Mr. Park Lane (The Mister)

I guess I could get my Genius Time after a trip to the supermarket. It would mean I could carry back what Hartford bought and then leave her to it and shut the door. I’d probably discover that the frisson of . . . whatever I’d felt, and the deep stir of my gut when I’d picked her up at the airport, had dissipated. A shopping trip with Hartford would clear my head, allow me to focus my thoughts on my business.

“You ready?” Hartford poked her head around my door.

“You know where you’re headed?”

“Of course. But tell me you know where your local supermarket is.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. She liked to prod, but in a way that was . . . charming almost. “There’s a Waitrose just around the corner.”

“Then we’ll head there.” She grinned at me as if I were her student and I’d unexpectedly given her the correct answer to a question.

As we stepped into the London drizzle, she took a deep breath in. I forced myself to glance away from her rising chest. Had she always had a chest like that? “I’d forgotten what rain felt like.”

“London’s different to Yemen, I imagine.” I led us to the crossing.

“Couldn’t be much more different.” She turned her head to look back on the hotel residences. “We slept under canvass in a compound, obviously.”

“A compound?”

Hartford expertly navigated the crossings and pavements like she’d always had her leg in plaster. My mother might have thought she needed help to settle in, but she was wrong. She didn’t need anyone’s help to do anything by the looks of things. “Like a little village ringfenced by security where we could move freely without . . . worrying. It’s where we were safe.”

“And you didn’t leave that compound, apart to go to the hospital?” It must have been like living in a prison. I couldn’t imagine living like that for a week, let alone a year.

“Sometimes to collect supplies or help a child who’d been injured and couldn’t be brought to the hospital. But not on our own.”

She’d basically been putting aside her safety and comfort to look after people. That was so . . . admirable. “So why are you back?”

She nodded at her leg.

“Was that, like, a bullet or something?”

She snorted, almost as if she was disappointed. “No. I tripped, but my leg must have been weak from the first time I broke it. This time wasn’t so bad.”

I would have thought tripping was better than being shot, but maybe I didn’t understand the nuances. “Mum said you have a job starting here. So, you’re back to stay?”

“Yes. Starts next week. I’ll be a little hampered from a practical perspective, because . . . you know, the leg. But I’ll figure it out. I always do.”

“You looking forward to it?”

She nodded and glanced away, as if not entirely sure. “It will be a change.”

Hardly an enthusiastic response. At my raised eyebrows, she continued.

“It will help my specialty, I think. I just . . . you know, I just enjoyed Medicines Sans Frontiers for the last few years. You’re so all-in, you know? In a place like London, I’m not sure how . . . busy I’m going to be.” Her voice flattened like it had been sat on.

“People need medical attention in London.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, I didn’t have any choice. I had to come back and it’s a good hospital. I have a lot to be thankful for. My boss is like The Guy in pediatric medicine, so I’m bound to learn a lot, if nothing else.”

I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so unhappy to be back in London, the best city in the world—and in a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park no less. But her obvious disappointment tugged at something inside me and I wanted to make it right.

“Give yourself a chance. You might love it here, sleeping under Egyptian cotton and cashmere.”

She laughed and her nose wrinkled in a way I’d never noticed when she was younger. I had the urge to circle her waist and pull her closer so I could examine the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks. I wanted to make her feel that everything was going to be okay.

Why had I agreed to this shopping trip?

* * *

“This is the best bit,” she said as I set the bags on the side. “Unpacking it all. Seeing what you’ve bought.”

“I’d find that an easier concept to grasp if we’d come back from Hermès, not Waitrose.”

She grinned at me and I tried to tell myself it didn’t feel good to make her smile.

“Grab a potato peeler and get started,” she said. “And don’t give me that I don’t know how to use a potato peeler. I’ve eaten your mother’s apple pie; I know you can peel.”

She was right, I’d been roped in to peeling duties as a kid more often than I cared to remember. “It’s been a while. Remind me again why we can’t just order something in? That way, I don’t have to peel anything. And we would have had the entire morning to do something more exciting than shop.”