Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

Sam growled deep in her throat and just managed to stop herself telling him what orifice he could stick his head into.

Inside the sanctuary of her own apartment, she dropped her briefcase wearily, shed her coat and sat down on the big pale couch in front of the fireplace. Determined to ignore the fact that the place was a mess, she switched on the television and watched the end of the evening news. But when it was over, she couldn’t relax. It was no good, she had to tidy up. Compulsive tidiness, Karl had teased her when she’d start changing the sheets on the bed while he was still in it.

Pulling on an absolutely ancient pair of jeans and a threadbare old grey jumper, Sam planned the clean out. The bedroom to start, she decided, tying her hair up into a ponytail.

It took two and a half hours to clean every area of the apartment to her satisfaction. By the time she was finished, the kitchen was restored to its sparkling, pristine perfection and the sitting room was once again a restful, Zen-like spot with all clear, white surfaces free of old newspapers, magazines and scribbled yellow post-it notes about work. The four big modern oils that hung on the warm cream walls stared down at a tranquil, clutter-free room furnished cleanly with big white couches, a low pale wooden coffee table and a muted cream rug on the pale floorboards. The grouping of fat creamy church candles on the fireplace was dust free and perfectly aligned, while the blond driftwood carving on the windowsill had been dusted to within an inch of its life. Even the big Indian silver elephant that stood in the corner beside her towering ficus plant gleamed. Sam knew that not everybody liked the clutter-free look but she adored it. She liked the order and the sense of calm that it brought.

Hope hated it.

‘You’ve no…stuff, no knick knacks,’ Hope had said the first time she’d seen the apartment in all its spartan modern glory. ‘It’s all too perfect for me,’ she’d added, eyes sweeping over heavy cream brocade curtains that would be speckled with grubby fingerprints if Millie and Toby were ever let run riot there.

Seeing the place through Hope’s eyes, Sam had to agree. Hope would have had tonnes of junk on every occasional table, instead of simply placing a lamp or a piece of sculpture there.

When they’d been kids, they’d shared a bedroom and Hope’s side had been a riot of cuddly toys, empty boxes kept because they were pretty, bits of tangled up jewellery and hand-sewn lavender sachets for her clothes, most of which were hung on her chair.

Sam’s side had the only colour co-ordinated wardrobe in their school. Graded from white to black, Sam’s clothes hung in a regimented line that awed Hope just to look at it.

Tidying her wardrobe properly would have to wait tonight, she decided, as she finished the bedroom. It annoyed her when the wardrobe was messy with the greys infiltrating the rail of blacks and skirts hanging with the trousers, but she’d do that tomorrow.

In the kitchen, she put away her cleaning equipment and put some cheese on a couple of water crackers. She poured herself a glass of crisp Sancerre and sat down on the couch again, this time content. As the strains of Mozart echoed softly around the apartment, Sam finally felt herself relax. She willed herself to forget about work and the job losses.

Then, the noise started. It was strange, because at first she wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Surely not upstairs? Even Mad Malcolm wasn’t mad enough to be playing loud rock music at ten o’clock at night. And then the penny dropped. Next door. Still clutching her glass of wine, Sam stared out the front window at the adjoining house and saw two young women lugging a crate of beer up the path. Standing beside the window, the music seemed louder. A taxi pulled up and disgorged more people, all happy and clearly party-bound, judging by the number of off-licence bags they were carrying. Sam felt the veins in her head throb. This was not wild party land. This was a wildly expensive neighbourhood where the notion of a wild party was one where the caterers served too much Bollinger or where guests tripped on their Manolos while staggering out to the chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

Whoever had bought the house couldn’t, wouldn’t, dream of ruining the discreet peace of Holland Park with a party? Or if they thought they could, they’d soon discover the error of their ways, Sam snarled.

Just as abruptly as it had started, the music stopped and Sam felt some of the anger leave her body. Good. Some other resident had complained; therefore she didn’t have to go in and do so. In her current mood of pent-up tension, who knew what she’d have said. The police would have been called sooner rather than later.

She curled up on the couch again, sipping her wine and letting the Mozart soothe her.

With a loud bass thump, the music next door cranked up even louder this time, sounding as if Black Sabbath had turned up and were playing a live gig.

As the music reached a crescendo, so did Sam’s temper. Downing half her wine in one gulp, she grabbed her keys, slid her feet into the espadrilles she used as slippers and rampaged downstairs and out into the street.

‘Oh no, a party,’ sighed one of the nice couple from the basement flat, who were just coming in after an evening out. ‘Have you rung the police, Sam?’ he asked.

‘No,’ snarled Sam. ‘But phone for an ambulance because whoever’s having this party will need it when I’m finished with them.’

With giant strides, she raced up to the other door and pushed. It wasn’t locked and opened easily. From here, the music was eardrum-splitting. The house, which was just a shell with stripped walls and bare, elderly floorboards, had excellent acoustics. Sound reverberated through it. Sam stepped over a rolled up rug and a crate of beer. The place was a disgusting mess. She could just imagine the thought process of whoever had bought it: have the party now, before the wallpaper was up and the carpets down. Or rather, Sam thought grimly, the spoiled teenage children of whoever had bought the house had thought it was a good idea to have the party now and their stupid parents had agreed, not caring about their new neighbours. Big mistake.

