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That was lucky, because cost was one thing she really couldn’t do any more of right now.
‘It isn’t just that,’ Lara said, pressing a hand to her forehead and trying to think rationally. Already there was a musty smell drifting from the soaked wood floor and bubbling wallpaper. ‘It stinks in here—it’ll permeate my stock. I’m hardly going to dominate the market with seductive lingerie that smells like a damp garden shed, am I? Not exactly alluring and sensuous, is it? And even if I could leave it here, there’ll be workmen traipsing through. I can’t risk any further damage. My back’s against the wall with the shop opening next week. And I can’t stay here anyway if there’s no running water.’
She could hear the upset nasal tone in her own voice and bit down hard on her lip to suppress it. She didn’t do emotional outbursts. That kind of thing elicited sympathy and she was far too self-reliant to want or need any of that. But she’d given her everything to this shop project and now it felt as if all her hard work had hit standstill in the space of ten minutes.
Poppy, who clearly didn’t know or care about the not-liking-sympathy thing, joined her on the sofa, put an arm around her shoulders and gave her an encouraging smile and a squeeze.
‘Come and stay with us for a few days, then, until it’s sorted out,’ she said. ‘The boxroom’s free—you’d be welcome to it. It’s pretty titchy, but at least it’s dry. And even better …’ she waited until Lara looked at her and threw her hands up triumphantly ‘… I have running water! Cheer up, it’ll all seem better when your hair doesn’t look like a ferret’s nest.’
Lara felt her lip twitch.
Poppy’s grin was warm and friendly. But still the shake of the head came automatically to her, like a tic or an ingrained stock reaction. Lara Connor didn’t take help or charity. She’d got where she was relying only on herself.
‘I couldn’t possibly impose on you like that,’ she said. ‘I’ll be perfectly fine. I’ll figure something out myself.’
Figuring something out herself had featured in a big way on her path in life. Taking offers of help didn’t come easily to Lara. Relying on other people was a sure-fire route to finding yourself let down.
‘You’ve got a headful of shampoo and no running water,’ Poppy pointed out.
Lara touched her hair lightly with one hand. It was beginning to itch now, and seemed to be drying to a hideous crispy cotton-wool kind of texture. She hesitated. Her back really was against the wall over the shop. She groped for some kind of alternative solution that she could handle on her own but none presented itself. Even if she had enough room at the pop-up shop to store all her extra stock, she couldn’t exactly move in and live there, could she? There was one tiny back room with a toilet, no furniture, no space, no chance.
‘Stop being ridiculous,’ Poppy said in a case-closed tone of voice. ‘It really is not such a big deal. It makes perfect sense. I’ve got a spare room and you’re stuck for a day or two. Where’s the problem?’
‘I don’t like to impose,’ Lara evaded.
Poppy made a dismissive chuffing noise.
‘If you were imposing, I wouldn’t ask you,’ she said. ‘Come on, it’ll be a laugh. Things have been a bit quiet since Izzy moved in with Harry—it’ll be nice to have someone else around for a bit.’ She stood up. ‘You can get straight in the shower and rinse that shampoo out, and then you can ring your landlord and sort out a plumber.’ She made for the door as if the subject was closed.
Poppy made it all sound so straightforward. But then of course she had a proper family background, supportive childhood and, let’s not forget, her big brother on the premises. She had no need to let coping with a crisis be complicated by things like pride and self-reliance and managing by yourself.
‘Just a couple of days, though,’ Lara qualified, finally giving in and following her. ‘Just until the water’s sorted out, and I’ll pay rent, of course.’
With what exactly, she wasn’t sure. But she would find a way. She always did. Being indebted to someone really wasn’t her.
‘It’s only small, I know …’ Poppy said apologetically.
‘It’s absolutely perfect,’ Lara said, wondering vaguely how she could possibly fit all her stock in here. The room was tiny, the only furnishings a small dresser and lamp and the narrowest single bed Lara had ever seen. But in terms of living space, it was a gift. She supposed it might seem small to Poppy and her friends. Lara had heard them talk about boarding school and their families; spacious living was clearly the norm. Lara had had many bedrooms over the years. The dispensable bedroom was part of the package when you were working your way through the care system. She’d lived with a succession of foster families over the years and a room of your own still felt like something to be prized. And after the flood debacle, it really was. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said. ‘All I need to do now is source some storage for the rest of my stock. Until the shop gets going I’ve got a bit of a stockpile. I’ll have a look and see if there’s somewhere locally that I can keep it cheaply.’
Poppy flapped a hand at her.
‘There’s no need for that. You don’t want to be putting those gorgeous clothes in some hideous manky lockup. You can keep them in Alex’s room—there’s tons of space in there.’ She led the way along the hall and opened the door on what was possibly the neatest room Lara had ever seen. The bed was made with symmetrical coin-bouncing perfection, the top sheet neatly folded back in a perfect white stripe across the top of the quilt. She narrowed her eyes as she took in the radiator, the ends of which were visible either side of the headboard. Goodness knew what acrobatics he’d been performing in this room to make the hideous racket she’d had to put up with.
