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Him.
Flora tugged her bottom lip between her teeth and pressed down, stemming the roar of something deep inside her...the part of her that recognised him.
And all six feet plus of masculine energy was charging towards her.
He crossed the field in the sun he’d brought with him. It pierced through the broken clouds, highlighting the black curls kissing his earlobes.
Goosebumps prickled to life on Flora’s arms, beneath her woollen jumper. She swallowed. He was as out of place as a city high-rise in the middle of a field. With a helicopter at his back. He didn’t belong here. But excitement sang to life inside her. Her pulse became a frantic beat.
He’d tracked her down...
Why?
He stopped before her, filling the air with the scent of him. Something deeply male. Uniquely him. Masculine. But it seemed different.Heseemed different. Restrained inside his suit...
‘Piccolina...’
That word. A word she didn’t know the meaning of, but he’d given it to her. An unknown name for a temporary woman.
But she wasn’t that woman now.
She was Flora Bick, daughter of farmers. An adoptee. A miracle baby saved from the hands of her maternal mother.
‘How did you find me?’ she whispered. The sound of her voice was foreign. Husky.
‘Did you not want to be found?’
The seams of his jacket tightened on his shoulders, bulging under the strain of his muscles as they moved. And she wanted to touch them.
She curled her hands into tight fists to stop herself from reaching out.
‘We said no names,’ she reminded him as flashes of the woman she’d been with him entered her consciousness. Her slipping off the straps of her dress, presenting herself to him...
No.That wasn’t the woman she’d been trained to be. She wasn’t spontaneous. She didn’t push against the invisible walls around her. She stood exactly where she was told to stand. To sit. To eat. To stay.
When they’d shared that night together she’d been someone else.
And those two women did not align.
They could not co-exist.
‘We said many things,’ he said, interrupting her racing justification of who she was...who she’d allowed herself to be with him. ‘And things changed.’
‘Changed...?’ Her eyes travelled over the taut lines of his clean-shaven cheeks to the pulse that pounded there. ‘Nothinghas changed,’ she said.
Because it hadn’t for her. Their time together lived in the shadows of her mind, not in the broad light of day.
‘Has it not?’ His eyes blazed, a colour she still couldn’t name. Burned into her with every caress of his gaze along her skin. And he didn’t rush. He took in every detail.
She shook her head, her heart racing. ‘No. Nothing has changed,’ she repeated—because it hadn’t. Not for her. She’d gone back to her life. Back to her risk-free existence.
There were no choices now. She could be only one woman here. The person her parents needed her to be. The only person she truly knew how to be.
His eyes flicked back to her face. ‘Nothing?’
An unwavering confidence exuded from his every pore, and Flora couldn’t help feeling that he knew something she didn’t. His gaze pulled at something inside her. Something she’d buried deep.
Her breath hitched, stuttering in the chilly morning air and burning away into dew on the heat of her parted lips.
