Tilly blinked rapidly as Ed caught Goodie’s eye and she shook her head once.
‘I’m fine, Ed,’ Tilly said, her eyes still wet but a wide smile now dominating her face as she turned to him. ‘Must be off in a jiffy though, babysitter and all that.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Ed told her, and Goodie was surprised to hear how firm his voice was. She wouldn’t have thought that Eddidfirm, not really.
‘Oh …’ Tilly blushed, her eyes sparkling and tears now very much a thing of the past, ‘well, I don’t want to put you out or anything. I know what a bore it is to have to leave early from things, Clive was always saying that –’
‘Clive,’ Ed cut her off, his voice harder than Goodie had ever heard it, ‘is a dickhead. No argument: I’m taking you home.’ He ran his hand down her forearm to her hand and held it possessively. Tilly looked down at their linked hands and blinked, then nodded with a small, pleased smile on her face.
‘No one’s going anywhere until we’ve played the hat game,’ the small blonde hostess piped up from her end of the table, bouncing up and down in her seat. ‘Boys against girls!’
Goodie was not aware that people still played games like this. She had never, even as a child, had a chance to do anything even remotely like charades, and that strange feeling of helplessness enveloped her as she was squashed onto the ‘girls’ sofa’ in the vast living room opposite the boys, and was instructed to write down famous names to put in a hat.
You had to first describe, then act out, then use one word to describe the names in the hat to your team in three different rounds. At first the game seemed simple but the rules grew more convoluted and seemed to change as the rounds progressed. Also, cheating appeared to be acceptable practice (hiding names behind your back was fine as long as nobody saw – but if you were caught a violent struggle with one of the opposing team would invariably occur to restore the name to the hat).
The girls won by a ridiculous margin. Goodie had a crazily accurate ability to retain information. The boys didn’t stand a chance. And it was the strangest thing. She started laughing when she watched Nick act out ‘the arse end of nowhere’ (apparently places were allowed in the hat also – a rule change which only emerged halfway through the game), and for the rest of the game she just couldn’t stop. In her twenty-nine years Goodie could count on one hand the number of times she’d actually laughed; in one evening she’d managed to smash all previous records to pieces. The evening finished off with ‘Fungal Bum Candle’ – a game which involved having a mushroom dangling from a piece of string attached to the back of your trousers and attempting to put out a candle on the floor with it.
It was the most ridiculous, utterly bonkers endeavour Goodie had ever witnessed. By the end of the evening her cheeks were actually wet with tears of laughter. Nick had done his fair share of laughing too, but she had noticed that more often than not he was happy to watch her, and nearly always had her in his immediate radius: his hand on her back before they sat for dinner, his arm around the back of her chair during dinner, holding her hand on the sofa when he extracted her from the girls’ sofa after the hat game had finally concluded. She allowed it. She was coming to realize that when it came to this man she would allow pretty much anything.
No, Goodie hadn’t felt fear in a good long while, but when it came to him she was terrified.
Chapter21
Here with you
Nick was smilingas he walked into his office. He had left Bertie trying to explain the merits of moss to a long-suffering Goodie; who knew how many types of the bloody stuff there were? He opened his laptop and was about to click on the file for the presentation that afternoon when his phone beeped, signalling a text.
I have something.
He blinked at the message. Walker had been on the job for three months now and he had yet to communicate in any sort of positive fashion. The name must have helped. Nick had begun to think of her as Anya since the day he saw her react to it. Even if it wasn’t hers it suited her better than Goodie (and certainly better than Yukanol Fukov – which she was now down as officially with HR).
Send it, he texted back. After a few moments his phone rang in his hand and he frowned. Walker was such a tight-arse Nick had never known him to be the one to phone using his own money, especially not when he would be paying a premium to call from Russia.
‘What?’ Nick snapped down the phone.
‘Nick,’ Walker started, then was silent.
‘Yes?’ Nick said slowly, losing patience.
‘What we’ve found … It …’ Walker trailed off and Nick leaned back in his chair to stare up at the ceiling in frustration. ‘… mate, it’s a little … fucked up.’
‘Just send it,’ Nick gritted out through his teeth. ‘I’m paying you to obtain information for me. The least you can do after months of bugger all is to send what you finallydohave.’
‘This woman … is she …?’ Walker broke off and there was another goddamn pause.
‘Is she what?’ Nick asked, starting to get angry now.
‘Is she okay?’ Walker asked softly, and Nick blinked.
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘I mean … is she …?’ Walker cleared his throat. ‘Nick, I’ve never seen anything like this. What I’ve got, it’s … you need to be careful with this girl.’
Nick frowned. This was the first time he’d ever heard Walker sound remotely unsure of himself. He heard Sam’s voice in his head:‘Some things are best left buried.’
‘Just bloody send it,’ he clipped, his hand tightening around the phone.
Walker sighed.
