But the fingers went still when he heard the first soft tread on the stairs.
His eyes slid open, but he didn’t move. Lounging there, he stared at the gap in the half-open door, listened and waited to find out what she was going to do.
Go right past the door or step into the room? She had to see the light, hear the music. She must know he was in here. The new Samantha was as unpredictable as the old one, but he would lay heavy odds on the old one being unable to pass by that door without putting her head in here—no matter how reluctant she might be to do so. It was a point of pride—of defiance, if you like—not to turn away from potential confrontation. She had done it only once in his experience, and that had been the time she’d left here one night a year ago, without hanging around long enough to have the whole ugly scene out with him.
Nothing happened. She hadn’t moved towards the kitchen; she hadn’t moved towards the front door. The muscles encasing his stomach began to tighten, trying to urge him to get up and go and check what she was doing out there. But he refused to give in to it. This was Samantha’s move. He would wait here to see what that move was, even if it was killing him to do it.
The annoying, provoking, beautiful witch.
A sound at last. His heart stopped beating. His fingers curled around the pen. The door began to swing wider. Dressed to go or dressed to stay? he asked himself as a tingle that began at the back of his neck spread out to infuse his whole system with a state of readiness to move like lightning if she was dressed to leave.
Then she appeared in the opening, and he had to narrow his eyes to hide their expression as relief turned the tingle to liquid until his bones felt like wax.
She looked as she’d used to look in the mornings, all warm and soft and still a little sleepy. She was wearing one of her old short silk wraps in a soft shell-pink the same colour as her warm, bare toes, and her hair was lying in an unbrushed silken tangle about her face and shoulders.
‘Hi,’ she murmured awkwardly. ‘I’m going to make myself some breakfast, if that’s okay.’
‘It’s nine o’clock in the evening,’ he said, frowning down at his watch.
‘I know.’ She offered a tense little lift of one shoulder. ‘But I fancy porridge with honey… Do you want some?’
He shook his head. ‘No, thanks,’ he murmured, only to immediately wish he’d answered differently when she just nodded and disappeared again.
The first real invitation she’d offered him and he’d turned it down. What a bloody fool, he cursed himself. Now he had no real excuse to go after her. No excuse to get close, get warm—since he hadn’t felt warm all day thanks to this wretched war of nerve ends they were waging on each other.
Closing his eyes, he relaxed back into the chair, cursed himself some more and managed to stay like that for all of five minutes, thinking of her wandering around the kitchen in that thin little wrap, and with nothing on her feet, and—
With a growl of frustration, he gave up trying to be strong, slid his feet to the floor, got up and went looking for her. She was standing by the microwave, watching a bowl of porridge rotate.
‘Your father would disown you if he could see you making porridge that way,’ he remarked lazily.
She looked up, smiled briefly, then looked away again. ‘He thought he got his porridge the old-fashioned way every morning, but he didn’t, the poor, deluded soul.’
‘Found the honey?’
‘Not yet.’
He went off to hunt it down in a cupboard, saw the kettle was coming to the boil with the teapot standing at the ready beside it. ‘I’ll have a cup of that, if you don’t mind,’ he said lightly.
‘Sure,’ she replied, and moved to pour boiling water onto the tea bags, took the pot to a ready-set table, before going back to get her porridge from the microwave.
Finding himself a cup, he sat down. She sat down. He loosened the top on the honey pot then set it down in front of her. She picked it up and took the lid off completely, then picked up her spoon.
And because he couldn’t help it, he started grinning. ‘Finishing the day as we started it.’ He explained the grin.
‘One hell of a lot went on in between,’ she dryly pointed out.
‘How is the headache?’ he queried belatedly.
‘Gone,’ she said. ‘The sleep gave my head a chance to put its filing system in order, I think.’ Twisting a spoonful of honey out of the jar, she then let it spiral its way down onto her porridge.
His mouth began to water. He didn’t know why, but the warmth suddenly heating certain parts of his body told him that his mouth wasn’t watering because he fancied the look of the honey!
It was the woman and what she was doing that was making him feel—
‘You were right about something you said today,’ she murmured.
‘Only one thing? I must be slipping.’ He grimaced. ‘What was it?’ he asked, lifting his eyes, up to her eyes to find them watching him from underneath her long dark gold-tipped lashes.