He let out a yelp of pain and jumped back, tripping over his own feet as he did so.
‘What the…?’
Adele had been preparing to scratch and bite and kick and do anything she could think of to get out of there safely. Her leg was draped across the arm of the chair, ready to spring over it and out of the door while he was off balance.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose. That voice…
‘Nick?’
There was a shuffling noise as he got to his feet.
‘Thanks for the warm welcome, sweetheart!’
‘What are you…? What do you think you…?’ The adrenaline surge quickly converted fear to anger. Given a choice of fight or flight, Adele was ready to get down and dirty. However, the heightened state of awareness seemed to be short-circuiting her ability to form a coherent sentence.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and tried again.
‘What the heck are you doing creeping round my house in the middle of the night?’
‘Our house.’
‘Stop nit-picking! You scared me half to death!’
‘I was looking for—’ Nick leaned over and turned on a table lamp ‘—this.’
He reached past her and picked up a leather wallet lying by her foot.
‘And this.’
A mobile phone was only a few inches away.
Adele stared at it. It wasn’t the one he’d used to have. For some strange reason the knowledge made her very sad.
‘I took them out of my jeans pocket earlier on. I discovered that it’s actually very hard to find somewhere to stay with none of my friends’ phone numbers and no money for a hotel.’
She was so dazed she didn’t know what to say. One minute she’d been wishing him here and, now her wish had been granted, she was ready to boot him out of the door again. All her anger suffocated in a cloud of bafflement.
‘How did you get in?’ she asked, still staring at the phone.
Nick reached into his back pocket, pulled out a set of keys and dangled them from the tip of his finger. Adele focused on them slowly.
He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d be in bed. I’d planned to slip in quietly, get my things and disappear again. You would never have known I’d been here.’
‘You have keys?’ Why were the most basic concepts so hard to grasp all of a sudden?
‘Yup.’
She tightened her forehead until her brows puckered. ‘So, if you still have keys, why didn’t you use them when you first turned up here?’
‘Dunno. I was trying to be polite, I suppose.’
Nick? Trying to be polite? Did not compute.
He’d dive-bombed into her life again in his size-eleven boots, tried to manoeuvre her into going to a party five hundred miles away and he was worried about letting himself into his own house? It was so absurd she couldn’t even start to get her head round it.
So she did the only thing she could; she collapsed into the chair, one leg hanging over the edge, and started to laugh. And then she found she couldn’t stop. Pretty soon, tears were running down her face.
Only Nick could do this. The man was impossible, intolerable and impossible some more.
For once, Nick didn’t have a cheeky grin plastered all over his face. He just kept staring at her and blinking. He looked so lost, and when he looked like that he was impossible to resist.
She let the rest of the mirth out on one long breath and shook her head. ‘You’ll never find anywhere to stay at this time of night. You might as well go and get your things and put them in the spare room. We’ll talk later.’
When Adele swept into the kitchen at six-thirty that morning she found Nick sitting at the table waiting for her. She stopped in her tracks and tilted her head to one side.
‘You’re up early.’ About three hours too early for his normal routine.
‘You said we were going to talk.’
She pushed up the stiff cuff of her blouse and looked at her watch. ‘I’m not missing work today, Nick. I have a life and I’m not putting it on hold for you.’
He grimaced. ‘Yeah, and don’t I know it.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He rubbed the corner of one eye with his index finger. ‘Ignore me. I’m tired and grumpy. The rest of us mortals don’t spring out of bed before dawn without a hair out of place like you do.’
He might not be dressed, but he was looking much better than mortal with his pyjamas done up on the wrong button and his hair sticking up in five different directions.
Hold on. Since when did Nick wear pyjamas?
But then her thoughts veered dangerously to what he normally wore in bed and a blush crept up her neck and kept going until it was under her hairline. Pyjamas were definitely better for her blood pressure than the alternative.
Adele looked down at her skirt and blouse and her high heels then smoothed an invisible hair into the twist at the back of her head.
He’d done it again. Sometimes, all Nick had to do was be in the same room as her and she was questioning herself. When she’d walked down the stairs this morning she’d felt confident, efficient, ready to face the world. Now she just felt…overdressed.
‘I’m just up and ready for the office, that’s all. Some of us can’t spend all our time locked in the garden shed until three in the morning and call it work, you know.’
Nick yawned and covered his hand with his mouth. ‘I’m too tired to have this argument again. Can we just take it as a given that I act like a three-year-old and you’re the grown-up? Then we can skip all the shouting.’
She wanted to say ‘No, I don’t want to skip it,’ but that would make her the three-year-old, so she bit her tongue and made her way to the coffee-maker. Much to her surprise, it was already on and hot, steaming coffee was waiting for her.
Nick got up from where he was sitting and handed her a mug.
‘The office doesn’t open until nine. We’ve got time to talk.’
Adele opened her mouth to speak.
‘Yes, I know you always like to be in before eight, but even then we’ve got time.’
She closed it again and nodded. However, once she and Nick were seated either side of the table again, the room fell into silence.
Finally, Adele could bear it no more.
‘Why didn’t you tell me your mum was ill?’
Nick’s jaw dropped. ‘How did you find out?’
‘Debbie left a message for you on the answer-phone. I suppose your mum’s not the only one who doesn’t know we’ve been living apart for almost a year.’
‘You know how close they all are. If any of them knew, they’d be sure to blab it to Mum and I didn’t want to give her the extra worry.’
‘You should have told me.’
Nick gave her a lopsided look. ‘I seem to remember hearing an awful lot of dial tone in our phone conversations.’
‘Not then. Now. Why didn’t you