‘That means no locks. It was something they’d always talked about in uni, but I never thought they’d go through with it. To be fair, though, I never thought they’d actually go into business together. We’d all talked about it, but no one ever does what they talk about doing at uni.’
Jett remembered the blonde woman Oliver had seen Clarkson with in his office. At the time he’d wondered if the story was a little too vivid a recollection of something that had happened inside Clarkson’s own office, almost like he’d been rehearsing it. A no-door policy unfortunately gave some validity to Oliver’s ‘mysteriously visible woman’ story.
‘Why did they cut you out of it?’
‘They didn’t.’ Nella smiled as the elevator dinged and the doors opened onto sandy wooden floors and glass walls. ‘I was always going to do it on my own.’
‘Just to prove your dad wrong?’
‘That was only part of it.’
A smile pushed his cheeks apart. Nella Barbarani had been single-minded ever since he’d met her. She was a hurricane, with no way to stop her once she’d set on her path. He let himself watch her as he followed her down the dimly lit corridor to Clarkson’s office. He’d held his breath the whole car ride after he’d seen her walk down the mansion steps in that dress. Nella was the kind of woman men blew up their lives for. Good men. Married men. And Jett was neither, so really, what fucking chance had he had against that bloody dress? The green gauze shimmered like the scales of a mermaid tail, hugging every soft part of her. Every time she moved, she sparkled, and Jett could barely breathe.
Jesus Christ.He couldn’t think.
‘It’s this one.’ His voice was thick and formal as he pointed to the office she’d just passed. If he hadn’t been looking for something to distract himself from her body, he would have missed it too.
‘Ready?’ She looked behind them, checking they hadn’t been followed, before her big dark eyes settled on him.
They were about to commit about ten different crimes to prove her family owned the Barbarani Sangue recipe, and all Jett could think about was the fact that they were alone in a dark, deserted space and Nella’s fucking green dress that he never, ever, ever wanted her to wear again.
‘Don’t think I’ll ever be ready,’ he said as he pushed past her into Clarkson Lieu’s office.
17
Nella
She couldn’t stand still as Jett drilled into the safe. Her organs and tendons were strung together, not with veins and arteries, but the buzzing of a heavy-duty electric fence. The moon was werewolf full and flooded the transparent box of an office with light – if someone walked past the glass walls now, there was nowhere to hide.
‘Did Nigel teach you how to do that?’ she whispered in between the stomach-clenching whirring sounds.
‘How to break into a safe or how to use a drill?’
She tossed him a look as she walked over to Clarkson’s bookcase. Legal textbooks, dictionaries and a few start-up company how-tos. Nothing personal, nothing that gave away anything about the kind of man Clarkson had turned into.
‘Neither,’ Jett said before the noise reverberated again, rattling Nella’s bones.
Had the police been here? The office looked undisturbed. What had she been expecting to find – the murderer’s driver’s licence under Clarkson’s desk? A bloody footprint leading out the door? His mahogany desk was empty except for a blue desk pad, a pen holder shaped like a cactus and a dog-eared copy ofMaps of Italy. So Clarkson was a desert enthusiast who was maybe planning a holiday to the Amalfi Coast?
There was nothing here. Certainly nothing to distract her from her conversation with Jett. Nothing to distract her from watching his broad shoulders tense and loosen beneath his shirt as he drilled further into Clarkson’s safe. She thought about the three letters inked onto his bicep beneath that shirt and had an unsettling urge to rip his sleeve right off and pierce her nails through his skin, tearing those letters off. Puncturing the wound with her mouth and sucking out the poisoned blood, until the skin healed over. Until he got it through his thick skull how she saw him. How most of the world saw him ...
‘You never told me why you didn’t go back.’
He stilled for a nanosecond while he changed one of the pieces on the drill.
‘To Nigel, like he said,’ she pushed.
‘I don’t go back, Nella.’ More drilling.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I move forward. I never stayed in one place more than a year when I was a kid. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I don’twantto do it. One year’s always been my rule, for homes, for ... jobs.’
‘Because you’re afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid.’ The drill started again.
‘You’re afraid of making connections with people,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to repeat what happened with Emily. You’re afraid of getting hurt.’
