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‘Noah—’ I say his name softly ‘—it’s too much. Way too much. This must have cost a fortune.’
He shrugs. ‘I have a fortune.’
Like it’s nothing. Unimportant. Irrelevant. It’s strangely disconcerting when I’m sure he meant to assuage my concerns.
‘Well,’ I say quietly, ‘you didn’t have to do that.’
‘I wanted to,’ he reiterates. ‘You deserve beautiful things, Holly. I want you to wear this tonight and then, when we get back here, I want to take you to bed wearing only the necklace.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘I COULDN’T EAT another thing.’
His eyes find mine, laughing and scorching, reminding me of the way I took him into my mouth.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he drawls, his accent thick, his words seductive.
I grin. We are sitting beside one another, looking out of the window at the street beyond. I lean over a little so that my breath warms his cheek. ‘At least, not for a while.’
His eyes meet mine and I see anticipation heat them. Beneath the table, his hand curls over my thigh, his fingers resting there as though that is natural and normal.
And it feels it; it feels wonderful.
We are in a tiny bistro somewhere in the Latin Quarter. We passed the Sorbonne as we came to dinner, our taxi moving quickly, with scant regard for my desire to take everything in. Then again, perhaps if he’d slowed down, I would have been overwhelmed. Not just by the beauty of Paris in the lead up to Christmas, all twinkling and magical, but by the feelings throbbing between Noah and me. By the way my heart, mind and body all seem to be bursting with something warm and huge, something I can’t define but that I am greedy to feel more of.
We’ve feasted on baked Camembert, scampi, steak and frites, oysters; we’ve sipped wine and shared a crème brûlée for dessert. I am full, satisfied and fuzzy around the edges in the nicest possible way. His hand on my thigh is the cherry on top of a night that is already one of the best of my life.
I place my hand over his, lacing our fingers, no longer feeling it to be an odd intimacy. I’ve known him for weeks, slept with him, and I glimpse in him something that I didn’t even know was missing in my life. I feel a strange completeness when we are together. If you’d asked me a month ago if my life was missing anything, I would have denied it. I’ve worked hard to build a great life for Ivy and me. I never considered letting anyone else into the fold. How could I risk it after what Aaron was? How could I trust my judgement?
Strange then that I know Noah is keeping so much of himself closed off from me and yet I still feel like I could trust him with my life. Some things, some instincts, go beyond what is said. This is a feeling, and I like it.
‘Do you come here often?’ I rub the pad of my thumb over his hand gently. His eyes fall to our fingers, his expression inscrutable.
‘We have an office here.’ He nods. ‘And a factory in the south. Gabe and I split the responsibilities.’
He hasn’t spoken of his friend much. I go gently, careful not to scare him off. ‘Do you do basically the same thing in the company?’
Noah’s smile is rich with amusement. ‘No.’ I wait for him to expand and he does, taking a sip of his beer before continuing. ‘I’m the coding side. I love programming. I don’t do it so much now, except for fun—’
‘Like the shower you talk to?’ I tease.
He nods. ‘Exactly. Gabe was never into computers. He’s the business side. He got our first bank loan that floated the company, that allowed us to launch; he runs all that stuff. I’ve got no interest in that.’
‘What is it about programming you like?’ I wrinkle my nose and he leans over and places a light kiss on its tip. My heart twists.
‘Everything.’ There is an intensity in the word.
‘Elaborate.’
He laughs. ‘Are you ordering me, Doc?’
‘Yep.’ I smile to soften the command. ‘I’m curious. It’s very foreign to me. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
He shifts his body weight and his hand on my thigh moves higher. Sparks of desire shift inside my gut. ‘I used to do it to get into my own head,’ he says, the words almost dragged from him. His eyes are stormy, filled with past pains. I hold my breath, aching for him and needing him to tell me more. ‘I was twelve when I first started. I got a book from the library and devoured it, cover to cover. I was in a boys’ home at the time,’ he says, so casually, as though that’s not devastating in and of itself. ‘And they had good facilities.’ He laughs awkwardly. ‘At the time, I thought they were good facilities. Now I see it was just a couple of old PCs, but for me, being able to load them up and practise what I’d read was what saved me.’
He has a faraway look in his eyes, like he’s in the past. There is a haunting pain. Holly who is his lover wants to kiss it away. Holly who is a professional therapist wants to dig into the wound and expose it, knowing it gets worse before it can ever get better.
‘Saved you from what?’ I ask, hoping to strike a middle ground by smiling brightly.
