Walking in Darkness by Charlotte Lamb

was sure it had been coolly deliberate. She hadn’t heard or felt anyone stumble into her. There had just been that hand coming out of nowhere. Someone had tried to kill her, and there had to be a reason. The more she thought about it, the more she had to face the fact that nobody else had a notive – it had to be Don Gowrie who wanted her dead. What on earth was she to do? He had tried, and failed – he would try again.
    Her mouth dry, her skin sweating, she desperately tried to work out what to do. She could ask Vladimir to get her out of New York, send her back to London . . . anywhere, out of Gowrie’s way.
    Oh, but how could she just turn her back on something that meant so much? She had made promises, promises she had to keep. Emotion choked her. She was trapped by her feelings; however risky it was, she couldn’t turn her back.
    You couldn’t turn your back on love. But oh, why did love have to hurt so much?
    It should be warm and gentle. It shouldn’t drive spikes into your heart whenever you thought about it.
    She tried to think of something else . . . home, she thought, aching with longing; she wished she was back home, not in Prague but in her childhood home, but she could never go back there now because it no longer existed as it had in her earliest memories. The golden glow which had lit it in her first years had gone now.
    When she was little the village had always seemed to be bathed in sunshine. She remembered sharp vignettes of Christmas and skating on the village pond, but mostly she remembered May, her favourite time of year, the hedges white with hawthorn in flower, purple lilac out in all the gardens, orchards white with cherry and plum trees in frothy bridal blossom. She had often lain on her back on the grass under them and stared at the blue May sky through their foaming branches.
    How long ago it seemed, those childhood years, before her mother married again, while there were just the two of them, with their memories of the dead, of Papa and Anya, a gentle grief which was part of everyday life somehow and did not make her sad so much as tie her to that place, that time, woven into her heart’s fibres. Then her mother married Franz and everything altered. After him came the boys, her half-brothers, who took all her mother’s attention. Sophie could no longer go out and play – she was needed at home, expected to help with the housework, help look after the babies; she was no longer a child herself. Oh, she loved them. How could she help it when she had nursed them, fed them, changed them, cared for them? She was their second mother and she missed them – but their arrival had shut her off from her childhood, all the same.
    Lost in her memories of home, she jumped in shock as the door of her room opened and Steve Colbourne walked in.
    Sophie was staggered to see him. What was he doing here? Had he been to her apartment? Why? What was he up to? Questions buzzed in her head like bluebottles shut up in a room, driving her crazy. Why had he made a dead set at her in the conference? Why had he come rushing over after she asked her question? Why had he been so insistent about taking her for a drink, why had he been so curious about her, asked her all those questions?
    A nerve jumped in her cheek. What if . . . what if he . . . he seemed to know so much about Don Gowrie, he admitted to having known him for years – could he have been the man behind her in the subway? Had he been the one who pushed her?
    Oh, for heaven’s sake, she told herself – are you going crazy now? Of course it wasn’t him – does he look like the sort of guy who kills people?
    He had a tough face, but there was an honesty there too, and a very human warmth when his eyes smiled or glinted with amusement. She couldn’t help liking him, and she couldn’t believe you wouldn’t know, by pure instinct, if someone was murderous. She couldn’t believe, either, that a man who had already tried to kill you wouldn’t betray it,