flagstones of the hall and echoing off the walls could possibly belong to Ana, the pint-sized housekeeper. Or Maria, the laid-back cook. Or any of the other staff employed on the estate for that matter. Some of them might be big and burly enough to possess a tread like the one now heading up the stairs, but none of them would be in this part of the house at this time of night.
No one was, apart from her.
And, of course, whoever it was who’d reached the landing, dropped something that hit the floor with a thud and was now striding down the long wide corridor towards her room.
Nicky’s heart hammered even more fiercely and her blood roared in her ears as it struck her that the footsteps were getting louder. Closer. That any minute now they’d stop, he’d be at her door, the handle would turn and—
Images of what might happen then slammed into her head, vivid and terrifying, and as the alarm rushing around her turned to full-blown panic she started to shake. Her vision blurred, her breath stuck in her throat and she went dizzy, and her heart was now beating so hard and fast it felt as if it were about to burst from her chest.
She was a split second from passing out, she realised foggily, and then the panic exploded inside her because if she did pass out then she’d be toast.
And she really didn’t want to be toast. She didn’t want not to be able to find out whether she might actually be able to sort out the mess her life had become. She’d waited too long. Suffered too much. Tried too hard...
So no, she told herself, struggling through the haze in her head and battling back the panic. No way was she giving up now and no way was she fainting.
Dredging up strength from who knew where and taking a series of deep breaths, Nicky determinedly reined in her spiralling-out-of-control imagination and willed her heart rate to slow because she really had to calm down.
Now was not the time to lose it. Now was the time for cool assessment and a plan, because, regardless of what might lie in store for her, she was damned if she was going to let whoever it was get his grubby hands on her precious camera. Even if it had been sitting in a cupboard and gathering dust for the last few months.
Besides, she’d been in situations far more hazardous than this and had escaped at least physically unscathed so why should this be the one to get the better of her?
The most important question right now therefore was: what was she going to do? Simply lying here, frozen still and quivering with panic, wasn’t going to get her anywhere, was it? Nor was dithering. No, it was time for action.
Allowing the instincts that had served her so well for so long to take over Nicky raced through the options. Options that weren’t all that abundant, she had to admit, but never mind. She only needed one to work with and—aha!—now she had it. And in the nick of time, it seemed, because the footsteps had slowed right down and were a fraction of a second from stopping altogether.
Setting her jaw and clutching the book even tighter, she thanked God she’d picked an unabridged and illustrated copy of Don Quijote for her bedtime reading—which came in at a whopping thousand pages and weighed a ton—and silently slid from the bed.
* * *
What a week.
Striding down the corridor towards the sliver of light that shone from beneath the door at the end of it, Rafael rubbed a weary hand over his face and stifled a yawn.
He didn’t think he’d ever had one like it, and frankly he’d be happy never to experience one like it again, because he couldn’t remember a time when the muscles in his body hadn’t ached or when his nerves hadn’t been wound so tightly, let alone the last good night’s sleep he’d had.
The crippling exhaustion could be attributed fairly and squarely to the merger he’d been working on recently and which had finally gone through this morning. It was a deal that had required delicate negotiation, tactful management, endless patience and long, long days at the office. All of which, of course, he’d been happy to handle. He was used to it, and sorting out other people’s problems with their businesses was what he did best.
What he hadn’t been so happy to have to deal with, however, and what was causing the unbearable tension in his nerves, were the myriad demands that the women in his life had chosen to unleash on him over the last few days.
Firstly, Elisa, the woman he’d been dating but had finished with a fortnight ago, had pitched up at his office the day before yesterday apparently unable to accept they were over. Despite the fact that he’d repeatedly pointed out he’d never promised her anything more than a casual fling, she’d been convinced she could change his mind, and the set of her jaw and the look in her eye had told him that no matter what he did or said she wasn’t going to give up easily, as her subsequent battery of phone calls had proved.
Too busy and too knackered to deal with a full-on showdown right then and there, Rafael had sighed, muttered something about discussing it another time, and had eventually pacified her enough to bundle her out and send her on her way.
He’d barely got over that confrontation when his mother had been on the phone complaining about the fact that his father was once again holed up in his study and showed no signs of emerging. She’d demanded Rafael do something about it, although quite what she’d expected him to do he had no idea, because for one thing when his father retreated there was no shifting him, and for another he’d never paid his son any attention before so why would he start now?
When he’d eventually prised out the reason behind his father’s withdrawal—the flap his mother was getting in over the organisation of a charity ball months away—he’d told her he could quite understand why his father had locked himself in his study, and that if it were him he wouldn’t emerge until the night of the ball was long gone. At which point his mother had hung up on him in a fit of pique.
Then hot on the heels of that phone call, his eldest sister had invited him to a dinner party she was holding tomorrow night, which he suspected she’d engineered for the sole purpose of lining him up with one of her many single friends.
Rafael did not need help with his love-life, as Lola was well aware, but she’d inexplicably made it her life’s mission to see him hitched again. Which was a thoroughly futile exercise because he had no intention of ever remarrying, especially not to any of his sister’s friends, given the traumatic mess it had caused the last time he’d tried it. Once was quite enough, as he’d told her on countless occasions, but Lola had an infuriating habit of brushing him aside with a dismissive wave of her hand, and it was getting to the stage where if she didn’t back off he might well lose it.
By the time his youngest sister, Gabriela, had begun her relentless onslaught of phone calls and emails, in the interests of self-preservation Rafael had made the snap decision to ignore her and everyone else, and flee the madness that was temporarily defining his life.
Whatever Gaby wanted it could wait, he’d assured himself, jumping into his car and telling his driver to make for the airport via a quick detour to his flat for a suitcase, then hopping on his plane and heading south.
He’d done the right thing by escaping, he told himself now. He’d known it the second he’d got out of his car a couple of minutes ago and for a moment had just stood there in the inky velvet of the night, listening to the blessed silence, breathing in the scent of earth and jasmine as the dry heat wrapped itself around him, and feeling some of the excruciating tension gripping his muscles ease.
Quite apart from probably collapsing with exhaustion, if he’d stayed in Madrid the usually strong bonds of filial and fraternal affection might well have snapped, so he refused to feel even a pinprick of guilt at disappearing without a word. His mother and sisters would survive perfectly well without him for a week or two. And as for his father, well, over the years he’d proved eminently capable of looking after himself by burying himself in his beloved books whenever there was a sudden surge of emotion about the place, as was being demonstrated by his current study sit-in.
So no. No guilt, he told himself, stopping at the door, wrapping his hand round the handle and turning