by Julie Cohen
‘If you haven’t seen your father in sixteen years, how do you know this was his last known address?’ she asked, quickly, to distract him from opening the door. She didn’t want to go into that bedroom; she didn’t want to do what she’d come here to do. It would make the truth too real and too permanent.
Nicholas reached inside his coat. He was wearing a weatherproof jacket, as a hiker would wear. It went with his all-weather trousers and his waterproof boots. Nice that he had a style theme going, anyway: rugged outdoorsman, not a common look in New York City. Of course, the man would look delectable in a plastic sack.
He pulled out a crumpled, cream-coloured envelope, and Zoe recognised it right away. She’d received letters in envelopes like that, written on matching stationery, embossed with this address, on every birthday since she could read. Even though they were standing right in the middle of Xenia’s apartment, the envelope was an almost shockingly intimate reminder of her great-aunt.
‘Xenia knew him,’ she said, almost to herself.
Nicholas had been extending the envelope to her, but he stopped mid-air. ‘Xenia? Who’s Xenia?’
‘My great-aunt. She owns this apartment.’
Owned.
‘You don’t own this apartment?’
Zoe spread her hands out on either side of herself, indicating her big leather jacket, her worn-in running shoes, and her frankly gross skirt—all of them the only black clothes she happened to own that weren’t skin-tight spandex.
‘Do I look like I own this apartment?’
He raised his eyebrows and twisted the side of his mouth in an acknowledgement that was, even though she’d asked for it, a little too readily given for her ego. Yeah, she looked like a tasteless girl from the Bronx dumped in a classy Manhattan apartment. He didn’t have to rub it in.
‘Why did you say you owned this apartment?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said, glad that this time she remembered the conversation better than he did. ‘I had a key for it and you assumed it was mine.’
‘Why do you have a key for it?’
Ah, now that was the question.
‘Xenia died three days ago,’ she said. ‘I was coming here to get clothes for her to be dressed in for her funeral. I got the call out of the blue this morning from the funeral director to say that she’d appointed me to arrange things for her.’
‘Oh.’ Right away, and seemingly without any conscious decision, his expression softened, from challenging to gentle. ‘I’m sorry.’
Zoe got the sudden urge to step forward, press her face against the fabric of his jacket, and ask him to wrap those strong arms around her and give her a hug.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a hug. Or wanted one.
God, she must really be attracted to this guy if she was thinking of pathetic excuses to touch him.
She shrugged. ‘Not your fault. At least it’s been amusing to watch a total stranger ransacking my great-aunt’s apartment.’
Nicholas inclined his head to the last unopened door. ‘Is this her bedroom?’ His voice was gentle as his expression.
Tall, dark, handsome, angry, and kind. Zoe plastered a grin onto her face and crossed her arms over her chest, where her heart was beating with a new crazy, stupid longing of its own.
‘You think your dad’s in there?’
‘Only one way to find out,’ the perfect stranger said, and he opened the bedroom door.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BED WAS vast, satin-covered, and empty. The rest of the bedroom, expensively furnished in cream and mahogany, silk-wallpapered, tasselled and mirrored, was equally empty. Zoe was relieved to see that it looked exactly the same as the last time she’d seen it. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting: a sign on the bed saying ‘Sorry, I’m Dead’?
No. She’d been expecting emptiness. But there wasn’t any emptiness in this apartment; every single inch of it breathed with Xenia, even though Xenia was gone.
Maybe it took some time for an apartment to understand its owner was dead. When that owner was somebody like Xenia, full of life and adventure, it probably took even longer.
She noticed that Nicholas was standing beside her. He hadn’t made any move to go into the bedroom.
‘Don’t you want to search the closet?’ she asked him.
He stayed where he was, gazing into the room. ‘Why does your great-aunt have a bear trap in her bedroom?’
