by Dani Collins
“Both. Our most heavily used is reproduction.”
She noted the escritoire that was likely an authentic Louis Quinze. “I’m a nut for tiny drawers and hidden compartments,” she admitted, firmly grasping her hands behind her back as she examined it. “I’m going to let myself believe there’s a key to a secret passage in one of these.”
“We had to lock it. To keep the ghosts from haunting the rest of the house.”
After an exaggerated gasp of delight, she said, “Thank you.”
His mouth twitched, but their drinks arrived before she could coax any more humor out of him than that one dry comment.
As they took their drinks, she made herself meet his gaze, no matter how disturbing, and say, “Egészségére.”
He repeated it and they sipped.
“Is it too bold to ask you to tour me around?” she asked.
“You wish to case the place?”
“No.” Was he serious or joking? So hard to tell. “I’m an artist. I’m interested.”
“That’s a lot of hats. I thought you were a gemologist and a goldsmith.”
“I’m midway through a master of fine arts in metalwork and jewelry design.” Did she take satisfaction from the slight elevation of surprise in his brows? Heck, yes, she did. “I work full-time for my uncle, making custom jewelry he sells in the shop my grandfather started. Barsi on Fifth? It’s quite well-known in New York.”
It might not have been featured in the title of a movie, but it held a similar reputation and was frequented by the same upper-class clientele.
“I know who your uncle is,” he said blithely.
“Then you know he wouldn’t hire me on nepotism alone. He expects me to constantly fill the well, which is why I’m continuing my education. But all art is inspiration for my own work. I would hate to miss this opportunity to study the masters who came before me, even though their disciplines are different from my own.”
He cocked his head in a small nod, relenting, and waved toward the hall where they had entered. He took her first to a music room where the brass pipes of an organ reached toward the sixteen-foot ceilings. A wall of double doors opened into the adjacent ballroom, which was straight out of Beauty and the Beast.
“Wow.”
“In answer to your earlier question, we host charity events and the odd film crew shooting a period piece.”
“I love those.” She moved into the center of the parquet floor and turned a slow circle, taking in the white walls with gilded trim, blue velvet curtains over the leaded windows and the chandeliers dripping with crystal. “What a dizzying place to live.”
“It’s an expensive obligation. I’d be fine with a modest apartment.”
She bet his definition of modest was a lot different from the place she occupied. Even so, this was only one of his many homes. What were the rest like?
“I’m a romantic, I’m afraid,” she confessed as he led her out to a hallway of portraits and vases that were so colorful and ornate they should have been gaudy but were perfectly tasteful in this surrounding. There was a chill in the air, though, and a faint scent of disuse. “I never want to hear that it’s actually cold as Hades to live here, even in summer. Or that back in the day, they had to use outhouses and drank bad water.”
“Mmm. I don’t know whether you’ll be pleased with this room or not, then.” He took her into an enormous dining room. It was very stately and beautiful, but distinctly chilly and empty. It held only a circular table with eight chairs upon an enormous rug. The windows looked on to the front grounds. “There’s a compartment in the floor where a table for forty is kept. At different times, people have hidden there.”
“Like you? Playing hide-and-seek when you were young?” She came from a big, lively family, but recalled at the last second that he had lost his only sibling, an older brother, when they’d been young men.
“Or you meant in wartime?” she hurried to add, trying to smooth over her gaffe.
“Both of those.” His expression remained inscrutable. “And the odd lover.”
“Oh, I do enjoy hearing about skeletons in the family closet,” she said with relish.
“Never found one of those. They always seemed to get out.” He sipped the drink he carried.
She chuckled, more out of relief since his dry sense of humor gave her the impression he was relaxing a fraction. Not that she would call him affable. Not ever and certainly not to his face.
“They must be a consequence of arranged marriages. Lovers, I mean.” She was teasing him a little, but also wondering if he really planned to succumb to such a thing.
“A consequence of being human, I’d say.” He wasn’t standing that close, but she suddenly felt the heat of his body. The lazy half-lidded look he gave her made her pulse thrum in her throat.
Would he resort to that? she wondered. If he succumbed to an arranged marriage?
She pushed the rim of her glass against her unsteady mouth, wondering what he would think if she told him she was a virgin at twenty-four. That she had made a pact at thirteen with her cousin to wait until they found a man they could truly love. It had partly been inspired their grandmother’s great love for Istvan, but for Rozalia, it was more personal. She needed to be sure she gave herself to a man who wasn’t secretly wishing she was Gisella.
“You come from a love match, I presume?” he asked, leading her into a smaller breakfast room that had a view of the back garden. It was still a showpiece, but much warmer and lived-in with fresh flowers and cut-crystal salt and pepper shakers on the lace tablecloth.
“My parents are deliriously in love,” she said with a grin of affection, moving to the windows that likely caught the morning sun, making for a relaxed start to the day. “But I will concede such a thing to be impractical.” She threw that over her shoulder, then tilted her head to reconsider her words. “Actually, my parents are impractical people, so I don’t know if one correlates to the other.”
