Matilda Next Door - Kelly Hunter Page 0,7
bright Aussie sunshine and, most of all, Tilly.
Chapter Two
The trouble with Henry Church was that in spite of his towering intellect, he was still three-quarters clueless when it came to knowing and understanding what people wanted from him. Like conversation—conversation would have been good, thought Tilly with a sigh as she sat at the airport and waited to board the biggest plane she’d ever seen.
She’d checked her luggage hours earlier, wincing as they’d asked if she had a heavy coat she could take out and carry with her, which she didn’t. But she did her best to add the extra weight from her luggage onto her person, and wore the glares of the people behind her in the line with only slightly wilting shoulders. By the time the counter staff had slapped a heavy sticker on her luggage and waved it and her through, she was dressed for Antarctica and carrying an extra pair of shoes in a handbag that wasn’t built to carry much more than a handkerchief, a pair of sunglasses and a purse.
But she was through, passport and boarding pass in hand, sunglasses on head, string bag full of water and chewing gum, hand lotion, food magazine, neck pillow and several electrical adaptors for converting Australian power cords to UK ones. Couldn’t have too many of those.
The plane needed to board soon, otherwise she’d be tempted to go back to the glittering, hideously expensive electronics counter for the noise-cancelling headphones she definitely didn’t need to spend her hard-earned money on. And then she boarded, and settled, and they were off and not even the newness of air travel and films she’d never seen before could keep the monotony at bay for long.
Thirteen hours and a stopover in a Middle Eastern country’s airport terminal, which was even more glittery and expensive than the terminal in Melbourne. Twenty-four dollars for a small tray of Persian dates—although those were worth every cent. Twelve dollars for warm coffee and stale pastry.
Eleven hours on a different plane, and then Heathrow.
Dear Lord, Heathrow.
Where the lost luggage counter had been almost as hard to find as her lost luggage, which still hadn’t been found, and now she was on a train heading for Trafalgar Square, spare shoes sticking out of her handbag, ridiculous neck pillow and food bags in the string bag on her arm—and the only positive she could think of was that at least she didn’t have her extra-heavy suitcase in tow, because there was hardly enough room for all the people jammed onto the train, let alone luggage.
Thirty-six hours, no sleep, no luggage, and one slightly bewildered doorman later, Tilly let herself into Henry’s apartment—sorry, flat—door.
And promptly forgot to unarm his very expensive, very loud security system.
By the time she’d raced back and hastily tapped the passcode into the console, half the people in the building probably thought it was on fire. She could just imagine doorman Len’s face. He wasn’t going to need to have gone through school with her in order to start calling her names.
Just a mistake, Tilly. No damage done.
She could hear her mother’s words in her ear and almost taste her father’s steadfast support for the daughter who rarely got anything right the first time around.
But she was here now, deep breaths, and pictures hadn’t done Henry’s living room or his spotless kitchen justice. She set her string bag and handbag on the kitchen counter, immediately rendering the space not so spotless anymore, and plugged her flat phone with its brand-new power adaptor into a socket. Henry had made her promise to go into a phone shop and get a local SIM card for it as soon as she possibly could, but surely one day without wouldn’t hurt? He’d also been the one to tell her to always carry the charger in the same carry bag with the phone, so at least she’d done that right.
She didn’t phone home, the time zone calendar she’d printed out to pin on a wall somewhere suggested her parents would be asleep. Instead, as promised, she texted that she had arrived. She added enough exclamation marks to make up for the missing luggage, then turned the central heating on, and then took a long, luxurious shower in the most overdesigned black-on-black bathroom she’d ever seen. Three different kinds of mood lighting in the bathroom—what was that about? And showerheads for two in the one super-wide cubicle? And handrails in the strangest of places? Either Henry had a kinky streak or