He wasn’t conscious of speaking, but he shifted a little, more into her peripheral vision and she startled, looking quickly and then dropping to the floor, her face pink from her exertions.
That didn’t exactly help matters.
“You’re back,” she spluttered, pulling a couple of airpods from her ears. That explained why she hadn’t heard the helicopter. “I didn’t realise.”
“Evidently.”
Stay where you are. Any closer and you’ll explode.
“How was your day?” She pushed to standing in one lithe motion, stretching her arms over her head in a gesture that only served to deepen the hammering sensation of need.
“Interesting.”
“Oh?”
“What exactly are you doing?”
“Yoga. Why?” She frowned. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No. I want you to keep going. That’s the problem.”
Somehow, her cheeks grew pinker. She gaped, searching for words, and he closed his eyes, the events of the past day weighing heavily on him.
“Have you eaten?”
She looked around. “What time is it?”
“Eight.”
“It’s late! I hadn’t realized.”
He also, therefore, could discount any notion that she’d been distractedly watching the clock, waiting for his return. “The day got away from me,” he explained, moving past her, into the kitchen and pulling out a platter of dips and breads. “Come, sit with me.”
Her eyes traced his face, and she hesitated. This morning, she’d really opened up to him, and though it didn’t mean anything to him, she felt strangely vulnerable now.
“I won’t bite,” he promised, and her heart did a funny flip flop as visions of him doing exactly that seared her, memories of his lips clamped around her nipples sending her into a tailspin. She cast about, looking for her shirt. It was discarded on the sofa, a casualty of the warm night. She walked towards it quickly, ripping it over her head then emerging, hair in disarray.
Anastasios was emptying his pockets, a gesture that struck her for how normal and domesticated it was, and for a fraction of a second she let her mind imagine that this was normal. That they were, in some way, a couple.
Longing was so strong, it almost felled her.
She blanked her face of emotion and pushed aside the childish, futile wishes, moving to meet him in the kitchen. While he gathered plates, she poured water glasses and removed a couple of cloth napkins from a draw.
“Do the staff usually feed you?”
“It depends what kind of mood I’m in. If I ask for food, I get it.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, how simple life must be for you, Anastasios Xenakis.”
“In some ways.”
Her eyes fell on a piece of paper he’d removed from his pocket and she gasped involuntarily.
“What is it?”
“This woman—,” she pointed to the brochure. “She’s fantastic.”
“You know of her?”