She stared down at the ringing phone in her hand, a perplexed frown between her brows, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
That was his cue to get the hell out of the room. He walked back out onto the terrace, and pulled the sliding door firmly shut behind him. Letting her take her goddamn phone call in privacy.
Since her affairs were no longer any of his fucking business.
Chapter
10
It took a ridiculously long time to find the right effing button to push, since Nell could barely see, her eyes were so blurred with tears.
She finally got it, and held the phone to her ear. “Yes?”
“Nell? Finally! It’s Nancy. Sorry I’m calling so early, but I couldn’t stand to wait. I hope I’m not interrupting anything, you know, delicious?”
“No,” Nell forced out, after a pained little pause. “You’re not.”
Nancy was silent for a moment. “Um…is everything okay?”
“Fine.” Nell forced false brightness into her tone. “So what’s up?”
“I just got off the phone with Elsie.”
Elsie was Lucia’s sweet, kind, nosy next-door neighbor since decades before any of the sisters had come to live there. Nell was surprised to hear her name spoken. “But I thought Elsie went down to the Jersey Shore to live with her daughter after the burglaries!”
“She did. She just spent a full half hour telling me the horrors of sharing a bathroom with her teenage granddaughters. Alison brought her home last night. Elsie had the key Lucia had given her years ago, so this morning she decided to go over and check the place out for us.”
Nell sucked in a breath. “Yikes. Did you ask her to do that?”
“Hell no! I told her not to do it again. Could be dangerous. But you know how she is. Anyhow, she found a letter under the mail slot, from Elisabetta Barbieri, in Castiglione Sant’Angelo. Elsie opened it—”
“Good God,” Nell muttered.
“I know, but I wasn’t inclined to criticize, and besides, it didn’t matter because it’s in Italian, and Elsie’s Polish. So she called me.”
“I’ll go up there right away and get it,” Nell said.
Nancy made a suspicious sound. “With Duncan, right?”
Nell squirmed, pressing against the ache in her middle. “We’ll see,” she hedged.
“You be careful,” Nancy scolded. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied. She closed the call, trying to sound cheerful, and stared through the glass doors at him, leaning over the railing.
He’d asked her to marry him. She’d said no. She was nuts.
Could she risk it? She knew he had feelings for her. He just couldn’t admit them or articulate them. Could she accept a cool, practical “partnership”? With protection and money and lots of hot, excellent sex? Just hoping that someday he’d finally recognize his feelings for her as love?
No. She wasn’t made that way. Maybe she would always be alone. Maybe she was unrealistic. Or just plain dumb. Letting her one chance at true love and passion go by. For the sake of stupid semantics.
But she wanted her man to love her. With an open heart. That was not too goddamn much to ask.
She opened the door, and stepped out onto the terrace. A gust of wind blew the terry cloth bathrobe open over her legs. She yanked it closed. She was nude underneath. Nudity that had abruptly become inappropriate. In fact, it had become an agony of embarrassment.
“I, um, have to go,” she quavered to his rigid, muscular back.
“Why am I not surprised,” he said, without turning.
She told him the story of Elsie and the letter. Duncan stared out at the city. “I’ll take you up there,” he said, his voice stony.
“No,” she whispered.
“No?” He turned, and the fury in his eyes knocked her backward, like a punch. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Nothing has changed. You’ve still got criminals prowling the city waiting for your guard to go down. Am I supposed to cut you loose? Let you get wasted?”
She shook her head, helplessly. “It’s not your responsibility anymore, Duncan,” she said. “It never really was.”
“What a crock of high-minded horseshit,” he snarled. “I get the message, Nell. You can’t stand to be with me—”
“That’s not it!”
“—so fine, I’ll arrange for a car service and a professional armed escort to accompany you. When you get back with your letter, you’ll check into a suite at the Hilton. Twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage. No more Sunset Grill shifts. Just your university work.”
Her mouth dangled, and her head shook helplessly back and forth. “Duncan. But…but that’s insane.”
“I’ll finance it until you’ve written your fucking thesis and gotten your precious Ph.D. At which point, we’ll reassess the situation.”
“But I—”
“Consider my position, Nell. Cold and detached as you think I am, I don’t want you to die. Even if you’re blowing me off, even if I’m not fucking you, I don’t want you to get hurt. If you got hurt, or dead, that would suck. Is that clear? Are we on the same page here?”
She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, and nodded.
“Good. Then stop arguing. I am sick of it. And I no longer need to bother trying not to piss you off. What a fucking load off my mind.”
Cold. Hah. He was anything but cold, standing there like some sort of raging, thunderous pagan god in the chill morning air, the towering cityscape as his backdrop. His face was rigid with fury.
He made a sharp gesture for her to precede him inside. “I’ll make the calls. Come on, let’s get this thing moving,” he said. “This shit is killing me. Go get dressed and packed. Fast.”
She scrambled to do so and dragged her suitcase out of his room into the living room. She overheard snippets of Duncan’s conversation with someone named Braxton as he arranged for the bodyguard. He turned, frowning. “What’s the address of this neighbor?”
“Twenty-one thirty-one Fairham Lane, in Hempton,” she said.
He repeated the address to Braxton. “Put this one on my personal account, not the corporate account,” he said into the phone.
His personal account? She’d be in debt to this guy for the rest of time. Well, hell. In essence, she already was. For her life.
Duncan escorted Nell down to the parking garage, where the car service was waiting, and bundled her into the vehicle. He lectured the bodyguard, a burly guy with long arms and a low, bulging forehead, about the mortal danger Nell was in for about fifteen minutes before he let the guy get into the car, still rolling his eyes. Fucking jerk-off.
He watched the car pull out of the garage, turn, and disappear.
It felt wrong. He wanted to run after the car, screaming and waving his arms. Something had been wrenched out of him. It left a bleeding hole.
He stumbled upstairs like a zombie, dropped onto the couch.
The sun got higher. His landline phone rang. His mother, for sure. Calling to give him hell about Ellie. The machine got it. His mother talked for five minutes onto the machine, her voice shrill. Not a word of it sank in. The square of sun on the floorboards inched along.
His cell rang. He checked the display. Bruce, wondering what the hell was going on. Nell had stood him up. He tossed the thing back down onto the couch, still ringing. Later for Bruce.
The only reason he didn’t turn it off altogether was because Nell was out there in the world without him. With just some jerk-off clown bodyguard to protect her. That phone was his last and only link.
Some time later, the phone rang again. This time it was Braxton. He pushed “talk.” “What happened?” he barked. “Is she okay?”
Braxton was taken aback. “Ah, yes. As far as I know,” he said carefully. “I haven’t heard from Wesley, so I assume things are fine.”