by Julie Cohen
‘I trust you.’
Zoe had been clutching her coffee-mug. She slowly set it down. Nick’s dark eyes were steady on hers and, though he was smiling, he didn’t appear to be laughing at her any more.
‘Why?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘You’re right, we’re at an impasse. We have to trust each other sooner or later if we’re going to get through it. Besides, even though you don’t seem to believe my father had anything to do with your great-aunt, you know how important this is to me, and though you might be grumpy in the mornings I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would wilfully get in the way of somebody else’s needs.’
‘What makes you think that? I haven’t exactly been overflowing with the milk of human kindness for you.’
‘I see how you deal with your great-aunt’s memory. You have respect. I think you respect my need to see my father.’
His smile had gone now and she saw, incredibly, that he was serious.
‘Now that’s something new. I’ve never been accused of being respectful before. Loud-mouthed and a pain in the neck, yes. Respectful and trustworthy, no.’
‘There’s a first time for everything, I guess.’
Zoe sat down and ran her hand through her tousled hair. ‘I’ll have a pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese and an orange juice.’
And his trust, apparently.
Nick nodded and threw her a smile and Zoe couldn’t stop staring at the empty space he left after he was gone.
Maybe she had been a little hungover because after the bagel and a shampoo Zoe felt a hundred per cent better. She pulled on her ugly skirt again and went into the living room, where Nick was sitting on the couch next to his backpack. He’d evidently packed away his sleeping bag and all of his other stuff. He was looking contemplatively at the chain-saw in the glass case.
She took the armchair this time. He might trust her enough to leave the apartment, but she didn’t trust herself enough to be close to him.
‘So what’s your plan for the day? Some more obsessive waiting for your father, maybe?’
‘I’m wondering about the chain-saw and the bear trap,’ Nick said. ‘They don’t seem like something that fits in NewYork City.’
‘You think they could be connections to your dad?’
‘Well, he had a chain-saw, but that’s true of most people in Maine who burn wood for fuel. His wasn’t as nice as this one—I know, because I was using it while I was still in junior high school.’
‘He could have gone up in the world, I guess.’
‘He only sent my mother twenty or thirty bucks at a time.’ Nick’s jaw set. ‘But, yes, he could have.’
‘Xenia’s had the chain-saw for at least five years,’ Zoe said. ‘That would mean their connection wasn’t very new, if it’s his. But I wouldn’t count on it. For all I know Xenia might have taken up chain-saw juggling.’
Nick’s tense look turned into a smile. ‘Your great-aunt would do that?’
‘She died while skateboarding. She was seventy-four years old and she’d just started lessons.’
Nick laughed and, even though she’d been talking about Xenia’s death, Zoe laughed, too.
‘She’d have wanted to go that way,’ she said. ‘She fell and hit her head on the sidewalk when she was trying to ollie a four-set. Whatever that means. At the hospital they told me she never knew what hit her.’
‘We had a retired ranger like that. On the morning of his eightieth birthday he climbed Cadillac Mountain. Got to the top, had a heart attack just as the sun climbed over the horizon. He was the first person in North America to see the sun rise and it was the last thing he ever saw.’
Nick stretched his long legs out in front of him and looked contemplatively at his boot-clad feet. ‘If I could choose where I’d die, I’d choose Isle au Haut off the coast of Maine on a summer twilight. The day animals going to sleep, the night animals coming alive, and the moon rising over the Atlantic Ocean.’
The pleasure in his voice and on his face made Zoe able to picture the scene, even though he was describing it in a Manhattan apartment. It was about the third or fourth time he’d infected her with his thoughts and hopes, she realised.
‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘Where would you want to go?’
In the middle of an orgasm with you buried deep inside me, panting my name into my ear, she thought, and then nearly smacked herself on the forehead.
Was there some sort of pill or lotion you could take for getting rid of lust?
‘Oh, I’ll take any old place as long as it’s not in the gutter,’ she said breezily. ‘Though I’ve been in some pretty nice gutters over the years, too. Anyway, you never answered my question: what are you planning to do today?’
