The Darkest of Shadows (31 page)

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded enthusiastically. “Great surfing.”

“You surf?” I raised my eyebrows at him. He could almost have pulled it off; he had the tan and the blond hair, but I wasn’t sure he could do casual that well.

“Not as well as I ski, but if you give me a board and a wave, I’ll have fun.”

A tray of drinks materialized on the table beside us and with a wave, Nicholas indicated that one was for me. Interesting that this area of the club had table service. I picked up the pink concoction and wondered what it was. Definitely not juice, and I could hardly claim that I didn’t drink considering, he had watched me skull a glass of scotch. A cautionary sip left a pleasantly sweet aftertaste; it couldn’t be that bad as I couldn’t taste any noticeable alcohol in it.

“You must not get to surf much here,” I said.

“No, not much. But I do get to Spain every few months, and then there’s the Alps for skiing. I get to do a lot of that in winter.”

“So what exactly do you do?” I was warming to him, ever so slightly.

“I’m into property,” he responded vaguely, and I knew that if I wanted more details, I would have to divulge something personal about myself. I wasn’t warming to him that much.

The drink went down well, and faster than I would have expected, but as soon as I put the empty glass down another replaced it. I tried to drink that one more slowly, but it just tasted so good.

“Do you live in London?” I asked him later.

“Generally,” he replied. “I have homes in several cities, but like you, I seem to always gravitate back here.”

“I was in New York last week.” I had no idea why I told him that.

“Did you enjoy it?” He didn’t seem to notice my stumble.

“Not really.” I shook my head and was somewhat surprised when the room continued to move after my head stopped.

“Would you like to dance?” He was pulling me up before I even realized what was happening.

Standing was not a good idea. Whatever was in those drinks was nasty stuff. I was drunk, more drunk that I had been in a long, long time, and I wasn’t enjoying the feeling.

I found myself standing in a small space behind the lounges where we had been sitting, and rather than the more contemporary music that had been playing out in the club, we were listening to jazz music, slow, sultry, and moody.

Nicholas’s arms were around me, and his body was pressed far to intimately against mine. Some part of my brain was telling me this was an unwise situation to be in, but that part of me was very quickly ignored while the rest of me struggled just to stay upright.

“Oh, please, stop moving,” I begged. I stopped dancing and tried to extricate myself from Nicholas’s arms, but when I realized they were part of the reason I was standing, I grabbed hold of them again—but tried to keep a distance between our bodies.

“You’re drunk.” He laughed in surprise.

“You got her drunk? Jesus, Nicholas!” Lawrence’s voice broke through the fog of my brain. I turned toward him—which, it turns out, was a really stupid thing to do, because I had to grab for Nicholas again to stop the room from swaying.

“You’re here with him?” Nicholas sounded astonished.

“What the hell took you so long?” I pulled myself from Nicholas’s arms and walked the few steps to Lawrence and collapsed against his chest. “I’m drunk.”

“I can see that,” he responded as his arms steadied around me.

“I don’t drink.” I reminded him.

“I know.” He adjusted me so that I was tucked into his side. “Yet here I find you, well and truly on your way to being smashed. Care to explain how she ended up this way, Nicholas?” There was an underlying tension to Lawrence that I’m sure Nicholas could feel.

“I didn’t know she didn’t drink.” Nicholas held up his hands. “When I met her, she was ordering a scotch at the bar.”

“That was my drink, you ass.” Lawrence ground out.

“Well, then where have you been for the last few hours?” Nicholas challenged.

“I want to go home.” I pressed myself closer to his body. Seriously, I wanted to die.

Lawrence’s arms tightened around me before he answered Nicholas. “It’s none of your business.”

“If you want to keep what’s yours, then maybe you should take better care of it.” Nicholas wasn’t impressed with Lawrence’s accusations.

“I didn’t think that I’d have to guard her against men trying to get her drunk, but then I guess we have different ideas about a willing woman, don’t we?”

I pushed against Lawrence. “Let’s just go,” I pleaded. There was a very good chance that I was going to be sick, and I really didn’t want to disgrace myself here. “It’s not his fault. Let’s just go.”

“Good night, Lilly.” Nicholas’s voice followed me. “If you ever want to talk more, come back and see me. I promise I’ll never ignore you.”

I felt Lawrence hesitate, fury flooding his body, so I pulled him with me, and we moved around the edges of the room and eventually left the club and the hotel behind us.

The trip home was harrowing: the stopping and starting, the corners…dear lord, it was all designed to make me feel awful. Even the elevator to the apartment was an experience that I never wanted to have again. That was the closest I came to losing the contents of my stomach.

It took me a couple of circuits of the bedroom to calm my rolling insides, and then a couple more to convince myself that I was OK. Lawrence watched me as I walked. He had stripped down to just his pants, and the calmer I got, the more I noticed him each time I passed. He looked good. Really good.

“Who’s Nicholas?” I asked at one point.

“Nicholas Janis. He owns that hotel we were in, one of many in his empire. Of all the people that you could have attracted tonight, you definitely picked a good one.”

“Property developer, my ass,” I snickered.

“What was that?” Lawrence asked.

“Nothing.” I waved away his question.

“Feeling better?”

“I think I’m still drunk,” I admitted.

“I imagine you’re going to be drunk for a few hours yet.”

I had to agree with him on that; I did feel happily numb to the world around me. A slow smile spread across my face.

