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He cleared his throat. ‘I have a regular poker game with a group of guys I’ve known since my army days.’
‘Where you got those terrible scars?’
‘Da—some.’
It hadn’t been a smart move showing her those scars. It had led to her hands on his body and his on hers.
Khaled slumped back on the sofa beside her and massaged the back of his neck, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing and knowing he had to wind this up.
‘How long did you serve?’ she wanted to know.
‘Two years.’
‘I guess you saw active service?’
‘Chechnya, Afghanistan,’ he said briefly, and a visual of heat and dust and sweat streaming between the bridge of his nose and a rifle sight bloomed in his mind. God, how he’d hated it.
‘Was it your choice?’
Khaled gave a shrug, a little surprised by the question. Few people asked. ‘It’s difficult to escape conscription—but, yes, in many ways it was my choice. My father was a professional soldier.’
She sat forward and tucked one leg under her. Clearly interested.
‘Did you want to follow him into the army?’
‘Talkative little thing, aren’t you?’
‘I’m just curious.’
He could give her the truth, that military service had opened up his life in unexpected ways and had transformed his life. He’d learned that his father was a hero, that he came from a long line of professional soldiers, and that his own beliefs about who he was and where he came from had been false and fed to him as a youth by the only father he had ever known. Leaving him with the huge trust issues he carried to this day.
But he opted for the generic. ‘It’s something we must all do.’
Her world of feathers and stage make-up was so far from what he’d seen as to be another planet. And yet he couldn’t help remembering those marks he’d seen on her feet, and the way she’d curled up like a snail on the vanity to hide them.
He frowned. Mostly it was his own fiercely protective reaction that continued to unsettle him, especially when he’d learned that some of that violence had been meted out by what sounded like a disgrace of a father.
‘Military service is boredom punctuated by adrenalin,’ he found himself confessing. ‘And a lot of poker. I got very good at it.’ He angled a smile her way. ‘When I was a kid I used to play cards for spent bullet cartridges.’
Hell, why had he told her that?
‘Bullets, huh? I guess where you come from is a long way from the dressing rooms and trailers I was raised in.’ She looked up at him through her lashes. ‘You’d probably prefer them to a cabaret you don’t want.’
‘I don’t know,’ he mused, unable to resist the siren call of her eyes shyly meeting his. ‘I wouldn’t have met you.’
Her mouth trembled into a half-smile and then she pulled it tight again, looking away. He knew the feeling.
He rubbed his jaw, knowing he should be winding this up—only to encounter the beard he’d ignored for weeks now. Usually after a couple of months away on a trek he’d be freshly shaven and snapped back into his Italian suits, hunkering down in his offices in Moscow and hitting the ground running.
Diverting to Paris straight from the Arctic shelf meant he’d come without that symbolic shift between two worlds.
Maybe that was why he was tempting fate here. The wilderness of his previous environment was still running through his blood...
He cleared his throat. ‘Gigi, in the bedroom—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She cut him off hurriedly, looking cornered. She stumbled to her feet. ‘I mean, it was just a stupid thing, right? Better we forget about it.’
A stupid thing? He didn’t think so. His hunter’s instinct kicked in.
Gigi set about clumsily gathering her things. ‘I should get out of your hair.’
‘I’m taking you home.’
The words formed and his certainty solidified around them.
‘No, that’s all right.’ She was busily packing up her laptop.
‘I’m taking you home.’
Gigi tried to ignore the little kick she got out of his assertiveness. Because, really, she shouldn’t like being told what to do.
But she could literally hear her heart hammering in her ears, and more liquid heat was pooling between her thighs. It was embarrassing. It was also unprecedented in The Romantic History of Gigi Valente. So far officially two pages, along with today’s Special Addition, and not much going on for the foreseeable future.
