Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
“Thea! Thea, if you’re in there I advise you to open this damned door!” Fergus warned after pounding his knuckles loudly on the wooden door to her hotel suite for several minutes and receiving no answer. “I mean it, Thea!”
To say he was furious would be to seriously understate the level of anger coursing through him both now and when he had turned around after ending his call with Angel to find Thea had disappeared.
Her disappearance was so sudden that at first, he’d wondered if her stalker had somehow taken her. But then good sense had kicked in and told him that the Champs-élysées was far too crowded for anyone to have kidnapped a reluctant female off the street in broad daylight without someone noticing and raising an alarm.
Which meant that Thea had deliberately chosen to leave.
Which was when Fergus had become angry. He had become angrier still the more he thought about the situation.
Thea had invaded his space and disturbed his peace of mind for the past two days. Even more so once he had confronted her and he had learned exactly who she was.
His attraction to Thea—to her beauty and the delectable curve of her bottom—was just as unwelcome.
What the hell right did she have to just up and disappear? Especially when nothing had been settled in regard to the reason she had said she came here in the first place, namely her stalker problem?
Fergus had initially tried to reason himself out of the anger. After all, he had been the one to take a phone call in the middle of their conversation.
But the call had been personal and important to him. Angel was important to him.
His current level of anger made him suspect Thea might become even more important to him.
Might?
He was a forty-two-year-old man, and this instant attraction and fierce physical response to a woman, any woman, was unprecedented.
In the same way his brother Magnus’s attraction to Sapphie had been, Fergus wondered?
And the same way his cousin Rufus’s attraction to Molly had also been?
Instant attractions and inexplicable emotional reactions, which had resulted in Magnus and Rufus now being married to the women responsible.
Fergus’s attraction to Thea aside, he had also begun to accept that her stalker was real and she really did need help. If not his, then someone else’s.
At which point, Fergus’s anger had deepened because he had realized he didn’t want anyone else to help her. That he wanted to be the one to protect Thea.
Which was when he was forced to accept that his attraction to Thea was far stronger than he had previously been willing to admit. Or wanted.
It was fucked-up, bloody illogical, after the way her mother had lied and tried to trick him all those years ago. But Fergus couldn’t get Thea’s shadowed golden eyes out of his head. Or the worried frown that marred the smoothness of her otherwise unblemished brow.
He had no doubt both those things were caused by the fact that she really did have a stalker.
Someone was deliberately messing with her, frightening her, with the result that she was afraid to trust anyone already in her life for fear they might have been paid or coerced into being involved in this deliberate emotional torment. Damn it, that distrust ran so deep Thea had felt she had no choice but to come to Paris to ask for his help. A man she had already known, considering their history, might just laugh in her face.
Fergus had treated her with disbelief and a certain amount of lingering suspicion at first. Not because he disliked Thea—how could he when he didn’t even know her?—but because of her mother’s devious actions in the past.
None of which Thea had been responsible for then, nor should she be held accountable for them now.
Fergus knew he, like everyone else in her life, from what she had told him, had let Thea down. Worse, he had taken a phone call in the middle of their conversation, proving how unimportant she and what she was telling him were to him.
Fergus had rung his office and asked his assistant to cancel his appointments for the rest of the day before coming to the hotel where Thea had told him she was staying.
After a brief and flirtatious conversation with one of the hotel receptionists, Fergus was able, by the stealth of listening and watching when she rang Thea to tell her she had a visitor waiting in reception, to know exactly on which floor Thea’s suite was situated. The call had gone unanswered, which had troubled Fergus even further as he wondered where else Thea might have gone after leaving him in the Champs-élysées.
The fact that she wasn’t responding to his knocking troubled him even more. “Thea, I am going to count to three, and if you haven’t opened the door by then, I’m going to—” He broke off when he heard the lock on the other side of the door disengage before it was opened a couple of inches.
Golden eyes peered at him around that slight opening. “Yes, what are you going to do?” Thea prompted dully.
Fergus knew immediately that something was wrong. That this wasn’t the same determined and fiery young woman he had met earlier.
He was even more convinced of that when he became aware she was swaying slightly on her feet and her fingers were tightly gripping the edge of the door.
Fergus didn’t waste any more time asking questions but instead took charge of the situation by pushing the door open further. He immediately grasped one of Thea’s arms when she swayed even more now that she no longer had the door to lean on. That was his primary reason, but it also allowed him to step into the suite before closing and locking the door behind him.
His quick and assessing glance around the sitting room was instinctive. It also yielded nothing that he could class as a threat.
As far as he could tell, Thea was alone.
