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Darius ordered in pizza to be delivered before taking her and Honey up onto the roof.
The garden was amazing. It covered the whole of the roof space and was covered in a colorful display of shrubs and neatly trimmed grass, with pathways in between, just like any normal garden. Mia nervously thought at first that it was completely open, but then she realized there was a wall of toughened six-foot-high glass all around the perimeter.
It was incredible. An oasis of calm in the middle of a thriving and crowded city.
Honey loved it, spending several minutes running about and exploring before taking care of business. Having only one dog to walk and cater to was certainly easier than the dozen Mia was used to.
Once they were back in Darius’s apartment and the pizza had been delivered, he verbally checked again if she was okay with being on her own for a few hours.
Mia laughingly dismissed his concern. “We can survive just fine on our own, can’t we, girl,” she told Honey as she nuzzled into the dog’s neck.
Except…the silence in the apartment, after Darius left, definitely felt eerie while Mia took her bath. Too much so, in fact, for her to linger in the scented water. Once she’d dried herself, she debated for several minutes as to whether she should put on her jammies—a pair of cotton shorts and a camisole top—or once again pull on the overlarge T-shirt Darius had lent her to sleep in this afternoon.
She now knew the latter was nowhere near as comforting as having the man’s arms about her, but it smelled of Darius’s detergent, which was better than nothing.
T-shirt it was, then.
After eyeing the sofa, she located the linen cupboard so she could take out a flat sheet to drape over the leather so that she could have the warmth of Honey’s body on there with her as they watched the cookery program.
Instead of turning on the TV straightaway, Mia dropped onto the sofa beside Honey, her expression pensive.
She’d dined on one of the best pizzas she’d ever tasted, had the warmth of companionship in Honey, was surrounded by every luxury money could buy, including underfloor heating. All of them things Mia had once thought to be the epitome of a perfect life, but now knew meant very little without someone she cared for to share those things with her.
As shecaredfor Darius?
Well, of course, she was grateful to him for everything—
No lying!
She’d been deeply attracted to Darius from the moment she met him. She’d also been just as aware he was totally out of her league.
But being kissed by him… Being fully aware of the wild passion he could convey through his lips and hands… Feeling the evidence of his arousal rubbing intimately against her… Knowing they’d both been on the brink of release when Andrea knocked on the window of the SUV. It all contrived to make her feel otherwise.
Especially now, when the wild fluttering in her chest just thinking about him told her she was falling in love with Darius.
Which, despite those passionate kisses they had shared earlier and his obvious physical reaction to her, had to be the stupidest thing she had ever done in a life that seemed to have been beset by disappointments. Granted, most of them hadn’t been of her own making, but those things had happened to her, nevertheless.
If she’d ever attempted to envisage the man she would fall in love with and want to spend her life with, he certainly wouldn’t have been wickedly handsome, sixteen years older than her, carrying haunting memories in the depth of his eyes, and have more money than Croesus.
“I am royally fucked,” she moaned to Honey. “Which means it’s time for us to watch something on the TV,” she added determinedly as she stood up to look for the controller. “I don’t care what we watch, it’s got to be better than sitting here continuing to think how inadequate I am to be with a man as gorgeous and emotionally complicated as Darius.”
When she couldn’t find the controller beside the TV, she turned her attention to looking in the drawers in the unit beneath it.
She spotted the buff-colored file the moment she opened the top drawer.
A file that clearly had her name printed on the front of it.
A file that she very quickly realized, after she’d opened the cover with shaking fingers, detailed every single thing about her life from the day she’d been found in that church in Cornwall.
She didn’t understand how Darius came to have this in his possession when the two of them had met for the first time only yesterday. When, at the time, there had seemed little possibility of the two of them ever meeting again.
The fact they had was purely through a set of unusual circumstances. It certainly hadn’t been deliberate on either of their parts. And since Darius had found her unconscious earlier today in Giles’s apartment, they had spent all their time together.
But Darius had made several phone calls while the doctor was examining her. Had Casper, the tech genius of the family, been one of them?
Had Darius asked, and Casper delivered when he came to Darius’s apartment this afternoon, this file of information about her?
If so, why had he?