The trap was on a table at the foot of her bed, in a glass case like the one that held the chain-saw in the living room. Its shiny, well-oiled jaws gaped open, as they had for years.
‘Like I said, a girl needs to protect herself somehow.’ She moved into the room, and when he didn’t follow she looked back at him. His dark eyes were settled on her, and she felt a hot flush underneath her ugly clothes. If he made a move to touch her, there was no way she’d ever set the bear trap on him.
But he wasn’t flirtatious, and what she saw was curiosity, not desire. She gave up the snarky answers and shrugged. ‘Xenia’s had it for a while. I don’t know where it came from.’
He nodded and this time did come into the room. She noticed once again how he walked with an easy athleticism, a natural economy of movement. A guy like that would have stamina and patience, both in bed and out of it. Pity it wouldn’t be with her.
‘You said you needed to get some clothes for her?’
Zoe dragged her attention away from pointless speculation about what this guy would be like as a lover and focused herself on the task at hand. The sooner she got it over with, the sooner she wouldn’t have to dread it. She marched herself over to her great-aunt’s walk-in closet. Before she opened the door, she couldn’t resist looking at Nicholas over her shoulder.
‘I don’t care if he’s your father, if he leaps out of this closet I’m going to knee him in the crotch.’
Nicholas said something under his breath; it sounded like, ‘Be my guest.’ He had something against his dad, all right. Zoe opened the closet door.
She saw nothing but row after row of shoes and designer outfits. She stepped back from the door so that he could see in, too. ‘Sorry, Nick, no luck, unless he’s disguised as an evening gown.’
Nicholas nodded. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Once again, his concern surprised her. This guy didn’t know her from Eve and, from the sound of it, he had enough problems of his own. Surely he couldn’t tell how her stomach was twisting with dread at the idea of having to go through her great-aunt’s clothes and find exactly the outfit Xenia had specified in her funeral plan.
‘Yeah, I’m great,’ she said. ‘Just disappointed I didn’t get to work on my crotch-kicking skills.’
‘I’m not going to offer to help you out there.’
‘Pity.’ She gave him a smile that should cover up any hint of what she was feeling—the dread, and most especially the fact that she was touched by his concern. ‘Well, your dad’s not around, so feel free to split if that’s what you plan on doing.’
‘I’m fine here,’ he said. He leaned comfortably against one of the high mahogany bedposts, as if he lounged around in outdoor gear in fancy bedrooms every day of his life.
‘I’ll be done in a minute. You can wait in the living room if you want, or in the kitchen. You might as well go ahead and make yourself some coffee, you look like you need some.’ Xenia won’t mind, she was about to add, but then she caught herself.
‘I’ll stay here. You probably could use some company. It can’t be easy going through her clothes.’
She didn’t want to stare at him, but she did, because she didn’t want this stranger’s kindness but at the same time it felt amazingly, scarily good.
He gave her his gentle half smile.
Zoe shook herself. ‘Whatever.’ She turned her back on him and went into the closet.
The clothes smelled of Xenia’s spicy, exotic perfume. Zoe breathed in and kept the air inside her lungs for as long as she could.
‘Please bu
ry me in my black Gaultier sequinned gown,’ Xenia had written in her funeral plan, ‘with the silver fox collar cloak and the black Vuitton shoes.’ Zoe flipped through endless hangers, wondering how she was going to know the right gown when she saw it. Her great-aunt had millions of the damn things, and Zoe wouldn’t know a Gaultier if the designer came up and slapped her in the face with a frock.
But she did remember this green jacket; it was what Xenia had been wearing the last time Zoe had seen her. She pushed it aside, firmed her lips into a thin line, and kept looking. She ignored the prickling in her eyes.
‘So do you always let strange men into your apartment?’
She snapped her head up to see that Nick had come to the closet and was leaning against the doorpost. He had obviously perfected the art form of looking gorgeous while he was minding other people’s business.
‘I told you, it’s not my apartment.’
