Sleeping with the Soldier. Charlotte Phillips

she marched back down the hallway to the front door.

      ‘Yeah, yeah. I bet that’s what they all say!’ she yelled back over her shoulder.

      He heard her high-heeled shoes clattering down the stairs as she made a swift exit. He turned back to his room, took in the clutter of girly clothing and breathed in the head-reeling scent of roses.

      He’d had enough trouble sleeping when the room was the epitome of calm and orderliness. How the hell was he meant to manage now?

      Lara woke to the muffled banging of knuckles on a door and floundered for a moment to get her bearings in the dark. She felt vaguely closed in.

      It came slowly back to her overtired brain.

      Flooded studio. Damaged stock. Poppy’s boxroom.

      The knocking continued and she wondered vaguely if it was the front door. Sex-god Alex must have locked himself out again. There was a hint of self-righteous satisfaction in that thought, especially after what she’d learned this afternoon from the emergency plumber who’d investigated the root cause of her flooded flat. A ten-minute conversation had made it clear the flood problem went a lot deeper than a need for a new washer. The old fire station might have had a modern makeover when it was converted to flats but it turned out the glossy living space papered over some serious cracks in the original pipe network. It all made perfect sense now. The pipes servicing her flat were clearly linked to those above and below, hence the insane racket from Alex’s bedroom activities travelling down so effectively to her bedroom underneath.

      In fact, according to the plumber, the pipework showed signs of recent stress—clearly this was what had caused the plumbing to give up the ghost. So not only was her lack of sleep down to Poppy’s sex-crazed brother, but now the flooding of her flat could be attributed to him too. He was fast becoming her least favourite person and therefore any initial guilt she might have felt about imposing on him by using his bedroom to store her stuff had been very easily suppressed.

      The brief temptation to just let him knock all night was trumped by the desire to tell him exactly what she thought of his nocturnal activities, the damage of which had now surpassed simple noise pollution. She threw the covers back and grabbed her robe from the back of the door.

      Turned out the knocking was coming from inside the flat. She’d been right about one thing though: it was Alex again.

      ‘Is no disruption too inconsiderate for you?’ she snapped. He jumped and turned to look at her. She had a mad sense of déjà vu at the sight of him with upraised knuckles hammering on Poppy’s bedroom door. Except that this time he was fully dressed. The dark blue shirt made his eyes look almost slate in the dim hallway light and her stomach gave an unexpected flip.

      The ability to speak momentarily disappeared because it felt as if his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Lara’s soft blond hair lay in messy bed-head waves over her shoulders. She wore a pink silk dressing gown, with wide sleeves, that ended a good couple of inches above her knees. His eyes dipped to her legs before he could stop them. The slight sheen of the silk against her skin seemed to give it a porcelain quality and the pink colour of the gown picked out the soft fullness of her mouth. He floundered for speech as the unexplained transformation of his bedroom made sudden sense. Was she somehow staying here? Why the hell would she be doing that when she had her own perfectly good bedroom down one flight of stairs?

      The door clicked open behind him and Poppy finally staggered out, yawning and squinting at the light.

      ‘What the hell’s all the noise about? I’m on duty in a few hours.’

      He took his eyes off Lara, not without some difficulty, and rounded on his sister. She looked at him with one half-lidded eye.

      ‘My bedroom looks like a tart’s boudoir,’ he snapped. ‘What the hell is going on?’

      ‘For Pete’s sake, it’s just a few pairs of knickers,’ she protested, an incredulous tone to her voice as if his room didn’t look like some vintage cathouse. ‘There’s been a flood in Lara’s flat so I’ve invited her to stay in the boxroom. She needed to store some of her stock for a bit and since there’s masses of spare space in your bedroom, I couldn’t see the problem. Can’t this wait until the morning?’

      ‘No, it can’t,’ he snapped back. ‘Have you seen it in there? You didn’t even ask me. It’s an invasion of my privacy and I’m not going to stand for it.’

      He’d always known Poppy’s patience was not at its best when she was tired and he braced himself for a sibling argument of monumental proportions.

      She drew herself up to her full height.

      ‘Don’t, then. Find yourself another flat if you don’t like it. Or you could go back home.’

      A low blow, and he could tell by the way she shifted her eyes away from him that she knew it. The subject of their inheritance from their grandparents hung between them as strongly as if it had been a visible sack of cash in the corner of the hallway. After getting access to it at the age of twenty-one, Poppy had put hers away, stashed it sensibly for the future, and now she had this flat to show for it. Living for the moment, he’d frittered his away on swanky nights out with Isaac while at university and later while on leave from the army. Expensive holidays were the order of the day. When he had time to himself, he made that time count. One particular ill-judged week in Las Vegas with the lads had reduced the pot considerably. He hadn’t given it a thought at the time, hadn’t needed to, because he’d had a career. Now that career was cut short he found he didn’t have the funds any longer for a house deposit, and he needed what was left to start over. Without Poppy’s offer of a place to stay he really would be reduced to returning to the family home and the thought filled him with distaste. If it was a choice between that and living in a room full of knickers, he’d just have to put up.

      Poppy cast exasperated hands up at the ceiling when he didn’t respond.

      ‘I can’t do this. I am not discussing your sleeping arrangements at one in the morning when I’ve got to be at work in a few hours. The underwear stays. You either put up with it or you move out.’ She turned away and stopped any further argument by shutting her bedroom door on him. He stared at the panelled wood, feeling Lara’s eyes on his back.

      ‘She loves me really,’ he said.

      ‘I’ll be out of your hair as soon as the plumbing’s fixed in my flat,’ Lara said, and instead of what should surely be an apologetic tone he picked up an undeniable pointed edge to her voice.

      ‘Plumbing?’

      She leaned against the hallway wall and crossed her arms. His mind insisted on noticing how the silk of the gown lovingly clung to her perfect curves. By act of sheer will, he kept his eyes on her face.

      ‘Yes, plumbing,’ she said. ‘Turns out your energetic nocturnal activities have put the pipe network under too much strain.’

      He stared at her.

      ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

      ‘Half the plumbing in this place is years old—it dates back way before the flat conversion. They might have built things to last back then, but no one reckoned on your bed being shoved up against it. The pipe running down from your bedroom radiator finally gave up the ghost today. It dislodged and because my flat’s directly below it caused a flood. I’ve got no running water down there and damaged stock, and if it wasn’t for Poppy I haven’t a clue what I’d do.’

      ‘I moved the bed away from the radiator,’ he protested.

      ‘Too little too late,’ she said, and as she spoke he noticed the dark smudges beneath the indignant eyes. A twist of guilt spiked in his stomach because he’d seen how completely immersed she was in her damned pop-up-shop project. In terms of actually living a productive life right now, he’d just slipped into negative territory. Living a quiet life and not hacking anyone off surely wasn’t meant to be this hard. The feeling of uselessness and lack of direction that he’d been shoving