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so naive. I’m here, aren’t I?’

      ‘You don’t look too pleased about it.’

      ‘Your email left me little choice. I didn’t realise how proficient you’d become in emotional blackmail.’

      ‘It wasn’t blackmail, Audrey. I just wanted to know if you were coming. To save me wasting another day and the flight from Shanghai.’

      Shame battled annoyance. Yes, she’d stood him up last year, but she found it hard to imagine a man like Oliver left alone and dateless in a flash restaurant for very long. Especially at Christmas. Especially in a city full of homesick expats. She was sure he wouldn’t have withered away from lack of company.

      ‘And playing the dead best friend card seemed equal to your curiosity, did it?’

      Because that was the only reason she was here at all. The relationship he’d had with her recently passed husband. And she’d struggled to shake the feeling that she needed to provide some closure for Oliver on that friendship.

      His hazel eyes narrowed just a hint in that infuriating, corporate, too-cool-for-facial-expression way he had. But he didn’t bite. Instead he just stared at her, almost daring her to go on. Daring her, just as much, to hold his glower.

      ‘They got new carpet,’ she announced pointlessly, thrilled for an excuse not to let him enslave her gaze. Stylised and vibrant dragonflies decorated the floor where once obscure oriental patterns had previously lain. She sank the pointed tip of her cream shoe into the plush opulence and watched it disappear into Weihei Province’s best hand-tufted weave. ‘Nice.’

      ‘Gerard got another Michelin.’ He shrugged. ‘New carpet seemed a reasonable celebration.’

      Somehow, Oliver managed to make her failure to know that one of Hong Kong’s most elite restaurants had re-carpeted sound like a personal failure on her part.

      ‘Mrs Audrey...’

      Audrey suppressed the urge to correct that title as she turned and took the extended hand of the maître d’ between her own. ‘Ming-húa, lovely to see you again.’

      ‘You look beautiful,’ Ming-húa said, raising her hand to his lips. ‘We missed you last Christmas.’

      Oliver shot her a sideways look as they were shepherded towards their customary part of the restaurant. The end where the Chinese version of Christmas decorations were noticeably denser. They racked up a bill this one day of the year large enough to warrant the laying on of extra festive bling and the discreet removal of several other tables, yet, this year, more tables than ever seemed to have been sacrificed. It left them with complete privacy, ensconced in the western end of the restaurant between the enormous indoor terrarium filled with verdant water-soaked plants and fluorescent dragonflies, and the carpet-to-ceiling reinforced window that served as the restaurant’s outer wall.

      Beyond the glass, Victoria Harbour and the high-tech sparkle and glint of hundreds more towering giants just like this side of the shore. Behind the glass, the little haven that Audrey had missed so badly last Christmas. Tranquil, private and filled with the kind of gratuitous luxury a girl really should indulge in only once a year.

      Emotional sanctuary.

      The sanctuary she’d enjoyed for the past five years.

      Minus the last one.

      And Oliver Harmer was a central part of all that gratuitous luxury. Especially looking like he did today. She didn’t like to notice his appearance—he had enough ego all by himself without her appreciation adding to it—but, here, it was hard to escape; wherever she looked, a polished glass surface of one kind or another offered her a convenient reflection of some part of him. Parts that were infinitely safer facing away from her.

      Chilled Cristal sat—as it always did—at the centre of the small table between two large, curved sofas. The first and only furniture she’d ever enjoyed that was actually worthy of the name lounge. Certainly, by the end of the day they’d both be sprawled across their respective sides, bodies sated with the best food and drink, minds saturated with good conversation, a year’s worth of catching up all done and dusted.

      At least that was how it normally went.

      But things weren’t normal any more.

      Suddenly the little space she’d craved so much felt claustrophobic and the chilled Cristal looked like something from a cheesy seduction scene. And the very idea that she could do anything other than perch nervously on the edge of her sofa for the next ten or twelve hours...?

      Ludicrous.

      ‘So what are you hunting this trip?’ Oliver asked, no qualms whatsoever about flopping down into his lounge, snagging up a quarter-filled flute on the way down. So intently casual she wondered if he’d practised the manoeuvre. As he settled back his white shirt stretched tight across his torso and his dark trousers hiked up to reveal ankles the same tanbark colour as his throat. ‘Stradivarius? Guarneri?’

      ‘A 1714 Testore cello,’ she murmured. ‘Believed to now be in South East Asia.’

      ‘Now?’

      ‘It moves around a lot.’

      ‘Do they know you’re looking for it?’

      ‘I have to assume so. Hence its air miles.’

      ‘More fool them trying to outrun you. Don’t they know you always get your man...or instrument?’

      ‘I doubt they know me at all. You forget, I do all the legwork but someone else busts up the syndicates. My job relies on my contribution being anonymous.’

      ‘Anonymous,’ he snorted as he cut the tip off one of the forty-dollar cigars lying on a tray beside the champagne. ‘I’d be willing to wager that a specialist with an MA in identification of antique stringed instruments is going to be of much more interest to the bad guys than a bunch of Interpol thugs with a photograph and a GPS location in their clammy palms.’

      ‘The day my visa gets inexplicably denied then I’ll start believing you. Until then...’ She helped herself to the Cristal. ‘Enough about my work. How is yours going? Still rich?’

      ‘Stinking.’

      ‘Still getting up the noses of your competitors?’

      ‘Right up in their sinuses, in fact.’

      Despite everything, it was hard not to respond to the genuine glee Oliver got from irritating his corporate rivals. He wasted a fair bit of money on moves designed to exasperate. Though, not a waste at all if it kept their focus conveniently on what he wasn’t doing. A reluctant smile broke free.

      ‘I was wondering if I’d be seeing that today.’ His eyes flicked to her mouth for the barest of moments. ‘I’ve missed it.’

      That was enough to wipe the smile clean from her face. ‘Yeah, well, there’s been a bit of an amusement drought since Blake’s funeral.’

      Oliver flinched but buried it behind a healthy draw from his champagne. ‘No doubt.’

      Well... Awkward...

      ‘So how are you doing?’ He tried again.

      She shrugged. ‘Fine.’

      ‘And how are you really doing?’

      Seriously? He wanted to do this? Then again, they talked about Blake every year. He was their connection, after all. Their only true connection. Which made being here now that Blake was gone even weirder. She should have just stayed home. Maybe they could have just done this by phone.

      ‘The tax stuff was a bit of a nightmare and the house was secured against the business so that wasn’t fun to disentangle, but I got there.’

      He blinked at her. ‘And personally?’

      ‘Personally my husband’s dead. What do you want me to say?’

      All

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