After the cosy bohemian colour of the rest of the flat, the room was practically austere. Poppy moved to one side so Lara could see properly. Open shelving ran the length of the opposite wall, filled with perfectly folded rectangles of knitwear and T-shirts. Gleamingly polished shoes were lined up neatly in pairs along the lowest shelf. A shelf was devoted to books, their spines lined up in order of height. Not an item was out of place, not a speck of dust marred the clear floor space. A dark oak wardrobe stood at the side of the window. Lara imagined his shirts and jackets would be hung in colour co-ordinated perfection if she were to look inside.
‘Wow,’ she breathed.
‘I know,’ Poppy said, completely unfazed. ‘He’s a million times more tidy and organised than I am. That’s what comes of being packed off to boarding school at the age of five and then later going into the military. He’s the most organised, methodical person I know.’
A pang of sympathy twisted in Lara’s chest at the thought of Alex as a five-year-old fending for himself when he had a family of his own back at home. She’d been forced into that situation by necessity; there simply hadn’t been an alternative for her mother. She couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to send their child away when they didn’t have to, and they probably paid a fortune for the privilege too.
‘He does all his own washing and ironing,’ Poppy was saying. ‘He just needs a bit of, well, female influence in his life.’
Lara looked at her with raised eyebrows. Female influence? Poppy grinned at her.
‘Maybe not that kind of female influence. I’m not sure he’s short of that.’
He certainly wasn’t, judging by the frequency of his overnight guests.
‘He needs someone a bit more long-term in my opinion. He’s spent far too long with only blokes for company. Who knows? Perhaps a roomful of lingerie might put him in touch with his feminine side a bit more.’
‘Are you sure he won’t mind having the clothes rails in here?’ Lara said doubtfully. ‘I mean, it’s so tidy. I’ve got quite a lot of loose stuff too.’
Poppy shrugged.
‘I’m doing him a favour here, letting him stay. It’s my flat, after all.’ She tossed her hair back. ‘Do you want a hand moving in?’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_91a0cfeb-3f7d-5c0e-9f7c-a2a01f3d49f1)
HEADING TOWARDS MIDNIGHT, and the landing and stairs were customarily dark as Alex propelled his latest evening companion towards the top flat—Name: Susie; Age: Twenty-six; Occupation: Medical Secretary; Favourite Drink: Strawberry Daiquiri … whatever the hell that was. He’d need to ask Isaac—although he’d bought a few this evening.
He opened the front door and ushered Susie down the dimly lit hallway to his bedroom. The rest of the flat was quiet. Poppy could sleep for England and Isaac was still out of the country. This last week after his encounter with the quiet freak downstairs, Alex had found himself grudgingly attempting to keep the noise down and so he skipped his usual stop-off in the kitchen for a nightcap. Not that it had anything to do with any personal regard for Lara Connor, of course, although he had to admit to a nod of admiration for her business drive. It was more a desire to keep her off his back and live an easy life. And after the embarrassment of sleeping the day away in her flat, he’d done his best to avoid bumping into her again. To that end, he’d also shifted his bed away from the wall a little. Apparently it had worked, since he hadn’t heard a word from her since.
As he opened his bedroom door it was the scent that hit him first. It assaulted him even before he flipped the light switch and it put him immediately on edge. Sweet floral notes that took him right back to the rose garden at his family home in the country. The memory wasn’t a particularly welcome one. Then again there were precious few childhood memories that were. Susie hung on to his arm and stifled a tipsy giggle, which trailed away as light flooded the room.
‘This is your room?’ Her voice registered shocked disgust, and the fun tone was completely gone, as if he’d lobbed a jug of cold water over her for perfect instant sobriety. She let go of his arm. ‘Oh, my God, you live with someone,’ she wailed. ‘I knew it was too good to be true. Where is she—out somewhere? Working?’
The perfect order by which he’d lived his life since he was just a small kid at boarding school, reinforced first by the cadets and then by the army, had been completely in evidence when he’d left the flat some six hours ago for his usual Friday night out. A place for everything and everything squarely in its place. In his absence the room had been inexplicably turned into what looked like a bordello. Clothes racks full of silk and satin nightwear stood alongside the wall; the floor space to one side of the room was stacked with baskets of frilly knickers and lacy bras; there was an overflowing box full of bars of ladies’ French soap from which the cloying girly smell was emanating and, most unbelievably, there was a padded clothes hanger over the door of his wardrobe on which hung a long and flowing peacock-blue silk dressing-gown thing trimmed with matching marabou feathers. He felt as if he’d stumbled into some insane dream world.
