by Nikki Logan
Click. Click. Cli—
Her finger froze, suspended over the keypad, eyes glued to her laptop’s screen, which displayed a more professional photo of a more professionally presented Broadmore heir. In a suit, like his father. And recent. She let the finger fall gently onto the screen. Resting it over Harrison Broadmore’s heart.
Using it as an anchor to stop the wild thrumming of her own.
Not Harrison Mitchell and Broadmore.
Harrison Mitchell Broadmore.
Harry.
Corporate to the max, but one hundred per cent her Harry.
Her stomach rolled. Was this what he’d been keeping from her? The reason for all the caginess and ambiguity and his aversion to media attention? Had he been working his way up through departments in one of Broadmore’s subsidiary firms? Was it some kind of hidden camera Undercover Boss thing for television? Or had he gone rogue, and his family didn’t even know where he was as some of the websites suggested? Or was this some kind of hilarious incognito experiment rich people liked to conduct?
A dozen questions swamped in at once and pressed down onto her roiling stomach but they all pointed the same way.
Harry Mitchell and Harrison Broadmore were the same man.
And they were both liars.
Every time he didn’t tell her the truth. Every time she gave him one of her quizzical looks and he distracted her with a kiss.
Lying. And rich.
And lying about being rich.
All the while shagging her senseless.
Why? Did he prefer his sexual activity to be confidential? He was already taking her to top restaurants and entertainment—did he imagine she’d want more? Did he think she’d demand to be part of his celebrity world, if she knew?
That set her off in a fury of searching and, sure enough, the internet was clogged with images of a younger him mixing it up with celebrities and gazillionaires alike.
And women… So many women…
She swallowed back a soggy lump and forced herself onwards.
Only a handful of images from the past few years, and a few ‘What’s happened to Harry?’ type blog pieces trying to dig up his whereabouts. So his lying was purely a UK thing, then?
Lucky England.
No wife, her subconscious urged. No organised crime. That was something, right?
He was just rich.
Rich. Four little letters.
Four little letters and a few minutes on her laptop and Harry suddenly became her ‘better’. The exclusive privacy of the places he took her to eat made her feel suspicious, not special. The exciting foreplay up against the Tate and on the tube suddenly smacked of slumming when viewed through a money-coloured filter.
Because it was no longer between two people who were each other’s equal. Two people who were enjoying exploring and getting to know each other. Two people just caught up in an unexpected affair.
Harry was heir to one of the top fortunes in the corporate world.
She was a nobody from the Chorlton estates who slept in a closet.
‘Did you find him, Iz?’
Poppy’s voice was an indistinct blur amid her wildly spiralling thoughts. Impossible to marshal once they were whipped up into a dread-based frenzy.
Every fear she’d ever harboured warred with her sense of natural justice. She couldn’t condemn the man before giving him half a chance, right? And there were no relationship rules stipulating a timeframe for full disclosure. Harry might have had a really good reason not to tell her who he really was before now.
Like…
She sat there staring at her laptop screen, thinking. And she got nothing. Nothing but the witness protection thing.
There was only one way to find out—a crazy, novel thought.
Ask him… Like a grown-up, and then deal with what came. That was what brave Izzy would have done. Brave, idealistic Izzy.
Or—logical, unflappable Izzy reasoned—you could give him a chance to tell you off his own bat. Be available. Be willing to hear. Be calm and mature and modern about it. Let it come.
See if he tells you at all, whispered burned, cynical Izzy.
‘He will,’ she said aloud, shaking her computer just slightly.
And soon.
‘Who will what?’ Tori frowned.
She refreshed the page and selected the top news story, the one from two hours ago.
Harry…!
Poppy cried out as Izzy shot to her feet and sent her computer flying into her friend’s lap.
‘I have to go…’
She snatched her phone from the table, shoving it into the accessory pocket of her running pants, and sprinted for the door. Behind her, Tori reached for the laptop as Poppy gaped.
‘What—?’
‘I have to go!’
ELEVEN
‘Please, can you drive any faster?’
‘This is London, love, not Monaco,’ the taxi driver commented. ‘I go as fast as the traffic allows.’
Izzy took pity on her inner cheek and gnawed on her fingernail instead. It seemed to help with the interminable drive across town.
‘I’ll jump out here, thanks,’ she said, knowing it was probably quicker to jog on foot through the bikeways and private lanes down to the embankment than to sit here in the taxi observing the niceties of the peak-hour road rules.
She tossed the driver her emergency twenty from her bra and sacrificed the change as she slammed the door behind her. Her long legs carried her down the rear lane of endless residential buildings, through parks and between the creeping traffic towards Vauxhall Bridge. Boom gates and no-entry signs meant nothing just now. It occurred to her, vaguely, that some of those no-entry laneways probably belonged to MI5, but hopefully all they’d see on their security monitors was a young woman out for a jog and taking a few unsanctioned short cuts.
Her runners ate up the last five hundred metres of the bridge and Riverside Walk and she arrived, gasping for breath, at the glamorous Thameside entry to Harry’s sprawling complex.
