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For a blissful moment he just held her, his hands firm, his scent intoxicating, but it was theholding. She couldn’t remember the last time...atime...when she’d just beenheld.
She heard him curse under his breath and tried to disentangle herself, embarrassed for weaving a fantasy from an accident.
‘We’ll just get off at the next stop,’ Mateo said dismissively.
Evie bit her lip and winced a little.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘Well, it’s just that the next stop...’ she said, looking into a stormy gaze.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Hong Kong. In nineteen and a half hours.’
Mateo furiously jabbed out a message to Henri on his phone. He didn’t know what he would have to do to make it up to Léi Chen, but he would find a way to do it. Mateo absolutely hated letting people down. In fact, this might just be the first meeting he’d ever missed. Tension and frustration roiled in his gut, and with Evelyn in the bathroom he had nowhere else to direct his ire than into his phone.
He fired off a message to his assistant asking him to arrange for his things to be collected from the hotel and for a car to meet them when they arrived in Hong Kong. Along with his passport. After a rather tense negotiation with the train inspector, he’d been given a fine and forced to buy a ticket for the cabin, although only once the inspector was convinced that Evelyn had no objections.
For a moment, he thought she would object. He’d seen the temptation in her eyes as she glared at him, before finally nodding to the inspector that he could stay in the only free space left on the fully booked train.
He leant back into the small seating square beside the cupboard posing as a bathroom, wincing as his shoulders hit the sides, and mulishly glared at the two bunks on the opposite wall. The top bunk had yellow tape across it, with what he presumed was Chinese for ‘out of order’. Hence why the inspector had needed Evie’s permission. He rubbed his eyes. His contacts had become dry and were already hurting. By the morning he would be in agony.
Only one bed.
Of course there was only one bed.
The thud of the water shutting off in the cubicle beside him was the only notice he got before Evelyn emerged from a cloud of steam, havingfinallychanged out of the dress that had been designed with the sole purpose of driving him out of his goddamned mind. He blinked, hoping to lubricate the lenses.
She took one look at him and sighed. ‘I really am sorry about your meeting. But it’s not my fault,’ she repeated for the hundredth time.
‘Really? If you’d just told me where you were going—’
‘Mateo,’ she snapped, using what he thought of as her teacher voice, ‘I am not prepared to fight over this for the next nineteen and a half hours.’
Which was a shame. Because he wanted to fight aboutsomething. Anything, rather than the unwanted desire coursing through his veins that had grown exponentially when he’d imagined Evie under jets of hot water.
He blinked again.
She slid onto the bunk to sit opposite him, the small plastic table wedged in between them, and peered at him in an unnervingly analytical way. She sighed again and reached into her briefcase, rummaging around until she found what she was looking for.
‘Here. These should work.’
She thrust a pair of glasses across the table at him.
Mateo stared at them as if they might bite. They were his father’s. He shook his head, less in denial and more in confusion.
‘You have the same prescription. He told me that once.’ She smiled sadly.‘“Blind as bats we are. Both of us,”’she quoted, getting his father’s intonation just right. ‘He was always losing them, so I got used to carrying a pair around with me. And when I came out to Shanghai I wanted...’ She shook the sentence away with a wave of her hand.
She’d wanted a part of his father there with her, he realised.
He nodded, taking the glasses into his hand. Refusing them would reveal more stubbornness than he was willing to concede. If he’d expected some kind of ‘there, I told you so’, he’d been wrong. Evelyn was still avoiding his gaze and he was pretty sure he knew why.
‘Thank you,’ he offered reluctantly.
Evelyn finally brought her eyes to his and accepted his thanks with an equally reluctant nod. She pulled a notebook from her briefcase—her own, not his father’s—and she started to make notes in it. Something about it was achingly familiar and utterly strange. He had never met her as his father’s assistant, but he could see it so easily. The two of them working together. What she had shared with him in the hotel had given him a much stronger understanding of what his father had been looking for in the search for Isabella. But he wasn’t quite sure what was driving Evelyn. She’d clearly identified with Isabella but he didn’t quite feel that was the whole truth.
‘You said that...’ He paused to choose his words carefully. He knew that he was treading on painful and dangerous ground for her, but maybe once he understood her, this insane fascination with her would end. ‘You said that my father was the first person who understood you. Your adoptive parents...Carol and Alan...they didn’t?’
