“I...” Her throat dried. She broke eye contact and sipped the wine. She’d expected this to be one of his flippant exchanges.
“Your instinct is to hide from a world you don’t always understand—I’m guessing that started way before all this. That’s why you like to interact from behind a computer screen, why you claim to not have many friends, why you’ve survived a year alone in hiding when it’d drive other people mad. Fear has kept you alive this past year or two. But now you’ve got to push through that fear, come out of that protective shell—and you already have, to get this far—and that scares you even more. You’re feeling like you’ve waded in too deep, you’re unanchored.”
The flames flickered in her wineglass. And she’d thought a man like him could never understand a woman like her. Had anyone bothered to look that deep before?
Don’t bring Latif into this.
He pushed his plate away and linked his hands on the table. “Am I right, Samira?”
A candle flared. Ghoulish shadows fluttered around the walls. “On almost everything, though some of these things I didn’t know about myself. I’ll have to have a think about them.”
“Of course. That’s another thing—you think very deeply but you like to take your time over it.” As his voice quietened and lowered, it developed a velvety warmth, like the wine and the fire. “You said ‘almost everything.’ Did I get something wrong?”
“Only one thing.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I don’t feel unanchored.”
A bemused half smile, half frown settled on his face.
“I hadn’t realized it until you said it,” she said. “But I don’t, not now, not for the first time in more than a year. You make a very good anchor.”
“Because I’m dull and stubborn and a dead weight?”
She laughed. “Because you make me laugh when it’s the last thing I feel like doing but probably the very thing I need. And you take the time to understand me. And you make me feel confident and safe. I don’t remember the last time I felt that—well, I do, but...”But I’m not going to think about that, not with the situation re-created in another borrowed cottage, in another country.
Too late.
His smile won out over the frown but it wasn’t the cheeky grin he usually brushed her off with. It was wide and gentle and thoughtful and it made her chest ache. “Good. I’m glad. We’ll get through this, Samira—but first you need to eat. I froze my arse off catching that trout.”
Yes. She’d hardly touched her meal. They finished eating in silence but not the suffocating kind she’d become accustomed to. A silence interrupted by the presence of another person—a warm body but a buoyant presence, too, despite his self-proclaimed dourness—his clothes rubbing as he shifted in his seat, the clatter of more than one set of cutlery, and, if she held her own breath and listened carefully, his breath, calm and steady.
When she’d finished, she pushed out her chair and stood. She waited half a minute for him to chase his last mouthful around before collecting both plates. As she passed, she caught her foot on the rug and wobbled, juggling her armload.
“Whoa,” he said, leaping up. He reached around from behind, scooped the plates from her arms and dumped them on the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have refilled your glass without you noticing. I wasn’t thinking.”
She turned. Her nose was inches from his collarbone. A soapy scent drifted from his neck. “Oh, it wasn’t...”The wine?Then how was she supposed to explain her unsteadiness? This fluttery sensation in her chest, her belly—it was the same feeling she’d dismissed a year ago as a reaction to the stress. Was it still that?
“You know, Samira, your speech doesn’t give much away but your eyes do.” He touched her cheek with two fingers. Her mouth opened. “So does your skin.” His fingers glided down her jaw, her neck, following her tiny gold cross to where it rested between her collarbones. “Your breath.”
He stepped closer. With the counter behind her she couldn’t retreat. And she didn’t want to. He traced his fingers back up her throat to her chin, coaxing her to meet his eyes. Crinkled and intent, like she knew they’d be.
“There’s this thing between us,” he croaked, “and it’s not going away.”
“There is,” she said, the words forceful with relief. “But you say that like you want it to go away.”
“Only because I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you having regrets afterward, like in France. God, I felt like such a jerk.”
“No, I was the jerk. I handled it badly. Sometimes...I’m not good at expressing myself. That day...” She winced. “I may have been a little forthright.”
He chuckled. “Aye, you were certainly that.”
“Regret upon regret.”
“Me, too.”
She tilted her head, in a question.
“I regret leading you where you weren’t ready to go,” he said. “But I also hate myself for walking away. I should have gone AWOL and—”
“Thrown away your life for someone you’d just met?”
