Dean looked over to her then, as if waiting for some sort of response. Hayley knew what he was thinking. She hadn’t told him any of what happened the night before, but the very fact she hadn’t waxed lyrical, or come out with any hilarious anecdotes told its own story. She should be shaking her head right now. She should be waving her hands and signalling that she wasn’t there.
‘Er…’ Dean made the non-committal noise, his eyes widening as every millisecond ticked by.
‘It won’t take a minute, I promise,’ Oliver said.
Huh, a promise meant little at the moment.And her physical reaction to his voice was betraying the level-headed side of her. Theside of her that wasn’t going to let her guard down for anyone ever again.
‘She’s here. She’s coming down,’ Dean finally spoke.
Hayley sent her eyes out on stalks. Why had he done that? Hadn’t he got the message that she didn’t want to see him? Now Dean had taken the decision out of her hands. Now there was nothing she could do about it. She had to go and see what Oliver wanted. The most annoying thing about all of that was the flutter of something in her stomach that was utterly unwelcome.Desire. She now officially hated herself.
She slipped down from the bar stool. She could do this. She would go down there, let him say whatever he had come to say and be done with it as quickly as she could. Like a doorstep conversation with an election candidate.
‘What’s going on with you two?’ Dean asked her.
She sighed. ‘Let me pass on answering and I won’t ask a thing about whatever is going down at Drummond Global.’
Dean closed his mouth like a drawbridge at a castle under threat of invasion and Hayley headed for the door.
Oliver was going to deliver this message and nothing else. When she walked out this morning, he was adamant he wasn’t going to see her again. Just being here was screwing him up, but he didn’t have a choice. He sighed as he waited. He wasn’t going to look into her eyes or drop his gaze to her lips or admire her defiant jaw which, under these circumstances, would definitely be defiant. He’d hurt her. At a time when she least needed it. She was vulnerable, in an unfamiliar country, looking for her daughter’s father and he had treated her so badly. He pulled in a breath as the cold started to seep through his woollen coat and sink its way into hisbones. He had to carry on treating her badly. It was the only way forward.
The door creaked open and light from the hallway framed her image. It was like someone had put his insides into a blender. He was turning into pulp right there on the step.
‘Hi,’ he greeted when the power of speech had come back to him. He cleared his throat, trying to get back on task.
‘What are you doing here?’
It was the very to-the-point question he’d been expecting after everything that had happened at the hospital. He held out a gift bag.
Hayley shook her head. ‘What’s this? Something from Tiffany’s to buy back my affections?’
He cleared his throat again. ‘It’s the bow tie and waistcoat we bought for Randy.’
He watched her expression change and she took hold of the bag, accepting it.
‘Oh… thank you.’
She looked directly at him then, those eyes meeting his. He hurried on. There wasn’t time to be distracted.
‘So, I just wanted to give you that and also to… to give you this.’ He passed forward the brown envelope he’d had tucked under his arm all the way here. It had felt like a bomb on a timer because, despite his honourable intentions, he was in deep and dire conflict about it. Half of him wanted to tear the papers to shreds and let them never see the light of day. The less selfish side of him, the pieces of the Oliver he aspired to be if he ever got his head straight, was urging him on.
Hayley took the envelope but, instead of looking at it, or tearing at it, she left her eyes on him. It was as if she were trying to see inside him and translate the contents without actually having to look.
Was she going to make him say the words? He blinked, breaking their connection for just a second. They shouldn’t matter so much. He needed to think of it as a business deal. Fulfilling wishes was what he did after all.
‘I found Michel,’ he stated.
Hayley grabbed the railings at the top of the stone steps, immediately snapping her hand back as the frozen metal burnt her fingers.
‘When I say found, I mean… someone I work with,’ Oliver took a breath. ‘Someone I use for difficult situations… I asked him to find Michel and in the envelope are his latest contact details.’ He swallowed. ‘There’s an address, here in New York, and… a number.’
She looked at the envelope in her hands, disbelieving. Was the answer to Angel’s dearest wish really held inside? After months of searching every place she could think of – every directory, every website, every different web provider – it seemed too good to be true. And all this was being delivered to her by the guy who stamped all over her heart only a few hours earlier. She smoothed her hands over the paper. Was this a trick? She jerked her head up then, facing Oliver.
‘Is this for real?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Because I have a little girl up there I made a promise to and if this is just false hope?—’
‘It’s not,’ Oliver said. ‘My source confirmed the location.’
‘Can you please stop speaking “spy”?’