Thank God for the register. It meant only the barest pause to announce herself to the security, who were too polite to so much as lift an eyebrow at her casualwear and flushed face. And thank God for the mirrored walls of the lift, which let her remedy the worst of the damage to her face and hair.
The lift opened on the top floor just metres from Harry’s apartment and she fell on his door, leaning hard on the bell.
Harry opened it almost immediately, shadows under his beautiful eyes, and paler than his lifetime tan should have allowed. His face transformed from grief to something blazing and bright as she fell into his arms. They slid up around her and held on as if she was the one giving him strength.
She practically willed some into him.
‘You came,’ he breathed against her neck.
‘Your father!’ she gasped, still struggling for air. ‘I’m so sorry. What can I do?’
His entire body locked up hard, except those parts he needed to push her slightly away. Apparently his Australian tan could get paler. ‘What?’
‘I read about his heart attack online. Are you going home? What do you need?’
The shock slowly morphed into something else. Something edgy and unfamiliar. ‘My father?’
‘Weston Broadmore,’ she explained in case he was in some kind of shock from the news. But that wasn’t shock on his face, she finally realised, it was anger.
A rigid kind of anger.
A man exited the second lift behind her. The man from Portishead. And Shakespeare. And Harry’s building. Harry caught his eyes and acknowledged him with the briefest of nods.
‘Do you really want to talk about this out here?’ she puffed.
He stepped aside and she practically tumbled into the comfortable apartment.
He spun on her. ‘You know?’
She waved away his concern and crossed close to him and curled her fingers around his arm. ‘What can I do, Harry?’
He didn’t yank his arm away b
ut the frozen way he stood was almost worse. ‘Nothing.’
‘So you’re going home?’
‘Of course.’
His icy tone muddled her already racing mind. ‘Yes, sorry. Dumb question.’ She squeezed his arm again. ‘How is your father?’
‘Dying.’
Icy and little better than monosyllabic. It finally got her attention. She stepped back and peered up at him. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Well, my father’s in critical care…’
‘I mean, are you okay with me? You seem angry.’
‘What gave me away?’
Sarcasm had always been his sharpest tool. The unfairness of that bit deep inside. ‘I’ve just run across half of London to be here for you.’
‘If you’d run just a bit slower you’d have missed me.’
Her eyes fell on the two packed bags by his feet. And on the man waiting politely in the hall.
Now? He was going right now? A wild panic started building in her gut. ‘I’ll come with you to Australia.’ That was what credit cards were for, right? Emergency transcontinental flights. ‘We’ll just need to stop by the—’
‘I hope you’re not expecting me to pick up the tab?’
His blunt tone had her taking a step back from him. In all his many guises, she’d never heard Harry be outright nasty. Or snarky about her lack of funds. Though a tiny voice reminded her that she really wouldn’t know what Harrison Broadmore was like at all.
‘No, I…’
But her airways weren’t clear all of a sudden. There was that feeling again, the whole he-makes-me-feel-bad-about-myself thing. Amplified times ten. She pressed shaking fingers to her sternum.
His face twisted for a half ümoment but then steadied. He shuddered in a breath. ‘How long have you known who I am?’
She rushed to reassure him. ‘I’m not upset. I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.’
‘You’re not upset? Oh, good.’
‘Harry, do you really want to talk about this now?’
‘You’ve been lying to me, Izzy!’
Old wounds stretched their scars at the flat-out judgement in his tone. Guilty until proven innocent.
But it wasn’t her father lying in a hospital halfway around the world, and, now that she knew who that father was, Harry had to be facing a world of new pressure. Sisters. A mother. A global corporation. Responsibility she could barely conceive.
She was the one who needed to suck it up, right now. Be the grown-up.
She took a deep breath. ‘Let’s talk about this when you get back.’
Not that she wanted either of them stewing on the hurtful accusations of the past few minutes, but he wasn’t thinking clearly now. And her own adrenaline was so high she was liable to say something she’d regret.
‘I’m unlikely to be back,’ he said. Flat. Dead. Uninterested.
Her knees wobbled dangerously, the shock and latent lactic acid from her sprint doing their job together. ‘What?’
‘I had to go home eventually. My father’s heart attack has just brought that forward.’
‘You’re never coming back? At all?’ she whispered. And then something else occurred to her. ‘Were you going to let me know?’
Or was it just one of the many things he’d decided not to tell her?
‘I called you.’
As he spoke realisation flooded into his eyes and they flared wide for a moment. ‘When you hear it you can disregard the whole message.’ Intensity blazed. ‘All of it.’
‘So…that’s it? We’re done?’
‘Disappointed, Izzy?’
She pushed out words between the sharp ache. That he’d even have to ask. ‘Yes. Of course.’
Disappointed. Confused. Lost.
Absolutely bloody heart sore.
Here she’d been all primed to work through their communication issues.
‘All that effort wasted.’
‘What are you talking about? What effort?’
‘I have to give you points for your approach. Turning up at my door with champagne. Half an hour later you had your thighs around my ears.’
