Ah, but he didn’t know how worried I’d been. EvenIhad had no idea how worried I’d been. It was all very well for him to scowl and growl like this. He wasn’t the one left behind to imagine the worst. ‘If I am overreacting, it’s because I was scared out of my wits.’
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to me, pinning me to the spot and stealing my breath with a look that was unsettlingly deep and searching, although marginally less fierce than before. ‘Were you really worried about me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
There it was again. Another probing yet unanswerable question that sent me into a spin of confusion. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, the sudden awkwardness awakening the jitters in my stomach and making me offer up the most superficial of explanations. ‘Because if something had happened to you, what would have become of my money? Of me?’
His expression cleared and his mouth twisted. ‘You’ve survived worse.’
Had I? Probably. Yet the dread that had mangled my guts was something I’d never experienced before and hoped never to experience again.
‘And you’d soon find another financial advisor.’
‘I don’t want another financial advisor,’ I said, recoiling at the thought of it. ‘I want you.’
He gave a bitter laugh, which made no sense when he ought to be flattered that out of everyone on planet finance I’d chosen him, even if he was the best, but we were getting off track.
‘At least you’re back now,’ I said, the panic and anger receding a little and some self-control returning as my racing pulse slowed. ‘And by the looks of things, unharmed.’
‘Sure.’
But as he put his hand on the handrail and turned to head on up, it struck me that something wasn’t quite right. Despite the staircase rising up from the centre of the room, bannisters on both sides, he was using his left hand to hold on. In fact, come to think of it, he’d been using only his left hand since he’d stormed in from outside. And now he had his back to me, I could make out a rip in his shirt at his right shoulder and a darker stain against the wet grey cotton.
‘You’re not unharmed, are you?’ I said with a lurch of my heart and a clench of my stomach.
He stilled on the first step. ‘I’m fine.’
‘What happened?’
‘A loose roof tile. As I predicted. It’s nothing. Just a scratch.’
It wasn’t just a scratch. Not if blood was seeping through his shirt. But whatever it was, an inch or two to the left and it could have been a whole lot worse. ‘You’re incredibly lucky it missed your head.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he muttered. ‘It might have knocked some sense into me.’
‘Let me take a look.’
He turned an inch in my direction, his jaw tight and a deep frown creasing his forehead. ‘I said it’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine,’ I countered. ‘You’re bleeding profusely.’
‘Profusely is exaggerating it somewhat.’
‘How do you know? You can’t see it.’
‘It’ll stop soon enough.’
‘There’s no need to be stoical.’
‘There’s no need to make a fuss.’
A fuss? Afuss? ‘You’re being absurd.’
‘I don’t want you touching me.’
He made it sound like a fate worse than death and I flinched, each word piercing my chest. Whatever he’d claimed just before storming out, he really did find me horrible.