“Impractical how?” He came to stand next to her and pointed out the window to the hexagonal windows that formed the roof of a squat, round building. “Like that sort of folly?”
“Why is it a folly? What is it?”
“A conservatory. My mother insists the staff keep it up, even though we can buy orchids for a fraction of the cost of heating that monster.”
“May I see inside it?”
He drew her into a hall where casual jackets hung over a boot bench, then opened the door she suspected was referred to as the service entrance. Faint kitchen noises came from behind a closed door. Looking along as she went down the outside steps, she saw a formal veranda obscured by a privacy hedge.
He was showing her the “home” part of his house, which gave her a sense of privilege and made her warm to him even though he remained very aloof.
Cool evening air surrounded them as they crossed to the door of the conservatory. She hugged her arms across her chest, hiding the way her nipples pushed against the fabric of her T-shirt, glancing nervously to see he’d noticed.
If anything, his attention made her nerve endings tingle all the harder, becoming even more sensitized and receptive. She had never reacted so elementally to any man before in her life. She kept wondering if this was how her grandmother had felt around Istvan—enthralled and ensnared. Helpless to powerful attraction. Desperate, even. Like me, want me. She didn’t want to be that needy, ever, but couldn’t hide from herself that he stoked that compulsion in her.
They entered the conservatory. It was humid as the tropics in here. She inhaled the earthy, dank undertones layered with heady floral aromas and a fragrance of citrus and herbs.
“I love the smell.”
His nostrils twitched and his chest expanded. He grew pensive. “I haven’t been in here for years.”
“I would be in here every day if it was mine.” She looked to the glass ceiling p
artially obscured by the fat leaves of exotic jungle plants. “This must be amazing in the winter. Oh, butterflies! How magical. You really are the luckiest person to have this.”
“There were birds once. Tomatoes were protected in that section and berries there.” He pointed to some cold frames. “My brother and I got into them. Left the doors open. The birds got into the berries and the cat got after the birds. We were banned after that.”
She smiled, heart squeezed by the memory. It sounded so beautifully human. She wanted to hear more, but his expression stiffened and closed up as though he regretted sharing.
“We grew a garden every summer,” she said. “My mother always put up her own preserves—even though you can buy canned peaches off the shelf for half the price.” She teasingly threw his words back at him.
“She didn’t work?”
“She had four children. It was work, trust me.” She rubbed a sage leaf and dipped her head to draw in the scent. “But being a stay-at-home mother was her dream. She was a daughter of immigrants and grew up in the back of the jewelry shop, mostly raised by her half sister—Istvan’s daughter Alisz.”
She copied his beat of silence, offering him a moment to argue that while sending him a look that told him he’d have an argument on his hands if he did.
He only lifted an unimpressed brow, not intimidated in the least.
She licked her lips and continued.
“Mom wanted to give us what she felt she had missed. She even day-cared Gisella. Mom didn’t take any money for it, either. Even though Aunt Alisz would have paid a nanny so she wanted to pay Mom. Even though we could have used the money. That’s what I mean about my parents being impractical. My mom viewed caring for her sister’s child as simply what you do for family. Maybe it was even payback for Alisz watching her when she was little. But Aunt Alisz didn’t have to work. Her ex-husband is quite well-off. Aunt Alisz wanted to pursue her academic career, though. My mom supported her aspiration by looking after her daughter.”
The way he looked at her, eyes narrowed as he weighed and measured all her words, made her wonder if she should repeat it in Hungarian.
“What does your father do?” he asked.
“He runs a nonprofit office that finds housing for the homeless.”
“It sounds as though you come by your romantic streak honestly.”
“I really do. ‘Pursue your dreams and you’ll never work a day in your life’ is the family motto.”
“Dreams don’t fill stomachs.”
“Tell me about it. But we’re not completely without sense. My older brother is a volcanologist. A wanderer, but gainfully employed at least some of the time. My younger brother swims. He still lives at home, but he’s training for the Olympics. That’s a full-time job in itself. Our baby sister, Bea, has applied to Juilliard for dance and she’s also very talented, so why shouldn’t we encourage her?”
Rozi leaned in to smell a lily. As the heady perfume filled her nostrils, velvet grazed her nose. She jerked back. “I always do that. Do I have pollen on my nose now?”
He brushed his fingertip against the tip of her nose.
Such a jolt of electricity went through her, she drew back sharply, tucking her chin and touching the spot herself to soothe the lingering burn. A myriad of feelings swirled through her. Self-consciousness, sheepish amusement, something uncertain and shy as she reacted to the most innocuous of caresses from him.
Did he think her horribly gauche?
He wasn’t laughing. His shrewd gaze seemed to delve all the way to her soul.
“And you chose to keep a foot on each side, artistry that is also a practical trade.”
A warm glow suffused her at words that weren’t even a compliment, but so few people saw her. She was the forgotten middle child, the one who mediated and pleased and stepped back to let the leaders and the babies have the spotlight.
“My vocation chose me. Partly it was growing up around the family business. My mother used to leave Gizi and me at the shop while she ran her errands. I never wanted to go anywhere else. And my parents always encouraged me to go after my dream. What if they had told me to get a business degree? I’d be miserable.”
