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Outside the Town Hall they strolled across Aotea Square, to a theatre restaurant where they ate a late supper and let Petra begin to wind down from her excitement, her feverish chatter eventually fading into a dream-like contentment.
Back in the hotel suite, Petra yawned her way into her bedroom and re-emerged in the heavy-metal T-shirt that passed for night attire to give Anya an unexpected hug, followed by an exuberant leap into her father’s arms. He whirled them both around, turning her babble of thanks into a shower of choked giggles. When he set her down she didn’t let him go for a moment, and when she did it was with a fierce kiss and a passionate little speech.
‘I know you pretended that you’d wanted to go all along, but you did this for
me. I’ll never forget that. I’ll make you proud of me, Dad, I promise!’
‘I already am.’ he said gently. ‘Let’s make a date for the first time you play Carnegie Hall—I’ll bring the flowers you bring the piano!’
She laughed, her incipient tears vanishing.
‘Go on, sleepy head,’ he said. ‘To bed—and if I don’t hear another peep out of you until morning, I’ll let you order breakfast on Room Service!’
After her door had closed behind her he stood still for a moment in the centre of the room, his head bowed, his face pale above his black dinner suit and white silk shirt, his hands flexing at his sides. ‘I don’t see the point of dwelling on what can’t be changed, regrets are so futile—but I hate how much I’ve missed of her life,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I hate that I was so ignorant and uncaring that I never got to hold her as a baby or see her first step, or her face the first time she ever touched a piano…And now there’s another man whom she obviously loves and is happy to call Dad—her everyday Dad, who’s a bigger part of her life than I’ll ever be…’
‘You may have been ignorant; you weren’t uncaring,’ said Anya compassionately. ‘Just human. We’re all entitled to make mistakes, especially when we’re young.’
‘Are we?’ His shoulders relaxed under the smooth jacket, the jut of his jaw easing as he lifted his head. ‘And what heinous mistakes did you make when you were young?’ It was said in a wry tone that doubted she would have any to confess.
‘I fell madly in love with a man whom I thought truly appreciated and accepted the real me. Unfortunately the real me was too boring, both in bed and out, to sustain his interest and he graduated to a very exciting, very public fling with my cousin.’
‘Ah.’ That rocked him back on his heels, as she had meant it to, but he recovered quickly. ‘So you and Kate have issues about men…?’ he murmured, walking over to the bar and uncapping a bottle of whisky.
‘An issue. And we resolved it. I decided Alistair wasn’t worth loving after all, and she dumped him.’
He winced. ‘Drink?’ He tilted the whisky bottle to show her the label and she shook her head.
‘I’m still feeling the effects of the Irish coffee I had at supper,’ she said, watching him pour two fingers for himself. ‘I don’t think I can take any more artificial intoxication.’
Scott raised the crystal glass to his mouth, then stopped, looking at her over the rim.
He set the glass back down on the bar behind him. ‘You’re right—natural intoxication is infinitely more preferable,’ he said huskily. ‘It gives you a much more sustained high.’ He shrugged out of his unbuttoned jacket and stripped off his black tie, tossing them onto the white leather couch. He stretched—a long, slow flex of his big body—and then strolled towards her wide-eyed figure, pulling his shirt-tails loose and lifting his chin. ‘Would you mind?’ he murmured as he came to a halt well within the limits of her personal space. ‘The collar is so tight and the buttons so small, my big clumsy fingers always have difficulty manoeuvring. Would you undo them for me?’
He waited passively, his big, clumsy fingers innocently hanging at his sides, and after a brief hesitation Anya reached up, going on tip-toes to see what she was doing so that she could comply with his request as quickly and efficiently as possible. He turned out to be right about the buttons. They were devilishly playful little things and she was aware of his warm breath stirring the hair at her temples as she slid her fingers inside his snug collar to help work the fastening loose, her knuckles massaging the hard column of his throat, the unique, spicy scent of him rising from his warm shirt as he lifted his arms, infusing her with familiar longing.
Suddenly she became aware of the reason that he had moved. The strategic pins anchoring her elegant French twist were plucked out and her hair tumbling in a silky, sun-streaked spray down her back.
‘What did you do that for?’ she demanded, struggling with the second and last tiny button as his arms fell back to his sides.
‘You were frowning and I thought that maybe your hair twisted up like that was giving you a headache,’ he said innocently. ‘You don’t wear it up at night, anyway, do you?’
He meant in bed. ‘Sometimes,’ she lied.
‘But not tonight,’ he said with a bone-melting satisfaction.
‘There!’ She tried to step back but he caught her hands.
‘You haven’t finished…’ Holding her eyes, he moved her fingers down to the first button below his collar. ‘Please…’ he said softly, and, mesmerised by the smouldering desire in the blue gaze, she undid it for him, only to have him slowly guide her hands down to the next button, and the next, and the next…each act of compliance acknowledging his bold intention to seduce.
‘Do you recognise it?’ he murmured, as they reached the last button and her fingers brushed against the betraying bulge that pushed at the front of his trousers under cover of the loose shirt.
‘Recognise what?’ she said, blushing furiously, recklessly tempted to trace the outline of that intriguing hardness.
‘My shirt…it’s the one you borrowed that night to cover your peek-a-boo charms,’ he murmured, sending a fresh flush of awareness through her body. ‘I’ve discovered I like having something that you wore next to my skin. It’s as if you’re wrapped around me, caressing me with your featherlight touch every time I move…’
His shirt was fully unbuttoned now, exposing his powerful chest with its masculine pelt of crisp, dark hair arrowing down over the hard ridges of his abdomen to a thin tracing below his navel. He placed her hands over his hard, flat nipples.
‘Would you like to do that to me, Anya?’ he invited in a whispering groan. ‘Would you like to touch me, stroke me, wrap yourself around me and move with me, on me….’ His hips shifted as he spoke, pushing at her skirt, teasing her with their mutual awareness of what she was doing to him.
