Something was horribly wrong here. Without thinking, she crept towards the door to get a better look.
In an instant she took in the scene. A woman lay on the hospital bed, her long dark hair spread out against the bleached white sheets which matched the colour of her face. Her eyes were closed and she was connected to tubes and monitors all around the bed.
The horrific truth of what she was looking at struck Lexi hard and left her reeling with shock, so that she had to lean against the wall to stay upright.
The nurses wouldn’t have been able to see her father from the main reception area, where a younger man she had never seen before was showing them some paperwork, diverting their attention away from what was happening in this exclusive clinic under their very noses.
When she found the strength to speak her words came out in a horrified shudder. ‘Oh, no. No, Dad. Please, no.’
And he heard her. In an instant he whirled around from where he was crouching and glared at her in disbelief. Just for a moment she saw a flash of shock, regret and contrition drift across his face, before his mouth twisted into a silent grin.
And her blood ran cold.
Mario Collazo had made a name for himself as a celebrity photographer. It wasn’t hard to work out what he was doing with a camera inside the hospital room of some celebrity that he had stalked here.
If that was true … If that was true then her dad hadn’t come to see her at all. He had lied to her warm-hearted mother and tricked his way into the hospital. None of the security officers would have stopped him if he was the relative of a patient.
Ice formed in the pit of her stomach as the hard reality of what she had just seen hit home. Her dad never had any intention of visiting her. The only reason he was here was to invade this poor sick woman’s privacy. Lexi had no idea who she was, or why she was in this hospital, but that was irrelevant. She deserved to be left alone, no matter who she was.
Lexi felt bitter tears burning in the corners of her eyes. She had to get away. Escape. Collect her mother and get out of this place as fast as her legs could take her.
But in an instant that option was wiped away.
She had waited too long.
Because striding towards her was a tall, dark-haired man in a superbly tailored dark grey business suit. Not a doctor. This man was power and authority all wrapped up inside the handsome package of a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped man of about thirty. His head was low, his steps powerful and strident to match the dark, twisted brow. And he was heading straight for the room where her father was hiding.
He didn’t even notice she was there, and she could only watch in horror as he flung open the door to the woman’s room.
Then everything seemed to happen at once.
‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ he demanded, his voice furious with disbelief as he stormed into the room, pushed aside the visitor’s chair and grabbed her father by the shoulder of his jacket.
Her breath froze inside her lungs, and Lexi pressed her back farther against the wall.
‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ His voice was shrill and full of menace, but loud enough to alert the receptionist at the desk to look up and lift the telephone. ‘And how did you get a camera in here? I’ll take that, you parasite.’
The camera came flying out of the door and crashed against the wall next to Lexi with such force that it smashed the lens. To Lexi’s horror she saw the young man at reception reach into his pocket and pull out a digital camera and start to take photographs of what was happening inside the room from the safety of the corridor. Suddenly the stillness of the hushed hospital was filled with shouting, yelling, crashing furniture and medical equipment, flower vases smashing to the floor, nurses running and other patients coming out of their rooms to see what the noise was all about.
Shock and fear overwhelmed her. Her legs simply refused to move.
She was frozen. Immobile. Because, as if it was a horrible train wreck, she simply could not take her eyes away from that hospital room.
The door had swung half closed, but she could see her father struggling with the man in the suit. They were fighting, pushing and shoving each other against the glass window of the room. And her heart broke for the poor woman who was lying so still on the bed, oblivious to the fight that had erupted around her.
The door swung open and her father staggered backwards into the corridor, his left arm raised to protect himself. Lexi covered her mouth with both hands as the handsome stranger stretched back his right arm and punched her father in the face, knocking him sprawling onto the floor just in front of her feet.
The stranger lunged again, pulling her father off the ground by his jacket and starting to shake him so vigorously that Lexi felt sick. She screamed out loud. ‘Stop it—please! That’s my dad!’
Her father was hurled back to the ground with a thud. She dropped to the floor on her knees and put her hand on her father’s heaving chest as he pushed himself up on one elbow and rubbed his jaw. Only then did she look up into the face of the attacker. And what she saw there made Lexi recoil in horror and shock.
The handsome face was twisted into a mask of rage and anger so distorted that it was barely recognisable.
‘Your dad? So that’s how it is. He used his own daughter as an accomplice. Nice.’
He stepped back, shaking his head and trying to straighten his jacket as security guards swarmed around him and nurses ran into the patient’s room.
‘Congratulations,’ he added, ‘you got what you came for.’
The penetrating gaze emanating from eyes of the darkest blue like a stormy sea bored deep into her own, as though they were trying to penetrate her skull. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ he added, twisting his lips into a snarl of disgust and contempt before looking away, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her and her father for a second longer.
‘I didn’t know!’ she called. ‘I didn’t know anything about this. Please believe me.’
He almost turned, but instead shrugged his shoulders and returned to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him and leaving her kneeling on the cold hospital floor, nauseous with shock, fear and wretched humiliation.
Five Months Later
GOATS!
Lexi Sloane pushed her designer sandal hard onto the brake pedal as a pair of long-eared brown and white nanny goats tottered out in front of the car as she drove around a bend, and bleated at her in disgust.
‘Hey, give me a chance, girls. I’m new around here,’ Lexi sang out into the silent countryside, snorting inelegantly as the goats totally ignored her and sauntered off into the long grass under the olive trees on the other side of the road.
‘Which girls? Lexi? I thought you were working.’ Her mother laughed into her earpiece in such a clear voice that it was hard to imagine that she was calling from the basement of an historic London theatre hundreds of miles away. ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve changed your mind and taken off with your pals on holiday to Spain after all.’
‘Oh, please—don’t remind me! Nope. The agency made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and I am definitely on Paxos,’ Lexi replied into the headset, stretching her head forward like a turtle to scan the sunlit road for more stray wildlife. ‘You know how it goes. I am the official go-to girl when it comes to ghostwriting biographies. And it’s always at the last minute. I will say one thing—’ she grinned ‘—I stepped off the hydrofoil from Corfu an hour ago and those goats are the first