International Player
Louise Bay
One
Truly
If getting a kick from solving spreadsheet errors was wrong, I didn’t want to be right. I lived for this stuff. My fingers didn’t work as quickly as I wanted them to, and the numbers on my screen seemed to appear in slow motion. Clicking back to the original cell on my spreadsheet, the totals now balanced. A simple blunder made by one of my junior team members had just taken me an hour to fix. And I’d loved every minute of it—the challenge of turning disorder into order and then the neat numbers that now lined up. “Thank you,” I said to myself, raising my hands in the air as if taking in applause from a crowd.
“You know you’re a total geek, right?” my twin sister, Abi, asked from the doorway of my office.
I dropped my hands. “Jesus, how long have you been standing there watching me like a complete weirdo-stalker?”
“Actually, I said your name several times but you were in some geeky trance.” Abigail kicked my office door closed behind her then stalked toward my desk, sliding one of the two salad boxes she was holding toward me. “I brought you lunch. I figured we could eat together.”
I saved my now-accurate spreadsheet. “Since when are you free for lunch? Don’t you have some donor to schmooze?” While I was all numbers and back-office stuff, Abigail was in charge of bringing in the money to the charitable foundation that my mother founded nearly forty years ago. I called her Chief Schmoozer or Director of Arse Kissing. She preferred CEO. Whatever.
“Not today, little sister.” Abigail had been born six and a half minutes ahead of me and she never let me forget it. “Today, I get to have lunch with you.” She plonked herself down on the chair in front of my desk, and from her handbag, she pulled out two drinks, her phone, and cutlery wrapped in napkins, then set them between us.
“Are you moving in?” I sighed. Lunch with Abigail was a complete time suck. I had a thousand things to do. “I’m really busy. I’m way behind getting the monthly reporting finished off and—”
“Thirty minutes, Truly.” She emptied a pot of dressing onto her salad and began to stir. “You have to eat, and it will do you good to have a break. I keep telling you that you need more balance.”
I groaned and grabbed the salad. I clearly wasn’t getting rid of her. “Should you be having dressing on your salad?” I asked as I emptied my pot onto the chicken, herb, and cucumber bowl she’d brought me.
“Don’t you start too. Rob has already turned into the food police. And the exercise police. And the breathing-in-and-out police.”
I winced. “Well, it’s understandable—it’s your first baby. It’s nice that he’s being protective.”
“As if I’m likely to be reckless. It’s not like he wants this kid more than I do. I swear, it’s like he’s expecting me to announce that I’m going to sign up for a bungee jump or something.”
“You should leave some brochures around the house, just to mess with him.”
“If it wasn’t likely to bring on a stroke, I might. Speaking of extreme sports, I have some interesting news.”
I poked my fork into my salad. “About extreme sports?” The Harbury Foundation often had people fundraising throughout the UK by participating in sponsored sky dives or abseiling or other crazy stuff people were prepared to donate to.
“Kinda. Rob spoke to Noah last night.”
Noah. Blood pounded in my ears, and I was sure if I glanced down, I’d see my heart beating out of my chest. I kept my chewing constant, as if the sound of his name had no effect on me whatsoever.
Abigail paused to finish her mouthful of food. I willed her to get on with it. To tell me whatever it was she didn’t want to say about her husband’s best friend.
“He’s moving back.”
I swallowed before my throat closed up and I choked to death on salad.
“Rob told him he can stay with us for a few weeks while he finds a flat—the last thing I need is a houseguest when I’m as big as a whale and working twenty hours a day trying to get things ready for when I go on maternity leave.”
I closed the lid on my lunch, my appetite dead, and dumped it into the bin beside me. “That’s not very considerate of him. Did you tell him no?”
“He knows I’m not happy. He didn’t get any last night.”
I hadn’t seen Noah Jensen for four years, two months, and three weeks—not that I was counting.
“You used to be good friends with him, right?” Abi asked.
Good friends. Yeah. That’s what we’d been. I’d been closer to him than any man I’d ever known, despite never having slept with him. I’d never told Abi about my crush on him. It felt silly and childish to long for someone so hopelessly out of my reach. I knew she suspected—she’d made a few comments about the time we spent together and the fact that we were both single. But I’d always just ignored her. “I doubt he even remembers my name, and I’ve forgotten what he looks like.” That wasn’t entirely true. Or even a little bit true. Noah was the best-looking man I’d ever laid eyes on. A six-foot-four Nordic god with a square jaw and eyes as blue as the ocean.
He looked like he belonged with my sister.
Despite being twins, Abigail and I were complete opposites. She worked hard but made it look easy. Was always perfectly put together but never seemed like she tried. With shiny, golden-blonde locks, she took after our mother, while I’d inherited my unruly dark hair from my father. It wasn’t straight enough to be sleek or curly enough to be interesting. Abigail’s pale skin and blue eyes gave her a captivating, regal air. My amber eyes and unremarkable coloring helped me melt into the background. She was married. I was terminally single. But despite our differences, we’d always been close. The one thing we had in common apart from DNA was our shared commitment to the foundation.