bag as Jackson holds it from behind.
Jackson’s casts his eyes over my shoulder and nods twice towards the door as I hammer through the next sequence, finishing with a kick that rocks him back on his feet.
“You’re getting stronger, kid. Want a break?”
I nod but don’t move from the spot. Instead, exhausted by my workout and lack of sleep, I slump down to my bum next to the bag and drop my face into my boxing gloves, pressing tears back into my eyes. “I just want it all to go away, Jackson.”
Jackson being Jackson, he doesn’t say much but I know he understands exactly what I’m talking about. I wanted Gregory’s past to stop haunting him. Now it haunts me. The constant feeling of distrusting people—Trina, Stuart—unable to get past that fatal night. The worry that Katrina Martin is out there and, suspended or not, she’ll be digging.
I clear out of the gym before Gregory gets back from his run. I shower, pin up my hair and dress in record time, then head out before Gregory’s even finished his session with Jackson. I text him that I agreed to meet Amanda for breakfast before work. A lie I feel guilty about but a lie that will make him feel better than the truth. I just need to be alone. Away from the apartment where I killed a man. Where I’m scared of Amy stepping out of the bloody door. Away from the bed that’s home to my nightmares. And as much as it breaks my heart to admit it to myself, away from the man who brought it all upon me.
I can’t shake this feeling that something just isn’t right but if you asked me what that thing is, I wouldn’t know.
It was my choice. All of this. That’s what I’m reminding myself as I ride a black cab to work. I could have walked away when I knew the takeover was hostile. I didn’t. I wanted to save the little boy from my dreams. Retribution for the scars on my perfect man. And eventually, revenge for the only two men I’ve ever loved.
I hand the driver a ten pound note then head straight to Caffe Nero for a seriously necessary hit of caffeine.
“Now there’s a lady who looks like she needs a latte,” the barista who thinks he’s being nice says, handing me the double shot latte in a blue cardboard cup.
“You have no idea.” I thank him and accept a paper bag containing an almond croissant.
“Holy hell!” I turn smack into Gregory’s chest, still covered in a light grey, sweat-drenched hoody.
“Amanda stand you up?” His arms are folded across his chest.
I don’t know what to say so I say nothing at all. Instead, I stare into the eyes I saw in my sleep and shudder.
“Americano,” he says across my shoulder. Then he looks back at me. “Sit.”
After retrieving his Americano, he pulls up a seat opposite me across a small wood table for two in the otherwise empty café. He takes my croissant from the bag and tears off a chunk for himself then pushes it on top of the bag towards me. “Eat.”
I tear the croissant into pieces but push them around the paper bag, preferring instead to sip my latte.
“Scarlett, I need you to talk to me.”
“That’s rich,” I snipe.
“I can see what’s happening to you and I won’t let it. I won’t let you fall into darkness, Scarlett. Not you. Not ever.”
“I’m not. I just, I had a nightmare and I... I couldn’t be there anymore. I needed to get out.”
“Do you want to leave? Will it help? I can buy us somewhere else. Sell the apartment. We could go to the farm for a few weeks or stay in a hotel in the city. I’ll do whatever it takes to make things right, baby.”
“No. It’s not...none of that’s necessary. I’m fine, generally, I just. I can’t stop thinking that the payoff could come back to haunt us. And this thing with Black Diamonds and Stuart is on my mind. Then I, urgh it sounds ridiculous, but Amy came out of the apartment last night, and the door was ajar and it just, I don’t know. I thought I was better than I am. Maybe it’s just the stress of yesterday, that’s all and my dream last night was just...messed up...it got to me. But I’m fine.”
“I want to ask you something. Don’t be offended.” I nod, uncertainly. His expression is dead serious. “Would you like to see someone? A counsellor?”
I snort through a sip of my coffee. “Christ, Gregory, it was only a nightmare. You know better than I do that nightmares happen.” Yes, I can play you at your own game. “You retreat. It took you months to talk to me about anything. I’m just taking a morning. Is that too much to ask?”
His eyes cloud with a pity that could make me scream. After everything he’s been through, I’m the one behaving like the world owes me a favour. Shaking my head at myself, I move around the table and sit onto his lap in my royal blue pencil dress, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I’m sorry I left. I’m okay. I promise.”
I drop my lips to his and he surprises me by taking my mouth roughly, his hands moving to my neck and pulling me to him. “You’re my reason, baby. My Aurora. As long as we’re okay, the world is right.”
“We’re okay. I love you.”
He yanks my hips towards him. “I would love nothing more than to take you home and fuck you right now.”
“Hold that thought for ten hours. Then you can take me any way you like.”
“And I’ll be thinking about how I’d like to take you for ten hours. My cock will be aching to get inside your tight little cunt all day.”
I gasp, pulling my head back from his to find two perfectly serious, black and lust-filled eyes. “You can always shock me, Mr. Ryans.” I stand from his lap, pop a piece of croissant in my mouth and scoop up my coffee and bags. Then I lean down to his ear. “And I’m drenched just thinking about welcoming you into my cunt.”
* * *
By the time people start filing into the office, I’ve been over the information foreign counsel have sent me on Black Diamonds in China and the US. Both adverse registrations have been filed by ne
wly incorporated companies, set up in the respective jurisdictions, and their sole shareholder is a parent company incorporated in France. I Google the companies but they show only websites under construction. I email local counsel and ask them to take a look at the corporation documents of the Chinese and US companies to see if there’s anything suspect about them but both lawyers confirm the companies look legit.
Why doesn’t it feel legit? A question I’m unable to answer, therefore I have to trust the judgment of Malcolm and Wang Nongfan.
Amanda bobs into my office to say hello and show me a bamboo unisex clothing range for Bump Darling. She leaves on a less than subtle hint that she’d quite like a baby shower.
Luke, my university ex and friend, calls me at eleven to catch up on my holiday and profess his concern that Gregory being engaged makes it less likely he’ll be gay, or at least dabble, with Luke.
I arrange a twelve thirty lunch with Emily, Lawrence’s niece, which Amanda gets in on when she stalks my Outlook calendar to remind herself of the time of our handover meeting for Mr. Ghurair’s final deal this afternoon.
By 4:00 p.m., I’ve kept myself too busy to think about nightmares or how much I really want Gregory to service me tonight. But now my mind is wandering and that’s exactly what I’m thinking about when my desk phone rings.
“Scarlett Heath,” I say, hoping I’ve disguised the fluster from my voice, knowing my cheeks are blushing.
“Scarlett, Richard here.” The tone of his voice tells me there’s a problem. “Black Diamonds.”
My heart sinks. “Someone has beaten us to the registration?”
“Yes. In the EU and the UK. Registrations are already pending. How did you know?”
I breathe out heavily through my nose. “Call it a hunch. Do you have the applicant details?”
“I do. It’s a French company, seems above board from the register. What’s strange is that they only filed yesterday. They literally just got there first. Is there a fight going on for ownership of the game?”