His gaze returned to her. Her face wasn’t just pale; there was a gray tinge to her skin, and her expression was pained. Although Fergus couldn’t see anything that might?—
“Is that blood?” He reached up with the hand that wasn’t holding on to her to dip his fingertips into the trail of red running down the side of her neck. The viscous stickiness of the liquid told him that it was definitely blood. “Did you hit your head?” He turned her gently to see a sizable lump and cut behind her left ear. The latter was obviously responsible for the bloody trail down her neck. “What the hell happened here?” he demanded as he turned her back to face him.
* * *
What happened ?
Thea had no idea. One minute, she had been standing in the doorway of the bedroom of her suite and heard a noise behind her, followed by a sharp and reverberating pain, and the next thing she knew, she had woken up lying on the floor.
It had taken her several long seconds of lying there to regain her equilibrium enough to be able to gather her wits and remember that sequence of events.
A glance at her wristwatch had told her she had probably only been unconscious for a few minutes. But the throbbing at the side of her skull and the blood that stained her fingers after she had touched the area where it hurt the most told her that someone must have hit her on the side of the head.
That whoever they were had to have still been in her suite when she came back into it, possibly hiding behind the door?
That thought alone had been enough to make her cringe at the realization that something so much worse could have happened to her than just being knocked out.
The weapon used to hit her was lying on the floor beside her. It was an Art Deco brass ornament of a woman, and it usually sat on the side table just inside the main door of the suite. There was even a speck of blood on the woman’s hand, evidence that was what had cut into Thea’s skin.
She’d managed to sit up but had still been struggling to get back on her feet when Fergus started banging on the door leading into the hotel corridor. It had taken her a few seconds to steady herself and walk over to answer that loud knocking. Long enough she could tell by the rising anger in Fergus’s accompanying voice that his frustration with her was deepening.
One glance at his furious expression, once she had opened the door a couple of inches, and she’d known her assessment had been correct.
“Explanations can wait,” Fergus dismissed. “We need to deal with your injury first. Then you can tell me what happened.”
“What are you doing?” Thea demanded as he swung her up into his arms and carried her through to the bathroom before sitting her gently on top of the marble vanity unit.
“I’m going to clean the wound.” Fergus proceeded to do exactly that after he had dampened a face cloth with cold water. “The cut doesn’t need stitches, but I still think you need to see a doctor. I can call down to reception or get my own doctor to come here and examine you?—”
“No!” Thea cut in forcefully. “I don’t want or need a doctor, yours or any other.”
Thea didn’t want to make a fuss. She never had. Probably as a result of her mother’s anger ten years ago, once Thea was recovered enough from her emergency appendectomy to withstand being berated for having ruined all of her mother’s plans for a future with Fergus Wynter.
“I’m fine,” Thea insisted as she slowly eased down from the vanity unit onto the marble floor. She forced herself to keep her balance, not willing to show any sign of weakness. Although she had a feeling the pallor of her cheeks might give her away.
Fergus’s scowl said it did. “You could have a concussion.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” she repeated fiercely before turning back into the bedroom.
What she needed to see, to know , was if she had just been imagining things earlier.
“What are you doing?” Fergus scowled darkly as he followed her through to the bedroom.
The familiar pillow—or maybe just the pillowcase put onto a pillow here? Not that it mattered which it was—that had been stolen from her apartment in London was still exactly where she had last seen it: sitting in the middle of the king-sized bed in her hotel suite in Paris.
She knew she hadn’t brought it with her, and it definitely hadn’t been there before she went out earlier.
“Steady,” Fergus soothed when Thea reached out to grip the door frame to once again stop herself from swaying. “What is it?” He glanced around the room.
Thea knew he would see nothing unusual. That the room was tidy, as she had noted earlier, and the bed was made. There were very few personal items to disturb that tidiness, an e-reader on the bedside table and her reading glasses, because Thea had brought very little with her for this four-day stay.
No, the only thing out of place was the pillow in the center of the bed, and she doubted Fergus would see anything unusual about that?—
“What’s this?” He stepped forward to stand at the bottom of the bed before reaching down for the pillow.
“Don’t touch it!” Thea ignored the increased pounding in her head as she rushed to grab the pillow and hug it against her chest.
“Is that the pillow you told me had been stolen?” he prompted gently.
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you accusing me of lying?”
“No—”
“This pillow wasn’t here when I left my suite this morning,” she told him defensively. “No matter what you might think to the contrary.”
“I don’t?—”
“Yes, you do,” she accused fiercely. “You were skeptical earlier when I told you the pillow had been stolen from my apartment in London. Now, because it’s in my hotel suite in Paris, you must think I was lying about the whole thing.”
* * *
Did he?
Fergus wasn’t sure what he believed anymore.
