Chapter 13
You don’t understand anything
Rafe
“What the hell?” I muttered as I looked up at the grimy block of flats beside me.
I was loath to cut the engine. In fact, I was loath to stop here at all.
This place was a complete dump. Dodgy area aside, the glass in the front door of the building was smashed.
What on earth was Clara doing living here?
Was Molton Prep really paying its teaching assistants this poorly?
I looked over at Clara and sighed. She’d fallen asleep just a few seconds into the car journey.
As she drifted off, she curled into a small ball with her arms around her legs and her head resting against the leather of the seat.
Her glasses were askew now, her long eyelashes leaving shadows over her cheekbones.
She looked completely at peace, and it was so at odds with her normal expression that it made me realise how much tension she carried in her facial features when she was awake.
In sleep, all that drained away, so much so, it was hard to believe the woman next to me was the same person.
Like this, she was breathtakingly beautiful, and I had the mad urge to keep the engine running all night just to watch her.
But that would be a bit creepy. I was Rafe Sterling, a highly respected barrister, voted most sexy lawyer in London the last two years in a row and I was not bloody well creepy. So I forced myself to cut the engine.
Her eyelids fluttered and then those big brown eyes opened. When she first saw me, before the fear could set in, she blinked a couple of times, and then she smiled. Not one of her small, tense, fake smiles but a real, genuinely pleased one, and, God help me, I smiled right back at her.
As our eyes held, the most bizarre sensation swept over me. A kind of deep acknowledgement passed between us. A recognition. I felt a sense of huge relief, as if I’d found something I hadn’t even known I’d been looking for. Everything seemed to shift in that moment.
The universe realigned, leaving Clara and me in the centre.
Together.
But then I watched as the uncertainty crept back into her eyes, and the anxiety settled back over her features.
So it was no surprise when she sat up quickly, forcing her glasses to slip even further down her nose.
She pushed them back up with jerky movements and tucked her hair behind her ears, a gesture I’d noticed Clara used in moments of discomfort.
“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, and I gritted my teeth. If I never heard another sorry from this woman for the rest of my life, I would be a very happy man.
“Right, well, if we could get this over with, that would be great,” I clipped, annoyed by the loss of that smile but even more so by the loss of her trusting, unguarded expression from a moment ago.
“As you know, I’m extremely time-poor, and this is a major inconvenience so… Clara? Are you listening?”
She was looking beyond me out of the window at something across the street.
I flicked a glance behind me, but I couldn’t see anything other than a random teenager loitering outside the pub and a family coming out of the Tesco Express opposite her block of flats.
Her face, once rosy from sleep, had now drained of all colour. I frowned.
“Clara?”
“Sorry,” she whispered, her gaze still focused out of my window.
She blinked a couple of times, then looked back at me.
“Of course, you’re busy. I-I-I’ll just grab my things and be out of your hair.
” With that, she spun round, grabbed at the door, and tried to open it, but my automatic locks were still on.
“Hey,” I said softly, leaning over on instinct and putting my hand over hers on the handle, my body caging her in on the seat. She took a deep, shuddering breath in and let it out slowly. “I’ll take you up, okay?”
She shivered. I was close enough to breathe in her lavender scent.
I affected her, but I already knew that.
I’d seen the way she looked at me. The way her pupils dilated when I was close.
The way she tracked my movements. The fact that little mousy Clara had a crush on me shouldn’t have made me feel so lightheaded, shouldn’t have made my stomach tighten in need, but it did.
For a moment I had a vision of the sleepy Clara from earlier in my bed with her light brown hair splayed across my pillow. I cleared my throat and shook my head as if to clear it. If I pounced on her now, I’d scare her to death.
“Y-you don’t have to come in with me,” she said in a shaky voice. I pulled back and settled back into my seat.
“Clara, I told you I would go and check the flat with you, and I meant it. If it’s true about the security situation, which from this vantage point seems extremely likely, then we need to contact the landlord.”
“Oh, right. Look, Lily might have exaggerated a bit there. It’s just a… slight problem I’ve had… in the past. But it’s all resolved now.”
“A slight problem?” I said, levelling her with a long look. She shrugged and I sighed.
No amount of digging had turned up the source of what Clara termed a slight problem. If it were a violent ex-boyfriend, then he’d covered his tracks well.
“Clara, I’m taking you inside. And that’s the end of it.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment and the colour came back into her cheeks.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I just don’t want you to feel inconvenienced.”
I finally unlocked the car and she yanked the door open to jump out onto the pavement.
When she retrieved her sad little backpack from the backseat, she didn’t spare me a glance before she jogged up the front steps to her building.
I caught up with her easily. She was right – every one of my strides matched two of hers.
I frowned in disapproval as she simply pushed open the door. No key code, no security.
The first thing that hit me in the entranceway was the smell of urine. Good God, how did people live like this? Clara turned down the corridor and then we were outside the door to her flat. I looked at the stairs behind us and then back at her door.
