CHASING TROUBLE

Elsa emerged from her bedroom where she’d gone to give Caroline and Glen some privacy, “How did he take it?” she asked.

“Okay, I guess” Caroline replied, “He was a bit upset, but he’ll be fine. I did the right thing, right? Please tell me that I did the right thing?”

“You did,” Elsa told her, “It’s much better than giving him false hope,”

__________

Just how much stuff was Elsa out there buying? Caroline wondered as she finished drying up the plates and put them in the rack.

In preparation for her return back to her college, Elsa had decided to do some clothes shopping, but it already been an hour and thirty minutes and she had not returned. Elsa loved clothes and shopping, and Caroline was beginning to wonder what else her sister was out there buying.

Finally, she heard someone drive in and smiled, wondering what explanation Elsa would come up with for whatever she’d ended up buying. Anticipating the knock before it came, she opened the front door and froze in shock as she saw who stood there.

Nicholas…. The last person in the world she’d expected or wanted to see. Her heart lurched, and the whole world tilted.

“No!” Her immediate impulse to slam the door in his face was thwarted by swift action on his part. Clearly he’d anticipated her response to his arrival and in a powerful movement he slammed a hand in the center of the door, resisting her attempts to close it.

“Don’t even think about it,” he launched savagely, dark eyes connecting with hers with the lethal force of a missile, “Besides I tried to call you but you didn’t pick up,”

“And it didn’t occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to talk to you? When someone doesn’t pick your call, it doesn’t mean come over,” She glared at him, previous hostilities rising to the surface with such frightening force and speed that for a moment she struggled to breathe, swept away on a tide of emotion. “And how the hell do you even know where I live?”

She’d moved to a new and bigger apartment after Charlie was born and It had never entered her head that one day, he’d be at her door. Not after those first miserable months after he left where she’d done nothing but stare out of the window, desperately hoping to see his car pull up outside her home. Gradually she’d grown accustomed to the knowledge that he wasn’t coming after her. That it was well and truly over. Ended with an explosion of bitter emotion every bit as intense as the fiery relationship that had gone before. She’d walked out. He hadn’t followed.

And that had said everything there was to say about their short, fragile relationship. To him it hadn’t been worth saving and truth be told, it was never really a relationship. It had been an unmitigated disaster and she’d already promised herself that if she ever fell in love again it would be with a safe, mild-mannered, modern man, not a blisteringly ruthless, own-the-world man whose attitude to women was firmly embedded in the Stone Age.

She stared at him furiously, her gaze drawn by the power of his broad shoulders, the arrogant tilt of his handsome head and the dangerous glint in his cold, hard eyes. It was wrong for one man to be so indecently sexy, she thought numbly, trying valiantly to ignore the kick of her heart and the sudden quickening of her pulse. She didn’t want to respond like this. It was this response that had involved her with him in the first place. Against her better judgment.Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

But Nicholas Connelly was not a man that women ignored. He was indecently good-looking and the aura of power that he wore with the ease of a designer suit attracted women like sharks to blood-infested water. And she’d proved as vulnerable to his particular brand of macho sex appeal as all the others.

Suddenly aware that he was staring over her shoulder into her house, she frowned. She didn’t want him in her home, staring at everything and making her feel exposed. She made another futile attempt to close the door, knowing that it was a waste of time. In a battle of strength she would be the loser. Nicholas was tall and powerfully built. She lifted her chin, trying not to remember those early ecstatic days they’d spent together. Before reality had set in. Before they’d discovered that they had absolutely nothing in common and nothing to keep them together. “So, why are you here?” she asked him.

“To see my son,” he replied harshly, “Isn’t that supposed to be obvious?”

“You mean you’re here to take him…”

He frowned, “What? No…. You think this is the way I planned to go about getting custody? By kidnapping him?”

Caroline continued to stand in his way, knowing that it wouldn’t take much for him to shove her out of the way so he’d get into the apartment, but he did nothing of the sort. Instead he stood there, watching her with dark eyes.

With a sudden feeling of unease, she realized that he looked tired. And Nicholas Connelly was never tired. He had more stamina than anyone she’d ever met. She’d never seen him like this before. He looked gray. Exhausted. Like a man at the very limit of his reserves. Instinctively she stepped to one side. “You can come in,” she told him, “But if you try anything funny you can be sure that I’ll call the cops and I won’t hesitate for a second,”

He followed her into the house, looking around as he did. It wasn’t a very large apartment, but it looked big enough. Beautifully decorated, and his eyes landed on some of the pictures displayed on a table with some flowers. There were mostly pictures of her and Charlie and Caroline wondered what he was thinking as he stared intensely at them, especially at the ones of their son.

“Would you like something to drink?” Caroline asked him shakily as he turned to look at her, brushing aside the fiery curls that threatened to obscure her vision. The gesture caught his attention and his shimmering black gaze fixed on her wild mane of hair with almost primal fascination. The tension in the room suddenly increased. For a moment both of them had forgotten their horrible situation, too absorbed in each other to make room for the pressures of the outside world.