He suddenly remembered Susie standing next to him and shook his head lightly as if to clear it.
‘I’m not with anyone,’ he said. ‘I’m single.’
Her tone now shifted to sickened.
‘You mean this stuff is yours? I should have listened to my friends, all those warnings about one-night stands and weirdos. Where’s my phone?’ She opened her handbag and began to paw through it. ‘What are you, some kind of cross-dresser?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, exasperated. ‘For Pete’s sake, do I look like I might enjoy wearing women’s clothing?’
‘They never do,’ she said, pulling out her phone and scrolling through it. ‘I’ve watched enough reality TV to know that the ones to watch out for are the masculine types. And they never choose the kind of clothes that blend in either, oh, no. It’s always a bloody prom dress.’ She pointed an emphatic finger at him. ‘Or a silk negligee.’
The situation was careering way out of control. He held up placating hands.
‘There’s obviously been some kind of a mix-up,’ he said.
‘Too right there has.’ She turned away from him. ‘Taxi, please,’ she snapped into the phone. ‘I’ll be waiting outside Ignite, Lancaster Road, Notting Hill.’
‘It’s probably something to do with my sister,’ he called after her as she marched back down the hallway to the front door.
‘Yeah, yeah. I bet that’s what they all say!’ she yelled back over her shoulder.
He heard her high-heeled shoes clattering down the stairs as she made a swift exit. He turned back to his room, took in the clutter of girly clothing and breathed in the head-reeling scent of roses.
He’d had enough trouble sleeping when the room was the epitome of calm and orderliness. How the hell was he meant to manage now?
Lara woke to the muffled banging of knuckles on a door and floundered for a moment to get her bearings in the dark. She felt vaguely closed in.
It came slowly back to her overtired brain.
Flooded studio. Damaged stock. Poppy’s boxroom.
The knocking continued and she wondered vaguely if it was the front door. Sex-god Alex must have locked himself out again. There was a hint of self-righteous satisfaction in that thought, especially after what she’d learned this afternoon from the emergency plumber who’d investigated the root cause of her flooded flat. A ten-minute conversation had made it clear the flood problem went a lot deeper than a need for a new washer. The old fire station might have had a modern makeover when it was converted to flats but it turned out the glossy living space papered over some serious cracks in the original pipe network. It all made perfect sense now. The pipes servicing her flat were clearly linked to those above and below, hence the insane racket from Alex’s bedroom activities travelling down so effectively to her bedroom underneath.
In fact, according to the plumber, the pipework showed signs of recent stress—clearly this was what had caused the plumbing to give up the ghost. So not only was her lack of sleep down to Poppy’s sex-crazed brother, but now the flooding of her flat could be attributed to him too. He was fast becoming her least favourite person and therefore any initial guilt she might have felt about imposing on him by using his bedroom to store her stuff had been very easily suppressed.
The brief temptation to just let him knock all night was trumped by the desire to tell him exactly what she thought of his nocturnal activities, the damage of which had now surpassed simple noise pollution. She threw the covers back and grabbed her robe from the back of the door.
Turned out the knocking was coming from inside the flat. She’d been right about one thing though: it was Alex again.
‘Is no disruption too inconsiderate for you?’ she snapped. He jumped and turned to look at her. She had a mad sense of déjà vu at the sight of him with upraised knuckles hammering on Poppy’s bedroom door. Except that this time he was fully dressed. The dark blue shirt made his eyes look almost slate in the dim hallway light and her stomach gave an unexpected flip.
The ability to speak momentarily disappeared because it felt as if his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Lara’s soft blond hair lay in messy bed-head waves over her shoulders. She wore a pink silk dressing gown, with wide sleeves, that ended a good couple of inches above her knees. His eyes dipped to her legs before he could stop them. The slight sheen of the silk against her skin seemed to give it a porcelain quality and the pink colour of the gown picked out the soft fullness of her mouth. He floundered for speech as the unexplained transformation of his bedroom made sudden sense. Was she somehow staying here? Why the hell would she be doing that when she had her own perfectly good bedroom down one flight of stairs?
The door clicked open behind him and Poppy finally staggered out, yawning and squinting at the light.
‘What the hell’s all the noise about? I’m on duty in a few hours.’
He took his eyes off Lara, not without some difficulty, and rounded on his sister. She looked at him with one half-lidded eye.
‘My bedroom looks like a tart’s boudoir,’ he snapped. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘For Pete’s sake, it’s just a few pairs of knickers,’ she protested, an incredulous tone to her voice as if his room didn’t look like some vintage cathouse. ‘There’s been a flood in Lara’s flat so I’ve invited her to stay in the boxroom. She needed to store some of her stock for a bit and since there’s masses of spare space in your bedroom, I couldn’t see the problem. Can’t this wait until the morning?’
