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‘I told you I knew what I was doing. Can you show me somewhere I can wash up?’ He spread out his oily and grease-grimed hands. He’d pushed his sleeves up past his elbows and she could see a few nicks on his wrists. It hadn’t been such a straightforward job after all.
‘Of course.’ She could have told him where the bathroom was but she was so flustered she led him along the hall and into the green and white bathroom. She indicated the pedestal basin but he was looking around at the deep, claw-footed bath—big enough for two—the extensive collection of ornamental glass containers of bath salts and oils decorating the window sill and the fat, scented wax candles dotted on saucers around the room.
His speculative eyes moved to her warm face, intense masculine curiosity forming in the depths.
‘Don’t you dare say a word,’ she warned him.
‘Not even to ask you if you have any chemical cleansing cream?’ he asked, with an injured innocence that didn’t fool her for a moment. He nodded at the sea-shell of miniature soaps on the pedestal. ‘I don’t want to besmirch your pretty little soaps, sitting on their dish,’ he purred.
...your pretty little breasts, begging to be kissed…
He was deliberately trying to embarrass her all over again.
‘I think there’s som
e in here.’ Anya reached past him to open the mirrored bathroom cabinet mounted above the basin. He didn’t move out of her way, allowing her arm to brush across his chest, nosing with interest into the contents of her cabinet as she looked for the elusive tube of cream.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, as he tilted his head to read the prescription off a box of pills.
‘You can tell a lot about people from their bathrooms,’ he mused. ‘For instance, you’re obviously healthy, except for a little hay fever now and then. You don’t like taking pills any longer than is strictly necessary, you prefer the silky-smoothness of a wet shave to the mechanical kind, you’re currently celibate, very protective of your delicate skin, and—’ this with a provocative glance towards the bath ‘—you like to keep yourself very, very clean.’
Currently celibate? That slyly buried piece of effrontery was obviously based on the absence of any form of contraception in her bathroom cabinet, but it could only be a wild guess because lots of women kept their contraceptives in a bedside drawer, thought Anya. She had, during the holiday in New York after her graduation when she had naively believed that Alistair was going to be the love of her life, before Kate had blazed across his firmament and Anya’s flattering attentions had suddenly become an embarrassment.
Anya grabbed the cream and slammed the door shut, almost clipping Scott’s nose.
‘Be careful, I’ve had that broken once already,’ he said, throwing up a protective hand.
‘Disgruntled client?’ she enquired tartly, unscrewing the lid and handing him the tube.
‘Angry father.’
She had been about to leave, but he must have known that she wouldn’t be able to resist the tantalising lure of that brief statement.
‘You and your father had a physical fight?’ Was that how he had got the scar on his mouth?
He dropped the plug into the basin and nudged the hot water tap on with his forearm, vigorously working the non-foaming cream into his oil-streaked palms. ‘He fought—I dodged…most of the time, until I got big enough not to have to run.’
Her heart dropped into her boots and she felt a familiar, helpless anger. ‘You were abused as a child?’
He picked up the nail brush in the shape of an iridescent green fish and began to scrub the tips of his fingers. ‘Not until my mother died of cancer when I was ten. Dad had a lot of anger inside him after that, and when he got drunk, which was pretty often, he let fly with his fists. He never touched my sister, though—Joanna’s always been the spitting image of Mum—and when I got as big as he was he stopped. Never stopped being angry at the world, though.’
‘Didn’t anyone ever realise that you were being hurt?’ asked Anya.
His shoulders moved dismissively. ‘I wasn’t hurting half as much as he was. At least I had an escape—a future to run towards. He couldn’t break free of the past. He was locked into his pain until the day he died.’ He pulled the plug and let the dirty water drain away, rinsing the basin and his raw hands under the cold tap.
‘I’m sorry…’
‘Pity him, not me.’ He turned, holding up his dripping hands like a surgeon waiting for a scrub nurse.
Anya hurriedly passed him the sinfully fluffy green bath sheet from the towel rail.
He dried his hands and then lifted the plush pile to his cheek, turning his face inwards to inhale the faint body scent which lingered in the fibres from her bath the night before. ‘Mmm…sumptuous. You’re really a closet sensualist, aren’t you, Miss Adams? Or, should I say, a bathroom sensualist?’
‘I thought you were going to call me Anya,’ she said, choosing to confront the lesser of two evils.
‘I’ve decided I like Miss Adams. It sounds so…’
She knew what he was going to say and her hand flew up to cover his mouth, trying to smother this latest outrage. ‘Don’t say it!’