He didn’t sit up, but he switched his contemplative look from his boots to her. ‘The next logical step is searching your great-aunt’s apartment for signs of him. Looking in her desk, her letters and bills for mentions of his name, things like that.’
Anger flushed up in her. And here she’d thought the guy had principles.
‘No,’ Zoe said immediately. ‘Xenia was a private person. She didn’t ask questions about me and I didn’t ask questions about her. I’m not going to start going through her stuff just because she’s dead. And if you think I’m going to let you, a stranger, paw through her private papers—’
‘That’s fine,’ Nick interrupted.
Zoe stopped mid-flow. ‘It’s what?’
‘It’s fine. I understand how going through your great-aunt’s stuff would be an invasion of her privacy. I’ll have to find another way of finding out her connection to my dad.’
Zoe couldn’t believe it.
‘What about that whole “I’ll do whatever it takes to find my father” line?’
‘I guess I won’t do whatever it takes. If I would, I would’ve gone through her study last night when you were asleep.’
She narrowed her eyes. Was he trying to tell her he’d done that very thing? And he wasn’t putting up a fight now because he’d already found out what he needed?
And yet she remembered her instinct on the doorstep that he wouldn’t harm her, angry as he was. The way he’d distracted her from sadness. How he’d floored her this morning with the three words ‘I trust you’.
Life and the city had made Zoe suspicious. It only took one moment with your guard down to get it in the back, or worse.
But Nick was looking rueful, and he was rubbing his chin as if he felt foolish. Every instinct Zoe had was telling her this guy didn’t have a false bone in his body.
‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘Thank you.’
Nick nodded. ‘Sure. So what are your plans today?’
‘When I woke up, my plan was to sit here and stare you out until you got the hell out of the apartment. I was going to throw the cutlery at you, if necessary.’
‘But things have changed,’ Nick said.
‘But things have changed,’ she agreed. Though they had changed less than Nick probably thought. The revelation that he trusted her and that she trusted him meant it was even more urgent that she get rid of him as soon as she could.
And it looked as if the only way to do that was to help him find his father.
‘I’ve got an appointment in half an hour to see Xenia’s lawyer,’ she said. ‘He’s going to go through the will. You should probably come along to see if it has any mention of your dad.’
Nick suddenly sat up straight. ‘That’s a great idea. Thanks.’ He stood, unzipped his backpack, and pulled out a blue piece of clothing. Then he reached down and pulled his T-shirt up over his head.
Zoe gasped, and immediately snapped her mouth shut.
Nick’s bare chest was spectacular.
In the split second before she turned her eyes away the sight of him was burned into her vision. He had broad shoulders and golden skin stretched over perfectly developed muscles. She could see and name them all: deltoids, pectorals, abdominals, obliques, every one of them defined and firm. A line of da
rk hair went from his navel downwards under the waistband of his jeans.
‘God,’ she muttered. She stared at the thumbscrews on the wall, thinking about torture.
‘What is this, a strip show?’ she managed to say at last.
‘I thought I should put on nicer clothes if we’re going to a lawyer’s office,’ Nick said, and she risked a glance. He’d put on the long-sleeved shirt and was buttoning it. Even through the cotton she could picture his naked chest.
She was probably going to picture it for the rest of her life.
Nick rolled up his T-shirt and shoved it back in the pack, and then pulled out a pair of dark trousers. Zoe jumped to her feet.
‘I’ll just make a phone call,’ she choked, and fled the room before he decided to drop his jeans, too.
‘How do you deal with all of this?’
Zoe dragged her attention away from the easy, sexy way Nick walked and glanced around her to see what he was talking about. The taxis beeped, the street vendors shouted, the homeless guy muttered, the sidewalk vents steamed. It was all normal.
‘Deal with what?’
‘Everything.’ Nick swept his hands out in an all-inclusive gesture. ‘The smell, for a start.’
Zoe sniffed in a deep breath and let it out. ‘Hot dogs, concrete, gasoline, and somebody’s perfume. What’s wrong with that?’
‘It’s not air, it’s fumes. Don’t you feel like every breath is coating your lungs with gunk?’ He grimaced.
