Kelly was a PA in the public relations department at Maitlands, but her hours were hugely flexible thanks to the amount of social junketing with clients she was obliged to do.
When her previous flatmate had decided to move to Sydney a few months ago, Nora had posted an ad on the company’s computer bulletin board. Kelly’s outgoing personality and enthusiasm for life had persuaded her that the bubbly twenty-one-year-old would be fun to have around. It had only been after she moved in that Nora had begun to realise that their ideas of fun didn’t always coincide.
She watched Kelly walk jauntily off towards the bus stop around the corner. It didn’t seem fair that the hard-partying Kelly should be brimming with health and vitality, while Nora squinted through bleary red eyes, her mouth puckered with horrible dryness, her head squeezed in the vice-like grip of a vicious hangover. Of course, Kelly had been able to enjoy all the comforts of home last night, whereas Nora had had to make do with a depressing motel room and the spurious sympathy of a bottle of eighty-per-cent-proof vodka. And she didn’t even like vodka!
The feeling, she had since found out, was entirely mutual.
As soon as Kelly turned the corner, Nora coaxed the Citroën’s temperamental engine back into life and eased out from the line of cars at the kerb, driving down to slot into her usual parking place amongst the other residents’ vehicles.
She got out of the car, moving carefully so as not to jolt her painful head, still brooding over the reasons for her enforced exile.
By the time she had reached her car last night she had been alternately sweating and shivering, almost semi-hysterical with relief. As she’d navigated her way through the saturated streets she’d vowed that she would never, ever, behave so irresponsibly again—no matter what the provocation. Or the temptation!
Operating on auto-pilot, she had instinctively headed for the security of her own home and had been shattered when she’d turned into her street and spied a familiar silver BMW parked outside the apartment and the lights in Kelly’s corner bedroom glowing cosily behind drawn blinds.
Ryan certainly hadn’t wasted any time, she had thought numbly. He must have left the party straight after Nora and raced over for more fun and games with Kelly. How many other times had the pair of them taken reckless advantage of Nora’s absence?
Anger balled in her stomach. Ryan always liked to have the last word in an argument. What if he had arranged with Kelly to wait around and confront Nora when she eventually arrived home?
Home. That was a laugh. A home was supposed to be somewhere you felt safe, a protective fortress against the slings and arrows of misfortune.
And now that had been taken from her, too.
Nora had wanted to storm inside and scream at the pair to get out. The lease of the compact two-bedroomed ground-floor apartment had always been in her sole name, so she had every right to ask Kelly to leave, but she couldn’t very well do it tonight—not in her current woefully vulnerable state; not until she had shored up her defences again.
She had several friends who would put her up, but most of them were friends with Ryan, too, and right now she felt too emotionally exhausted to run the gauntlet of the inevitable questions if she turned up distraught and begging for shelter.
So she had put her foot back down on the accelerator and sought out the nearest low-rise motel, a rather down at heel establishment which included an hourly rate on its dog-eared price card. Unlocking her door, she had noticed the neon-lit window of a liquor wholesaler across the road, in which a sexy female mannequin sported a sign promising a free T-shirt with every purchased bottle of famous-brand vodka.
When Nora had walked out of the store she’d been carrying not only the vodka and a black T-shirt but also the mannequin’s fluorescent green leggings. She might have been stranded in the twilight zone but she wasn’t going to spend a minute longer than necessary in the dress that had come to symbolise her stupidity.
And, having bought the vodka, it had seemed a good idea to stave off some of her misery by opening it. It would make a fine title for a reality TV show, thought Nora, as she opened the car boot: When Good Ideas Go Bad!
The vodka idea would certainly go down as famous in the annals of bad decisions she had made. She drank, but never to excess, and now she wondered why anyone would knowingly court this kind of physical torture.
Carrying the company laptop she had forgotten to take inside when she had eagerly rushed home to try on her new dress, and with the rest of her things stuffed into the liquor store carrier bag, Nora nudged the boot of the Citroën closed with her elbow, wincing as the heavy thunk rattled her aching skull.
A tall solidly built man in a rumpled white shirt was getting out of a black van across the road as Nora approached the steps, her mind concentrated on getting to the top without her head falling off. The first thing she was going to do when she got inside was make a huge pot of coffee, she thought longingly.
‘Excuse me?’
Nora looked gingerly around at the politely forceful voice. The rumpled shirt had a face to match—fiftyish, lived-in, blandly unremarkable except for sharp periwinkle-blue eyes.
‘Miss Lang?’
She was trying to work enough fur out of her mouth to answer, conscious of his arrested survey of her vodka-touting T-shirt and bilious leggings, when he added, ‘Miss Nora Lang?’
There was a hint of amusement in his tone which rubbed at her raw nerves. ‘Who wants to know?’ she said with uncharacteristic rudeness.
‘These are for you.’
He held up the sheaf of red roses he had been carrying half-concealed at his side, and Nora was startled into feeling a momentary lift of her spirits.
Her mouth began to curve into an involuntary smile. ‘For me? Are you sure?’
‘If you’re Eleanor Lang from apartment 1A.’
‘Yes, that’s me.’ Her elation died and her smile inverted itself. Only one person she knew had any reason to send her flowers. She recoiled as if they were plague-ridden. ‘I don’t want them!’
He seemed taken aback at the heated response. ‘Look—I’m just making a delivery, OK?’
She glared. Any colour would have been unacceptable, but red was rubbing added salt in the wound. They were even more offensive considering that Ryan had never bothered to send her flowers before.
‘Then you can just deliver them right back where they came from,’ she declared, her contempt recharging her dwindling stores of energy. ‘And you can tell that—that snake who sent them that he’s a moron if he thinks he can bribe me with a measly bunch of flowers! He’s never going to get back what he lost. And when this goes public I’m going to make sure that everyone knows how it went down. Maybe people won’t be so quick to trust him in future, if they know his personal morality stinks!’
She stumped up the steps, feeling slightly better for having vented her spleen, even if only at an innocent bystander. The poor guy had looked quite stunned by her outburst. She glanced back as she went into the building and saw him walking back to his van with the rejected roses, cell-phone plastered to his ear…reporting his aborted mission, no doubt, she thought with a bitter sense of satisfaction.
Entering the flat, Nora felt none of her usual welcome sense of homecoming. To her dismay she felt alien in her own environment, tense and resentful of all the signs of Kelly’s occupation—the open fashion magazine left on the couch, the unwashed dishes in the sink, the pile of ironing draped over a chair, the drips of nail varnish on the coffee table. Usually Nora was tolerant of her flatmate’s habitual untidiness, but now her thoughtlessness seemed insultingly close to contempt.
It had been too much to hope for that Kelly had already started to pack up her things, Nora brooded as she switched on the coffee-maker, but surely she must have realised that she would have to move out? Until