Praise for Nikki Logan
‘Superb debut—4.5 stars.’
—RT Book Reviews on
Lights, Camera … Kiss the Boss
‘Now, here is an Australian writer who manages to both tell a good story and to capture Australia well. I had fun from start to finish. Nikki Logan will be one to watch.’
—www.goodreads.com on
Lights, Camera … Kiss the Boss
‘This story has well-defined and soundly motivated characters as well as a heart-wrenching conflict.’
—RT Book Reviews on
Their Newborn Gift
About the Author
About Nikki Logan
NIKKI LOGAN lives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theatre at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by night—the perfect way to combine her two loves. Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages she knows her job is done.
Visit Nikki online at www.nikkilogan.com.au
Also by Nikki Logan
A Kiss to Seal the Deal
Shipwrecked with Mr Wrong
Lights, Camera … Kiss the Boss
Their Newborn Gift
Seven-Day Love Story
The Soldier’s Untamed Heart
Friends to Forever
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
Rapunzel in New York
Nikki Logan
Dedication To Carol and Marlon: I hope my Viktoria is the kind of woman you’d have wanted yours to grow into.
Acknowledgement To my friend Sandra Galati, and coffee-shop stranger Teresa Izzard, for your invaluable assistance discovering Manhattan. Sandra and I were meeting in a coffee shop halfway around the world from Morningside, NY, where this book is set, and the woman at the next table had lived there for a year. Talk about kismet! And to all the internet sites dedicated to New York City’s urban raptors. Thank you! I had a wonderful time researching this story and watching your beautiful birds every day.
CHAPTER ONE
“YOU’d better get up here, Nathan. There’s a woman about to jump from your building.”
Two sentences.
That’s all it took to tear Nathan Archer away from his Columbus Circle office and send him racing uptown. Ironic that the A-line was quicker than a cab or even his driver could get him up to Morningside, but the subway spilled him out just one block from the West 126th Street building he’d grown up in. Grown old in. Well before his time.
He pushed through the gathered throng, shaking his head at the impatient crowd. Was there a whole population of people who hovered in alleys and bars just waiting for some poor individual to be nudged too far in life? To climb out onto a bridge or a rooftop?
Or a ledge.
He followed their collective gaze upward. Sure enough, there she was. Not exactly preparing for a swan dive; more crouched than standing. She looked young, though it was hard to tell from this distance.
She was staring at the sky with an intensity strong enough to render her completely oblivious to the crowd gathering below. He lifted his eyes to the popcorn clouds. Was she praying? Or was she just in her own tormented world?
“The crisis team is mobilizing,” a nearby cop said, turning back to stare uselessly up to the tenth floor. “ETA twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes? She’d already been out there at least the quarter hour it had taken him to get uptown. The chances of her lasting another twenty?
Not high.
He glanced around at the many spectators who were doing exactly nothing to rectify the situation and swallowed a groan. There was a reason he was more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. Behind the scenes had served him well his whole life. You got a lot done when you weren’t wasting time as the center of attention. He paid people to do the limelight thing.
Unfortunately, none of them were here.
He was.
Nathan looked back up at the looming building and the woman perched precariously on it. Hadn’t these old walls contained enough misery?
He muttered a curse and his legs started moving. Had nobody thought of doing this sooner? He pushed past a gaggle of onlookers and headed toward the building, counting windows as he went. It took him three minutes to get into his own building and up to the eighth floor, and he passed three residents on the stairs up to the tenth—they had no clue about the drama unfolding in their own building. If they saw it on the news tonight they’d be kicking themselves they missed it. Not that it was making the news tonight, or any night while he still breathed. His development didn’t need the bad press. He hadn’t worked on it all this time only to have it turned upside down by a woman with a blown psychiatric fuse.
Nate burst through the stairwell door and turned left, counting the windows he knew to be on the outside of the building. Nine … ten … eleven … On twelve, he paused for only a second before delivering a strategic kick right at the weak point in the door of apartment 10B. As fragile as the rest of the century old building, it exploded inwards in a shower of splinters.
Inside, the apartment was neat and carefully decorated but small enough that he was able to check all the five rooms in less than thirty seconds, even with a limp from the jar that had just about snapped his ankle. Three rooms had outside windows that were sealed tight—safety measures. But, apparently back at the turn of the twentieth century some architect had considered that only grown men needed to be saved from themselves, because every apartment had one more window—small and awkwardly positioned above the toilet cistern, but just big enough for a slight woman to wiggle through. Or a young boy.
He knew that from experience.
This one stood wide open, its tasteful lemon curtains blowing gently in the breeze, providing access onto 10B’s sheltered ledge.
Nathan’s heart hammered from way more than the urgent sprint up two flights of stairs. He took a deep, tense breath, climbed onto the closed lid of the toilet and peered out the window, sickeningly prepared to find nothing but pigeon droppings and a swirl of air where a woman had just been.
But she was still out there, her back to him as she stretched out on the ledge on all fours, giving him a great view of her denim-clad behind …
… and the