‘It’s still a stupid thing to do. I could have been anybody.’
‘You want me to practise my crotch-kicking skills after all?’
He held up his big hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Just pointing out some safety tips.’
‘And here’s one for you: stop criticising me.’
She glared at him. He put his hand over his mouth, but his brown eyes still smiled at her. She turned her back on him and resumed her search.
It took her a couple of minutes and a dozen outfits before she realised her eyes weren’t prickling any more.
She shot Nick another look, but his face was neutral, and it was impossible to tell if he’d been goading her on purpose to distract her. But she suspected he had.
Her hand landed on something soft and sleek; without looking she knew it was the cloak. It was made up of yards of soft black material, with a silver fur collar.
‘Fox?’ Nick said.
‘Funny, I wouldn’t have pegged you as an expert on fashion.’ She pulled it off the rail.
‘I’m not. I’ve seen pelts like that walking around.’
She shrugged. ‘Bear traps, chain saws, fox fur. Xenia was lots of things, but politically correct was never one of them.’
The Gaultier dress was next to the cloak. Zoe took it off the rack. Even on the hanger it looked tiny; Xenia, like most of the Drake women, had been graceful and elegant and beautiful, even into her seventies. Traits that Zoe Drake had definitely not inherited.
‘Were you close to your great-aunt?’
Carrying the clothes, Zoe brushed past Nick on her way out of the closet. She could actually feel the difference in scent, from the perfumed closet to Nick’s breath of outdoors. She laid the clothes on the satin bedspread.
‘Not really, not in the regular way. We didn’t tell each other everything. I didn’t really know her. She let me stay here when I needed somewhere.’
Why was she telling this to a stranger?
‘I have no idea how I’m going to find her shoes,’ she added. She turned back to the closet, doing her best not to see Nick’s face.
‘You loved her.’
She brushed past him again—big, tall, strong, annoying men took up a lot of space in doorways—and stooped to look at the array of shoes. Xenia had millions of dresses, but she apparently had sixty gazillion pairs of shoes, a good proportion of them black.
‘Like I said. I didn’t really know her.’ She picked up some impossibly pointed heels, checked them for a label, put them back.
‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t love her.’
Zoe’s hand paused on a pair of pumps. She looked sharply up at Nick. His face was serious, far more serious than it would be if he were just talking about her.
Yeah. This carey-sharey stuff was so not her. ‘Listen, I’m pretty sure there are a few kitchen cupboards you haven’t checked yet for your father. You can go ahead and do that now. Otherwise, please shut up.’
He shrugged himself off the doorpost and joined her in the closet. The enormous walk-in closet was a hell of a lot smaller with him in it. And he was so…tempting.
He squatted down next to her.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Shoes.’
‘Yes, I gathered that. What kind of shoes?’
‘I don’t need help, thanks.’
He just stayed there next to her, big and still and warm. ‘What kind of shoes?’
Zoe exhaled sharply. If she let him help her at least they’d get out of this closet more quickly and she wouldn’t have to deal with her hormones. ‘Black Vuitton heels.’
‘What do black Vuitton heels look like?’
‘Black. With heels.’
He surveyed the shoe racks. ‘Every single one of these things looks like a recipe for a broken neck.’
‘Tell me about it.’ She looked at shoes, discarded them, and looked at some more.
‘Then again, if you had good legs these shoes would look very sexy.’
The word went through her like a double shot of expensive whiskey, warming her from her throat to her toes.
He was speaking theoretically, of course. ‘Maybe if you wear size fives.’ She picked up a pair at random and saw the label: Louis Vuitton. They were black, and they had heels—extremely high and narrow ones, sharpening to a point at the end.
‘What size do you wear?’
‘Nine.’ She stood, shoes in hand. ‘Found them.’
Nick straightened himself up to his full height beside her. ‘People walk in heels like that?’
