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Sleep and exhaustion hit her in waves and Clio decided the concern she had heard in his voice had to be a side effect of her medication.
* * *
The next morning, Stefan awoke in his bed with the smell of coffee teasing him awake. It took him a few seconds to figure out why he had a feeling that he had missed something. He looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand, which said eight in the morning. The red digits burned his brain.
He hadn’t checked on Clio in a few hours.
Pushing back the covers, he leaped from the bed and walked through the corridor to her bedroom.
He came to a halt as he found it empty with the bed neatly made up.
The scent of gardenias clung to the air and before he knew it, his lungs were filled with it. Running a hand through his hair, he leaned against the entrance, a wisp of something keeping him in the room.
A hairbrush lay on the dresser opposite the bed, and a pair of jeans and a silk top neatly folded on the bed.
A strange quiver gripped his abdomen to see the bed empty of her tall, athletic form after seeing her there all day yesterday. She had refused to even eat anything, only asking for water again and again. Silently bearing it as if it were her punishment. Looking at him with eyes wide with shock as he checked on her every couple of hours.
Why are you checking on me? she had asked once, her eyes drugged with sleep.
Did she think him so heartless that she was shocked at such a small act of concern? Had he given her a reason to think differently? Why did he care?
Irritated at how scattered his thoughts were, he walked back to the kitchen, following the smell of coffee.
He came to an abrupt halt at the unusual scene in front of him.
Clio stood at the counter, her back to him, unpacking breakfast, he assumed, from the mouthwatering smell.
She was dressed in dark blue jeans that hugged her long legs from ankles to her trim waist and a sleeveless white silk shirt that showed off her tanned arms.
Her hair fell straight to her waist, a river of ambers and reds, glinting where sunlight struck it.
He watched in rising fascination as she slid the lid off one plastic box, grabbed a fork and popped a piece into her mouth.
Pancakes and maple syrup, mouthwatering bacon and coffee—his favorite meal from back when they had been at university. They had all teased him because he would eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Her face turned toward the French doors, she closed her eyes and let out a long moan as she chewed. A drop of syrup stuck to the side of her mouth and she licked it off with another satisfied little groan. Color suffused her cheeks as she repeated the ritual.
Bemused and turned on, Stefan watched as the pleasure she wrought from the little ritual rendered him stupefied.
The next time she picked up another piece with her fork, it took everything he possessed to not join her and direct her fork to his mouth. Or not to taste the syrup on her lips.
“The suite comes with a butler on call twenty-four hours, Clio,” he said, pushing off the wall and walking into the kitchen. “You don’t have to arrange our meals, bella.”
Her fork clanged on the counter, the tinkering sound of it filling the silence.
She turned and watched him with those big eyes, color climbing up her neck.
The silk blouse was so sheer that he could see the outline of her bra, and the dip of her waist. It was so strange how so many small things about her he observed, his fascination arising from the most mundane of moments.
Like the delicate turn of her wrist and the blue veins there, like the crooked slant of her nose, the way she grabbed her hair away from her face with both hands and roughly pulled it back thrusting her breasts up...
Dannazione, the woman was lethal in how quickly she made him think of sex and skin.
Shrugging, she stepped back as he advanced. “I actually wanted to cook breakfast as a thank-you,” she muttered. “But this state-of-the-art kitchen doesn’t even have sugar and milk. So I walked a bit and grabbed breakfast.”
“A thank-you? Why?”
Her expression was straightforward, her shrug a bit too casual. “For looking after me yesterday.”
“Do they always last that long?” he said, thinking of how she had held her head. For a couple of hours, he hadn’t left her side, a tenderness he had forgotten he had possessed keeping him there instead of ordering the staff to help.
It had been a long time since he had done something so simple and satisfying as looking after someone. He used to do it all the time.
Another of his innate traits that he had buried deep.
“Kind of, yeah.” Another shrug. “This whole week has been very stressful and then I didn’t eat anything the whole day of the wedding and then guzzled down that champagne, so it was kind of like inviting the demons to play inside my skull.”
