His for the Taking (2 page)

Suddenly, fiercely, Zoe wanted her great-aunt Xenia back. And Xenia was gone for ever.

She twisted the doorknob under his hand and pushed the door open. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Have a look.’

He dropped her hand and went past her into the apartment.

‘Manners,’ Zoe murmured, watching him rush past her. But she couldn’t take much offence; the guy was in a hurry and she was the last person on his mind. He’d even left his enormous backpack in the hallway. And if there was somebody skulking in here, she could use some backup.

Hold on. Backup? Three minutes ago she’d thought this guy was a psycho killer and now she was thinking of him as backup?

Zoe shrugged. Stranger things had happened to her today already, and at least this was a good distraction from why she was really at the apartment. She followed him inside, closing the door behind her.

He was halfway down the entrance hall already, giving her the opportunity to observe that he was also good-looking from behind: broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. A great butt. His brown hair curled slightly on the back of his neck. When she got to the living room she leaned against the doorway and watched him looking around.

It was a big room, with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough furniture and screens to make it not immediately obvious that there wasn’t anybody else in it except for the two of them. The man scoped it out with quick efficiency, looking swiftly in the reading nook behind the Chinese silk screen, behind the tall armchairs and into the corners and even, briefly, behind the heavy velvet drapes.

Zoe saw with amusement that for all his searching he didn’t seem to notice the collection of thumbscrews on the wall or the chain-saw in the glass case on a sideboard.

‘Does your father usually lurk behind drapes?’

He didn’t even spare a glance for her; instead he opened the door to the library. Zoe wandered across and watched him examine this room, too, and the study beyond it. She followed him back into the corridor, waited as he searched the big tiled kitchen, and then trailed after him as he headed towards the bedrooms.

‘If you tell me what your dad looks like I’ll help you,’ she said.

‘About six feet tall,’ he said, not glancing at her as he opened a closet door and then closed it again. ‘Brown hair, brown eyes, forty-eight years old.’

‘You mean he looks like you, except older.’ Zoe pretended to consider. ‘And he’s fond of hiding in closets, apparently.’

Nicholas turned, walked towards her, stopped, crossed his arms on his impressive chest, and looked at her. He started at the top of her head and took her in, head to toe, with a flash of his dark eyes. She noticed he didn’t exactly linger on her body or her face.

The attraction was one-way, then. What a surprise.

‘I don’t have your father hidden underneath my clothing,’ she said.

He didn’t acknowledge the crack. ‘I’m trying to figure out how far I trust you.’

‘Hey,
you’re
the one who was hanging outside in the corridor looking suspicious.’

‘You’re the one who has a chain saw in your living room.’

He had noticed, then. ‘Well, a girl has to protect herself.’ She smiled at him, though he didn’t smile back. ‘When was the last time you saw your father?’

‘Sixteen years ago.’

‘And what makes you think he’s in this apartment?’

‘Because this is his last known address.’

That made her blink, though it probably shouldn’t. Her great-aunt Xenia must’ve had plenty of guests in her apartment. And some of them were bound to be male guests. Just because Xenia had never married didn’t mean she didn’t like male company, and if Nicholas’s father was as attractive as Nicholas was, Zoe couldn’t blame her great-aunt for letting him move in for a while.

‘Is he your lover?’ Nicholas Giroux asked.

That really did make her blink. ‘What? Your
father?
No.’

Nicholas searched her face more closely. ‘You’re not his daughter, are you? Are we related?’

Zoe laughed. As if she and this god could possibly be related. ‘My father is Michael Drake and he lives in Fairfield, New Jersey. I wouldn’t mind losing him sometimes.’

‘What’s your connection to my father?’

‘I don’t have any. I told you I don’t know him.’

‘No, you didn’t. You said you didn’t know where he was.’

She thought back. He was right. ‘Well, I don’t know him, either.’

Nicholas shook his head, and even though she’d just met him, she could recognise exasperation. He turned his back on her and opened the door to the first bedroom.

This was Xenia’s guest bedroom, the one that Zoe usually used when she stayed over, and Nicholas’s conviction that he would find his father was so strong that Zoe almost expected to see an older version of Nicholas stretched out on the bed reading
Sports Illustrated.