“What?” he asked cautiously, catching my grin.

I didn’t need to answer him, I showed him exactly what I wanted. Slowly, provocatively, I unzipped the back of my dress, then stepped out of the material as it pooled on the floor. I wasn’t wearing anything underneath it, but I did keep my heels on, and with a slightly more wobbly walk than normal, I crossed the room to him.

“Want to take advantage of a drunk woman?” I asked him with a wicked grin. He did. Oh boy, did he ever.

The next morning it all came back to haunt me. In grand style. I made the early morning dash to the bathroom and deposited all the alcohol that my body rejected into the toilet. I could hear the amused chuckle come from the bedroom, but I didn’t have the energy to respond. I ended up sitting under the hot water on the floor of the shower and spent a good portion of an hour throwing up nothing but bile. I think I might have poisoned myself.

“Are you alive?” Lawrence asked, as he settled beside me on the floor. Luckily, it was a big shower.

“No.” The words sounded hoarse coming out of my throat.

“Would you like me to kill Nicholas?” he asked hopefully.

I shook my head, which made me feel even worse. “My fault.”

“Why did you drink?” He wasn’t accusing, merely curious.

“Accident,” I admitted. “I got stuck with Jewell for a while, and I had your scotch in my hand. It was either drink it to numb the sound of her voice, or smash her over the head with it.” I shrugged. “I caved and drank it; then when Nicholas gave me a drink later, I didn’t realize it was alcohol, it was so sweet.”

“They usually are.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re not.” He stroked the hair back from my face. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I thought I would only need a minute or two with Marshall and then be back before you were, but the old bastard wanted me to pay him on the side, and I don’t do that. It took some serious talking before he would play the game properly.”

“I should have known better. It wasn’t your fault. You should be able to trust that I can look after myself for a few hours without getting into trouble.”

“Yeah, but you forget that I know the sort of people that troll through those rooms. You have to be very strong to survive that alone.”

He was right; they were a force unto themselves sometimes. The truly rich lived by a different set of rules than the rest of us did, and it was a game you played only when you knew all the rules—and I didn’t know anywhere near enough.

Our conversation was interrupted by another round of vomiting. Lawrence finally left me to my misery, and for the first time since I started working for him, I had a day off. There was absolutely no point in my trying to work; it took till nearly four in the afternoon before I stopped feeling like I wanted to be sick if I so much as moved an eyelash, and there was no argument from me that night about not accompanying Lawrence to dinner. The very thought of food had my stomach contracting painfully.

TEXT:		Oh god I got drunk last night.
REED:		U?
TEXT:		No my identical twin!!!
REED:		Funny.
TEXT:		Its so not funny today
REED:		Serves u right. U know better.
TEXT:		Its kind of hard to explain
REED:		r u an adult? Do you not know how to say no
TEXT:		yes, and yes, but it was drink or smash some woman in the face and I don’t like jail
REED:		oh, well in that case. Good work.
TEXT:		Im wishing I had taken my chances with jail about now.
REED:

I was sitting on the lounge with Charlie, who had been left behind to babysit me, when the first package arrived.

The intercom buzzed loudly enough to jerk me out of my half-doze. With an exasperated glance at the ice hockey match he was watching, Charlie walked over to the wall to answer. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I really didn’t care that much. I was in my PJs with a fluffy white robe on, and that’s how I intended to stay.

Charlie waited by the door, half his attention on the game, and the other half obviously waiting for something to arrive. The something turned out to be a huge bunch of roses. Red, of course. I cracked an eyelid long enough to have a quick look and then went back to napping.

They were plunked down on the table beside me, and I’m sorry to admit that I gagged. “Oh God, take them away.” I all but threw them at Charlie, who was grinning madly at me.

“Don’t you like your pretty present?” he asked, and deposited them in the kitchen.

I took deep calming breaths; the smell of them was so strong that it made me feel nauseous. “What are you talking about?” I finally managed to ask.

“They’re for you.” He flicked a card at me, which I only just managed to catch.

He was right. Astonishingly, they were for me. From none other than Nicholas. The card read
“For an unforgettable woman. Nicholas.”

“Lawrence is going to go ape shit,” Charlie predicted happily.

I was too sick to care what he did, so I ignored both the flowers and Charlie. The theory was good, up until about an hour later; then the buzzer sounded again. This time Charlie leaped up with a great deal more enthusiasm to answer it, and from his grin I could tell that I wasn’t going to like what was coming up in the elevator.

This package was much smaller, too small. It weighed next to nothing in my hands, and I had a sinking suspicion that it was probably jewelry, which was horrifying in its inappropriateness.

It was a sparking diamond tennis bracelet, and it must have been worth a fortune. Seriously, only someone exceedingly wealthy would think that it was OK to give someone they didn’t know a gift of this much value. Whatever happened to sending chocolates?

“I think we can safely assume that Lawrence is not going to like that at all,” Charlie added to his earlier comment.

I carefully placed the bracelet back in the box and picked up the card that was attached. There was no note this time, just a mobile number. I stared at it for a long time, wondering what I should do. Obviously I had to return the bracelet; there was no way that I was accepting it.
Who cares about the flowers
…but this, it was unacceptable. The only problem was that I didn’t have his address, only a phone number. If I called it from my phone, he would have my number, which I wasn’t about to give him; that and the fact that I was more than positive that Lawrence would not be happy if I called Nicholas.