Valentine's Day. Nicola Marsh
grab a coffee,’ he said and turned her west.
Georgia did her best not to flinch at the feel of Zander’s hand at her lower back. It was just a courteous gesture. Unconscious. It didn’t mean a thing. Even if it did feel more intimate and personal than the salsa clinch they’d been in just moments before. Something about the way it failed to entirely disengage even once she was fully moving...
It took a few silent minutes to get to the Tudor-style coffee shop. Then a few more to get seated and settled and their drinks ordered.
She struggled to not be distracted by his long fingers tapping on the tabletop—fingers that had traced her skin so beautifully just nights ago and curled so strongly in her hair. But if she looked at his face she’d either drown in his eyes or start obsessing about his lips.
All of which were entirely off limits to her now. Despite the torment of the taste-test after the marathon.
So she fluctuated between looking at the place where a lock of his hair fell across his forehead, a spot of fluff on his collar and glancing around the room at the other patrons.
‘Tell me about Ankara.’
That managed to bring her eyes back to his. ‘Now?’
‘I know nothing about it and I’m going to be going with you. Why is it so special?’
‘Cappadocia.’ Amongst other wonders.
He shrugged. ‘Old cities and ballooning. That’s it?’
She pressed forwards against the table. ‘Seriously? You can’t understand why someone would want to float high above a city where houses and chapels are carved into the rockfaces? Where entire communities used to live underground to hide from invaders two thousand years ago? Cities that were founded twenty centuries before Jesus?’
He just stared. ‘You’re serious?’
Excited warmth warmed her cheeks. ‘Where else could you do it? It’s so intriguing...’
‘It’s not to put me off?’
‘It’s not about you at all.’ Lies! ‘It’s something I’d like to do. I saw it in a documentary years ago and I’ve never forgotten it.’ And if Zander came along, bonus. Good things happened to them when they got out of London. Things just tended to go south when they were back in it.
His eyes burned into hers. Deciding. He slid his recorder up onto the table. ‘OK. Tell me more.’
She did. For the next hour and a half. All about Göreme, where she wanted to stay, all about Cappadocia’s extraordinary ancient lunar-scapes and traditional villages and the amazing peoples that had lived there for forty centuries. All about how it had wheedled its way under her skin all those years ago.
‘And you can stay in these underground buildings?’
‘They carve them out of the side of enormous rock faces. And they’ve been modernised. Electricity, water. They even have Wi-Fi. So you won’t be slumming it.’
He’d been smiling for the last five or six minutes straight, though she knew she wasn’t saying anything funny. His eyes practically glittered looking at her.
‘What?’
‘You just...’ He struggled for the right words. And he turned the recorder off. ‘You love life, don’t you?’
Generally, she just endured life. But maybe that was because she’d been missing the best of it. ‘I love the possibilities. I love that you’ve given me this opportunity and I’m going to do something I’ve always wanted to. I couldn’t do this without you.’
‘Without the station,’ he clarified.
Right. Just in case she was thinking he was doing this for her. ‘Without help.’
‘You might have got there by yourself. Eventually.’
‘Maybe not. I was this close—’ she pinched her fingers ‘—to consigning myself to the role of wife and mother. That would have meant a lot less flexibility and freedom for a really long time.’
He shrugged. ‘A different kind of adventure, perhaps?’
His words sank in. If marriage was an adventure, then shouldn’t you enter into it with someone that you’d want to be adventurous with? Discover new worlds with? Fly across a lunar landscape with. Her breath tightened up. She said the first thing that came into her head in order to stop anything more inappropriate appearing there.
‘Is that what you think marriage is? An adventure?’
‘I used to.’ He pressed his lips together the moment those few tiny words voiced.
The unexpected glimpse into his past was tantalising. She wanted more immediately. ‘Is that why you created the Valentine’s promo?’ she fished. ‘To celebrate marriage?’
His answer was fifty-per-cent snort. ‘Definitely not. I created the promo to cash in on the leap year commercialisation. Nothing more.’
Well, that was depressingly cynical. ‘You don’t think matrimony is worth celebrating?’
‘On the whole I think marriage is highly overrated.’
She stared at him. ‘I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. Otherwise you’d have been snapped up ages ago.’
One expressive eyebrow lifted. ‘You don’t think I’d have done the snapping?’
‘You strike me as a man who gets what he wants. If you wanted a wife in that big lonely house of yours there’d be one there now.’
He drained the last of his second coffee. ‘You have a very high opinion of my desirability. Not everyone would agree with you.’
His staff perhaps? ‘Maybe you work too hard keeping people at a distance...’
‘You’re here.’ He tossed it out like a challenge. ‘I can’t seem to shake you at all.’
His light words filleted her neatly along her ribs. Although, she could see he wasn’t saying them to be cruel. In fact, if anything, he looked more engaged and more intent than ever. And positively mystified.
‘I’m particularly uncaring about societal niceties,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sure there’s been a hundred not-so-subtle hints I should have been taking.’
If she weren’t so busy looking for hints that he might be more interested than he was letting on. Maybe than he even knew, himself. But for every sultry look, for every gentle touch, for every unexpected waterside kiss there was a frown, pressed lips, words like professional and aberration. And ill-equipped.
They kind of cancelled each other out.
‘Besides,’ she braved on, ‘I’m not your target market.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Really? Who is?’
She looked around. A lone woman sat reading a thick book in the far corner. Her perfectly manicured nails were the exact same shade as her shoes. ‘Her. Maybe...’ She looked around for someone else. ‘Maybe her?’
Two glamour queens in one coffee shop. Convenient.
Zander looked around far more subtly than she had. ‘They’re both very attractive.’
Of course that would be the first thing he noticed.
‘And stylish,’ he went on.
‘And well educated.’ She nodded to the woman with the thick hardback. ‘She’s reading Ayn Rand.’
‘And that’s who you think my target market is? Stylish intellectuals?’
‘I can see either one of them in your house very easily.’ Much as it galled her to admit it.
His grey eyes pierced her. ‘Can you see them sitting on the side of a weather-beaten