Baby on Loan. Liz Fielding
would wake Bertie and frighten Mao and maybe the burglar wouldn’t run away. Maybe he’d come looking for her in order to shut her up. Which thought was sufficient to put a hold on screaming. For the moment.
It would have to be option number three, then. The barricade.
She put the cat down and looked around. Memory and the light spilling in from the landing suggested that the furniture was of the kind that required a minimum of three heavily muscled men to shift. With a fourth directing operations. Except for Bertie’s lightweight travelling cot, of course. Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t stop a determined flea, Bertie was in it. Asleep. And no one was going to wake up Bertie if she could help it.
But any burglar worth his salt would certainly come upstairs looking for jewellery and money.
It was time for option four. No! Not screaming! And maybe not confronting the villain; she preferred to remain defensive if at all possible. What she needed, then, was something with which to defend herself. And Bertie. And, since he was her responsibility too, Mao.
She swallowed. And if there was more than one of them?
Refusing to think about it, she opened the wardrobe door and peered into the dark interior, desperate for inspiration. She’d been too busy to unpack and now she discovered it was full of dark, heavy clothes. Really, Carrie might have emptied the wardrobe of her gothic junk before she let the place…
She didn’t have time to worry about it. What she needed right now was a sharply pointed umbrella, or… Something hard and heavy fell out and landed painfully on her toes. She bit back a yell of pain and bent to pick up the object.
It was a cricket bat. Brilliant. Odd—she didn’t quite see Carenza leading out the England ladies’ cricket team—but brilliant. She seized it and immediately felt more in control. Hefting it defensively in her hand, she crossed to the door, opened it a little wider in order to listen.
Before she could stop him, Mao shot through the gap.
Patrick opened the fridge. On the shelf inside the door, there was an open carton of milk; he sniffed it cautiously. It was fresh. He replaced it and explored further.
He took out a dish, uncovered it. It appeared to be mashed up fish. Unimpressed by Carenza’s culinary skills, he rejected it, but as he opened a box of eggs something soft and warm brushed against his ankles.
Unnerved, he stepped back. The creature let out a banshee wail as he stepped on its tail, before tangling itself between his legs as it tried to escape.
Off balance and uncertain where he could safely put his feet, Patrick made a grab for the first thing that came to hand.
It was the shelf inside the fridge door.
It took his weight for a tantalising millisecond during which he thought he’d got away with it. Then, as shelf and door parted company, milk and moulded plastic succumbed to gravity and hit the floor. Patrick and the eggs were delayed slightly, while his head bounced off the edge of the work surface.
Jessie, dithering behind the bedroom door and wondering whether in fact the bat was such a good idea after all—she might just be handing the burglar a weapon—heard Mao’s howl of outrage, swiftly followed by a horrendous crash.
Had the burglar killed the cat? Had the cat killed the burglar? Whatever was going on, it was clear that she could no longer hide upstairs. With the cricket bat raised shakily before her, she advanced slowly down the stairs and approached the kitchen with caution.
She’d been too tired to bother with clearing up before she’d fallen into bed, but, even so, the scene that met her gaze was a shock. Smashed eggs, milk spreading to form a small lake, a lake at which a perfectly content Mao was busy lapping, and in the middle of it all, flat on his back, blood oozing from a wound on his forehead, lay a man who seemed to fill all the available space. A man dressed from head to toe in burglar-black. Black chinos, a black shirt, sleeves rolled back to reveal thickly muscled forearms.
He was tall and strong and he would have disarmed her without raising a sweat.
Fortunately, he was unconscious.
Or maybe not. Even as she stood there, congratulating herself on the fact, he groaned and opened his eyes. Jessie grasped the bat tightly, swallowed nervously and croaked, ‘Don’t move!’
Patrick stared up at the ceiling. The kitchen ceiling. He was lying on the kitchen floor, in a very cold puddle, and his head felt as if it was about to fall off. And there was a wild-haired, semi-naked woman wearing spectacles two sizes too big for her, threatening him with his own cricket bat. Had she hit him with it? He began to raise his hand to his head in order to assess the damage.
‘Don’t move!’ she repeated.
The words, undoubtedly meant to be threatening—although the effect was considerably diminished by the nervous wobble in her voice—were unnecessary. He had no desire to move. He just wanted to close his eyes and hope that when he opened them again all this would have gone away.
He tried it.
His eyes closed again. Jessie ventured a step nearer. He looked horribly pale and the gash on his forehead looked nasty. Oh, good grief, he was going to die. He was going to die and she’d get the blame and go to jail. That was the way it was. You read about it in the papers all the time. Burglar breaks in, burglar dies, innocent householder goes to jail.
Kevin and Faye would be sorry then…
She gasped. What on earth was she thinking of? He might have broken in, but the man clearly needed her help. She dropped the bat and paddled barefoot through the lake of cold milk to his side.
Stretched out on the kitchen floor he seemed very large, very threatening. Even unconscious he looked very dangerous. But she couldn’t just leave him there. Grabbing a clean bib from the work surface, she knelt beside him and dabbed, tentatively, at the blood oozing from the wound on his forehead, forgetting her fear in her concern.
His eyes opened with an immediacy that suggested he hadn’t been as far out of it as she’d thought, and he grabbed at her wrist. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he demanded.
‘Jessie,’ she replied instantly, not wanting to irritate him in any way. ‘My name’s Jessie. How do you feel?’ She put real warmth into her voice. She really wanted him to know that she wasn’t going to do anything bad…
‘How do I look?’ he countered.
He certainly didn’t look good. Apart from the pallor, made worse by the dark shadow of a day-old beard, there was the blood which still hadn’t stopped oozing. She put her fingers against his throat to check his pulse. It seemed the right thing to do, although she wasn’t sure why because she could see for herself that he wasn’t dead.
His skin was warm and smooth beneath her fingers, his pulse reassuringly strong. ‘Well?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Will I live?’
‘I th-th-think so.’
‘I’d be happier if you could sound a little more convincing.’
He didn’t sound like a burglar. But then, what did she know? ‘Well…’ she began. Then something about the sardonic twist of his mouth alerted her to the fact that he wasn’t being entirely serious.
‘I won’t struggle if you think I need the kiss of life,’ he said, confirming her worst suspicions.
For a moment she was tempted. He might have broken in, but if he’d been the man in black leaving a box of chocolates she had the feeling any woman would be left wearing a smile. Maybe she should offer to kiss him better…
No! For heaven’s sake, would she never learn?
And if he was well enough to joke, he was probably capable of getting up and…and maybe it would be better not to think about what he was capable of doing. Actually, she realised, as her brain stopped freewheeling and finally clicked into gear, she should stop wasting time and call the police and an ambulance.