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The bathroom was a place where she didn’t mind the extravagance. It was spectacular. Someone had already lit the candles around the massive copper tub. She was sorely tempted but was conscious of the time factor and Zach’s parting words. Instead, she contented herself with washing her face—her make-up was long gone anyway. She applied a smudge of grey shadow to her eyelids, two flicks of mascara, and rubbed some clear gold on her lips. Her hair, after a severe brush, she left shiny and loose, before changing her top for a clean, though slightly creased, black silk blouse from her case, which somehow had arrived in the room before her.
With three minutes to spare she was outside the bedroom in the corridor, not pausing to analyse her determination not to have him step inside her room. It wasn’t as if he was going to carry her through to the French-boudoir bedroom with its canopied bed that was probably a lot of women’s dream. The same women probably dreamt of having a man like Zach throw them on it and make mad, passionate, head-banging love to them...or should that be with them?
She had never felt that her ignorance of head-banging sex was a disadvantage in life previously, but now she found herself wondering what she was missing.
‘You don’t want to know, Kat. It’s not you.’
The echo of her announcement had barely died away before a voice very close by responded.
‘What don’t you want to know?’
Kat felt as if guilt was written all over her face, but she managed a very credible recovery. ‘If they dress for dinner here.’ It was, she decided, inspirational but, now that she thought about it, actually quite relevant.
‘Well, there is no they, just us, and as you see...’
She accepted the invitation of his downward sweeping gesture and felt her tummy muscles quiver in helpless appreciation as she took in the pale shirt, open at the neck, and the black jeans that clung to his narrow hips and suggested the powerful musculature of his thighs.
The wash of colour lent a peachy glow to her skin as she put effort into controlling her breathing and dragged her eyes back to his face. His dark hair was damp, as though he’d just stepped out of the shower.
‘That’s good, then.’ She turned and began to walk briskly away. He let her go a few feet before calling after her.
‘Wrong direction.’
She compressed her lips. ‘You might have said!’
He might have, but the truth was he had been enjoying her rear view too much. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m not really a formal sort of person.’
‘Alekis rarely entertains, but I’m sure he will want to show you off when he is discharged.’
She turned her head, falling into step beside him. ‘He looked...frail. How ill is he, really?’
‘He has a history of what I believe he euphemistically has in the past called “cardiac events”. This time, however, he had more than one cardiac arrest. He is not a young man.’
‘You mean he died?’ His neutral delivery made it impossible for her to figure out if he would care one way or the other. She got it that some people didn’t wear their heart on their sleeve, but this was ridiculous!
Did he think it was weakness to show emotion?
‘So they tell me.’
‘Should I...?’ She shook her head. ‘No, it doesn’t matter—’
He hefted a sigh. ‘Your first lesson is to stop thinking about what the right thing is, and think instead about what you want.’
She skipped a little to catch him up and angled a puzzled look at his profile. ‘Do you mean you never do anything you don’t really want to?’
‘Why would I?’ It was a question he had been trying to answer since Alekis had foisted the task of bringing his granddaughter home. A spreadsheet would have shown that any debt he felt towards Alekis was fully paid up by the knife he’d taken for him, but some things could not be defined by spreadsheets and analysis.
His instinct, honed by his visceral hatred of bullies, had saved Alekis’s life, but Alekis had enabled him to rewrite his own life. He would always owe Alekis. It was not something that he could analyse, it was just something he accepted.
His eyes drifted to the cloud of dark hair, loosened now, that fell almost all the way down to her narrow waist. His acceptance meant he would never feel that silky hair slide through his fingers.
‘Oh, I don’t know, because it’s the right thing?’
He dug his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Who decides what the right thing is? But the answer is, no, I don’t. You are looking at me as though you have just discovered a different species. I promise you, Katina, I am not the one that is different.’
‘You make it sound like it’s a bad thing to be different.’
