Ellie stared sightlessly at the spreadsheet on the screen in front of her.
Mainly because she didn’t need to see the numbers to know that HERA, the agency she had worked so hard during the past eight years to make a success, was going down. Not because she wasn’t good enough, but because Andrew was making it happen. Not content with ruining her life, he wanted to completely destroy her career too.
The second reason she was sitting here like a zombie was that she was tired after spending most of the night returning to her apartment to some sort of order.
An apartment she no longer felt safe living in when Andrew had been able to break in so easily.
How he was doing that, she still had no idea!
It truly was devastating to accept that a man who hadn’t been part of her personal or business life for the past six months should still want to hurt her. She had loved him once, and believed he loved her, but now all she felt from him was hate and a desire to hurt her in any way that he could.
Such as hiring two men to ransack and spray graffiti in the HERA offices.
There had been as much destruction in her apartment when she returned there after the visit with Karen, Geoff and the babies. No graffiti but some of her furniture and other things were broken beyond repair. Thank goodness Knox hadn’t come up with her. She doubted Andrew would have survived that encounter.
When she saw the mess in her office she had taken photographs with her cell phone. She had decided to do the same with her apartment before she started the tidy-up.
It had taken her the better part of the night to put things away and then, after she had done so, to clean every room with biological wipes from top to bottom.
None of which had worked in eliminating Andrew’s presence in her private sanctuary. Because no matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t seem to take away the feeling of having been violated. That everything in her apartment was now tainted by Andrew being in her personal space and touching her things.
She had dropped a bag of her bra and panty sets in a dumpster on the way in to work. She knew she would never be able to wear them again, knowing Andrew had touched them when he pulled them out of the drawer to scatter them across the carpeted floor. She’d stuffed the rest of the clothes he’d touched into another bag and left them at a thrift store.
She would go to a couple of the shops on the second floor at lunchtime and buy some new things to replace the ones she’d had to give or throw away.
Still, the thought of returning to her apartment this evening, knowing Andrew had the means to enter whenever he felt like it, filled her with dread. So much so that she believed she would have to find and move into another apartment, one with even more security.
Unfortunately, that was going to take time. But she could always book into a hotel or, in a pinch, sleep on the sofa across the room here in her office. Either option would be preferable to lying awake in her apartment, terrified of the next time Andrew decided to let himself in. Although that hadn’t seemed to keep those men out of here the other night.
The thought of them coming back here was so unsettling, it made her feel slightly sick.
The only thing keeping her sane at the moment was the thought of having dinner with Knox this evening.
Just thinking about him was enough to?—
She looked up, eyes widening with surprise, after the door to her office was suddenly thrown open and Knox appeared in the doorway.
Just thinking about him seemed to have somehow caused him to manifest inside her office!
Which, Ellie instantly realized, was a totally ridiculous conclusion to have come to.
Immediately followed by asking herself what he was doing here now, when they were due to meet again this evening. “Is it seven o’clock already?” she teased.
Knox didn’t answer her immediately; instead, he carefully closed the door on a curious Benny, who was hovering just behind him, before locking it.
Knox then crossed the room with a predatory grace until he was standing directly on the other side of Ellie’s desk. “Did he hurt you?”
From the fury glittering in Knox’s eyes, Ellie guessed exactly who he was referring to. She just had no idea how he even knew she had seen Andrew again since the two of them parted yesterday. Unless…
“Have you spoken to Andrew today?” she prompted sharply.
His mouth twisted. “Spoken to him might be a generous way of describing our meeting at the DERA offices this morning.”
“What have you done— Why did that question amuse you?” she asked cautiously.
His mouth twisted. “Because I asked Day that very same thing less than an hour ago.”
“And?”