I pause in my dishwashing, my eyes filling with tears once more. I’m such an idiot. What did I think? That I’d tell him I’d fallen in love and he’d leap into the air and exclaim, Me too, darling! Nicholas Rothsmore wasn’t the ‘fall in love’ type—he showed me that again and again. All the love was coming from me, and it just proved what a fool I am.
‘Bins are overflowing, Amy!’ one of the w
ait staff calls to another.
‘I’ll do it.’ I shuck the rubber gloves off and walk away from the sink, keeping my head dipped so no one speaks to me. I have to get it together. I have no interest in causing people to speculate on what’s going on in my life.
I grab one of the bags out of the bin and tie it, carrying it carefully through the kitchen and banging out of the doors and onto the street. It’s Christmas Day and it’s deserted out here. Everyone’s at home with their families, enjoying this perfect snowy Christmas.
I open the lid on the bin and drop the bag in it, then lift my head when I hear the closing of a car door.
And everything comes into a strange kind of focus, too bright, shaky, weirdly discordant. As though I’m looking through those old-fashioned 3D movie glasses.
Striding towards me dressed in jeans and a leather jacket is Nicholas Rothsmore, and damn if my heart doesn’t rejoice even as I know I have to protect myself somehow.
Confusion sears me. Did he stay in New York? Is he here till New Year’s, just as he said? Is this some Hail Mary, ‘one last night’ kind of booty call?
Nicholas Rothsmore is the love of my life but I swore I’d never see him again. So what the hell is he doing here now?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘HI.’
He has this incredibly sexy, raspy quality to his voice, like a radio commentator or something. It makes my blood pound even as my stomach is dropping to my feet.
I find it hard to meet his eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’
My throat is so dry. I swallow but it barely helps.
It’s some consolation that he looks uncertain. Nervous? Apprehensive?
My stomach loops some more.
‘I came to see you.’
I turn back to the building. Things are slowing down in there. I don’t have to rush back—I’m superfluous now, here because I have nowhere else to be, no one else I want to spend this day with.
‘What for?’ The words are soft, showing my hurt, and I hate that. I hate how much he’s hurt me. I hate that I let him.
He moves closer and I startle a little, wariness at war with a deep-seated physical need. I shoot him what I hope passes for a warning glare.
His expression shifts.
‘What do you want, Nicholas?’
A muscle jerks low at the base of his jaw. ‘I have spent the last ten hours working out what the hell I would say to you and now I find I have no fucking idea where to start.’
‘Tell me why you’re here, on Christmas Day,’ I demand, looking inside again.
‘I came to see you,’ he says, as if it’s simple.
‘Yeah, but why?’
‘That’s harder to explain.’
I grab hold of my anger, glad to feel it, glad to have some line of defence against the desire and wants that are ruining me from the inside out.
‘Forget about it.’ I spin away from him. ‘It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have come.’