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Her mouth opened to protest.
‘That’s an order,’ he said before she could get the words out. ‘Go now, please.’
She didn’t really want to argue, because he was right, shewastired. And he said please, which he almost never did. Plus she didn’t particularly want to prolong this conversation so she only closed her mouth, nodded, and went.
Augustine watched her go, an unfamiliar restlessness coiling through him. He could still feel the light, cool pressure of her fingertips in his, as well as the unexpected jolt of electricity that had hit him as soon as he’d touched her.
He’d hidden his reaction almost instantly but he hadn’t missed the flare in her dark eyes in response.
He knew what that electricity was. He knew it very well.
Physical chemistry.
He moved down the aisle until he was back in the lounge area of the plane, and flung himself down on one of the comfortable white leather seats. Through another doorway he could see the plane’s bedroom door, now shut.
A stewardess approached him, smiling, but he waved her away.
The restlessness wouldn’t leave him alone, his brain going ninety miles an hour. Freddie hadn’t been the only one who hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. While his headache had dissipated in the darkness of the hotel room and the fatigue hadn’t yet dug its claws in, his brain had raced, going over and over Freddie’s little announcement.
As a child, he’d always loved puzzles and there was one in particular his father made up for him, one with numbers, and he’d loved it. The puzzle started off easy, drawing him in, only to get more difficult making each solution hard won yet triumphant. Sometimes it would take him days to solve, especially when it came to solving the last problem. He’d examine it from every angle, unable to leave it alone, coming back to it again and again. And every time, he’d solve it. His father had always been particularly proud of him for that. Perhaps his mother might have been too, but she’d died a year after he was born, killed by the cancer she refused to get treatment for because she was pregnant with him, and he’d never known her.
Of course, these days he couldn’t do puzzles like that, but still. He couldn’t stop thinking of the puzzle that was Freddie. Freddie, who’d never been puzzling before in any way.
Freddie, whom he’d never felt any electricity from before either. And yet...that crackle had been unmistakable.
Why now, though? He’d never touched her before, it was true, so there had never been any opportunity to find out. But he generally knew straightaway if he had chemistry with a woman. It didn’t usually take him five years to be aware of it.
Was it the fact of her pregnancy? That got him thinking about who’d been touching her and when and why. That had got him feeling...territorial about her almost. Possessive, even. He couldn’t think why he felt that, though, since she wasn’t leaving him to work with someone else. In fact, as she’d said, she was intending to come back.
Not that he’d do anything about it, even so. He had few boundaries, but those he maintained with his staff were strict ones.
Leaning back in the chair, he shut the blinds on the window next to him to stop the sun’s glare from getting in his eyes. Then he stared straight ahead of him, turning things over in his head.
His questioning of her earlier had upset her and yes, he knew his questions were intrusive. It really wasnone of his business who’d fathered her child. Yet he hadn’t been able to stop himself from pushing her about it.
The man had to have been someone she trusted, because he didn’t think she would have had sex with a stranger.
When he’d mentioned that, he’d seen something flicker across her face. A face that had grown pale and then flushed with what he thought had been anger. That had fascinated him. First that she’d let her usual self-possession slip enough to reveal what she was feeling, and secondly that he’d managed to provoke her to anger at all. Sometimes she’d seemed so impervious to him that every so often he caught himself wanting to ruffle her. Startle her.
Everyone else found him so very affecting so why not her?
Of course, he couldn’t do that. That would cross that boundary he’d drawn and again, he didn’t cross those boundaries.
Still...
It was true that sometimes protection didn’t work and there was a failure rate. Maybe that had happened.
Predictably, his thoughts turned to that night again, and how he’d reached for the condoms in the bedside table. He’d come close to forgetting about protection himself, and he still couldn’t believe he had. But the doctor had been very clear that there was a vasectomy failure rate in the first three months, so he had to be careful.
As usual, the mere thought of that night made his body wake into full, aching life. Making him shift irritably in his seat.
He needed to get himself a lover. Wipe the memory from his brain once and for all. Sex always relaxed him, eased some of the tension from his muscles and that helped him sleep. He couldn’t think why he hadn’t found a woman sooner, but he hadn’t.
It was only that there had been something about the mystery woman that had got to him on a fundamental level. She’d responded to him so honestly, so passionately. She hadn’t hidden how much she’d wanted him. Hadn’t been self-conscious the way some women were, too busy worrying about how they looked or the sounds they made. No, it was as if she hadn’t cared about any of that, giving herself so utterly to him and to the pleasure they created between them that all self-consciousness had fallen away. There had only been him. Only them. Together.
They’d been so in sync with each other it was almost as if they knew each other. She definitely knew who he was, and maybe... maybe he’d known who she was too, deep down in some distant part of him.
But who she could be, he still had no idea.
