Glass Houses

by Stella Cameron

  “You’re right, coach,” Aiden said. “Take what bags Olivia’s got. Now beat it. We’ll be there.”

  Without argument, Chris slung Olivia’s two bags over his shoulder, wheeled his own large bag behind him, and set off. He turned back once to wave before hurrying outside. Olivia saw him hail a cab and get in.

  “I really like him,” she told Aiden.

  “You’ve got great taste. Sonnie had a cesarean with Anna. They’re hoping Chris gets to coach through to the end this time. That’s why he doesn’t want to be out of reach.”

  The service rep was on the phone, and the answers she was getting weren’t pleasing her. “How long?” she asked.

  Aiden smoothed Olivia’s hair back from her face.

  “That’s a lot of help. Yes, I’ll wait to hear.” The representative hung up. “This is going to take a little while. I’m sorry. Might be a good idea to find coffee or something and come back in half an hour.”

  “Can’t we just go through the bags and get it if it’s there?” Olivia said.

  The blond woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. We’ve had too much trouble lately with the wrong people taking the wrong bags.”

  “Come on.” Aiden took Olivia’s arm. “We’ll be back. Let’s make sure Boss is okay, then get that coffee.”

  The baggage area had all but cleared, and the hubbub had faded until the shoes of those who remained clipped noisily on the hard floors. Boss’s travel crate was easy to locate. It was huge. The dog lay forlornly inside, his eyes moving from side to side.

  “It’s okay, old fella, we’ll get you out of there as soon as we know we’re leaving,” Aiden said, sticking his fingers through the front grid to scratch Boss’s nose. Boss’s response was to get up, present his back to them and flop down again. Aiden shook his head and said, “Looks like we can’t get anything right tonight. We’ll be back, Boss.”

  On their way past the service desk, Aiden inquired for the bag again, only to be told the computers were still down. At some level he was tired to his bones, and he knew Olivia must be just as weary. But at another level his awareness snapped and felt every nuance in the atmosphere surrounding him and Olivia. He ought to cool it. Their days together hadn’t included a single normal hour. Everything they’d experienced had been extraordinary and played out against a drama most people wouldn’t believe if he tried to recount it.

  “Let’s find somewhere to sit,” he said. “Did the coffee idea sound good?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Tea?”

  She gave him a quick smile. “No, thank you.”

  “Somewhere to sit, then?”

  “You sit. You need to be good to your ankles. I’m going out to get some fresh air.”

  What was he supposed to say to that? He considered a row of black plastic chairs beyond counters that enclosed the silent and empty baggage carousels. At this time of night the airport was a people-spitting machine in sleep mode.

  Olivia didn’t look back. She walked to doors that opened onto a short-term parking area and went outside.

  Aiden didn’t want her out there alone.

  He didn’t want her anywhere alone—ever.

  Deliberately keeping his pace slow, he followed and stood on the inside of the doors. To the right, where she’d be out of sight if he’d stayed where he was, she faced the building and balanced her toes on the curb, then jiggled her heels up and down.

  Aiden pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his pants. He probably shouldn’t let her catch him watching her.

  Her arms were crossed, her face turned from him. Her breath sent clouds of vapor into cold, faintly foggy air. A light on the side of the building shone on her head, and he saw beads of moisture glimmer in her hair.

  Best just walk away and sit down. She’d be okay.

  Olivia wiped a hand over her eyes and kept it there.

  Aiden swallowed. They were some pair. People from two different worlds who had collided like magnetized trouble on a collision course.

  The leather pants showed what her preferred shapeless skirts didn’t; her hips were rounded and very, very nice. But he knew that—he’d seen Olivia FitzDurham in nothing at all and she looked the best then, fabulous then.

  She was unique. Everyone was unique, but Olivia was… unforgettable.

  He turned away and started back toward the chairs. If he could be sure he wouldn’t repeat the pattern of selfishness he’d seen in his father, or the man’s indifference toward his child if Aiden ever had children of his own, he might be thinking about how it would be to come home to Olivia.

