Read Online The Last Kolovsky Playboy by Carol Marinelli - Free Book Online Page A

door.
    ‘My leg…’
    She could see the sweat beading on his forehead as he limped over the threshold—which told her of the pain he was in, because this week he had hidden his limp so well. ‘Have you had a pill?’ She had never seen him like this. Not since the early days at the hospital, when they had been trying to get his pain medication under control. ‘Maybe you need an injection?’
    ‘I’ve stopped taking anything!’ he gasped.
    He was so pale beneath his tan she thought he might pass out.
    ‘You’re supposed to be on a reducing dose.’
    ‘I have reduced—I’ve stopped completely.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Today.’
    ‘Aleksi!’ She was truly horrified. ‘They said you had to reduce slowly—that it would be months before you could manage without them. You can’t just stop like that.’
    ‘Well, I just did.’ Aleksi said. ‘I need to think straight.’
    ‘You can’t think straight if you’re in pain!’ Kate insisted.
    ‘Listen!’ His hand closed around her wrist, his voice urgent. ‘Listen to me. Since the accident I have not been able to think straight…’
    ‘That’s to be expected.’
    ‘Exactly.’ His eyes were grey, the whites bloodshot, and she had never seen him look more ill. ‘They do not want me to think straight. Since that new doctor, always there are more pills…’
    ‘He’s the best,’ Kate insisted. ‘Your mother researched…’ Her voice trailed off—surely Nina wouldn’t stoop that low? But from the way she was acting now, maybe she could.
    ‘I am going back under the care of the hospital. I have an appointment on Monday. Once I can think, once I am off this medication, I will get them to manage things—not a doctor of my mother’s choosing.’ He looked over to her, and she could see pain there that was so much more than physical. ‘You must think I’m being completely paranoid…’
    She was silent for the longest time before she spoke. ‘Regretfully, no.’ She thought a moment longer. ‘I think maybe we’re both being paranoid but, yes, I can see you don’t trust her.’
    ‘If I can get through tonight then I can think straight…’
    That much she understood.
    There was still so much she didn’t.
    It should have been uncomfortable—awkward, perhaps, but when he was here in her home. It wasn’t.
    Oh he was scathing and loathsome and everything Aleksi, yet he travelled lighter here—even if he was in pain, it was as if all his baggage had been checked and left at the door.
    ‘How,’ he said, standing at the bathroom door, ‘can you lose a plug?’
    She’d suggested a bath and, given he’d probablynever run one in his life, for tonight she’d made allowances and offered to run it for him. Except she couldn’t find the plug!
    ‘Maybe Georgie…’ Kate started. But, no, she’d had a bath herself tonight.
    ‘Retrace your footsteps!’ was his most unhelpful suggestion.
    ‘What about a shower?’
    ‘You’ve just talked me into a bath, Kate,’ Aleksi said. ‘You spent the last ten minutes telling me how it would relax me, how—’
    ‘Here!’ The plug was in one of its regular hiding places—between the pages of a book she’d been reading—and of course he didn’t let her get away with it that easily. As she put in the plug and turned on the taps, having checked for towels and the like, she tried to beat a hasty retreat. But Aleksi blocked the door, holding out his hand and taking the novel from her reluctant hands.
    ‘I might like to read in the bath too,’ he told her.
    He must, because he was gone for an age.
    She didn’t really know what he was doing here—what it was that made him come. She just knew that he did.
    Knew, somehow, that to question him would close the tiny door that occasionally opened between them.
    The suave, sophisticated thing to do would be not to answer the door.
    To pretend perhaps that she was out.
    But she was in.
    Definitely in to Aleksi.
    She had a life.
    A career.
    A family.
    But he was her