“I have a business degree.”
“Do you enjoy what you do?”
“I enjoy my standard of living,” he said dryly. “I don’t need to paint or sculpt to feel fulfilled. It’s enough to watch the stock numbers go up and know that my decisions, and whatever risks I’ve taken lately, have paid off.”
“I’m not much of a risk-taker.”
“Aren’t you?”
She really wasn’t, but he had a point. In the back of her head, she could hear her mother freaking out that she was alone with a stranger in a faraway city, putting herself in a precarious situation in a stone-walled hothouse where no one would hear her screams.
But the risk Viktor posed had nothing to do with murdering her and hiding her body under the floorboards of his dining room. Her entire body was still tingling from the brush of his fingertip against her nose. He made her think and want and wonder. She wasn’t a covetous person. In her childhood, yes, she had been jealous of Gisella’s electronics and pretty clothes and constant vacations to amusement parks, but she also knew that she was very lucky. Gisella’s parents had divorced. Gisella envied Rozalia’s jumble of family and her affectionate parents and the fact Rozi wasn’t pursued by every man who walked by.
So Rozi wasn’t eyeing up this man’s circumstance beyond admiring the sheer beauty of him and everything around him. She wasn’t drawn to him because he was six-foot-gorgeous. She was feeling, for once, like she was her own person. One who wished this intriguing man might find her halfway as interesting as she found him. She wanted to get to know him.
Which was a huge risk because she knew when she was out of her league and, seriously, she had only read about the sort of home runs he no doubt cracked out on a nightly basis.
But as he picked a pale pink hibiscus flower and tucked it behind her ear, she knew she was going to take a small risk and see where this would go. It was another opportunity she refused to miss.
* * *
Rozalia’s lashes swept down shyly as he settled the flower behind her ear. He took the liberty of smoothing her hair over it, allowing his touch to linger against the fine, soft tails.
He reminded himself that seeming innocents could hide secrets. They could betray. She had already coaxed him into betraying himself, mentioning his brother, Kristof, when he had bricked off those painful memories never planning to revisit them. Ever.
This woman was definitely more threatening than she appeared. On the surface she was mousy, but her brown hair had streaks of caramel, her brown eyes glints of bronze and gold. She had an unerring sense of artistry, taking time to study pieces that were not the most eye-catching, but which he knew to be of the most esteemed works they possessed. She was tactile and curious, impulsively touching and smelling, but in a way that savored the experience.
She was fascinating to watch, making the mundane corners of his world new and interesting to him again. It made the idea of kissing her, of seeing how she would take in that experience, a compulsion he couldn’t resist.
He touched her chin, urging her to lift her mouth. The tip of her tongue appeared to wet them. His skin tightened. He lowered his head, not usually one to hesitate, but this was a one-time thing. He would never see her again after tonight. He would never kiss her for the first time ever again. It made him want to play and tease and draw this out.
He grazed his lips against hers until his own burned with anticipation. A small gasp parted her lips and she opened her eyes. Her pupils were massive, and the light changed around him, telling him his own were reacting. All of him was expanding in an urge to overwhelm but he only kept that one finger crooked under her chin, wanting the full impact to be this, just this. A kiss.
&n
bsp; He settled his mouth more firmly over hers, felt the tremble of her soft, soft lips. The timid response as he took his time rocking to find the perfect fit. She lifted on her toes to increase the pressure and her lips clung to his.
A noise he didn’t consciously make growled in his throat. He moved his hand to the side of her neck so her pulse pounded against the heel of his palm, and gave himself more freedom. He explored the silky shape of her lips from the pillowy softness of her bottom lip to the luscious curve of her top lip.
Then he tasted her. Deeply.
And she moaned. Deeply.
He was dimly aware of her hands splaying against his ribs, nails like kitten claws as she searched for balance while rising higher on her toes, wanting more.
Sliding his arm around her slender waist to support her, he pulled her in. Her one arm came up around his neck and the warm swells of her breasts mashed into his chest. She softened in surrender, unleashing the barbarian in him.
He dug his hand into the thick silk of her hair and plundered. Made love to her mouth and filled his hand with the lush cheek of her behind. Pulled her up so she could feel his growing arousal straining against her mound.
She dove her fingers into his hair and encouraged him. Sucked delicately on his tongue while shyly dallying her own across it. It was both carnal and sweet. He forgot everything except that this woman ought to be his. He wanted to take her to the gravel at their feet and make it happen. He also wanted to stand here and savor the most flagrantly passionate kiss he’d ever experienced. The most purely sensual woman he’d ever met.
As he started to guide her leg up to curl her knee at his hip, her other foot turned. She gasped and grasped at him. He had a firm hold on her and it only took a half step to regain their balance, but it was enough to pull them out of their sexual spiral.
Her expression was stunned. His heart was pounding, his breath uneven.
“That—” She carefully drew back until she stood before him without so much as a loose thread connecting them. Her shaking hand went to her mouth. “That wasn’t what I came here for,” she said in a voice still husky with desire.