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‘Relax,’ he advised, thinking she was wound so tight that any false move might shatter her like fragile glass.
It seemed to Anna that this was advice he might well follow himself. No wonder she felt fraught—behind his laid-back facade he was so tense it felt like sitting next to an unexploded bomb!
She glanced at his clenched profile through her lashes... Unbidden, her glance drifted to his mouth.
Fighting the urge to touch her own lips, she blurted, ‘I am relaxed.’
It was a lie and his sardonic look suggested she was fooling no one.
‘And you’re not about to throw yourself from a moving vehicle?’
‘I wasn’t. I would have waited for it to stop. Oh, all right, not relaxed, but it has not been a relaxing day and, besides, my mother told me never to get into cars with strange men.’ The flippant addition was a lie, she hadn’t, though it was a story Anna had told so often that she almost believed it.
It was one of her selection ofcaring parentstories. She had built up quite a repertoire of them during her school days so that she could roll her eyes along with school friends and join in as they bemoaned how their parents were such pains who hadno idea!
What would they have said if they had realised that Anna had nobody telling her what to do, that she didn’t want to escape, but longed for the security of some restrictions to complain about?
Even on the other side of the world her mum might have seen the headlines; she’d be worried. Her mum might be selfish, but Anna knew she did care for her in her own way.
‘What are you doing?’
He watched as she rifled through the contents of the bag she held on her knee like a shield...against him? Unfortunately the shield did not totally conceal the sliver of smooth stomach that his eyes kept drifting to...Was she that smooth and silky all over?
‘I think I forgot my phone.’
‘I would imagine you’d know by this point,’ he said drily, handing back a lipstick that had rolled against his leg. He didn’t miss the fact she made a conscious effort not to touch his fingers, or that her lips were not coated with any of the ‘sweet cinnamon’ she tucked back into her bag.
‘I should get a message to my mum. She will be worried.’
From what Franco’s research had revealed about her mother, Soren seriously doubted it.
Married young, widowed young, Mia Randall had decided that parenthood was not for her, though even before she took off for good she had not allowed having a small child to interfere with her adventurous globetrotting lifestyle.
His friend, not normally one to judge, had offered the opinion that some people should not have children.
Soren did not disagree, but he didn’t judge so harshly, perhaps becausehewas one of those innately selfish people that children would be better off without.
This was not information he had as yet shared with his grandfather, who frequently spoke of the great-grandchildren he anticipated. There were occasions when he arranged for Soren tostumbleover eligible mates, and Soren never called him on it, not because he was afraid of conflict with the old man but because he saved those explosive encounters for things that actually mattered to him.
When it came to marriage they were never going to be on the same page. His grandfather, who was obsessed with hislegacy,would never understand that Soren lived in the present and did not think about the future or care about his legacy. The past had to this point taken up most of his emotional energy, that and achieving some sort of closure.
‘Use mine if you like?’ he offered casually.
‘I... I don’t know her number...or, for that matter, if there’s any reception where she is.’
‘Which is where?’
Her eyes slid self-consciously from his. ‘I’m not totally sure. She was in Brazil the last time she made contact.’
‘Last time...?’
‘It’s fine. I’ll contact her when I get home... Where are we going?’ A glance out of the window told her it was nothing like her north London address. Ambitiously advertised as a penthouse, it was more realistically an attic, a nice attic. The sight of a patch of green through the roof window had swung it for her, along with the fact she could reach two Tube stations in a five-minute walk.
The leafy tree-lined avenue skirting the park they were driving along was several pay grades above where she lived.
‘Not far now.’
She glanced sideways, felt her stomach flutter and thought,Thank God!
