Chapter Thirteen
Stephen
The next morning, I double-checked the address details in the text message Elle had sent me.
It wasn’t quite the East Village area like I’d first thought, even if it was still technically the Lower East Side, and it hadn’t gone through gentrification yet.
Her road headed away from the river, on and on, up towards Sara D Roosevelt Park.
The buildings were old tenements, four to five storeys high, packed in tight, over the top of small shops and restaurants, and a number of unknown entities, their metal shutters drawn down, graffiti tags decorating them.
Her apartment was above a Vietnamese restaurant.
The entrance door to the side pushed open, the intercom looking like it’d had an argument with a hammer and lost, leaving me with a strange stirring of concern for her.
Perhaps I’d been guilty of imagining her living in a Friends-style apartment as she flitted about the city, frequenting bars and writing on her laptop in cafés.
This was far more reminiscent of the area in South London where I grew up, with tower blocks and a higher crime rate. I hoped she had a roommate.
After five minutes of hanging around on the first-floor landing, repeatedly knocking on her door, I was prepared to give up and put my brain to work on another solution to find Trevor.
Perhaps this was Elle’s payback for my comment on Friday night? She didn’t live here at all; she’d sent me to a random address to waste my time with the added possibility of being mugged.
But it seemed a lot of effort to go to in order to get the final mark on the scoreboard. It was equally likely she’d gone out because she hadn’t heard from me. I hadn’t told her I was coming, so it was feasible her plans had changed —
She yanked the door open and my gaze snapped down to her bare legs.
Short as they were, they were shapely and led enticingly up to the hem of an oversized T-shirt, which…
Yes, she was braless underneath it. Heaven help me.
My eyes finally reached her face and I nearly took a step back at the scowl she was wearing.
‘What the hell kind of time d’you call this?’ Her voice was throaty with sleep and, along with the limited attire and the deliciously wild red hair, a dark curl of unwelcome lust snaked around me.
I blinked and checked my watch. It took a moment to read the dial properly through the haze. ‘Twenty to nine.’
‘To nine? It’s not even nine yet?’ She shook her head and retreated back inside her apartment, muttering what sounded like blasphemy under her breath.
But she left the door open, so I went in and quietly closed it over.
The heat inside was almost as bad as that on the street – I could understand why she was wearing so little clothing.
It was tempting to strip off myself…but thoughts like that were going to lead me into trouble so I shoved it out of my head and asked politely: ‘Am I early?’
She spun around and pushed a wave of her hair back from her face.
‘Of course, you’re early. If the hour is a single digit number, it’s practically an act of aggression. And where the hell was the RSVP? I thought the English knew all about etiquette. Is one of those coffees for me?’ she added at the end, barely taking a breath.
I smiled and held out one of the cups. ‘It is.’
She padded back over and took it, eyeing me like she thought it possible I’d poisoned it. Popping the lid, she took a small sip. ‘Americano with a sugar. Perfect. How d’you know?’
‘I remembered.’
‘Huh?’
‘From the hotel.’ On Christmas morning neither Nick or my nan had been at breakfast, so Elle had asked to join me.
We’d talked, eaten, gone to play chess in the library after – it had an uncomfortable similarity on recall to a date.
I hadn’t realised she was gathering information on me to narrow down her search for the anonymous blogger.
‘Oh. That’s… Well, thanks.’
‘I aim to please.’
‘Yeah, I bet you do,’ she muttered grimly into her coffee as she dipped her head to take another sip.
Her eyelashes were a pale tawny colour and there were little freckles dotted over her nose.
I wondered if she always looked so delectable when she woke up in the morning.
I wondered what it would be like to tumble her back into bed. What was I here for again?
She pressed her lips together as she looked up and caught me watching her. The quiet between us became as heavy as the humid air.
I diverted my attention to finding a space to sit down where I assumed her sofa must be hidden beneath the mountain of notebooks, sticky pads and magazines.
‘So, what made you change your mind?’ she asked.
‘There’s a priceless painting at the Met I’ve had my eye on—’
‘And you’re putting together a team?’ She smirked. ‘Is that your way of saying you realised what a valuable asset I am?’
‘A man can only deny the truth before him for so long.’ I allowed my eyes to flick from her face to the tips of her bare toes and back up again. ‘Are your assets still for hire?’
She blushed but her grey eyes turned hard. ‘They never were, as far as you’re concerned.’
‘You’re not offering to help me find the man in my mother’s will, then?’
She raised one eyebrow. ‘Help is not hire. And I have a couple of ground rules.’