A Lady Under Siege - By B.G. Preston Page 0,32

my wife’s quarters. I’ve tried to make it as comfortable as possible.”

“Have you changed the sheets since she died?”

He met her icy glare with a gentle, supplicating look. “Please don’t hate me,” he pleaded. “Go and eat what I’ve offered, then have your maid bathe you, aided by my wife’s former maidservants, whom you will find to be sweet-natured, trustworthy girls. Then sleep. Perhaps in restful sleep you’ll feel your pain subside, and your heart begin to soften.”

“He talks of softening my heart while he keeps my hands shackled,” Sylvanne said.

“Of course, of course,” said Thomas. “How thoughtless of me. But you must promise to be good.”

“You don’t know the meaning of that word,” Sylvanne snapped.

“Yes, well. Eat. Bathe. Sleep. Tomorrow is a new day.” He gestured to Kent to take her away.

17

“Hello, anybody up? Good morning! Hello!”

Meghan woke with a start on the living room couch. The room was bright with sunlight. She threw off the duvet, and staggered to her feet, bumping the coffee table she’d pulled close the night before to keep her two phones within arm’s reach. In her groggy, half-wakened state she thought at first one of them must have rung, but which? No, a voice had called, that’s what it was—she turned and could see across the kitchen counter to the back door, where Derek knelt outside, bringing his grinning, expectant face close to the broken window pane.

“Slept on the couch, did you?”

Meghan came to the kitchen in her pyjamas. “I didn’t feel comfortable sleeping upstairs, knowing the door wasn’t lockable,” she explained. “Don’t!”

It was too late—Derek had already stuck his hand through, unlocked and turned the handle, and given the door enough of a push that the wine glass, perched precariously atop the paper towel roll, teetered and crashed to the floor tiles. Derek flinched at the sound, and closed the door sheepishly. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Didn’t know you’d booby-trapped the place.”

“Jesus Christ,” Meghan answered irritably. “Don’t try to come in until I sweep up.” She rummaged in the cupboard under the sink for a dustpan and a hand broom, and set to work brushing up splinters of glass on her hands and knees. Derek watched her through the closed door. She felt his eyes on her and realised self-consciously that on all fours like this her thin pyjamas were stretched tautly across her behind. She stood and then lowered herself to a squat instead, not that it made much difference. She was still a woman in pyjamas being watched by a man through a window.

“I’ve already been to the hardware and got the glass, it opens at seven a.m. for tradesmen, you know, even on Saturdays,” Derek nattered from the sunshine of the deck. Through the missing pane she could hear him well enough. “They’re all there, too, the poor bastards, working weekends. You have such a nice little deck here. Very cozy. Great view of my place, all the prized possessions piled in my back yard. It looks a mess, but believe it or not I know where everything is. And don’t ask me if I want coffee.”

“I wasn’t about to,” Meghan grumbled. A couple of the slivers of glass were so microscopic the broom was passing over them, leaving tiny glinting irritants that stoked her annoyance.

“And don’t make any for yourself, either,” he said cheerfully. “I brought you one, and some croissants. I asked myself, does she seem like the croissant type or the Danish type? Went with the croissant—you can add jam to a croissant, but scraping the jam from a Danish, it’s just not done.”

“That’s very good thinking!” chirped Betsy, prancing into the kitchen all smiles.

“Stop right there,” Meghan ordered. “Don’t come any closer in bare feet.”

“You I got tea,” Derek said to her.

“Black tea?” Meghan frowned. “She’s too young for caffeinated drinks.”

“I bet she likes Coke,” Derek responded. “That’s got a hell of a lot more caffeine than an innocent cup of tea.”

“She doesn’t drink sodas either,” Meghan answered sharply.

“You’re always getting me in trouble with your mother,” Derek teased Betsy.

“I drink ginger ale, sometimes,” she announced.

“That’s not caffeinated,” said Meghan. She stood up, surveyed the floor, and decided it passed muster. She went to empty the dustpan with its shards of wineglass under the sink.

“How’d you break that?” Betsy asked.

“I didn’t. He did,” said Meghan curtly. At the door she unknotted and removed the rope she’d strung the night before, her last line of defence. She opened the door and let him in. He