‘Harry!’ She glanced at the open doorway, desperate, mortified. The man in the hall stared at some point on a far wall and pretended not to have heard.
‘Truth’s ugly from that angle, huh?’ He stalked to the far side of the room.
Oh, my God…
‘I came here because I thought you’d be devastated about your father. I thought you’d need my support. What is wrong with you?’
He spun back. ‘You thought your ship was coming in early, you mean, and you didn’t want to miss it.’
Oh, God…the Broadmore billions. Was that what this was about?
‘I’m not interested in your money, Harry.’
‘I know how this goes, Izzy,’ he thundered. ‘I’ve watched this all my life. Beautiful woman uses sex to get what she wants. Well, you can blame my father’s dodgy heart and lifetime of excess for cutting you off at the knees. If not for that, who knows what might have happened?’
His face grew even more thunderous and his hands worked furiously in his pocket. At something in there.
‘Full credit to you, Izzy. You’ve done a bang-up job of making yourself feel like part of the furniture in that time. Like you belonged here in my life. You almost had me fooled.’
A discreet throat-clear at the ajar door. ‘We need to get going, Mr Broadmore.’
The use of Harry’s real name threw her. Especially from another tenant.
Harry reached for his bag. ‘I have to go.’
‘You’d rather take a lift with a stranger than with me?’
Was he that angry?
‘He’s my personal guard. He’s arranged the jet to get me home.’
An aching numbness surged through her veins. Bodyguards. Private jets. Uber suspicion. Was that the world he really came from? It was more than alien.
It was awful.
She slid her hand over his as it reached for the door. ‘You could do that? Just wipe off everything we’ve had?’
It took him a moment, but he finally turned his face half back to her. ‘What have we had, Izzy?’
‘Something special. Something unique.’
But as she said the words she realised how ridiculously naïve they sounded. Harry was just an overgrown rich kid killing a few years in London working for Daddy’s firm and slumming it with a local. Having some good times. He’d made her no promises, he’d given her virtually nothing of himself, he’d even warned her—multiple times—that all they really had going between them was sizzling chemistry.
Chemistry that, even now, zinged like electricity between them.
‘It’s not special or unique, Izzy—’
Of course, she heard ‘you’re not special’ and ‘you’re not unique’.
‘—it’s what I grew up with. And I promised myself I’d never let it happen to me.’
His parents, with their corporate merger of a marriage that was so acrimonious even the internet knew all about it. The model against which Harry must measure all relationships.
Words rushed up her trachea and over her lips. The only thing she could possibly say. An utterly useless thing.
‘I love you, Harry.’
Of all the ways she’d thought about confessing it—draped on a petal-strewn bed, standing atop the Eiffel Tower, rugged up by a fire in some cottage in Scotland—standing here dying, moments before never seeing him again, was not one of them.
Part of her wished she were strong enough to stay silent.
He froze with his back to her, halfway to picking up the second suitcase. His voice was thick and measured. ‘Just let it go, Iz. You gave it a shot. Retire gracefully.’
‘Please don’t leave things like this,’ she begged.
He reanimated, picked up his bag and turned. ‘I have a jet waiting.’
‘It’s real!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘I swear.’
He shrugged her off. When he lifted his eye
s, his expression—his voice—was devoid of… pretty much everything. ‘This is the first real moment you and I have had together—no secrets, no lies between us—and it’s hardly going well, is it?’
He walked through his front door and left it gaping, handing his bag to the dark-suited man standing there. Every bit the CEO in training. The same lift that she’d arrived in opened for him immediately.
Panic twisted through her.
If Harry got on that plane feeling as he did she would never hear from him again. He’d find too many reasons to wipe her from his consciousness. Too many excuses to let it happen.
If anyone knew how easy it was to write off someone you loved it was her.
So, while it galled her to beg, some things were more important than pride.
She started forward. ‘Please, Harry—’
He flicked the merest glance to his security, who neatly blocked her with one strong arm across the lift entrance.
‘Pull the door shut behind you when you go,’ Harry said, bleak and cold. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added, ‘Don’t steal anything.’
And then the doors slid shut.
Izzy stumbled back against the foyer wall and collapsed against its solid strength.
What the hell had just happened?
How could he be so angry at her when he’d been the one lying for weeks? Months! She’d been in possession of his secret for less than an hour.
Why didn’t she call him on all the secrecy earlier? Or at all. Maybe the only truthful thing he’d said to her was that he wasn’t looking for a relationship. But she’d been wilfully blind to it because she’d finally found somewhere she fitted.
In Harry Mitchell’s arms.
She sacrificed her T-shirt to her tear-streamed face, sliding down the wall into a ball on the plush carpet.
She would never feel this carpet under her bare feet again. She’d never see Harry’s particular view or lie on his big, comfortable bed again. She’d never feel his arms around her or his hot, bare chest against her skin, or sit with him in a bad movie and laugh at his lame sense of humour.
She would never taste him, or feel him inside her, or hear his sexy voice.
And she’d never get to ask him why he felt the need to lie to the world. To her.
Through the shambles of conflicting thoughts, one phrase cut through.