The Morning After the Night Before: Love & Lust in the city that never sleeps! (21 page)

‘I'm unlikely to be back,' he said. Flat. Dead. Uninterested.

Her knees wobbled dangerously, the shock and latent lactic acid from her sprint doing their job together. ‘What?'

‘I had to go home eventually. My father's heart attack has just brought that forward.'

‘You're never coming back? At all?' she whispered. And then something else occurred to her. ‘Were you going to let me know?'

Or was it just one of the many things he'd decided not to tell her?

‘I called you.'

As he spoke realisation flooded into his eyes and they flared wide for a moment. ‘When you hear it you can disregard the whole message.' Intensity blazed. ‘All of it.'

‘So…that's it? We're done?'

‘Disappointed, Izzy?'

She pushed out words between the sharp ache. That he'd even have to ask. ‘Yes. Of course.'

Disappointed. Confused. Lost.

Absolutely bloody heart sore.

Here she'd been all primed to work through their communication issues.

‘All that effort wasted.'

‘What are you talking about? What effort?'

‘I have to give you points for your approach. Turning up at my door with champagne. Half an hour later you had your thighs around my ears.'

‘Harry!' She glanced at the open doorway,
desperate, mortified. The man in the hall stared at some point on a far wall and pretended not to have heard.

‘Truth's ugly from that angle, huh?' He stalked to the far side of the room.

Oh, my God…

‘I came here because I thought you'd be devastated about your father. I thought you'd need my support. What is wrong with you?'

He spun back. ‘You thought your ship was coming in early, you mean, and you didn't want to miss it.'

Oh, God…the Broadmore billions. Was that what this was about?

‘I'm not interested in your money, Harry.'

‘I know how this goes, Izzy,' he thundered. ‘I've watched this all my life. Beautiful woman uses sex to get what she wants. Well, you can blame my father's dodgy heart and lifetime of excess for cutting you off at the knees. If not for that, who knows what might have happened?'

His face grew even more thunderous and his hands worked furiously in his pocket. At something in there.

‘Full credit to you, Izzy. You've done a bang-up job of making yourself feel like part of the
furniture in that time. Like you belonged here in my life. You almost had me fooled.'

A discreet throat-clear at the ajar door. ‘We need to get going, Mr Broadmore.'

The use of Harry's real name threw her. Especially from another tenant.

Harry reached for his bag. ‘I have to go.'

‘You'd rather take a lift with a stranger than with me?'

Was he that angry?

‘He's my personal guard. He's arranged the jet to get me home.'

An aching numbness surged through her veins. Bodyguards. Private jets. Uber suspicion. Was that the world he really came from? It was more than alien.

It was awful.

She slid her hand over his as it reached for the door. ‘You could do that? Just wipe off everything we've had?'

It took him a moment, but he finally turned his face half back to her. ‘What have we had, Izzy?'

‘Something special. Something unique.'

But as she said the words she realised how ridiculously naïve they sounded. Harry was just an overgrown rich kid killing a few years in London
working for Daddy's firm and slumming it with a local. Having some good times. He'd made her no promises, he'd given her virtually nothing of himself, he'd even warned her—multiple times—that all they really had going between them was sizzling chemistry.

Chemistry that, even now, zinged like electricity between them.

‘It's not special or unique, Izzy—'

Of course, she heard
‘you're not special'
and
‘you're not unique'.

‘—it's what I grew up with. And I promised myself I'd never let it happen to me.'

His parents, with their corporate merger of a marriage that was so acrimonious even the internet knew all about it. The model against which Harry must measure all relationships.

Words rushed up her trachea and over her lips. The only thing she could possibly say. An utterly useless thing.

‘I love you, Harry.'

Of all the ways she'd thought about confessing it—draped on a petal-strewn bed, standing atop the Eiffel Tower, rugged up by a fire in some cottage in Scotland—standing here dying, moments before never seeing him again, was not one of them.

Part of her wished she were strong enough to stay silent.

He froze with his back to her, halfway to picking up the second suitcase. His voice was thick and measured. ‘Just let it go, Iz. You gave it a shot. Retire gracefully.'

‘Please don't leave things like this,' she begged.

He reanimated, picked up his bag and turned. ‘I have a jet waiting.'

‘It's real!' She grabbed his arm. ‘I swear.'

He shrugged her off. When he lifted his eyes, his expression—his voice—was devoid of… pretty much everything. ‘
This
is the first real moment you and I have had together—no secrets, no lies between us—and it's hardly going well, is it?'

He walked through his front door and left it gaping, handing his bag to the dark-suited man standing there. Every bit the CEO in training. The same lift that she'd arrived in opened for him immediately.

Panic twisted through her.

If Harry got on that plane feeling as he did she would never hear from him again. He'd find too many reasons to wipe her from his consciousness. Too many excuses to let it happen.

If anyone knew how easy it was to write off someone you loved it was her.

So, while it galled her to beg, some things were more important than pride.

She started forward. ‘Please, Harry—'

He flicked the merest glance to his security, who neatly blocked her with one strong arm across the lift entrance.

‘Pull the door shut behind you when you go,' Harry said, bleak and cold. And then, because he couldn't help himself, he added, ‘Don't steal anything.'

And then the doors slid shut.

Izzy stumbled back against the foyer wall and collapsed against its solid strength.

What the hell had just happened?

