Nick’s eyes widened and his body went rigid with tension. ‘Goodie, I …’ Acting on impulse, she wrenched away from him and stumbled to her feet, wincing as her leg almost gave way with the sudden weight through it, and grabbing onto the table for support.
‘Goodie, listen to me …’ Nick had risen from the chair and lifted his hand to support her elbow, but she pulled away from him violently, causing another tearing pain through her leg, but at this point she was beyond caring. The room actually felt like it was spinning as she backed away from him, using the chairs for support because her crutch was on Nick’s other side. She hadn’t been called that name for twenty years.
Nick held his hands up, palm down. ‘Goodie,’ he said, low and even, as if approaching a wounded animal, ‘baby, you’re going to hurt yourself. Please calm down and let me explain.’
‘How do you know that name?’ she asked, moving to the other side of the conference table and ignoring the throbbing ache in her leg.
‘You’ll take this the wrong way, honey, but I had to know more about you. It was driving me nuts and I … I’m not good with being in the dark.’
‘Who told you that name?’ Her voice was now cold, completely devoid of expression, as were her eyes. Her quick mind was processing everything at lightning speed. She had thought her past was buried, but if anyone had the resources to dig it up it was of course Nick. The deception and betrayal cut deep, but what really chilled her was that this knowledge wasdangerous. This stupid, stubborn mule of a man had put himself in danger to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about her.
Nick sighed. ‘I found out the bloody name by myself.Youtold me that much.’ Goodie frowned at him and he continued. ‘You reacted. You flinched when her name was called. It was small, nobody else but me would have ever noticed but … God, Goodie, I watch you all the time. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I just wanted to know more about you … tohavesomething –’
‘You have everything,’ she said. To her horror her voice broke and the shame of that weakness made her anger grow even more. ‘Everything. Why would you go digging when I had already given you all I had.’
‘I’m sorry, Goodie, I just –’
‘Look,’ Goodie cut him off, her gaze shearing away from him as she considered her options. It was obvious that he was not going to tell her his source. She had no way of extracting the information she needed like this. ‘Natasha will be here soon. I can’t talk about this now. I need to lie down, get the weight off my leg and take something for the pain.’
‘Listen, I –’
‘I’m inpain, Nick.’ Goodie watched as he ran his hands through his hair and let out a long sigh.
‘Okay,’ he said, reaching back for her crutch and then moving to her. He followed after as she hobbled to the stairs, and as was normal for them now she allowed him to lift her to climb them, but instead of breathing him in and clutching around his neck as she normally would, she let her arms settle loosely in her lap and turned her head away. He laid her down in his bed; she rolled onto her side, facing the window, and closed her eyes.
A good few minutes passed, but once she heard the door softly close behind him her eyes popped open. He would be going back to his office but his laptop was in the bedroom. Observation was one of Goodie’s particular skills. As well as a photographic memory when it came to written pages, she had almost perfect recall of the layout of a room and the items inside it. She’d noticed Nick leave his laptop in the room this morning when he came to bring her a cup of tea. The bank of computers in his office meant he rarely had to use it during the day and he often left it lying around. Goodie had had no need to hack it before. She had studied Nick well before she started working for him. This, however, was different. This was abouther.
She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, grabbed her crutch and pushed to her feet. Once she was sitting at the small desk near the window she opened the lid of the laptop and then entered the password. She knew all of Nick’s passwords, just like she knew everything else about him: from his shoe size, to his GCSE results, to the names of every woman he’d ever slept with (that knowledge had proved painful on occasion, especially when she was forced to watch him dance with one of the women he’d shagged on a semi-regular basis over the years).
It took a few minutes to hack every corner of his hard drive until she found what she was looking for. Before she opened the file, she paused to look at the private investigator’s name and contact details, then took a deep breath. Something was stopping her from making the last few key-strokes she needed, and she found herself just staring at the screen as the seconds ticked by. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and a cold feeling of foreboding swept over her as she forced her fingers to move.
The screen changed as a scanned document filled it: she took in her name, her mother’s name, her date of birth (something she hadn’t acknowledged in over twenty years). A few more key-strokes, and instead of more documents an image filled the screen. Goodie wasn’t shocked by the blood or the hollow emptiness in the blue eyes staring back at her, but she was surprised by how young she looked: even younger than Arabella. An image of Arabella going through what Goodie had at the same age went through her mind, and she was swamped by a sick feeling of horror.
I was just a child, she thought as she dragged her consciousness away from that image. She frowned. Had she ever been a child in the true sense of the word? Closing her eyes for a moment, she drew in a breath and her fingers flew back to the keys. At the next image she froze. The image of a blonde woman with a small, equally blonde child in her lap appeared, another dark-haired child standing at their sides and leaning into them both. Their arms were around each other, the blonde child was smiling a wide smile into the camera, and the dark-haired child’s head was thrown back in laughter. But the woman’s eyes were on the blonde child’s face; her smile was smaller than her children’s and her blue eyes were soft. Goodie reached out a finger and traced the woman’s beautiful face on the screen as the memories started invading.
‘Mama,’ Anya said into her mother’s soft hair in Russian, ‘throat sore. Make me better.’
‘Ugh, you’ve got a cold, Anya,’ groaned Tasha from her position on the ratty sofa, rolling her eyes.
‘Don’t worry,myshka, I can make better,’ Anya heard her mother murmur, and felt the arms around her give her a squeeze as she was carried through to the tiny kitchen. She was sat at the small table as her mother moved to the stove, pouring the white mixture into Anya’s mug. She then placed the mug in front of Anya and stroked her hair as Anya drank the warm liquid, easing the pain in her throat and lessening the shivers that wracked her body. She took Anya’s hand when she had finished, and guided her to the bedroom they shared. They lay down together and Anya’s eyes closed as her mother stroked her hair. She heard the bedroom door open but was buried so far into her mother’s chest that she couldn’t make out Tasha’s words.
‘She’s fine,kotyonok,’* Anya heard her mother say. Then she felt heat at her back as Tasha came in behind her to wrap her arms around both of them. Anya had drifted off to sleep, warm and surrounded by love.
Goodie blinked at the screen but was unable to tear her eyes away. She was wrong when she thought she’d never been looked after before. She’d been loved, totally and unconditionally. After the horror of what happened to her mother and the nightmare of everything that happened after that night, she’d blocked out those memories. That way she could deal with being separated from Tasha. She could deal with anything because she no longer felt pain or loss; but in turn she no longer really ever felt happiness or joy.
Not until him.
Not until Nick.
*kotyonok– kitten
Chapter28
You promise?
‘You’ve hadplenty of time, but she still called forme.’ Goodie froze outside the library as she heard Tasha’s voice float through the door. ‘I’m not leaving without her. Not if she wants to go. I won’t let her down. God knows she’s never, ever failedmebefore.’
‘She’s running away because she’s scared; she –’
