‘You know, I’ve always wanted to go it alone. I admire you.’
There was nothing to admire, Carrie thought, maintaining her upbeat expression. ‘I’ll let you know how it goes.’
As the flight attendant hurried away Carrie wondered if anything could blunt the passion she felt for Nico and allow her to think clearly. He didn’t make it easy. ‘Not yet, mouse, I set the pace…’ That was what he had said to her at the party and she had been happy to fall into line. All that had to change now. No one challenged Nico, but she would now for the sake of their child.
It wasn’t as if she was unprepared. She had played the scene where she told him about their baby over and over again in her head, preparing for rejection. She had even drafted the accusations for him: she should have been more responsible; she should have taken precautions; she should have been on the pill at the very least. Condoms? Condoms took a degree of forward thinking and there had been no time for that….
Freeing her seat belt and standing up, Carrie eased her way into the packed aisle. As she waited for the line to move forward a woman in front of her turned and said, ‘Perfect, isn’t it?’
Nico had said she was perfect….
No one had a door into her thoughts, Carrie told herself firmly. The woman was only making a comment about the sun-drenched landscape as they waited to disembark. ‘Yes, perfect,’ she agreed pleasantly, trying to blank the precise moment Nico had said that to her. But it was too late. She was already remembering Nico releasing the clasp on his jeans, lowering the zipper and freeing himself. Helping her to lift her legs and lock them around his waist, he’d leaned over her, pressed her knees back and said, ‘Perfect…’
Her cheeks were on fire as she forced her thoughts back onto a practical track. It was important to keep her wits about her. She had nowhere to stay and very little money…So she would just have to take it one step at a time, Carrie reasoned calmly. First, she would find a bed for the night and then she would find Nico.
Doubt hit her again as she stepped onto the tarmac. As she looked around and inhaled the warm, spicy air she could tell that Niroli was even more glamorous and exclusive than she had thought. Even the airport officials were elegant. She felt pallid and shabby by comparison, just as she had on the night of the party….
Staring at her face in the bathroom mirror after they’d made love she had compared herself to the other women at the party and known she was plain. Her glorious hair was a bad joke that had landed on the wrong head. Just like one of the paper dolls she had played with as a child she was all jumbled up—the wrong eyes in the wrong face on the wrong body. It wasn’t possible that Nico would want her for herself. Nico had wanted sex, and that was all. She had lost her virginity to a man who treated sex like a fast-food meal and used her like a disposable container.
And she was totally innocent of course, Carrie thought dryly, glancing up as she tried to orientate herself and search for some signs to Baggage Reclaim. She had encouraged Nico with everything she’d had, and, unsurprisingly, he had given in without a fight. The moment he had cupped her buttocks in his work-roughened hands was something she would never forget. She had rubbed herself against him, loving the sensation and knowing that for all his power in the boardroom Nico was a man who used physical strength as well as brainpower on-site. One of his greatest pleasures, he had confessed during a meeting where she had been taking notes, was to see his designs rise from the paper and take three-dimensional shape. He liked to see, touch, feel and suck everything he could out of each new experience.
She had always believed this thoroughness accounted for his success; she knew it made him a fantastic lover. She had been frantic by the time he had moved lightly back and forth and, when he had allowed the tip to catch inside her, it had shot the breath from her lungs like a punch. But he had pulled back before she’d had chance to close around him, by which time her body had been liquid fire. Working her nails cruelly into his bunched-up muscles, she had begged him, ‘Nico, please…’
‘Please, what?’
‘You know what I want….’
‘Do I?’ He had seemed amused, and she’d gone way too far to pull back.
Face it, Carrie, you didn’t want to pull back.
Carrie tried not to smile as she heaved her suitcase off the carousel, but it wasn’t easy when she remembered the next time she had bucked towards him Nico had taken her deep.
Thinking about Nico was one way to get through the tedium of airport formalities, Carrie reflected, responding to a prompt to move forward in the queue. Handing over her passport, she smiled thinly in response to the immigration official’s well-mannered scrutiny. Her mood had flattened, tiredness, maybe, or perhaps she had just reached the point in her reminiscences where it had all gone wrong. It had happened when Nico had said he loved her, because what he had actually said was, ‘I love my mouse.’ By reducing her to a cartoon image, Carrie guessed, Nico found it easier to brush her off. He didn’t love Carrie Evans, he loved the compliant mouse she had allowed him to think her.