“I want to be here with you,” he whispered.
I nodded into his chest, trying to quiet the danger warning in my mind.Don’t let yourself get too comfortable here.
“There’s nowhere else I want to be, Niklas,” I said, burying my hands in his hair. This was the truth.
“We’ll figure this out, Caroline.” Niklas unwrapped his large arms from around me and led me down the hallway, peeking inside a guest room and a small bathroom. He opened up the last door to an office, almost bare, with a sleek, thin desk next to the long wall of glass, facing the water.
“I thought you could work here,” he said, resting his hand on my back. “I rarely use it.”
I smiled. “An office just for show? To impress the women with your intellectual side?”
Niklas snorted. “Right.”
But his eyes darkened as he registered the comment. He guided my gaze up to his face and said, “I never bring women here. This is different.”
I let out my breath and smiled. Why did I still crave reassurance that what we had together was different from his past?
“Thank you, Niklas,” I whispered. “I’d love to work here.”
Again I saw relief in his smile. I traced my fingers over the thick muscles of his arm and found his hand. He lifted my hand to his mouth and brushed his lips over my knuckles, but he didn’t say anything.
We walked back down the hall, past the living room where we had started and into the kitchen. The room was bright and airy, much like the living room, with sleek lines and empty surfaces, straight out of a design catalog. It looked untouched. I let go of Niklas’s hand and began opening the cabinet doors. Most of the shelves were empty. I found a few lonely pots and pans, an expensive-looking white dishware set, a handful of silverware and a waffle iron. I picked this last item up and showed it to him. He leaned against the entryway to the kitchen, hands in his pockets, silently watching me.
“You have one appliance in this kitchen, and it’s a waffle iron?”
Niklas smiled. “I like waffles.”
“More than coffee?”
“I thought I had a coffeemaker somewhere in here.” Niklas took his hands out of his pockets and stepped into the room, brow furrowed. He opened a few empty cabinets before he pulled out a bulky black machine from the dark recesses of the corner shelves. “Voila,” he said, dusting it off.
I raised my eyebrows. “You know how to use that thing?”
“Of course,” he grinned. “Coffee for the lady?”
Actually, coffee sounded delicious. “Yes, please.”
He even found the coffee beans on the first try. He loaded up the machine and turned to the fridge.
“We have food, too. The housekeeper stocked it this morning,” he said over his shoulder as he pulled out the milk.
“The housekeeper?”
He turned around and smiled, raising an eyebrow. “What? You don’t like a clean house?”
The idea of someone else coming into this home, stepping into his private life, made me shiver.
“Do you have any other…services?”
Niklas frowned.
“Well, there’s someone who takes care of the lawn once a week. And some other business-related people, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. You don’t like the housekeeper thing?”
“It feels a little strange.”
Every day of the last months I had been waited on in restaurants, and housekeepers had cleaned the hotel rooms I stayed in. But somehow all that felt different from the idea of someone coming here, to this retreat from the rest of the world. But this house was Niklas’s sanctuary, not mine.
Niklas poured a little milk into my coffee and brought it over to the island counter where I was standing. He lifted me up onto the counter, nudged open my legs and stepped in between. We were almost the same height this way, and if I leaned forward just a few inches, my lips would touch his.
