“Are you kidding? I’d eaten half the house by the time I got to stick it together. I am a sucker for gingerbread. The less baked the better. In fact, it would probably be my desert island food.”
“A gingerbread house?”
“Nope. Gingerbread dough. Unbaked. Cold and smooshy.”
“That sounds … disgusting.”
“You wait. I’ll make it for you one day.”
Something odd flushed through him at the easy way she threw such promises around.
He covered it quickly with another question. “Who made the best gingerbread houses?”
“Ava,” she responded immediately. “I can still picture her, sitting up late measuring the walls to within a millimetre. She’d bake spare slabs in case any developed cracks. She is very precise.”
“She sounds it.”
Sophie sighed. “And on Christmas morning, we’d wake up to the smell of baked ham and scrambled eggs, and croissants with cheese. Mum was a wonderful cook. Looking back, it must have been exhausting, but she always swore she loved it.” Sophie’s smile was bitter-sweet. “That was mum, though. She was determined that we would have a happy, uneventful life.”
“A true opposite to my own childhood, then.” He’d spoken without thinking. He never, without exception, spoke of his youth.
But Sophie was fast. “In what way?”
“We are not talking about me,” he attempted to demur, but she wasn’t going to let it pass so easily.
“No, but I’d like to. I presume you mean you were the water. Or at least, that you were flotsam on the water. Rather than the air-bubble,” she clarified, at his lost expression.
He couldn’t help but smile at her quick turn of phrase. “If you exchange water for sludge, then yes. I was detritus in the mud of life, during my childhood.”
She squeezed his fingers. “I am tempted to say that it can’t have been so bad, except that I suspect you are not prone to exaggeration.”
“No,” he admitted grimly. “It was more dire that I would admit to most people.”
“How?” She pushed, in the same demanding way he had employed.
And though he’d brought her to his house to seduce her, and though he believed he had every reason to distrust her, he heard himself say, “It would be impossible to describe.”
Sophie lifted his hand above the table and unfurled his fingers. She placed a kiss in his palm and then closed his fist back up. “I want to know more.”
An exasperated noise escaped his throat without his consent. “I’m not sure it would do any good to speak of it.”
“But would it do any harm?”
He studied her carefully. “You might think less of me.”
Sophie pulled a face. “If you truly believe I am the kind of woman to judge someone on their background or the way they were raised then you don’t know me at all.” She flushed to the roots of her pale, silky hair. “You don’t know me at all. Not really. So let me tell you something. I don’t really care about where you’ve come from, except in so much as it changes who you are now. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll let it go. But if you’re hiding it from me because you’re ashamed, then I’m going to be very offended.”
A long beat of silence throbbed between them before Alex found his voice. “You seem to have an ability to unsettle and surprise me.”
“I try hard,” she teased with a shrug of her shoulders.
“It is not something my lovers usually care to discuss.”
And in a flash, the atmosphere began to crackle with tension. It zapped around them, and Sophie didn’t know where to look. Despite the crowd in the restaurant, they were alone, and her chest was hurting.
“What do they want to discuss?” She managed through half-gritted teeth.
“Sophie.” He sighed. “We have gone off-course.”