‘Fortunately, Xenia’s not going to have to worry about that.’ On her way out of the closet, she snagged a garment bag and immediately started packing up the clothes.
Nick emerged from the closet. ‘Your great-aunt had interesting taste.’
‘She was interesting in every way.’
‘How do you think she knew my father?’
She let out a laugh. He was being kind to her, but he hadn’t forgotten his own mission. ‘I really have no idea, Nick.’
‘What’s your name?’
Zoe stopped zipping the garment bag. ‘Why?’
‘Because you know mine.’
She pulled the tab up to the top of the zipper, and knew another reason she should tell him her name. Because she’d just done the job she was dreading, and she hadn’t shed a single tear.
Thanks to him.
‘My name’s Zoe Drake.’
‘Hello, Zoe Drake.’ Nick held out his hand, a cordial, winning smile on his perfect lips.
Well. Hadn’t he been well brought up. Zoe gripped his hand with her own. For a moment her strength met his strength and for her at least it was a testing, as well as a greeting. He was firm and gentle and warm.
She dropped his hand. ‘I’m done here. Coffee?’
He grimaced slightly. ‘Actually I could really do with using the bathroom. I was waiting in that hallway for a long time, and I was beginning to think about using one of my water bottles.’
She laughed. ‘Go ahead,’ she said, and then glanced at Xenia’s en suite bathroom. Zoe had never used it herself.
Before she could say anything Nick was already heading for the door out of the bedroom and into the hallway. ‘I remember where it is, one up from the kitchen.’
Zoe followed him into the hall and watched him go into the guest bathroom, relieved that he had the good sense to know that using Xenia’s bathroom would be too much of an intrusion. Not that it should matter, now—but it did.
She hung up the garment bag on a hook near the front door and found a tote bag to put the shoes in, and then she shucked her leather jacket and went into the kitchen. She never made coffee at home—why make it when the Greek deli next door made it better?—but she was used to the routine at Xenia’s, because one of her jobs whenever she’d stayed over had been to make the coffee in the morning and bring it to Xenia in bed.
She found the beans in the freezer, otherwise empty except for ice trays, got out the grinder, measured the beans and listened to the familiar rattling buzz as the grinder did its work. She empti
ed it into the filter and added bottled water to the machine and sat at the table as the aroma of coffee filled the kitchen.
By all rights, this should be a sad thing to do. There was no Xenia to pour the coffee for. Zoe should feel lonely and mournful.
And yet it was as if by banishing her rare tears in the closet Nick had dulled the edge of her sadness. She’d been dreading finding Xenia’s clothes, and yet he’d made her laugh.
Zoe frowned. What was she thinking? Not five minutes after she’d met him this guy had muscled into her great-aunt’s apartment, and then just as quickly he’d muscled into her private life. And she was feeling all glad about it?
She stood and got down two mugs. She’d give him a cup of coffee, and then, father or no father, she’d kick his handsome butt out of here before she got even stupider.
Nick washed his hands and face in the marble sink and dried them on the fluffy white towel. After ten hours of driving and a couple more hours of waiting in a corridor, hot water and soap felt great.
He’d checked already, but he surveyed the bathroom once more for signs of male toiletries, some sign that his father had maybe stayed here. But the soap was scented and the shampoo was floral. There was a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, but it was bright pink.
Nick remembered Eric Giroux as a big man, an outdoorsman, a hunter and a fisherman who always wore flannel and faded denim. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Eric could use a pink toothbrush, but in itself it wasn’t convincing evidence.
He’d only been able to cast a swift glance into the en suite bathroom, but he hadn’t seen anything promising there, either. The most promising thing he’d seen in the whole apartment had been the bear trap, and even that was pretty ambiguous. He had no idea whether his father had hunted bear or not, and he was pretty sure if his father did hunt bear, he wouldn’t keep his traps in glass cases.
Maybe later Nick would be able to do a real search. On the other hand, maybe later his father would come strolling through the door.