‘Try and open your eyes,’ she said gently.
‘Very funny!’
‘I mean it. If you can manage to open them and blink a bit, the eye can do its job and wash the chilli juice away. It works a lot faster than sitting there with your fingers pressing into your eyeballs, making it worse!’
Mark groaned again, removed his hand and attempted to prise his watery eyelids apart.
‘Wait there!’ she ordered, dashing to the sink and washing her hands vigorously with washing-up liquid and scrubbing under her nails with a little brush.
‘Here, let me see.’
She moved in close and delicately placed a thumb on the smooth skin near Mark’s eye. He flinched.
‘Sorry! Did I hurt you?’
‘Um … no, it’s okay.’
She gently pulled downwards, helping to open his eye. ‘It looks a bit pink. Is it still stinging? Try blinking a few more times.’
‘It’s fading now, thank you, Nurse. How did you know what to do?’
She blushed. ‘You think with a memory like mine that I haven’t done this to myself a million times?’
Mark’s laugh was deep and throaty. He blinked a few more times, opened his good eye, then attempted to do the same with the other, but it stayed stubbornly at half-mast.
Ellie’s partial smile evaporated as she became conscious of the warmth radiating from him. They were practically nose to nose. He was sitting on the stool, one long leg braced against the floor, the other hooked on the bottom rung. She was standing between his legs, only inches from his chest. She knew she should move. Mark was looking back at her through bleary eyes. She picked a spot on the floor between her feet and stared at it.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said, succeeding in inching backwards slightly.
Try not to look at him.
‘You only touched the chilli briefly. It would have been much worse if you’d been chopping them …’
Mark caught her hand as she attempted to shuffle back further. She made the mistake of looking up. A soft, tender look was in his eyes, despite the fact that one eyeball was still pink and watery.
‘Thank you, Ellie.’ The sincerity in his tone was making her feel all quivery.
She managed to shift her gaze to her hand, still covered by his. Static electricity lifted the hairs on her arm.
‘That’s—that’s all right,’ she stammered. Her hand jerked from his as she shook herself loose. She turned and headed for the door. ‘I’ll go and have that shower now, then,’ she added.
Perhaps a cold one.
She started to scuttle off down the passageway.
‘Ellie …?’ he called after her, a laugh underscoring his words.
The urge to keep going was powerful, but she turned and popped her head back through the open door. ‘Yes?’
Mark was grinning at her. She had the sudden sinking feeling she didn’t want to know why.
‘I was going to have a shower, remember? You were cooking.’
Ellie closed her eyes gently and darted a moist tongue over her bottom lip, trying to work out how to salvage the situation. She looked at Mark with her best matter-of-fact expression. ‘Of course.’
For some reason he looked very pleased with himself. He wasn’t going to tease her about this for months to come, was he? What if he guessed it was him who had got her all in a fluster?
Once her cotton wool legs had taken her back to the chopping board she set about peeling the garlic, trying to block Mark’s view of her shaking hands with her body. She heard the scrape of his stool across the floor as he rose from his seat. Every part of her body strained to hear his movements as he left the room. She stripped the skin off a clove of garlic, leaving it vulnerable and naked, and listened to Mark whistling something chirpy as he bounded up the stairs at least two at a time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘MARK!’
His head snapped up. Nicole, his PA, stood with hands on hips, a buff folder clutched in one hand, scowling hard. This wasn’t good news.
‘Huh?’
‘What is wrong with you this morning? That has to be the fifth time I’ve caught you admiring the London skyline while ignoring every word I say. You’re making me feel like my old maths teacher, Mrs McGill.’
Mark stopped staring through the glass wall of his office and turned to face Nicole fully. She was right. He hadn’t been paying attention. But now that he was she still wasn’t making any sense.
‘What?’
‘She was always throwing chalk at Billy Thomas for staring out the window during double algebra. I mean it, Mark! If you make me sound like Mrs McGill I’m going to do something drastic.’
He hunched over his desk and scribbled feverishly away on the pad in front of him. Nicole flopped into the chair on the other side of the desk and massaged her temple with her free hand.
‘What are you doing now? I’m feeling too grotty for your stupid games.’
When he had scrawled a handful of lines, he ripped the sheet off and thrust it in Nicole’s direction. She snatched it from his hand and started to read it out loud.
‘“I will not daydream in Mrs McGill’s class. I will not daydream in—” Very funny!’
He easily dodged her missile as she crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it back at him. He did the puppy-dog thing with his eyes he knew she could never resist.
‘Sorry, Miss.’
‘You’d better be! You were saying something about pushing the record company for a three-sixty-degree contract for the new band’s next deal, and then you just drifted off.’
‘Sorry, Nic. I promise I’m listening now.’
He rested his elbows on the desk and propped his chin on his fists, deliberately focusing on her and only her.
‘And I need to know what you want to do about this video shoot. We’ve only got five days before we leave for the Caribbean, and Kat’s in a state because Razor went AWOL. The director has changed his mind about one of the locations, and the stylist has had a strop and isn’t taking any of my calls.’
Mark did his best to listen as Nicole continued to brief him on the latest string of disasters to hit the upcoming shoot. It had been a nightmare from start to finish. He was starting to wish they’d opted for the other treatment, which had involved lots of time on a soggy moor in Scotland. When they’d set it up he’d been looking forward to going to Antigua. He’d planned on taking a few days off after the shoot—the closest thing to a holiday he was going to get this year.
But now the date was looming close he was starting to wish he could wriggle out of it. He didn’t want to leave Larkford. A week on the other side of the planet would be a week away from Ellie. Coming into London was different. He was away for the day, but in the evening he would be stranded on the M25 in the rush-hour traffic with a smile on his face, knowing he was on the way home.
Home. Ellie had made his house a home. He loved arriving back there and seeing a warm glow in the windows instead of faceless black. He would park his car, walk through the door and find Ellie pottering in the kitchen, cooking up something fabulous.
He had started to fantasise that she was there waiting for him, not because he paid her to, but because she wanted to be.