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Soon.
He stroked the hair off her face, feeling an unaccountable level of well-being he hadn’t felt in years. Her skin was dewy with faint perspiration, her cheeks pink; she was fairly glowing.
His gaze moved over the rounded shapes of her sumptuous breasts and flagrant hip curved under his hand. He squeezed her softly, enjoying the flesh under his hand.
‘You like looking at me,’ she said, her fingers tangling in his chest hair.
‘I’d be crazy if I didn’t.’ He touched his lips to the tip of her nose and then her eyelids and finally her temple. Nothing salacious, more in reverence for how tender she made him feel.
‘I like looking at you.’ She massaged her lower lip with her teeth, as if something else was on her mind. ‘I always had…trouble taking my clothes off in front of Simon. I felt, I thought, I don’t know, I wondered what he saw.’
He gave her a lascivious smile and she smiled back and then her eyes filled and overflowed with tears.
‘Sorry,’ she gasped, cupping her face with her hands, ‘so silly. Don’t mind me.’
She was so English. So polite in the oddest circumstances. She was a woman. She was emotional. She shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It made him feel tender. So he reached for her and kissed her tears and murmured to her in Russian, which seemed to quiet her. Presently her shoulders stopped quaking and she lay still against him.
‘You were very young when you got married,’ he said.
She nodded against his shoulder. ‘Only I didn’t think I was. I felt like I’d lived a lifetime before I met Simon.’ She raised her face to look at him. ‘He was my first love. We met in my first year at university. But after a year he—we—decided to take a break for the summer. He was going on a dig in Athens—amateur archaeology was his hobby, we kind of had that in common—but I couldn’t go with him. I needed to work, save some money, so it was a break in our relationship.’
Nik waited; he suspected he knew where this was going.
‘The next term he wanted to get back together but he told me he’d had a sort of a fling with another girl. It was okay,’ she hurried on, glancing at him as if daring him to condemn her precious Simon. ‘We were split when it happened.’
But he could hear in her voice there had been no splitting as far as Sybella was concerned. She was loyal. He’d known her twenty-four hours but he’d seen her loyalty in action, keeping the crucial information about the letters from him to protect Deda.
‘Then, you see, she was in a few of my tutorial groups so I had to spend the rest of the year seeing her several times a month. I got a little funny about it. She never said anything, I don’t think we ever exchanged any more than the normal pleasantries, but she must have known.’
‘Do you want me to comment or just listen?’ Nik had a number of thoughts, all of them about her fool of a husband.
‘Listen, I think.’ She gave a soft, nervous laugh. ‘I’ve said all the critical things in my head and I said a few to Simon at the time. It’s just, we got back together—obviously—but I knew something wasn’t right. Even on my wedding day there was this niggle.’
‘He was still seeing her.’
‘Gosh, no, no! Simon wasn’t that kind of guy at all.’
Nyet, and in Sybella’s partial eyes probably never would be. Nik did his best not to take a dislike to her dead husband.
‘He was very ethical. I mean, he didn’t have to tell me.’
Nik wisely kept his own counsel. But the thought remained, I wouldn’t have told her, I would have protected her from the knowledge. Then the next startling thought arrived: I wouldn’t have gone to another woman.
Not when the girl was Sybella. She seemed to him a little traditional, the kind of woman who would expect fidelity. If the guy had loved her, he would have known that.
She eyed him, nervous once more. ‘I know this will sound silly but I got a bit funny about my body. I got it into my head Simon didn’t find me desirable.’ She frowned a little, as if puzzling over the girl she’d been.
Now Nik officially wanted to punch her dead husband.
‘You see, this other girl, she was very pretty and she was tiny, like a fairy tiny, and I’m not.’
