His for the Taking (3 page)

‘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 emptied 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.

The scent of fresh coffee greeted Nick as soon as he stepped into the hallway; he followed it to the kitchen where Zoe sat at the table with two mugs in front of her. ‘There isn’t any milk,’ she said. ‘Xenia doesn’t take it.’ She frowned slightly. ‘Didn’t.’

‘That’s fine, I like it black.’ Nick took the chair across from Zoe, and a sip of coffee. He leaned back with the mug warming his hand.

She’d taken off her leather jacket, revealing a black T-shirt that allowed him for the first time to see her shape. She was well built, with full breasts and a flat stomach and toned arms.

Nick’s appreciation of this woman climbed a couple of points up the scale. She wasn’t pretty—not like the women he was attracted to. Nick liked the small, feminine type, and Zoe wasn’t delicate or overtly feminine: her jaw was too square, her mouth too wide, her nose too definite, her hands short-nailed and competent. But she was better-looking than he’d thought when he’d first seen her in the corridor. Especially when she was talking. Her mouth and eyes were mobile and interesting, and her movements were fluid. And her smile was bright and sudden.

She wasn’t smiling now, though. She had her brows drawn down and her jaw was set. Her eyes were focused somewhere in the middle of the table.

‘What’s the matter?’

She glanced up at his face. ‘Oh, only the obvious. I’ve got a funeral to arrange and there’s this random guy barging into the apartment looking for his father.’

She was annoyed. Nick didn’t mind that; he’d rather she was annoyed at him than sad about her great-aunt.

‘Oh, that’s all right. For a minute I thought you might be mad at me.’ He took a leisurely sip of his coffee and watched her frown deepen. ‘So, Zoe, what do you think? Did your great-aunt ever mention my father? Do you think he might be staying here still?’

Her blue eyes glinted at him. ‘You really have a one-track mind, did you know that?’

‘When I was ten years old, my dad went for a hunting trip one weekend and never came back,’ he told her. ‘My mother thought there had been an accident. She was frantic. I remember me and my sister going to school and trying to pretend that everything was all right, while my mother was at home, waiting. Two days after my father was supposed to be home, she got a phone call. I remember I was watching Bugs Bunny on TV when the phone rang.’

Zoe was still frowning, but her mouth had softened. ‘What was it?’

‘My mother thought it was the police calling to say my father was dead. I have never seen her so terrified, not before or since.’

Just retelling the story, Nick could feel the fierce protective instinct that had made him, at ten years old, turn off his cartoons and go to his mother and take her hand. His teeth had gritted against each other, his small body had drawn itself to its full height.

It was the moment he had become a man.

‘Nick?’ Zoe had put her coffee down and was leaning forward on the table. Nick realised he must have stopped speaking, caught up in memory.

‘It was my dad on the phone. I could recognise his voice through the receiver, so I knew it was him. I couldn’t hear what he said, though. When my mother put the phone down she told me that my father hadn’t been hurt hunting, he was fine, but he’d gone away and we wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. About a month later she packed up his stuff and put it in the attic.’

‘And you didn’t hear anything from him at all until this letter?’

‘I think my mom got envelopes with money in them occasionally, but not often, and not much. And she’d never show me the return address. She burned the envelopes before I could get my hands on them. I think she knew I’d go off to find him.’

‘Looks like she was right.’

‘My mother is usually right. I was too young then. The envelopes stopped when I was sixteen.’

‘Were you afraid he was dead?’

‘If he were dead he would have an excuse.’

He felt a pain in his hands and looked down at them to see them fisted, his knuckles white and the fingers red.

He swallowed and, after he had concentrated on his hands, they relaxed. He heard the kitchen clock ticking to the same artificial rhythm as the clock in the corridor outside. And, for a few seconds, he heard nothing else.

Zoe cleared her throat loudly. ‘Well.’ She pushed her chair back with a noisy scrape. ‘It’s been great talking about this, Nick, and thank you for sharing, but I’ve got to get home and do stuff, and I’m sure you’re eager to comb the entire city for your missing father. Are you done with your coffee?’ She held out her hand for his mug.

Nick didn’t move. He flexed his hands and looked at the palms. On each of them there were four red crescents where his short nails had dug into the skin.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m staying here.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Y
OU’RE WHAT
?’

Zoe stared at Nick. He was tall and dark and handsome as ever with the added bonus of being principled, wounded, and passionate.

No, no, no. He ticked all her ‘perfect man’ boxes exactly. She could not have somebody like this around. She needed to get rid of him.

He rubbed his palms against his thighs. ‘I’m staying here. Do you know for sure my father isn’t living here?’

‘Did you see any sign of him?’

‘Nothing definite, but that doesn’t mean anything. Do you know for a fact that your great-aunt didn’t have anybody staying with her?’