‘What?’ he asked, suddenly incurably curious about her—everything and anything about her. He wanted to know it all.
‘I have a list too.’
Emma couldn’t believe that she was telling him about her list. During chemo she had heard people talk about their bucket lists, and had felt overwhelmingly sad that the supposition was at the end there would be death, not life.
‘It’s my Living List. My mum helped me to make it,’ she said, smiling at the memory of being in her parents’ sitting room, pen and paper in her hands, as her mother and father encouraged her to write down everything she wanted to do when it was all over.
‘What’s on the list?’ he asked, drawing her from her memory.
She looked at him and realised how their bodies had shifted position on the sofa. Somehow during their conversation she had turned towards him, her back against the armrest, her legs stretched out. If she moved an inch her feet would be in his lap. And Antonio had turned towards her, mirroring her position, one leg bent, anchored over the other.
It was beguiling, having Antonio Arcuri’s full attention. The low light from the small lamp on the table beside him shaded half his features, highlighting the cut of his cheekbones, the hollows of his throat...a throat she wanted to run her fingers over, her tongue...
But it was the look in his eyes as he asked the question. Curiosity and something else. Something almost pleasurable.
She felt heat swirl in her stomach and, desperate to dampen this quickening attraction for her boss, she focused on his question.
‘A whole lot of things—big and small.’
‘What’s the biggest?’
‘Only a man would ask that first,’ she joked, and appreciated the humour that was returned to her in his eyes. ‘Okay—I think the biggest would be that I want to see the sun rise over a desert and set over the Mediterranean.’
‘In one day?’ Antonio asked, his surprise almost funny.
‘Not necessarily. I’m not fussy. Just a sunrise. Just a sunset. But, yes, deserts, sea views... I want to see the world. I’m really looking forward to Hong Kong,’ she confided.
‘I know the perfect place to take you.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s a surprise. But you’ll like it,’ he assured her, and that thrill of excitement began to unwind throughout her body and across her skin. ‘The smallest?’ he pressed.
‘Ah. The smallest I have achieved. I wanted to eat a stack of American pancakes with crispy bacon and maple syrup. It was divine.’
He laughed as she groaned with remembered pleasure.
‘What else?’
And once again Emma’s thoughts went to the one thing that she hadn’t been able to write on the list in front of her parents. She was sure that her mother would have understood, but writing losing my virginity had just seemed more than a little uncomfortable.
But it was about so much more than simply having sex. At the time, Emma had been approaching her reconstructive surgery with the same practicality that had pushed her through the other areas of treatment.
Now, when she looked in the mirror she just saw shapes. The shapes that had been taken away and then put back on her body. It was hard for her to see her breasts, her body, as her own. To own them, to glory in them. She had a good figure—she knew that. But somehow she had never felt able to exalt in it. To see it as her own.
‘You didn’t ask me to help you achieve anything on your list,’ Antonio stated when she didn’t answer his question.
‘When?’
‘When I offered you whatever you wanted.’
‘No,’ she said. She hadn’t. ‘These are things I want to achieve Antonio. I want to make them happen. Asking you to do them for me...kind of feels like cheating.’
He let that lie between them, and the silence was consumed whole by the tension and crackle of attraction on the air between them.
Antonio’s declaration to dedicate more time and energy to the charity had been almost fierce. And Emma found herself wondering what it would be like to have that dedication and power directed at her. As a woman. As someone or something beautiful.
She couldn’t help but study him once again in the half-light of the room, seeing the way it illuminated his masculine beauty. She could lie to herself and pretend to think that it was her wayward thoughts about her virginity that had conjured her attraction to him by association—not the curve of his almost cruelly sensual lips, the feel of his eyes on her body. She could blame it on the new and surprising intimacy that had been created between them in these last few hours and not on the way his direct gaze, eagle-eyed and intense, seemed to reach into her and kick up her pulse.