In a huge airy room, fairy lights were strung from the high ceiling and a gang of people stood around, smoking furiously and drinking beer from bottles. The scent of marijuana was heady. Nobody took any notice of Sam. In her jeans, she fitted right in. All she needed was a beer and she’d have looked like the rest of them, except for the fact that she had to be up at six a.m. and needed to get some rest, Sam thought furiously as she searched through the throng for her quarry.

The noise was coming from another room. Sam pushed through into what was obviously the nerve centre of the party. It was barely recognizable as a kitchen because most of the units had been ripped out by builders but there was still an island unit piled high with bottles of booze, six packs of Coke and a half eaten loaf of tomato bread. Sam ignored the people in the kitchen and headed for the dining room.

There, behind a bespectacled youth with a pile of CDs, she found it. The stereo system.

‘Is there anything you want me to play?’ yelled the disc jockey eagerly.

‘Yes,’ hissed Sam. ‘Cards.’

With one expert movement, she wrenched the plug from the socket and all was quiet.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked the DJ in shock.

Everyone stared at Sam, bottles of beer held at half mast. They saw a small, slim woman with a blonde ponytail who wore ragged jeans and worn espadrilles and had what looked like newspaper smudges on one cheek. ‘I live next door and I don’t want to listen to this sort of crap late at night, do you understand?’ she yelled, not in the least perturbed to have at least twenty curious thirty-somethings staring at her. Sam had bawled people out in public before.

‘Sorry…’ said the DJ politely. ‘We just thought it wouldn’t matter because nobody was living here yet…’

‘Nobody may have been living here but there are eight people living in the house next door, an adjoining house,’ Sam pointed out, ‘where you can hear every bass thump.’

‘So you thought you’d come in here and pull the plug instead of calmly asking us to turn the volume down, did you?’ said an amused, low voice.

Wearing jeans that were astonishingly more torn and faded than hers, jeans that clung to a long, lean body, and a white creased shirt with most of the buttons undone to reveal a hard, muscled chest, was a man who made Sam’s breath suddenly catch.

He wasn’t handsome and he wasn’t a mere twenty-something either. His face was too long, his eyes too narrow and his nose was too hooked to be model material, yet he was somehow the most incredible looking man she’d ever seen. Around her age, she guessed. Sam, who spent hours looking at pictures of male singers who sent other women into paroxysms of joy and left her utterly unmoved, could only stare.

If he could sing, she’d bet her bonus she could sell millions of albums with his face and body on the cover. Even if he couldn’t sing, come to that. Still smiling, the corners of that fabulous mobile mouth twisted up into an ironic little smile, he ambled towards her. The tawny rumpled hair and the barely buttoned shirt made it look as if he’d just dragged himself out of some bed or other. Narrowed, treacly eyes surveyed her lazily as though he was eyeing her up with the intention of dragging her back to bed with him.

Sam objected to being surveyed. She was not some bimbo: she was a managing director, a woman who made subordinates flatten themselves against the walls in fear when she was angry. She drew herself up to her full five foot four inches and prepared for battle.

‘I live next door –’ she began fiercely in her killer boardroom voice.

‘Do you?’ he interrupted, still unhurried and unperturbed. ‘Is it a nice neighbourhood?’

He stopped right in front of her. Even though he was barefoot, he still towered above her. Sam hated that. It was why she liked wearing perilously high shoes for important meetings so only the tallest people ever got to look down on her.

‘It used to be,’ she hissed. Talk about invading her personal space, his body was only a few inches away from hers. Normally, she’d have slayed him with an icy word but feeling strangely vulnerable out of her normal habitat, Sam took a step back. The wall was behind her, she couldn’t go any further. Retreating was a mistake in business, it was now too. She stuck her chin out defiantly and the hand clenching the stereo plug tightened.

‘Is this your house?’ she said, trying to stay fearsome in the face of this Adonis invasion.

He ignored the question. ‘You have something of mine,’ he said, his voice almost a drawl. He reached long arms around her, and for a second Sam’s breath stilled. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t. The charismatic, mocking face was close to hers as he reached down and she felt her stomach contract. His mouth was laughing and it was getting close to hers, so close she could feel the heat of his breath and smell a sharp citrusy tang from his warm body. Without knowing why, she closed her eyes. Then she felt the plug being pulled from her hand.

‘Mine, I think,’ said the man. With one graceful movement, he reached down, brushing against her leg, and plugged the stereo in again. He flicked a switch and loud music pumped into the room.

‘You bastard!’ screeched Sam, shocked and embarrassed. ‘You absolute bastard.’ She had to really yell now to make sure he heard her. ‘How dare you…’

‘I think you’re the one who dared,’ he said, faintly amused. ‘If you wanted us to turn the noise down, you should have asked me. I wouldn’t have refused you.’

Impotent rage surged through her and for one terrible moment, Sam forgot all about good business, about how revenge was a dish best served cold and how any corporate raider needed a cool, calm mind.

He was using his physical presence to intimidate her and she reacted in the age-old, instinctive way of a woman confronted by a larger predator. She kicked him. In the shin as hard as she could, the blunt end of her espadrille connecting with hard bone and sinew.

‘Ouch!’ His yelp of pain could only be heard by her as the current song was at an eardrum-splitting decibel level.

That got rid of the mocking smile. Sam smirked. It had hurt her toe too, mind you, but now was no time to think of her own personal pain. Those years of ballet meant she had tough little feet.

‘Who the hell do you think you are shoving your face in my personal space, you asshole!’

At that precise moment, the DJ unaccountably turned the music down. Sam’s roar reached the entire room and provoked some giggles.