Dominic strained his ears all night listening for Claire, but she was as quiet as she’d ever been up above him. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he was lolling on his sofa, feeling bleary and weary and only just conscious, that he heard a noise from the hallway. He hauled himself up with superhuman effort and ran outside.
She was coming down the stairs, dragging a small wheeled suitcase behind her.
‘Claire!’
She ignored him. Just kept thudding the case down the next step and then the next.
‘I want to explain.’
She banged her case down one more step. ‘Actually, I don’t want to know what twisted little game you’re playing.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Oh, so you haven’t been lying to me all along?’
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
‘Running into you at that party, that was a set-up, wasn’t it? Go on, admit it! You were tricking me the whole time! God! I’m such a fool. I almost fell for it too.’
For a moment another emotion broke through the anger. The look of hurt on her face made something deep inside Dominic’s chest squeeze, but then her features hardened and contorted again.
‘And you were very clever about it,’ she added softly, calmly. If anything, that was even worse than the shouting had been.
Dominic shook his head, tried to tell her that it was pure stupidity and stupidity alone that had got him into this mess, that there hadn’t been anything remotely clever about it, but he seemed to have lost his new-found skill of communicating with a woman he cared about. All that came out was a grunt.
‘You played it just right,’ she continued smoothly, ‘reeling me in with your “I need help being romantic with the girl I’m devoted to” nonsense—’
She stopped. Her eyes widened, and then she let out a laugh so loud and hard it made Dominic flinch.
‘Hah! A girlfriend who didn’t actually exist!’
She brought a hand up to her forehead, massaged her temple, and then she laughed again, but this time it was soft and croaky, barely there. ‘It’s all starting to make sense to me now.’
Dominic finally found his missing voice. ‘No! It wasn’t like that!’
She pulled her case down the final step to the floor, paused for a moment to catch her breath and shot a sideways glance at him. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘At first I still thought it was your grandmother living upstairs. I didn’t know you’d taken over her flat. Neither of you told me!’
Claire’s expression became blank. ‘Well, she wouldn’t have. She died.’
Oh, hell. He should have worked that one out, shouldn’t he? ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t know that. I always liked Laurie.’
Claire stared at him hard, as if he was doing something sneaky by being nice to her. He supposed he could understand that. At the same time, he could see her brain working behind her eyes, processing the information. He was thinking of those early notes he’d written her, about hearing aids and cocoa and knitting. It seemed she was too, because after a long pause she said, ‘Well, that certainly explains a lot.’
‘See? I didn’t know the whole time.’
She tipped her chin up. ‘But you knew before me.’
He nodded.
‘When? When did you know? Just now? Yesterday? Last week?’
‘I worked it out at the Hamilton party.’
Her mouth made tiny movements, as if she was trying to form words, and then she just shook her head and headed for the door. She flung it open then paused. ‘Okay,’ she said, hardly able to get the words out she was so angry. ‘You want a chance to explain? Tell me one thing.’
‘Anything.’
A single word left her mouth, ‘Nick?’ She watched very carefully for his reaction. ‘I know that’s not your real name.’
Ah. That. He swallowed.
‘It is ‘Nic’—N I C—short for Dominic. I didn’t realise you had thought it was spelled differently until later. And I didn’t tell you that was my name. You just picked it up from Doug. He’s always called me Nic. Most of my friends do.’
She gave him a look that suggested she was surprised he had any.
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ he said, pulling himself up a little bit straighter. ‘But I also didn’t put you straight.’
‘Why? Why did you do it? Why base it all on lies right from that very first moment? You didn’t have to, you know.’
He nodded. He knew that now. God, how he knew that now. He just was stupid enough not to have known it back then. ‘I worked out who you were when you were telling Doug about the ridiculous gift I’d left you that morning, when you showed him my note.’
A magazine and some cheap flowers? How had he ever thought that appropriate? He astonished himself with his own cluelessness once again.
‘I knew you’d never give me a chance if I told you who I was right at that moment. You’d already made up your mind about who Dominic Arden was, without even meeting me, so I decided to make use of the misunderstanding about my name to buy myself a little time, so you could get to know me before you judged me.’
He’d been hoping an explanation might soften her anger a little, but she was standing there, hand on her case, staring at him as if she’d like him to explode on the spot.
He cleared his throat. ‘I know that was wrong now … but I didn’t think it’d go on for so long, get so complicated.’
Her features hardened. ‘If you’d come clean right at the start, I might have found it funny. I might even have realised I’d got you all wrong and given you a second chance.’
He sent her a heartfelt, pleading look. He knew that underneath all her anger, Claire had a generous heart, that she was ready to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
He just needed to convince her he deserved some of that generosity. ‘Could you give me that second chance now?’ he asked softly.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I can’t be with a man who lies and manipulates to get what he wants. I can’t be with a coward who pretends to be something he’s not. Even if I could forgive you, there could never be anything between us. You’re simply not good enough for me.’
Dominic had thought he couldn’t feel any worse than he already did, but he’d been wrong. Her words hit him right in the chest, in the heart she’d softened up nicely for him. The sad thing was, he didn’t blame her at all.
Everything got very numb then. It was as if he was on overload and his systems started shutting themselves down one by one. All he could do was blink and try to stop himself feeling as if he might float away. He looked at her smart red case, trying to focus on something solid and real. It was cabin luggage size, stuffed to the brim. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a holiday booked.’
She wrestled her case towards the door and muttered, mostly to herself, ‘I blooming well could do with a holiday.’
He did the gentlemanly thing and opened the door, held it for her so didn’t swing back and send her flying. ‘Where are you going?’
Despite his chivalrous behaviour, she refused to look at him. She pulled the trolley handle on her case all the way up. ‘Away from you.’
‘You can’t move out! Not because of me. Not because of this.’
Claire looked over her shoulder at him as she bumped her case over the threshold and onto the front step. ‘Watch me.’
And then Dominic was left standing on his own in the hallway, wondering if this was what open heart surgery felt like and what on earth he was going to do with all the eggs and avocados and tomatoes he had sitting in his fridge.