‘New Yorkers love gunk in their air.’ She grinned at Nick and winked at him. He’d made himself so at home in her great-aunt’s apartment, it was amusing to see him looking uncomfortable here on a NewYork street. ‘Is the city too big for you, Eagle Scout?’
‘It feels like another planet.’ He pointed across the street, to the green trees and grass of Central Park. ‘That, I understand. This, on the other hand—’ he pointed right, towards the buildings ‘—is suffocating. All these walls. How do you ever feel like you’re outdoors?’
‘You know you’re outside because the traffic gets louder. Come on, the office is up this block.’
They turned away from Central Park and Nick cast a longing look over his shoulder at the trees they were leaving behind. ‘Were you born here?’ he asked.
‘Nope. In Jersey.’
‘So you chose to move here.’
‘The minute I turned eighteen.’
‘Why?’
Zoe twisted the silver ring she wore on her thumb. She’d found it only a few blocks from here, kicked into a forgotten corner, and she wore it constantly to remind herself of everything else she’d found on the streets of New York.
‘Because you can be yourself here,’ she said. ‘Nobody cares what you do.’
‘That’s appealing?’ Nick manoeuvred around two men who were having a loud disagreement in a foreign language in the middle of the sidewalk. They carried on yelling at each other without taking any notice.
‘Very.’
‘But how can you feel as if you matter to other people, if everyone’s so caught up in their own lives?’
‘Why would you want to feel as if you mattered to other people?’
She wasn’t looking at him, but she felt Nick throw a sharp glance her way.
‘Here’s the lawyers’ office,’ she said, launching herself up the stone stairs before Nick asked any more questions. She wasn’t sure how a general conversation about New York’s pollution had turned into a big question-and-answer about her philosophy of life, but she had enough things to think about without it.
And two of those things were standing in the lobby waiting for the elevator up to the offices of Hopper, Stein and Feinberg, Attorneys-at-Law.
She padded up in her running shoes behind the two slim blondes and said, ‘Yo, sis and sis.’
Jade and Cindy turned around, both swivelling gracefully on their heels. Like all of the Drake women aside from Zoe, they were delicate and feminine. Jade, her eldest sister, wore the stylish conservative clothes of the young soccer-mom-in-training; Cindy had on a sharp designer suit that fit her job as a PR executive.
‘Zoe,’ Jade said and leaned forward to give her a light, perfumed hug. Her younger sister hugged her, too, though more briskly, as befit a successful businesswoman.
‘It’s been ages,’ said Jade, as sweetly as she always said everything. ‘When are you going to come out to Fairfield and visit us? Kelsey and Justin would love to see their auntie.’
‘I’ll bring the cab by the next time I have a fare out there,’ Zoe lied.
She knew when Nick came up next to her, partly because she felt a warming and excitement of the air, partly because of the breath of freshness that seemed to cling to his body, and partly because both her sisters’ eyes widened.
Jade might be happily married with two toddlers and Cindy might have half the male population of New York at her feet, but neither one of them minded having a good look at a prime specimen of man. Zoe guessed that was one family trait she’d inherited, at least.
‘Jade, Cindy, this is Nick,’ Zoe said, and watched as her gorgeous sisters beamed all their blonde beauty in Nick’s direction. Nick smiled, obviously dazzled, and held out his hand to them.
‘Nick, these are my sisters,’ Zoe said unhappily, watching him shake hands with each of them in turn. ‘Is Di already here?’
Jade and Cindy were bound to know where their second eldest sister was; the three of them were practically attached by mobile phone.
‘She’s upstairs with Mom and Dad,’ Cindy answered, not tearing her eyes away from Nick’s handsome face.
The elevator dinged. ‘Well, we might as well go up,’ Zoe said. She restrained the urge to put her arm through Nick’s in the sort of possessive gesture she often saw her mom and her two older sisters making with their men. There wasn’t any point. He wasn’t her possession, and he never would be, and Jade and Cindy would never believe her even if she pretended.