‘No, it can’t,’ he snapped back. ‘Have you seen it in there? You didn’t even ask me. It’s an invasion of my privacy and I’m not going to stand for it.’
He’d always known Poppy’s patience was not at its best when she was tired and he braced himself for a sibling argument of monumental proportions.
She drew herself up to her full height.
‘Don’t, then. Find yourself another flat if you don’t like it. Or you could go back home.’
A low blow, and he could tell by the way she shifted her eyes away from him that she knew it. The subject of their inheritance from their grandparents hung between them as strongly as if it had been a visible sack of cash in the corner of the hallway. After getting access to it at the age of twenty-one, Poppy had put hers away, stashed it sensibly for the future, and now she had this flat to show for it. Living for the moment, he’d frittered his away on swanky nights out with Isaac while at university and later while on leave from the army. Expensive holidays were the order of the day. When he had time to himself, he made that time count. One particular ill-judged week in Las Vegas with the lads had reduced the pot considerably. He hadn’t given it a thought at the time, hadn’t needed to, because he’d had a career. Now that career was cut short he found he didn’t have the funds any longer for a house deposit, and he needed what was left to start over. Without Poppy’s offer of a place to stay he really would be reduced to returning to the family home and the thought filled him with distaste. If it was a choice between that and living in a room full of knickers, he’d just have to put up.
Poppy cast exasperated hands up at the ceiling when he didn’t respond.
‘I can’t do this. I am not discussing your sleeping arrangements at one in the morning when I’ve got to be at work in a few hours. The underwear stays. You either put up with it or you move out.’ She turned away and stopped any further argument by shutting her bedroom door on him. He stared at the panelled wood, feeling Lara’s eyes on his back.
‘She loves me really,’ he said.
‘I’ll be out of your hair as soon as the plumbing’s fixed in my flat,’ Lara said, and instead of what should surely be an apologetic tone he picked up an undeniable pointed edge to her voice.
‘Plumbing?’
She leaned against the hallway wall and crossed her arms. His mind insisted on noticing how the silk of the gown lovingly clung to her perfect curves. By act of sheer will, he kept his eyes on her face.
‘Yes, plumbing,’ she said. ‘Turns out your energetic nocturnal activities have put the pipe network under too much strain.’
He stared at her.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Half the plumbing in this place is years old—it dates back way before the flat conversion. They might have built things to last back then, but no one reckoned on your bed being shoved up against it. The pipe running down from your bedroom radiator finally gave up the ghost today. It dislodged and because my flat’s directly below it caused a flood. I’ve got no running water down there and damaged stock, and if it wasn’t for Poppy I haven’t a clue what I’d do.’
‘I moved the bed away from the radiator,’ he protested.
‘Too little too late,’ she said, and as she spoke he noticed the dark smudges beneath the indignant eyes. A twist of guilt spiked in his stomach because he’d seen how completely immersed she was in her damned pop-up-shop project. In terms of actually living a productive life right now, he’d just slipped into negative territory. Living a quiet life and not hacking anyone off surely wasn’t meant to be this hard. The feeling of uselessness and lack of direction that he’d been shoving away pretty much since he’d returned to London made a sudden gut-churning comeback.
She looked on as he passed a hand tiredly over his forehead. She could feel the climb down as he spread his hands.
‘Look, I’m sorry about the flood. You’re sure it was down to me?’
An apology? And a marginally more genuine one this time since he really didn’t have anything to gain from it. He wasn’t shut out on the landing half naked now, was he? In acknowledgement she curbed her angry tone a little.
‘According to the emergency plumber, the problem originated in the area of pipework attached to your radiator, so that would be a yes.’
He made a move towards the kitchen and she followed him and watched from the doorway as he filled the kettle.
‘Hot drink?’ he said, eyebrows raised.
She shook her head and he took a single mug from the drainer.
‘Any idea on timescale?’ he said. ‘How long do I have to live in a frou-frou bordello?’
‘Do you mind? My stuff is classy, not tarty,’ she snapped.
He sighed. ‘Of course it is.’
‘The plumber did that thing where they suck in their breath and shake their head pityingly,’ she said. ‘I’m guessing at least a few days. Plus you have to factor in the weekend. He’s made it safe but he’s not going to actually do much else until Monday.’
He thrust an enormous heaped spoonful of instant coffee into the mug and topped it up with hot water.
‘You’re really going to drink that now?’ she said, eyeing it. ‘You’ll be buzzing.’
He glanced at her. She could see the dark circles beneath his eyes even from here. Why would anyone who looked that tired want a caffeine boost?
‘Yup.’
He turned around to face her, leaning back against the worktop. Her heart rate upped its pace a notch at the intense look in the grey eyes. The last time she’d been this close to him he’d been asleep, his face relaxed. Now he looked drawn and tense. He looked as if he needed a good night’s sleep.
