‘I’ll do it.’
‘No.’ Too fast. She had no idea if he was completely naked under the sheet, but she suspected he might be, and she wasn’t sure her equilibrium could take another exposure to his glorious, Greek god body. ‘I can do it.’
‘Do you want coffee?’
Genevieve firmly believed that the first sip of the first coffee of the day was one of life’s greatest pleasures, yet she shook her head to demur. ‘Let me make it.’
‘It is not like you are used to,’ he pointed out. ‘No flicking a button on a machine.’
‘How do you know that’s how I make coffee?’
‘Am I wrong?’
She hesitated, unable to refute his presumption. ‘Well, I saw what you did last night,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m sure I can manage.’
He simply stared back at her, in that disconcerting way of his, as though he was thinking things he knew better than to say. She prodded the fire back to life first, choosing a large log and placing it into the embers, then using the fire poker to shift the log around until flames began to lick against its sides. Afterwards, she moved to the kitchen, exploring the burner he’d used, the pot for water. It seemed simple enough. Add heat to water, let it boil, add coffee,et voilà.
She turned to say as much, only to find Nikos was out of bed and standing right there, in the kitchen, all big, looming, enormous hulk of a human, all gorgeous and, thankfully, wearing a pair of shorts, so at least she was spared from whatever her reaction might have been to seeing his nakedness again.
To remembering the way that nakedness had thrust inside her and turned her world utterly and wholly upside down.
‘Allow me,’ he said, his eyes probing hers, and now there was something in his face that was softer. Almost gentle, except nothing about this man with his harsh lines was gentle. This was the kind of man who could kill a bear with his hands alone, who could scale mountains and probably even part the sea, she thought with a surprising flicker of amusement.
She’d never known anyone like him.
Hardly surprising, given the circles she’d moved in. A quiet childhood on the outskirts of Boston, an Ivy League college education thanks to a full-ride scholarship, and then marriage to James, which had led to a suffocatingly pretentious Washington life. No chance to use her degree—James hadn’t wanted a wife who worked.
‘Something amusing?’
Her eyes flicked to his. ‘I was just imagining you in my normal life,’ she said, honestly. ‘I can’t imagine you anywhere but here.’
‘I don’t want to be anywhere but here.’
‘I wasn’t offering.’
His eyes sparked to hers and the air between them crackled with something that could have been animosity or could have been desire. Her insides tightened with a mix of the two.
‘You’re just so…rugged. The thought of you in a suit is hard to imagine.’
‘Easier to think of me naked?’ he asked, the question teasing. Light in tone, in a way she hadn’t heard from him before. Her lips quirked but when she glanced at him, he was busying himself making coffee, back turned to her.
There was no comfortable armchair to sit in, and she didn’t fancy the cold hardness of the chairs at the dining table, so she padded back to bed and sat gingerly on her side of it, propping the pillow behind her to create a sort of headrest.
‘Do you work?’
He glanced over his shoulder then turned properly to face her as he waited for the water to boil.
‘Yes.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Are you some kind of botanist?’
At that, he actually burst out laughing. ‘No, I’m not a botanist.’
‘A naturalist? A scientist of some kind? Some sort of conservationist?’
‘No.’
‘Then, what?’