When they stepped in the elevator Zoe could see that her sisters were dying to ask all about Nick. They were holding it in well, though. Jade was arranging her pretty face into the sombre expression appropriate for a reading of one’s great-aunt’s will, and Cindy wasn’t about to break etiquette if Jade didn’t first.
‘Poor Aunt Xenia,’ she said instead, softly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Zoe, irritated, because Cindy hadn’t spent more than four hours with Xenia in the past five years, as far as Zoe knew. ‘Getting killed while doing a skateboarding stunt was a pretty classy way to go. I bet she was pleased.’
‘Zoe,’ Jade said, more for form’s sake than because she could ever possibly be shocked by anything that Zoe said.
‘Really,’ Zoe said. ‘I bet she’s up in heaven laughing her ass off. Nick and I were just talking about it, weren’t we Nick?’
She heard the possessiveness in her voice, as blatant as the gesture she’d resisted, and winced.
‘We were, and it does seem like a good way to go,’ Nick said genially, and Zoe was immediately fifty times as irritated because Jade and Cindy didn’t demur against Nick’s comment and it seemed as if she needed him for backup. Which she didn’t.
Zoe made a mental note not to ask Nick anything else. Her family would be all too glad to see her depending on a man.
The elevator dinged and they all went into the plushly carpeted hallway, and down it to the lawyers’ office. Zoe hadn’t been here before, but she guessed if you had to choose a lawyer it made sense to choose one who was rich, because they obviously had to be good at their stuff to earn all that money. Nick opened the glossy door for them as if he’d been opening doors for women all his life—he probably had; he had that whole ‘shining armour and white charger thing’ going on—and Jade and Cindy glided in as if men had been opening doors for them all their lives, which they had, of course. Zoe filed in after them, her hands on her hips.
Her mother and father and other sister Di were all in the waiting room, sitting on leather chairs. They stood when
the four of them came in and there was the obligatory hugging session. Zoe suffered it.
‘Oh, Jade, you look stunning,’ her mother said, fingering Jade’s cashmere cardigan, and then turning to Cindy with a smile. ‘And that suit is beautiful, Cynthia. Zoe, it’s so nice to see you in a skirt.’
Zoe caught the subtext. We expected to see you in ratty old jeans, and that skirt isn’t much better.
‘Bought it at a yard sale,’ she said. ‘Three bucks. Are we ready to go in and hear this will thing?’
‘Who’s your friend, Cindy?’ Michael Drake asked his youngest daughter.
His smile was indulgent. Zoe had no doubt that her parents spent many a pleasurable evening discussing their youngest daughter’s bevy of beaus. They’d done the same thing about Jade and Di, while Zoe had been still living at home and her two older sisters had still been unmarried.
The only beau Zoe had ever brought home had been one of the guys who hung around near the railway tracks racing dirt bikes when she was about fifteen. Her parents had talked about him, all right.
Cindy was attractively confused at her father’s mistake. ‘Oh, Dad, I don’t—’
‘Mr Drake, Mrs Drake,’ Nick said, stepping forward and extending his hand to Zoe’s parents, ‘I’m Nicholas Giroux. Zoe brought me here to see if there was anything relevant to my family in Ms Drake’s will.’
‘Zoe?’ He concealed it well, but Zoe saw that, while her father had looked indulgent talking to Cindy, he looked wary talking to her. ‘You think your aunt Xenia had something to do with this young man’s family?’
‘Let’s face it, none of us had the slightest idea what she was up to,’ Zoe said with as much cheerfulness as she could muster. ‘There’s some evidence she might have known Nick’s dad. Nick’s been staying with me in Xenia’s apartment,’ she added, and was rewarded by the surprised expressions on all of her family’s faces.
At that moment the big wooden door on the side wall opened and a tubby man in a very expensive-looking suit came out. ‘Mr and Mrs Drake, Jade, Diana, Zoe, Cynthia? Would you care to come in?’
Mr Feinberg shook each of their hands, including Nick’s, as they came into his panelled office. He’d set up enough upholstered chairs for them all to be able to have a seat with a couple left over. The lawyer seemed nervous for some reason.