“I just wanted to let you know I’m going downstairs to check out Benjamin’s office and see if he’s got anything in there we can use to communicate with the outside world.”
“Can’t you do it later? You need to sleep.” Oh,whycould she not stop caring for him?
“I’ll sleep soon. It’s on my mind, so…”
Imagining the shrug he was making, her face crumpled into a tortured smile. How very Niccolo. When something came into his mind, he had to do it immediately. Not for him hanging around and waiting for the grass to grow beneath his feet. It was one of the many things she, the woman who’d spent her life happy to follow Callie’s lead on everything, had loved so much about him, even when she hadn’t known it was love. His impulsive energy had been inspiring to her, and oh, how easily and quickly everything was coming back. All the feelings. All the emotions. All the pain of the aftermath she’d tried so hard to bury.
Somehow she managed to keep her voice even and stop it betraying all that she was feeling. “Shall I come with you?”
“No. I won’t be long. I just didn’t want you to be frightened of intruders if you heard me moving around downstairs.”
How could someone who’d treated her so cruelly be so thoughtful? “Thank you. Just…” Her voice close to choking with emotion, she swallowed. “I don’t know how strong those stitches are, so take it easy, okay?”
“I promise.”
The carpeted landing muffled his footsteps as he walked away from her door. It took a long time before she was capable of pulling herself together and pulling away from it, too.
After drawing the curtains on the rising sun, she slipped into the small ensuite and was glad to find spare toothbrushes and a fresh tube of toothpaste in the medicine cabinet, and gratefully scrubbed away the taste of fear she’d been carrying in her mouth the whole day and night.
Close to feeling dead with exhaustion, she staggered back into the bedroom and finally removed Niccolo’s leather jacket, then horrified herself by rubbing her cheek into its softness and giving in to the urge to inhale the trace of his cologne embedded in it.
Bad enough that all the old feelings had come roaring back without making everything worse by feeding it.
Placing the jacket on the armchair, she opened the wardrobe in the hope of finding clean clothes. A row of shirts hung neatly in it. Plucking a dark blue one off the rail, she removed her jeans and released her breasts from the tight confines of her bra – she really needed to buy some bigger ones – and donned the shirt. She could tell by the roominess around her breasts and how it fell to mid-thigh that Benjamin was shorter and stockier than Niccolo. Niccolo’s shirts had always caressed her breasts and fallen to her knees.
She’d adored wearing his shirts. Adored the sensation that she was wearinghim.
Oh God, she didn’t want to remember that. Didn’t want to remember how good it had been between them. How crazy in love she’d been for him.
There was another tap on her door. “It’s me,” he called. She could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “I’m all done, and now I’m going to get some sleep.”
She couldn’t open her throat to reply.
She needed sleep, too. It felt like she’d lived a whole life in one day and night, and she knew that come the morning… afternoon… she would live another when she told Niccolo about the baby and dealt with whatever fallout came from it.
She needed sleep, so she was in a good enough mental state to cope with it all.
Niccolo stood naked before the bedroom’s full-length mirror and examined himself closely with eyes gritty from exhaustion.
One last job needed to be done before he could switch his brain off.
The only useful device he’d found in Benjamin’s office was a desktop computer. He’d already locked himself out of it by failing to guess the password. He would try again later.
One other item, although not pertinent to making contact with Dante, had caught his eye, and it was this that he’d brought up to the bedroom. It was an old digital camera with a memory card in it. He had a vague memory of Benjamin bringing it along on a skiing trip years ago, when they’d still been at university. This was in the days before phones were capable of taking decent photos.
Working carefully, Niccolo removed the bandage Georgia had so carefully placed over his stitched wound and began taking photos of it. He should probably wait until he’d slept, but he wanted the images while the wounds were fresh and vivid.
When he was satisfied he had enough of his stitched wound from enough angles, he took photos of his bitten bottom lip. Anyone looking at it would think the swelling had come from a punch. He then moved on to the lump on his head, which provedthe trickiest to get on camera, but he succeeded, parting his hair and snapping one particularly good shot of the egg-sized lump encrusted in blood. He’d got his face reflected in the mirror too, so there could be no doubting it was him.
By the time he’d finished, he was sweating with the pain that came from pulling at his stitched wound when lifting his right arm. He should have got Georgia to take the photos, but then he’d have to explain what he was taking them for, and as his plan was only half-formulated, it was best to wait until it was solid in his mind. Besides, she would be asleep. He hoped she was asleep. Hoped her sleep was dreamless.
It was a hope he knew wasn’t worth a damn.
Reapplying the bandage to his stitched wound, he practically fell onto the bed.
He needed sleep. Wounds needed sleep to heal. That was something he’d learned at a young age at the hands of his father. The wounds that is, not the healing. Sadists didn’t heal anything.
As badly as he needed to sleep, though, every time he closed his eyes, all he could see was Georgia. That expression in her eyes when they’d said goodnight…