But the bed was made, the room empty.

He only had to glance into the second bedroom, which was full of junk and boxes and a small cot, and then he was twisting the knob of the third bedroom, Xenia’s bedroom, which had been Zoe’s destination in the first place.

‘If you haven’t seen your father in sixteen years, how do you know this was his last known address?’ she asked, quickly, to distract him from opening the door. She didn’t want to go into that bedroom; she didn’t want to do what she’d come here to do. It would make the truth too real and too permanent.

Nicholas reached inside his coat. He was wearing a weatherproof jacket, as a hiker would wear. It went with his all-weather trousers and his waterproof boots. Nice that he had a style theme going, anyway: rugged outdoorsman, not a common look in New York City. Of course, the man would look delectable in a plastic sack.

He pulled out a crumpled, cream-coloured envelope, and Zoe recognised it right away. She’d received letters in envelopes like that, written on matching stationery, embossed with this address, on every birthday since she could read. Even though they were standing right in the middle of Xenia’s apartment, the envelope was an almost shockingly intimate reminder of her great-aunt.

‘Xenia knew him,’ she said, almost to herself.

Nicholas had been extending the envelope to her, but he stopped mid-air. ‘Xenia? Who’s Xenia?’

‘My great-aunt. She owns this apartment.’

Owned.

‘
You
don’t own this apartment?’

Zoe spread her hands out on either side of herself, indicating her big leather jacket, her worn-in running shoes, and her frankly gross skirt—all of them the only black clothes she happened to own that weren’t skin-tight spandex.

‘Do I look like I own this apartment?’

He raised his eyebrows and twisted the side of his mouth in an acknowledgement that was, even though she’d asked for it, a little too readily given for her ego. Yeah, she looked like a tasteless girl from the Bronx dumped in a classy Manhattan apartment. He didn’t have to rub it in.

‘Why did you say you owned this apartment?’

‘I didn’t,’ she said, glad that this time she remembered the conversation better than he did. ‘I had a key for it and you assumed it was mine.’

‘Why do you have a key for it?’

Ah, now that was the question.

‘Xenia died three days ago,’ she said. ‘I was coming here to get clothes for her to be dressed in for her funeral. I got the call out of the blue this morning from the funeral director to say that she’d appointed me to arrange things for her.’

‘Oh.’ Right away, and seemingly without any conscious decision, his expression softened, from challenging to gentle. ‘I’m sorry.’

Zoe got the sudden urge to step forward, press her face against the fabric of his jacket, and ask him to wrap those strong arms around her and give her a hug.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a hug. Or wanted one.

God, she must really be attracted to this guy if she was thinking of pathetic excuses to touch him.

She shrugged. ‘Not your fault. At least it’s been amusing to watch a total stranger ransacking my great-aunt’s apartment.’

Nicholas inclined his head to the last unopened door. ‘Is this her bedroom?’ His voice was gentle as his expression.

Tall, dark, handsome, angry, and kind. Zoe plastered a grin onto her face and crossed her arms over her chest, where her heart was beating with a new crazy, stupid longing of its own.

‘You think your dad’s in there?’

‘Only one way to find out,’ the perfect stranger said, and he opened the bedroom door.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE BED WAS
vast, satin-covered, and empty. The rest of the bedroom, expensively furnished in cream and mahogany, silk-wallpapered, tasselled and mirrored, was equally empty. Zoe was relieved to see that it looked exactly the same as the last time she’d seen it. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting: a sign on the bed saying ‘Sorry, I’m Dead’?

No. She’d been expecting emptiness. But there wasn’t any emptiness in this apartment; every single inch of it breathed with Xenia, even though Xenia was gone.

Maybe it took some time for an apartment to understand its owner was dead. When that owner was somebody like Xenia, full of life and adventure, it probably took even longer.

She noticed that Nicholas was standing beside her. He hadn’t made any move to go into the bedroom.

‘Don’t you want to search the closet?’ she asked him.

He stayed where he was, gazing into the room. ‘Why does your great-aunt have a bear trap in her bedroom?’

