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‘There is so much I didn’t know, and now it’s too late.’
He felt his anger drain away as the tightening in his chest made him wonder if the cabin hadn’t suddenly depressurised. The husky note in her voice touched him in a place he hadn’t known existed. If she had sobbed and looked sorry for herself he would have been fine, instead—instead he was experiencing one of the emotional responses that his grandfather had taught him to equate with weakness.
‘I was young when your grandfather was in my family’s life, a teenager. Everyone over twenty seemed old to me, and I was pretty much only interested in my own life and ambitions. Before his death, I barely had a conversation with my father. I didn’t have a clue what was going on with him.’ He had often wondered if, had he not been so self-obsessed, things might have been different. The lingering guilt was something he had never shared and now...to her... His eyes went to her face, which was predictably softening with empathy.
How the hell this woman survived in the real world when she emoted all over the place was a mystery to him, almost as much of a mystery as why he was opening up to her. The knowledge brought a dark frown to his austerely handsome face.
She watched as his dark lashes came down, filtering out the expression she had imagined she’d glimpsed in his cerulean eyes, something close to shock.
‘That doesn’t make you an unusual teenager.’ He might have been an average teenager, but he was not an average man, and it was not just that he was so incredibly off-the-scale good-looking, it was the currents below the surface of calm, his complexity reflected in the way his eyes could change from ice-cold frigidity to volcanic smouldering emotion.
Anna wasn’t sure which end of the spectrum was easier to deal with. The entire unpredictability factor made him exhausting to be around...and then there was the added complication that she knew what it felt like to be kissed by him.
Soren watched her take a massive gulp of brandy and choke a little as it hit the back of her throat, and he thought about tangling his fingers in her hair, dragging her face up to his and kissing her.
One of the more sensible pieces of advice his grandfather had given him wasNever sleep with the help, and he ought to know. It was a badly kept secret that a housemaid Biagio had impregnated had a pension for life and a nice house in Palermo.
The only thing she’d had to do was sign away her unborn child’s rights to the Vitale estate. The baby had been stillborn, but to his grandfather’s dismay the contract his legal team had written was airtight.
‘Have you told any friends where you’re headed?’ By this point he felt quite philosophical about the answer.
‘No,’ she said, relaxing as the brandy—or it might have been whisky; it seemed to her they both tasted similar—ironed out the kinks in her spine. She was actually feeling much more mellow. ‘I told Sara and Penny that I have a live-in job, not where. They wouldn’t talk to journalists anyway.’ She ignored his doubtful look and gave her head a sharp positive shake.
She totally trusted her friends. She knew Penny from university, and she and Sara went back to primary school when Sara, a writer these days, had honed her early skills at fiction using the stories Anna told about her mother with some interesting additions of her own.
‘Boyfriend?’ He threw the question in casually.
Anna, who wasn’t looking at him, shook her head. ‘Not for a while.’ Her brow puckered as she tried to remember the disastrous double date that had to have been a good six months ago now. She liked the safety of double dates. ‘Tim, no,Tomdumped me. Oh, it’s fine,’ she added cheerfully. ‘He wasn’t really my type. Penny has this theory that I only date men I don’t reallylikebecause I don’t mind being dumped by them. I thinkonedate doesn’t really count asdating...’ She stopped and looked from his face to the glass in her hand. She put the glass down carefully, no longer looking at him at all. ‘Can I have some of that water?’ she said, nodding at the jug that stood on the table between them.
The ice chinked against the glass as he filled it for her.
‘Relax.’ He delivered a tight smile, assuming that when she said dumping she was actually the one doing it; the likelihood of a man dumping Anna seemed far-fetched to him. ‘I’m not judging. Well, actually, I’m in no position to judge.’
Her sex life was not his business.
Yet you feel such a keen interest in it, mocked the voice in his head.
His hooded gaze drifted over her face, sliding to the cushiony softness of her mouth. He was consumed by a primal urge to part those lips and plunge into the soft sweetness, make her forget every man who had ever tasted her before.
Disconcerted by his unblinking regard, Anna looked at him blankly, thoughts zipping through her head and never quite connecting. She took a deep gulp of ice water and things slotted into place: fordatehe had heard one-night stands.
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. If this had happened with any other man she would have burst out laughing, but she seemed to have had a sense-of-humour bypass.
The irony was, of course, delicious, but he was never going to be in a position to appreciate it, and it was infinitely less embarrassing if he carried on believing she had an impressive back catalogue of lovers whose names she had forgotten, when the truth, the increasinglyembarrassingtruth, was that she was a virgin.
Not a lifestyle choice, just circumstances, caution and a low sex drive and possibly there was a grain of truth in Sara’s theory—her friend had a library of self-help books and an encyclopaedic knowledge of them.
Her favourite quote for Anna was:You have to believe you deserve to be loved.
Sarameantwell, but there were times when Anna dreamed of donating her friend’s library to a charity shop. Though sometimes she thought there might be something in her friend’s more recent theory, which was Anna wouldn’t commit because she was afraid of being rejected—her mum leaving her had made her afraid to care enough to have someone walk away.
For Anna it was much simpler: she didn’t see the point in sex if it had no meaning for her. Sure, she was curious, but she had a suspicion, like most things that were given a big build-up, it was probably going to be a let-down when it eventually happened.
Her eyes settled on Soren’s hands, his long brown tapering fingers—maybe not so disappointing if the first time was with someone who knew his way around—
‘I’m going to sit up front with the pilot, a friend... And you couldn’t be in safer hands—he’s ex-navy.’
She gave a nervy jump and felt the shamed colour score her cheeks as he got to his feet. Incapable of responding, she just nodded.