He did know, after one look at the pillowcase, obviously designed for a child—he thought it might be a Disney princess?—on the pillow sitting incongruously in the middle of the king-size bed in a suite in this prestigious Paris hotel, that it didn’t belong there.
“I was so distracted by finding it here when I came back earlier,” Thea continued, “that it allowed someone to come up behind me and hit me on the back of the head. Someone who had somehow managed to get into my suite and was still here when I returned. The door was ajar when I got back. But I just thought it was the maid cleaning the rooms.” She frowned.
“But it clearly wasn’t.”
She shivered. “No. I entered the suite and called out for the maid. When she didn’t answer, I realized something was wrong.”
“Did you see who struck you?”
“As I said, they hit me from behind, so no.”
Fergus’s thoughts raced in rapid-fire succession, the conclusion to all of them very clear. “It would seem your stalker has followed you to Paris after all.”
“Does that mean you believe me now, about the stalker and the stolen pillow?”
“I never said I didn’t believe you.”
“You didn’t need to. It’s okay,” she sighed. “What choice did you have? I am my mother’s daughter, after all.”
And the sooner Fergus dismissed that association, the better. Because he now had no doubts that someone was stalking Thea, and that they had attacked her a short time ago.
“Would I be right in thinking this pillow, the pillowcase, at least, has some sort of emotional connection to your deceased father?” The childish design indicated that might be the case.
“You’re good at your job, aren’t you,” Thea admired.
“Very good.” False modesty was out of place here.
She nodded, tears glistened in those beautiful golden eyes. “Dad took me to see the film the year it came out. I was eight, and I begged to have the themed duvet and pillowcase as a Christmas present. My mother said they were too expensive, that the money could be better spent on a night out for the two of them. But my dad—he bought them for me anyway.”
Fergus could too easily imagine the selfish Jessica denying her daughter such a trivial gift if it meant spending money she would rather spend on something she could enjoy.
“It was the last Christmas we had together before he—before my dad died,” Thea revealed. “The duvet cover was lost somewhere along the way, with all the moves we made after that,” she related flatly.
* * *
Fergus could too easily imagine how that much-loved duvet cover had become “lost.” Jessica really had been a complete bitch, even to her own daughter.
“I managed to hold on to the pillowcase.” Thea’s arms tightened possessively about the pillow as the tears began to fall unchecked down her cheeks, a defiant challenge in her eyes as if she were daring Fergus to doubt her again.
And that, right there, was proof enough to Fergus that everything Thea had told him, about the break-in at her apartment and theft of the pillow, having a stalker, and Lev Yegorov’s unwanted marriage proposal, was true.
Fergus was immediately suffused with feelings of self-disgust for having ever doubted her. Thea wasn’t a liar and a manipulator like her mother had been. Thinking she was stopped right here and now.
Quite how this acceptance, and the fact that she needed his help, was going to equate with the increasing attraction he now admitted to feeling toward her—and the lustful thoughts of that tantalizing arse that now tormented him!—was his problem to deal with, not hers.
“But maybe I’m just sticking to that story because you caught me out by coming here and seeing the pillow for yourself?” The defiance was still there on Thea’s face and in those challenging golden eyes.
Fergus felt that accusation like a blow to his chest. “Did you hit yourself on the side of the head too? Not an easy thing to do, by the way,” he assured. “And then arrange for me to arrive at your hotel suite so that I could be a witness to it all, when you had no reason to think you would ever see me again after you snuck away in the middle of our conversation?” He quirked a challenging brow of his own.
“I didn’t sneak… You were talking to—to your girlfriend.” Her gaze avoided meeting his. “I didn’t want to intrude, and I believed our conversation to be over.”
“My girlfriend?” Fergus repeated softly.
“My Angel!” she scorned.
Fergus frowned at her accusing tone. Why on earth?—
No, it wasn’t an accusation exactly. It sounded more like… Could it be jealousy?
Did that mean Thea was as attracted to him as Fergus now acknowledged he was to her?
A mutual attraction was a complication Fergus hadn’t anticipated.
Not that it made any difference to what happened next. He had made the decision to help Thea, and that was exactly what he was going to do.
Should he tell Thea who Angel really was, or should he leave her with the misconception he was already involved with someone?
No, that wasn’t the question he should be asking.
The real question was whether or not he was going to be able to keep his hands off Thea in the days, possibly weeks, to come.
The first time he failed to do so, she was going to think he was a two-timing bastard who was cheating on his girlfriend.
One look at Thea’s silky reddish-brown hair, her pale but beautiful face, and slender but perfectly curved body, and Fergus doubted he was going to be able to resist her for much longer.
Especially if, as he now intended to do, he spent more time with her when they traveled back to England together.