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‘Since around then.’
‘It must be incredible—that sense of history, that sense of ancestry.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. What about you?’
Star sighed. ‘We’ve just discovered a grandfather on our mother’s side.’
‘And that is what has you upset?’
She resisted the urge to ask how he knew, but it must have been clear on her face. She’d never been very good at hiding her emotions.
‘I... I have let my sisters down. My mother,’ she said, hating the way that saying it out loud seemed to make it real.
‘I know that feeling. With my brother. My father. I wasn’t exactly their first choice,’ he said before coming to an abrupt halt.
‘Choice for what?’
She watched the way his jaw clenched in the darkness of the oncoming night.
‘The head of the family business.’
‘Really?’ she asked, surprised. ‘You’d be my choice.’
‘You don’t know me,’ he replied darkly.
It was on the tip of her tongue to deny what he was saying. A half-forgotten song lyric hummed in her head about having loved someone for a thousand years... She shook her head, as if to free the words, but it only sent them scattering. Instead, she caught the words of one of her most loved books.
‘“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”’
He barked a laugh, notather but as ifwithher, and she felt the appraisal in his eyes even as he made a joke of it. ‘You just happen to have that to hand?’
‘It’s Austen. She should always be “to hand”.’
‘Oh, so you’re one of those,’ he teased.
‘If by“one of those”you mean someone who reads romance then yes, I am,’ she said with pride. ‘And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.’
He held his hands up in surrender. ‘I believe you.’
‘No, you’re humouring me. That’s a very different thing,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘It’s very easy to be cynical and sharp-edged in this world. It’s harder to have hope, to hold to romance and sentimentality, to allow the enjoyment of them and the sheer optimism, the faith of it all to sink deep into your bones.’
‘Faith?’
‘The conviction that love in whatever form conquers all.’
‘And if I say I don’t believe, does it knock a romance reader down dead?’
‘No,’ she replied, unable to turn to look at him with the smile on her face. ‘But it seriously diminishes your chances of finding true love.’
There was a beat—ofsomething. Something that passed his eyes and crossed his features before he barked out another laugh that had both traces of the humour she sensed in him but also the weight that pulled at him. And it was that weight she felt partly tied to, as if the deeper it plunged, the more it drew her with it.
She caught herself frowning, not because she was confused by her feelings—she knew what they were, knew that this attraction was something as unique as it was raw. She was confused as to what to do about it. Because, while she didn’t need to know the why of it, Kal was holding back and Star just wasn’t confident or experienced enough to call it out into the open.
But she didn’t want to walk away from it either. She couldn’t explain it. But she was sure, more sure than anything she’d ever felt, that if she walked away now, she’d never find this again. This feeling that sank into her skin and delved into her bones, that caught her by the throat and squeezed at her lungs. She wanted to gasp for air, she wanted to gasp for him. Just thinking about the way he made her feel had her pulse quickening, and something deep within her quivering.
The only place he’d ever touched her was the thumbprint he’d left on her bottom lip. She bit down once again, into the soft flesh as if...
‘Stop,’ he commanded.
