‘Not really,’ Rhys said, but I think we’d both known he was lying.
We had seats booked on a late-evening flight to Scotland, and a cab arranged to take us to the airport. Despite getting deliciously sidetracked when a slow, lingering kiss had led to a bedroom detour, my case was finally packed and standing beside his at my front door when we headed to the kitchen.
The stir fry was sizzling happily in the wok, filling the room with spicy aromas that were already making my mouth water.
‘It’ll be all haggis and black pudding for the next five days,’ I teased from my perch on a kitchen stool. He’d lifted me onto it, claiming he needed me on the opposite side of the room when hot food and sizzling oil was present.
‘You’re too much of a distraction when I’m cooking,’ he said. ‘I have a real problem keeping my hands off you.’
‘Sounds like a good kind of problem to me.’
He laughed softly and shot me a look over his shoulder that stirred me up all over again. I smiled. Whatever the problem was, it appeared to be mutual.
He raised his glass of red wine to me, and I responded in kind with the can of cola I was sipping from. I wasn’t always the best air traveller, and it had seemed safer not to have alcohol before flying.
‘Just a minute more,’ Rhys said, stirring the food and then frowning when his phone trilled from his back pocket.
He took one glance at his screen and that was all I needed to know the map of our evening was about to change. I just didn’t realise how dramatically.
Rhys ran his finger across the screen and there was already a tight, concerned expression on his face. I stared at each individual feature, trying to ascertain the nature of the call. The one thing I didn’t have to work out was who was calling. Annalise. It had to be. She was the only one capable of making him look the way he did right now. But seconds later, an expression I’d never seen before flashed across his face.
Rhys dropped the spatula as though his fingers had simply forgotten he’d been holding it and walked away from the stove. He was striding towards the hallway, igniting an immediate feeling of déjà vu, because this was exactly what he’d done on the day we’d met when he’d wanted privacy to take Tasha’s call. But it wasn’t his daughter on the end of the line tonight, it was her mother, and even though Rhys was walking away from me, I’d still been able to hear the distraught sobs coming from the phone pressed to his ear.
I immediately jumped off the stool and followed him. He was striding through my flat as though being pulled magnetically towards the front door. I tentatively touched his arm, but he just kept pacing, like a caged animal.
He was asking questions I recognised from the last time this had happened. But this time the panic on his face was dialling up and not down.
‘Slow down, tell me exactly what happened.’
It seemed to take an eternity between gasping sobs before Annalise was coherent enough to relate even half the information he needed.
‘Are you in the ambulance now? Where are they taking you?’
He looked around, searching for something to write on, and I was there with a notepad and pen that I’d already plucked up. It was a different hospital from the one he and I had been taken to.
‘I don’t know where that is, but I’ll find it,’ he said.
A piercing beeping filtered into the hall. I thought for a moment it was the ambulance siren, then I realised it was coming from the kitchen smoke detector. The room was filled with a haze from the stir fry we’d left abandoned on the hob. Even through the protection of an oven glove, the pan felt red hot. I threw it into the sink, drowning the burnt offerings in a gush of water from the tap.
By the time I’d smacked the smoke detector into silence and thrown open the windows to get rid of the smoke, Rhys had finished on the phone and was back in the kitchen, frantically looking around for the rest of his clothing – some of which I was still wearing. I tugged the t-shirt off and stooped to retrieve his hoodie, thrusting both into his hands.
‘I have to go,’ he said, looking dazed and distracted.
‘Tasha?’ I asked, wondering how it was possible for a single word to bear the weight of so much fear.
He nodded and I saw my terror was nothing compared to his.
‘She’s never had an attack this severe before,’ he said, walking in jerky, staccato steps as he began looking for his missing shoes. I took over, finding one beneath my bed and the other behind his suitcase. I think he’d been seconds away from leaving the house barefoot.
‘I have to get to the hospital,’ he said, each word short and sharp, as though it had been severed from him.
‘You do,’ I agreed, tugging on leggings and a sweatshirt and ramming my feet into trainers.
He patted down his pockets and pulled out his car keys.
‘What are you doing?’
He looked at me as though he genuinely believed I might be trying to stop him from leaving. That hurt.