The trap was on a table at the foot of her bed, in a glass case like the one that held the chain-saw in the living room. Its shiny, well-oiled jaws gaped open, as they had for years.

‘Like I said, a girl needs to protect herself somehow.’ She moved into the room, and when he didn’t follow she looked back at him. His dark eyes were settled on her, and she felt a hot flush underneath her ugly clothes. If he made a move to touch her, there was no way she’d ever set the bear trap on him.

But he wasn’t flirtatious, and what she saw was curiosity, not desire. She gave up the snarky answers and shrugged. ‘Xenia’s had it for a while. I don’t know where it came from.’

He nodded and this time did come into the room. She noticed once again how he walked with an easy athleticism, a natural economy of movement. A guy like that would have stamina and patience, both in bed and out of it. Pity it wouldn’t be with her.

‘You said you needed to get some clothes for her?’

Zoe dragged her attention away from pointless speculation about what this guy would be like as a lover and focused herself on the task at hand. The sooner she got it over with, the sooner she wouldn’t have to dread it. She marched herself over to her great-aunt’s walk-in closet. Before she opened the door, she couldn’t resist looking at Nicholas over her shoulder.

‘I don’t care if he’s your father, if he leaps out of this closet I’m going to knee him in the crotch.’

Nicholas said something under his breath; it sounded like, ‘Be my guest.’ He had something against his dad, all right. Zoe opened the closet door.

She saw nothing but row after row of shoes and designer outfits. She stepped back from the door so that he could see in, too. ‘Sorry, Nick, no luck, unless he’s disguised as an evening gown.’

Nicholas nodded. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

Once again, his concern surprised her. This guy didn’t know her from Eve and, from the sound of it, he had enough problems of his own. Surely he couldn’t tell how her stomach was twisting with dread at the idea of having to go through her great-aunt’s clothes and find exactly the outfit Xenia had specified in her funeral plan.

‘Yeah, I’m great,’ she said. ‘Just disappointed I didn’t get to work on my crotch-kicking skills.’

‘I’m not going to offer to help you out there.’

‘Pity.’ She gave him a smile that should cover up any hint of what she was feeling—the dread, and most especially the fact that she was touched by his concern. ‘Well, your dad’s not around, so feel free to split if that’s what you plan on doing.’

‘I’m fine here,’ he said. He leaned comfortably against one of the high mahogany bedposts, as if he lounged around in outdoor gear in fancy bedrooms every day of his life.

‘I’ll be done in a minute. You can wait in the living room if you want, or in the kitchen. You might as well go ahead and make yourself some coffee, you look like you need some.’
Xenia won’t mind,
she was about to add, but then she caught herself.

‘I’ll stay here. You probably could use some company. It can’t be easy going through her clothes.’

She didn’t want to stare at him, but she did, because she didn’t want this stranger’s kindness but at the same time it felt amazingly, scarily good.

He gave her his gentle half smile.

Zoe shook herself. ‘Whatever.’ She turned her back on him and went into the closet.

The clothes smelled of Xenia’s spicy, exotic perfume. Zoe breathed in and kept the air inside her lungs for as long as she could.

‘Please bury me in my black Gaultier sequinned gown,’ Xenia had written in her funeral plan, ‘with the silver fox collar cloak and the black Vuitton shoes.’ Zoe flipped through endless hangers, wondering how she was going to know the right gown when she saw it. Her great-aunt had millions of the damn things, and Zoe wouldn’t know a Gaultier if the designer came up and slapped her in the face with a frock.

But she did remember this green jacket; it was what Xenia had been wearing the last time Zoe had seen her. She pushed it aside, firmed her lips into a thin line, and kept looking. She ignored the prickling in her eyes.

‘So do you always let strange men into your apartment?’

She snapped her head up to see that Nick had come to the closet and was leaning against the doorpost. He had obviously perfected the art form of looking gorgeous while he was minding other people’s business.

‘I told you, it’s not my apartment.’

‘It’s still a stupid thing to do. I could have been anybody.’

‘You want me to practise my crotch-kicking skills after all?’

He held up his big hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Just pointing out some safety tips.’