The Christmas Party by Karen Swan

Author:Karen Swan [Swan, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2019-10-30T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

‘Here, take my arm.’ Ottie held out her arm and braced to take his weight. Ben was hobbling around at a decent pace on the crutches, but any steps at all were problematic when he couldn’t bend his knee.

She heard him wince as he tried to swing his leg over the step. Her house might be built on one level but that level still happened to be three steps higher than the garden path.

‘You need to lean on me,’ she said, stepping in closer and forcing him to put one arm over her shoulders. She felt his weight reluctantly bear downwards as together they struggled up the steps and into the house. She sensed he wasn’t one for accepting help gladly.

‘Well, here we are . . . home sweet home,’ she said a few moments later, closing the door behind them, faintly embarrassed by the spartan Scandi-esque decor as he stopped to take in his new address for the next couple of weeks. Was it okay, she wondered, her gaze sweeping afresh over the black-stained elm floorboards and double-height plain white walls, the eighteenth-century calico chairs she had yet to upholster (she had done a course at the sixth form college in Gallaloe), the ill-advised white linen sofa she had bought in a sale and which had been permanently shrouded ever since with a black throw.

She didn’t know what he was used to in New York – a Manhattan penthouse bachelor pad? A rent-controlled brownstone? A picket-fenced cottage in the suburbs? An industrial loft in SoHo? She knew nothing about him at all. Not for the first time she wearied at the impulse that had propelled her into offering up her home to a complete stranger.

On the other hand, she reminded herself, he’d spent a night with a broken leg and arm on an exposed cliff edge in a storm thanks to her. She figured she owed him.

‘That is one hell of a view,’ he said, his eyes immediately fastening on the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that gave onto the crescent beach and the purple hills further down the coast. The sky was a heavy, moody blue today, the sea rolling into the beach in big froth-topped waves, a lone windsurfer in full neoprene-hooded body-kit cutting across the bay at speed.

‘Thank you. I like it.’

Dropping his arm off her shoulder, he hobbled forwards, throwing a barely curious glance over the small all-white L-shaped open-plan kitchen on the right-hand side, heading for the picture window.

‘The bedroom’s just off to the right there,’ she said as he passed by the bedroom door and he paused to look in from afar. The black metal frame of her contemporary four-poster could be seen through the doorway, the sheepskin rug on the floor straightened, all her worn clothes that usually spent three weeks draped over the calico chair before making it to the laundry now washed and pushed away again.

He twisted back to look at her. ‘Look, Ottie, I know you said I could take your room, and I accepted purely to get the consultant off my back but I can’t accept that.

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