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His heart was racing, the adrenal response taking a moment to register that she was no longer in danger. That she probably hadn’t ever been. She moved off the ladder, onto the floor, and stepped back a few paces to regard her work.
She startled and for a moment he wondered if she’d heard him, but then she reached into the back pocket and fished out her iPhone, lifting it to her face for a moment before swiping it to answer.
“Hey!” A cheery voice, speculation kept him where he was. He felt a momentary surge of guilt for the eaves dropping he was about to engage in, but then again, she was his ward. Protecting her was in the job description. And part of that was getting to grips with just what was going on in her life.
“I’m sorry, Artie! I meant to call you. I got caught up.” Stavros stiffened. “I didn’t mean for you to be worried.”
And she said there was nothing going on between them?
A laugh, a low-pitched laugh. A sexy laugh. His gut rumbled. “Probably just a few days. Not longer, if I can help it.”
Another pause, and Stavros wondered what the other man was asking her. How would he react if Claudia had been his lover and she’d absconded from their love nest in the middle of the afternoon? Would he have waited until late the next day to call her? Hell, no. He’d have had the police out within an hour of realizing she was missing.
“My … guardian.” She hesitated before she said the word and he would have loved to know how the other man reacted. “Yeah, I know. He’s a pain in the arse.”
Stavros hid a smile. Well, she had every reason to feel that way, he supposed.
She turned around then, absentmindedly pacing the floor as people often did when speaking on the phone. Only her eyes arrested on Stavros’s face and she froze, the colour draining from her flesh, so that she was as white as a sheet.
“I’ll call you later, Artie. Don’t forget to feed Sophie, okay?”
Sophie? Stavros’s expression flickered with a frown.
“Are you listening to my conversations now?”
He shrugged. “Is that a problem?”
“Um, yes,” she snapped sarcastically, thrusting the phone back in her pocket. “Obviously.” And her eyes shifted away from his, almost as though she was afraid of him.
His frown deepened.
“I hope you don’t mind. About the tree.”
Stavros moved deeper into the conservatory and the smell carried with it memories. Memories of his childhood, spent here, unwrapping presents, curled up at his grandmother’s feet, a cup of English tea in his young hands.
“I presume you didn’t act alone,” he said.
Her lips twisted. “I won’t blame my accomplices.”
“Even when they’re guilty by association?” The air between them crackled with something like electricity and she kept her focus squarely on the tree rather than the man at her side. “No way a woman your size dragged this thing in here on your own.”
She fought an urge to ask what was wrong with her size. She was tiny; she knew it. Besides, it was moving dangerously close to the ground they’d stumbled over the night before.
She was done flirting with him.
She was done doing anything other than saying, ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ and whatever the hell else she needed to do to end this little exercise. Thinking she could get through this by pretending to be every bit as spoiled as he thought her to be wasn’t going to work.
“Who’s Sophie?”
The question neatly brought her back to the fact he’d been eavesdropping. “My cat.”
“You have a cat?”
“Temporarily.”
“You have a temporary cat?”
She looked at him. It was a mistake. Something hummed between them, scorching the flesh at the back of her neck.