“I thought you fell down a flight of stairs… at your home,” I said slowly.
“Er… yes, that’s right,” Clara said in an uncertain voice as she unlocked the door and pushed it open.
I gritted my teeth in frustration. “Clara, you live in a ground-floor flat.”
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, moving through the doorway into her space. I followed her and almost lost my footing when the scent of lavender and pure Clara hit me. Christ, this obsession with her was getting ridiculous.
“So why, if you live on the ground floor, did you fall down the stairs?”
There was a long pause. We were both standing in the middle of her space now, facing each other.
There was a small, bright blue sofa by the window, numerous colourful rugs covering most of the well-worn carpet.
A tiny table and chair, an equally tiny kitchen and the bed, all in the same room, all of which could have fitted in my guest bathroom.
I mean, Clara was small, but this place was built for a hobbit, and a tiny one at that.
Again, did teachers really earn so little?
“I was exercising,” Clara said into the silence, and I focused back on her face which was bright red now.
“You were… exercising?” I said slowly.
“Yes,” she explained, focusing on my tie. “I run up and down the stairs to… exercise.”
“That is bullshit.”
“It’s really good for you, actually,” she said, not willing to back down from her lie. “You should try it sometime. And not all of us have their own bespoke gym set-up.”
“Don’t lie to me, Clara,” my voice dropped lower in warning, and she bit her lip but after a few seconds her shoulders squared and her chin lifted in a defiant expression.
“I’m sorry,” she snapped. “But it is none of your business how I choose to exercise, Lord Sterling. Now, as everything seems to be in order here, I think you c-c-can go.”
For some reason, I felt a small thrill of pride at her furious rant. She’d gained confidence over the last month. The old Clara wouldn’t have dreamed of ranting at me. Only the small stutter at the end gave away how stressed this confrontation made her.
She lost a bit of her nerve then and broke eye contact before saying in a smaller voice, “Thank you for helping me. I know you’re time-pressured. Honestly, you can go.”
She glanced out of the window, then back at me. It was a small, fleeting look, but she was definitely searching for something or someone out there, and I could feel her fear from across the room.
Clara was afraid here, in this flat. And there was no bloody way that I was going to tolerate one of Ozzie’s favourite people in the world feeling unsafe. At least I told myself that was the only reason for what I did next.
“Right, come on, you’re not staying here,” I said, grabbing her backpack, swinging it over my shoulder and striding towards the front door.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked, jogging after me. “You can’t take my backpack! I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. I’m perfectly fine here. Honestly, you are the most insufferable, high-handed, bossy...”
“Yep, I’m all those things,” I said, “but you forgot powerful, arrogant, and very used to getting my own way. And I promise you, Clara, I do always get my own way. You are coming home with me. Until I can sort out what the fuck has been going on, you will be staying with me. Are we clear?”
Due to my job, I routinely witnessed the consequences of domestic violence.
Clara was lying. There had been no fall down the stairs.
It was the same old story I saw in the courts all the time.
Some bloke drinks too much, takes drugs, treats his girlfriend like shit, until one day something terrible happens.
In fact, I’d been working in criminal law for long enough to know that the endgame was often much more final than just a trip to hospital, and I wasn’t going to let Clara put herself at risk.
She’d been beaten up and hadn’t gone to the police.
Either this bloke was intimidating her, or she hoped to rekindle the relationship, believing he would change – I saw that often enough in the courts as well.
The coercive control these manipulative bastards wielded was insane.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered as she followed me out into the corridor, closing the door behind her and locking it.
I suppressed a smile. I’d expected her to put up way more of a fight over this, and I was pleased I wasn’t going to have to waste my time thinking of ways to force her to come to my house.
Physically forcing her wasn’t a possibility. She was too easily scared for that.
I felt a flash of anger towards whichever monster had hurt her. Was that who she saw out of the window of my car? Did she see her boyfriend? Was he staking out this flat? I was suddenly completely furious.
“Don’t make Ozzie worry about you,” I snapped. “Don’t be careless with your life. I’m offering you safety. I’m offering you somewhere to stay whilst you sort this out. Women’s refuges are few and far between. You’ll be better off at mine.”
She frowned up at me. “A women’s refuge? What are you talking about?”
“A women’s refuge for victims of domestic violence, Clara. You’re not fooling anyone with the fall down the stairs story, okay?”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand anything.”
“I understand that the man who did this to you won’t stop.”
She let out a long breath. “A women’s refuge would never have been an option,” she said quietly.
I had no idea what she meant by that, but when she looked back up at me, her expression was so beaten down, so weary, so exhausted that I felt my chest tighten.
“Right,” she said. “You’re right. I... I’ll come with you. ”
“Good choice,” I said, taking her by her elbow and steering her towards the stairs.
She let out a small, slightly hysterical laugh. “Are you pretending that I had a choice in this?” she asked. I could barely make out her next words, they were whispered so quietly. “I never have any choices.”