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“That must have been difficult.” He blanked out his own resounding understanding of loss, refusing to grieve more than he already had. Not now, anyway.
“She had cancer.” Katie said matter-of-factly. “She was ready to go.” Only Marcus’s own experience gave him the impression that her brusque explanation was hiding how much the loss had affected her. Still did, probably. She busied herself straining spaghetti and then tipping it back into the large saucepan. “What about you?” She returned to her practiced hosting routine. “I think you said you were down to look at birds, David?”
Marcus grimaced inwardly. If there was one thing in the world he knew nothing about, it was birds. At least, not the avian variety. “Well, yes and no.” He repeated her phrase to her with a teasing grin.
“What yes, and what no?” She volleyed back, feeling a squeeze in her stomach at the way his smile transformed his face.
“Touche.” He dragged his hand backwards and forwards through his hair, making it stand up in dark, tousled spikes. “Truthfully, I need a holiday.” It really was the truth, he acknowledged to himself uncomfortably. Uncomfortably, because he hadn’t had a holiday since he’d left high school. He’d gone straight to university, then started his business, and within eleven years, he’d climbed to his lofty position as global tycoon. So why was there this emptiness? He knew why. Bryan. Iraq. His marriage breakdown. The landscape of his life was so different to what he’d thought it would be, five years ago. “If I get to see some birds, that’s good, but I intend to explore the local area and have a break.”
“You’ve come to the right place if it’s peace and quiet you’re after. Wadeford in the dead of winter is pretty much as quiet as it gets.” She slopped the tomato sauce in with the drained spaghetti and began to fry some garlic off in a separate pan. The smell made Marcus’s stomach contract.
He watched with admiration as she effortlessly flicked her wrist to splash garlic and oil through the pan, before adding some prepared seafood, and a squeeze of lemon. “You’re a good cook.”
His observation, made in his low, deep accent, set a shiver running down her spine. “How do you know? You haven’t even eaten my food.”
Katie was a stickler for professional distance, and she had never had a guest in her kitchen before this. Operating a bed and breakfast, she’d always felt it was important to have an invisible wall between herself and her customers, or else she ran the risk of feeling like she simply had strangers staying in her own home. She liked her own space too much to get friendly.
Why then did it feel so good to have this man sitting in her kitchen, asking her about herself?
She really needed to go on a date. She thought guiltily of Ryan Macaulay from the village. He’d asked her out so many times she’d lost count, and she’d always refused. Maybe she needed to at least meet him for a casual coffee. She was so sex-starved and love-starved she was actually fantasizing about this guest of hers. Not that he wasn’t worthy of fantasies. On looks alone, he was the stuff dreams were made of.
“I don’t need to. I can smell it. And don’t they say half of your taste buds are in your nose?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t know who they are, but that’s ridiculous. All of your taste buds are in your mouth.” And without thinking, she poked her tongue out and tapped it with her finger. “Right here.”
It was a mistake. His eyes were drawn to her mouth, and even as she clamped it firmly shut, his gaze lingered, making her feel hot and cold at the same time. “B-but…” she stammered, “you do have olfactory receptors in your nose, so I know what you’re saying.”
“Do you?” He queried thickly, still staring at her perfectly pouted lips. He felt the stirring of an erection and leant forward in the chair to disguise it. He reminded himself that she was probably married, or at least taken, but his body didn’t seem to want to listen.
“I…” she shook her head. Nope. There was nothing to say to back-track that particularly heated exchange. She was grateful for the thick apron that hid the way her nipples were straining at the black wool dress she’d pulled on. She felt the crackle of sexual tension in the atmosphere and made an effort to ignore it. But if she felt it, she knew he did too. They were both adults and the mutual attraction was pretty obvious.
The last time she’d let her body fall under the spell of an interesting, handsome man, she’d learned her lesson ten times over. Not that she’d take it back, but she wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
“Mr. Trent,” she said shakily. “I think it would be better if you wait in the guests’ lounge.”
Marcus almost laughed. It was so unusual for a woman to push him away that at first he thought he hadn’t heard right. But one look at the set of her face and he knew she was serious. She meant business. And though he knew it reeked of egotism, he decided again that she must be in a relationship. There could be no other reason to ignore the heat in the air.
“Are you in a relationship? Married?” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and a frisson of nervous anticipation ran down Katie’s back.
“No.” She shook her head. She didn’t feel scared to admit to him that she was alone. Inexplicably, she knew this man was not dangerous. Well, not in the normal way. If she let herself give in to the desire that was threatening to overcome her, he would be very, very dangerous to her sanity.
He hadn’t realized until that moment how much he wanted her to be single. Available. Only she wasn’t really available, was she? Not to him, anyway. If she knew who he really was and why he’d come to Wadeford, he strongly suspected she wouldn’t want anything to do with him.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he said quietly, apologetically. “You’re a very beautiful woman. You must be used to men making fools of themselves around you.”
She scrunched her brows together and her face was so sweetly confused that, out of nowhere, he ached to kiss her, right on the tip of her little nose. “Beautiful! Oh, boy. You almost had me going.”
“Surely you can’t have any doubt as to how…attractive you are?”
She had been attractive once. Before she’d met that smooth-talking Roberto, she’d had the world at her feet and the joy on her face to prove it. That had all been sanded away by
the stress she’d endured over the last six years. Now, when she looked in the mirror, she saw someone too slender to be pretty, too exhausted to wear makeup or style her hair, someone who had hardly slept for years and had the shadowed eyes to prove it.
“Listen, Mr. Trent, David... I’m not really the kind of woman that those lines work on.” Not anymore, she silently added. “Besides, we’ve just met. You’re a customer at my Bed and Breakfast. This hardly feels like an appropriate conversation.”
He frowned. “Appropriate! This isn’t Victorian England. Surely two people are allowed to acknowledge a mutual interest in one another.”
“David…” her voice held a tone of warning.
