She might have been young, but there was nothing childlike about her. A woman she was, through and through. I had no doubt of that, not once.
I’d seen a hundred other women technically more beautiful than she was. In my job, I dealt with so many sophisticated socialites who thought they could impress me with slow-batted eyelashes and absent boyfriends or husbands, so many women with short skirts and a willingness to use the length of their legs and the size of their breasts to get what they could out of me. But not one of them made me want them the way I wanted her.
She had a purity about her, somehow, beneath her rugged, tomboy looks. As I watched her, I saw the delicate core of her that she kept hidden.
Bundled into a fluffy robe that had the logo of the hotel she worked at embroidered on the front pocket, with her short hair and her muscled arms, was the only woman who made me forget the rest of the world existed.
I would have crossed the street and broken down the door just to go upstairs and towel her feet dry, and worshipped them forever, if it hadn’t been for Valentin in my ear.
The first time I saw him hit her, I thought I’d let my eyes slip, and my subconscious had made it up, just because he was a boring, tiresome git, and sometimes, late at night, on high alert, my mind made up all kinds of things.
She barely flinched, just carried on like nothing had happened, packed up what she was doing and left the room.
The only reason I didn’t shoot him right then and there, square in the middle of the forehead, was because I questioned whether it had actually happened.
Sometimes she made it easy to miss the blows because she didn’t react at all, and I hated to think how many hours that level of self-control had taken her to achieve.
Three weeks in, I was unhealthily obsessed, and I didn’t care. She was the reason I was still here, even though Sutherland was going to carry on with his predictable routine and give me nothing new and I should have been pushing on with the publisher’s office instead. But I couldn’t leave her alone with him.
As close to the window as I dared, I scanned the darkened street with my binos, waiting impatiently for her to appear, irritated by the sound of the microwave behind me. I hated when she was out of my sight, and that was most of the time when I was trailing Sutherland.
But there she was. Right on time.
The microwave pinged.
I juggled the hot plastic tray my dinner came in down onto the upturned crate I’d been using as a table. Jabbing at the skin of melted cheese with the tiny plastic spork the supermarket called cutlery, I took a seat on the decorators’ step stool, wary of the way it creaked under me and adjusted the angle of the screen of the laptop for a better view.
This place was all plasterboard, plastic sheeting and exposed wiring, stuck somewhere between the first and second fix. Valentin had links with the firm who had the contract on the building. The owners were friends of his, although the paperwork didn’t say so.
It meant I had all the time I needed here, right opposite Pierce Sutherland’s home, and an ability to come and go during the day without arousing suspicion, as long as I banged around enough and played the radio loud. Outside business hours I had to be more stealthy. So candlelight it was.
You couldn’t get much more romantic than that, even though the cuisine was lacking.
I snarled down at the lasagne. The packet said it was the luxury range. I was unconvinced there was a great deal of difference between one dogmeat lasagne and the next. This one came in family size, and it was going to put more of a dent in my appetite than the child-sized portion that was supposed to be a calorie appropriate meal size. Not for a man with my metabolism it bloody well wasn’t.
Across the street, the kitchen light flickered on, and Elizabeth moved into view across the screen. It had taken some gymnastics to get the camera at the right angle to peer into the basement window of the kitchen, and I’d never admit I did it just for this.
It had become a habit to wait for her to get in from her shift at the hotel bar I knew she worked at, and set my dinner out at the same time she had her’s.
First she’d pour a glass of water from the tap and nearly down it, before filling it again right up to the brim. Then she’d take a plate down from the cupboard, and pick up a fork. Sometimes she’d microwave something.