How could he be so angry at her when he'd been the one lying for weeks? Months! She'd been in possession of his secret for less than an hour.

Why didn't she call him on all the secrecy earlier? Or at all. Maybe the only truthful thing he'd said to her was that he wasn't looking for a relationship. But she'd been wilfully blind to it because she'd finally found somewhere she
fitted.

In Harry Mitchell's arms.

She sacrificed her T-shirt to her tear-streamed face, sliding down the wall into a ball on the plush carpet.

She would never feel this carpet under her bare feet again. She'd never see Harry's particular view or lie on his big, comfortable bed again. She'd never feel his arms around her or his hot, bare chest against her skin, or sit with him in a bad movie and laugh at his lame sense of humour.

She would never taste him, or feel him inside her, or hear his sexy voice.

And she'd never get to ask him
why
he felt the need to lie to the world. To her.

Through the shambles of conflicting thoughts, one phrase cut through.

His voice…

Her tears eased a fraction.

She reached behind her and pulled her mobile from her pocket. It might as well have weighed a tonne for all the strength her fingers had. It took only a second to pick up her voicemail.

‘Iz. It's me…I've been called back to Australia effective immediately. Family emergency.'
She tried not to respond to the strained anxiety in his voice.
‘I don't know when I'll be back. My flight
leaves at four. Call me if you get this message in time.'

That was it.

Not, ‘My father's had a heart attack, Iz.'

No, ‘I'm going to be lost without you, Iz.'

Absent of, ‘I'll miss you, Iz.'

She played the message again. And then again. Nothing about the simple message changed. But on the last play it automatically began the second message in her queue.

‘God, sorry…'
Just listening to his accent it hurt.
‘My head's all over the place. I wanted to see you, but I have to get back for the girls. They're beside themselves. Mum's pretty useless in a crisis and they…'
His sigh was deep and mournful.
‘They need their brother.

‘I'll come back to you as soon as I can. There's something I need to tell you. And something I have for you. Keep me in your thoughts, Izzy. I love you, Quickdraw. I'll miss you.'

Beep.

Something deep in her chest swelled to overflowing. Until it ached. His words were so simple, yet so heartfelt. So rich with frustration and grief and hope and loss. And with love.

Harry Mitchell loved her.

An hour ago, anyway.

The thing spreading in her chest curled back into a tight fist.

When you hear it you can disregard the whole message…

All of it.

The flare of panic as he remembered his message, then the dead nothing in his eyes as he'd said those awful words… What did he mean by ‘all of it'? The intimate, affectionate tone? The concern for her feelings?

The love part?

What had changed? She'd come to him. She'd
run
to him. Despite all her misgivings about his motives, she went where he needed her. By his side.

She played the message again.

It didn't hurt any less.

But pain was at least better than the big, empty, lonely void she feared she'd be left with where Harry had just vacated.

She lifted the phone again but this time she pressed different keys. Doing something she should have had the courage for much, much sooner.

Her eyes stung as it rang and then they fluttered shut as it answered.

‘Mum?' she whispered. ‘I need you…'

Even the
best room in the best Australian hospital was too pedestrian for Weston Broadmore. The moment his father was released from Intensive Care, he relocated, bringing an entourage of nurses and specialists and a swathe of security personnel home with him. The whole upstairs wing now looked like a military operation.

His father was doing okay, but the media were salivating over the story like starved dogs: finance baron irreparably broken, young heir steps out of the shadows to take up the reins. Not that anyone had said that aloud, but the whole world knew that seventy-nine-year-old Weston Broadmore might have survived but wasn't going to be running his company, personally, any longer.

‘You look pretty miserable for someone who just inherited a billion-dollar empire.' The soft voice came from behind him in the hallway. He turned into the warm brush of lips on his cheek.

‘Carla.' His oldest sister. His favourite.

His role model. The woman who'd overcome a misogynist's ignorance—and his disbelief—to work her way up to a high-ranking job in her father's company.

‘This is not how I imagined it all happening,' he murmured, staring into the makeshift triage, where people in blue scrubs buzzed quietly around his father like bees around a queen.

She squeezed his shoulder. ‘Your ascension to the throne? How did you imagine it?'

‘I was older.' Much older. With a wife and kids. Tall, willowy kids. ‘And everyone was much more warm and fuzzy about it all.'

‘Warm and fuzzy?' Carla's snort brought one of the nurses' critical gazes around to where they were standing. ‘You did grow up in this family, right?'

‘This family is not just about one man any more than this company is. There's plenty of potential for warm and fuzzy in our branch of the family tree.'

Him. His sisters. No shortage of love and loyalty
there, even if they'd never really been encouraged to be huggy about it.

‘I think you forget who fathered us. And mothered.'

No. It took a special kind of hardness to tie yourself to a man like Weston Broadmore for life. Harry knew how trapped he'd felt his whole life by the weighty expectations on him as heir. And he'd been watching his mother closely since he got back. Looking for signs of relief. Ambition. But only finding pinches of anxiety around her eyes. For her husband or for her future?

‘Lord only knows the kind of strength it takes to live in a loveless marriage where your every move is scrutinised.'

Even if you'd engineered it yourself.

Carla stared. ‘What did you
do
in London? You've come back quite changed.'

‘I watched. And I absorbed. Learned.'

‘From who, the Dalai Lama?'

Immediately his mind betrayed him and went straight to Izzy. His gut squeezed.