Page 37 of Strictly Business

‘Take as long as you need,’ Liam told her and then he grabbed his suit jacket from its peg near the door and shrugged it on as he went out to greet Mr. Toh.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ALICE had never been so glad to reach the end of the working week.

Friday afternoon. She could scurry home and hide.

She could be pathetic and lonely and no one would notice.

Keeping up appearances in the office, pretending a nonchalance she didn’t feel had nearly killed her, but now she could stop pretending that she didn’t care what Liam was doing in Sydney, who he was with, or that he hadn’t contacted her. She’d suffered two weeks of sleepless nights and stressful days – no wonder she felt tired, weepy and sick in the stomach whenever she thought about food.

As she parked her car in the garage, she wondered if she should try to drag herself out somewhere tonight, to a movie perhaps. If she really exhausted herself she might sleep at last. She should make an effort to dosomething.

She grabbed her briefcase from the passenger’s seat, locked the car and went to check the mailbox. Two envelopes with windows. Nothing personal, just bills. Terrific.

She was halfway up the path to her front door when a van pulled up, a courier express delivery van, and the driver was looking directly at her.

Intensely curious, she waited and watched him get out, extract a largish parcel from the back of the van and begin to walk towards her.

‘I have a delivery for –’ he squinted to read the name on the address ‘—Alice Madigan.’

‘That’s me,’ she said and she realised she was trembling. How silly, but she’d seen a Sydney post mark.

Her heart kept up a wild kind of skipping as she signed for the parcel, thanked the delivery man and carried the box into the house. She set it on the kitchen counter and found a sharp knife to cut through the tape and she seemed to take ages to undo the packaging and the masses of bubble wrap, but at last the contents were revealed.

A beautiful glass bowl. It was gorgeous. A wave of shimmering ocean green was magically suspended within curved, clear glass. Holding it up to the light, she was overawed by its beauty and craftsmanship. It had to be terribly expensive.

A little card inside explained that the glass was hand-blown by artisans from Murano, which she knew was a famous island off the coast of Venice. She searched for a signature, turned the card over and found a message carefully printed in black ink.Missing you like crazy.

Oh, wow.

She felt a wave of giddiness, or was that happiness? Carefully she set the bowl on the counter.

Liam.

Liam was missing her.

How fantastic. But how confusing, too. How could he take the time to go shopping for a gift when he didn’t have time to phone her?

No. She wasn’t going to over-analyse this. Liam was thinking of her and he’d sent her a beautiful gift. Just because he’d been gone for...

Feeling a sudden need to count the days, she looked up at the calendar on her kitchen wall and then she frowned.

No.

She must be mistaken. Leaning closer, she studied the dates more carefully, flipped back to the red dot marked on the previous month and counted forward again.

That was odd. Her period had been due three days ago. She’d been so distracted she hadn’t noticed. But she must have miscalculated. Perhaps she’d marked the wrong day last month. She was never late. She knewthatfor sure. She’d spent years watching and waiting and her body was like clockwork. Never once had she been more than a day late.

She was quite confident that her period was on its way. She had all the usual premenstrual symptoms. In fact she’d been more tired and tender and stressed out than ever this week.

She looked again at the bowl – so beautiful and vivid, as if a living piece of ocean had been captured and imprisoned in glass.

How silly she’d been to fuss about Liam’s absence. No doubt the stress had thrown her hormones out of whack. Now she could calm down.

What she needed was an early night. She would wake up in the morning and her period would arrive and her life would carry on in its usual, predictable rhythm.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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