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Second by desperate second, her flailing efforts weakened as the strength leached from her body. Try as she might, she could find no energy in reserve. With her lungs ready to explode, the blackness tainting her vision thickened, threatening to extinguish the last of the light from her world …
‘No!’
The force of her own defiant cry snapped her awake. In an instant, the fog of darkness was dispelled, the malevolent shades of her nightmare extinguished by the soft golden glow of the bedside lamp that revealed familiar surroundings to her darting, fear-widened eyes.
Muscles locked stiff with shock, she lay temporarily frozen in her bed, the sound of her gasping breaths amplified in the blanketing stillness of the night. Displaced, the bed covers tangled low around her calves, leaving the winter air to chill the sweat that filmed every inch of her skin and stuck her nightshirt to her damp chest.
It took only a moment to register each of these details, to process them and ground herself in reality. Just a dream. A bad dream. Not real.
The sudden wave of relief that broke over her brought a rush of weakness that turned every locked joint and tightly knotted muscle to quivery jelly. She was OK, she assured herself as she exhaled a shaky breath’. Of course she was. Shaken, but safe. Because, despite her sleep being haunted by memories of the awful attack she’d suffered at the hands of her mother’s ex-lover, in reality the man himself was no longer a waking threat.
Instinctively, protectively, her hand went to her right forearm, the sensitivity of the skin there a reminder that the limb had been cut free of its cast only earlier that day. She traced with her fingers the line of the newly knit bone. No, Tony Maplin couldn’t hurt her any more. The drunken violence he’d unleashed upon both herself and her mother, coupled with a long list of outstanding court summonses and unpaid dues, had put him where he belonged – behind the bars of a prison cell.
Releasing another slow, unsteady breath, Annabel blinked at her alarm clock. Not even midnight. With a groan, she raised trembling hands and scrubbed them over her clammy face. It was going to be a long time until dawn.
Keen to rinse away the thick aftertaste of fear, she pushed herself to a sitting position, careful of her weakened arm. Reaching for the glass of water on the bedside table, she stalled as the sight of the photograph standing at the edge of the pool of lamplight brought a further rush of memories and powerful emotion.
While the frame itself was new – an elegant, unfamiliar replacement for the original, which had been broken at the same time as her arm – the image it held was one she was thoroughly acquainted with. A perfect picture of her five-year-old self, held aloft in her father’s arms, the two of them laughing in the summer sunshine in front of the inn that had been her childhood home. It was the most important record she had of that distant time. A frozen snapshot of love and laughter that she’d been forced to use as a weapon in the fight for her life. A glimpse of forgotten happiness that had smashed and splintered, leaving her believing it damaged and lost for ever.
Until today.
Until Aidan had walked back into her life and returned the precious gift of the past as well as offering the unnerving promise of a future.
Her barely slowed heartbeat threatened to skyrocket again as the name conjured a breathtaking image of dark masculine beauty, and raised a whole different set of fears that left her mouth suddenly dry.
Swinging to sit on the edge of her bed, she reached for the glass and took a mouthful of water. Chilled as she already was, the cold liquid caused a shudder to shoot from scalp to toe. She got to her feet and made for her wardrobe, aware that the turn of her thoughts towards a certain Irishman had done nothing to improve the weakness in her knees.
Aidan Flynn. Impossible, infuriating … and apparently irresistible. The man who’d turned her nice orderly life on its head from the moment fate had put him behind the bar of Cluny’s – the London restaurant she managed – until long after circumstances had caused him to leave. A rule-breaker, a force of nature and a law unto himself, he’d blasted his way past the barriers of accepted professional codes of conduct and personal etiquette and got closer to Annabel than anyone had before … until, ironically, the prospect of losing him had made her push him away.
Like the photo, she’d been convinced she’d lost Aidan from her life for ever. But after six weeks of silence he’d suddenly surfaced, showing up at her door, looking for answers.
‘I want to know why you acted the way you did. Why you ran out without a word, without a reason,’ he’d demanded with an uncharacteristic cool detachment, the lovely lilt of his accent clipped short, the look in his beautiful grey eyes – usually so expressive – shuttered and remote.
Shivering as she discarded her damp nightshirt and pulled on a replacement, Annabel pondered how, in the past, she would have welcomed such remoteness, would have encouraged exactly such emotional distance between herself and another human being.
But this time had been different, and even as she’d felt a rush of hope at his unexpected appearance, one look at his stern demeanour had crushed it, leaving her convinced he’d come for nothing more than to officially end things between them, face to face, after she’d been too cowardly to.
Feeling certain that she had nothing left to lose had somehow made it easier to open up, to reveal more vulnerability than she could ever remember doing with anyone else. ‘I was scared,’ she’d admitted, because when she’d so abruptly run out on his generosity and kindness, she had done so out of fear. Since she had so little experience of close friendships, let alone relationships, the shocking strength of the feelings this intensely passionate man had awoken in her had her literally running scared.
And now, as she pulled on her robe, she was scared all over again. Scared because, rather than gloating over or disdaining her for admitting her cowardice, Aidan had done something far more devastating and dangerous to her emotional state. He’d shown compassion and understanding by restoring her most precious possession to her.
Annabel grabbed the faux-fur throw from the end of the bed and returned to the bedside table to gather up the photograph before making her way to the sitting room. Clutching the frame to her chest, she recalled how that ultimate act of kindness had caused that very spot to ache with a pain so overwhelming that she had turned away from him to hide the tears that threatened to overflow.
‘Thank you,’ she’d barely managed to rasp out. ‘I don’t deserve this.’
He’d touched her then, for the first time since his arrival. Fingers on her chin, he’d forced her to face him, to meet that crystalline gaze that left her tears and her pain nowhere to hide. ‘If you had the chance to do that day differently, would you?’
Too choked at the thought of everything she’d thrown away, she’d simply nodded, unable to find her voice. But instead of the final goodbye she’d been anticipating, she’d found herself wrapped in a strong pair of arms and given a second chance. The deal sealed with a kiss.
And what a kiss. Potent, ardent, yet tempered with such heart-rending tenderness that even the memory had Annabel’s lips tingling.
She entered the sitting room and returned the frame to its usual place on her bookshelf before switching on a lamp and the television. Settling on the sofa, she draped the throw over herself and snuggled down to try to get comfortable.
Almost immediately, the lack of give in the cushions reminded her that, however bad her nights might currently seem, it was nothing compared to what was in store for her once the small, style-over-substance piece of furniture became her bed again when her mother was finally released from hospital. For six weeks Ellen had been in traction for the fractured neck she’d sustained during Tony Maplin’s attack. Although it had never been mentioned, Annabel couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s sleep was as terrorised by nightmare replays of that day as her own.
Feeling the heavy pull of exhaustion, she used the television remote to channel-hop, searching for some late-night show mindless enough to send her back into a doze before she had to