  His mother had been a sweet woman, passive but concerned for her one child, her son. His father had provided well for his family, in every way but with his presence. Aiden had never caught a ball thrown by his father, or kicked a ball while his father watched, or heard his father cheering at the edge of the pool when he swam in a meet. The man had sought solitude as if he needed it as much as breath. Hiking mountain trails, hunting, fishing, those had been his passions, but never with his son, and his wife wouldn’t have gone anyway. Hilary and Dan Flynn used their son as a messenger between them, not as a symbol of what Aiden had convinced himself had once been love for one another.

  But he was okay with all that Cautious about his own involvements because of it—that was wise—but not hung up on history.

  How would it be to come home to Olivia?

  He grinned and said, “Crazy.”

  He really didn’t like her being out there alone.

  When he got to the doors again, she’d swapped her toes for her heels on the curb and looked over the almost empty parking area.

  Olivia was chilled, but she welcomed something to think about other than Aiden Flynn. Not that she wasn’t thinking about him, too. She’d rather be inside the building with him, sitting by him even if there was nothing to say—even if he fell asleep again.

  The tears that welled in her eyes made her feel angry and sad at once. From the moment she met Aiden, she’d decided she wasn’t the kind of woman who would interest him because he was the type of man women stared at and she was the type of woman men did not stare at.

  Rubbish. All those preconceived ideas were rubbish. She didn’t know for sure that they would have passed each other by if circumstances hadn’t brought them together.

  Why couldn’t she have the courage to find out if they could have more together than an outrageous sexual fling? Each time she thought about it all, her stomach flipped and she saw herself as a stranger, someone she didn’t know. How did one go about finding out something like that, anyway?

  “Olivia.”

  She said, “Hello, Aiden,” but blinked rapidly rather than look at him. “It’s cold. Stay inside.”

  “You do slip into mother mode, don’t you?” he said, but without sounding annoyed.

  “I’m not your mother, Aiden, I just care about you.” Oh, great, she thought, not that he’d notice what she’d said.

  “I care about you, too.” He stood beside her, copied her stance by balancing his heels on the curb. “You look pretty cold yourself.”

  She shook her head.

  “Chris and Sonnie love it out here. They say they like the seasons. Every time I come I feel I’ve walked into one big car wash.”

  “I like it,” Olivia said. “This is the way it feels in London at this time of year.”

  “Damp and dripping, you mean?”

  She smiled a little. “Perhaps. And there’s the smell of winter. Fallen leaves.”

  “Dead and rotting leaves.”

  “You don’t like it here.”

  He stepped from the curb into the gutter, then walked in a circle around her. “I didn’t say that. I like it fine. I’m just not into romanticizing.”

  Of course he wasn’t. “No,” she said. “So when I look at droplets of moisture on a cobweb like that”—she pointed— “and see crystal and diamonds by moonlight, or tinsel on a Christmas tree, trembling when the branches move, you see—
what?”

  He began another turn around her. “You expect me to say moisture on a cobweb. Okay, I see that, but I like looking at it. Little miracles. If I did think about it, I might think that.”

  “Little miracles,” she echoed. “They’re everywhere if we ever have time to appreciate them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish you’d stop walking around me. You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Good. Maybe you’ll fall and I’ll have to catch you.”

  Olivia sighed. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

  “Nothing. Put it down to delayed shock. It must just be hitting me and making me say weird stuff.” But he stopped his measured pacing. He stood beside her again, but on the street rather than the curb. Still he had inches on her. “It would be a bad idea to get lulled into thinking we’re safe.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because apart from Ryan Hill, we’re dealing with the most inept bunch of criminals I’ve ever come across, and I come across them daily. Whenever you’ve got perps who are repeaters but they’ve never been caught, they’re a bigger problem. They start to think they’re above the law. Add stupidity to the mix and anything can happen. You start imagining it’s all some sort of elaborate joke, a farce peopled with characters who would be dangerous if they could get their acts together.” Olivia hadn’t put it all together like that, but he made sense. “These people are dangerous because they’ve got a dangerous machine on their side,” he said. “They’ve got the law. Until we can turn the balance of power we’re in deep kimchee.”

  “If I weren’t with you, you could go back and tell them what happened. You might get a slap on the wrist, but they’d probably see how you’d been chivalrous at first, then got dragged in deeper.”

  Aiden faced her. He didn’t feel like smiling. “Good idea. I think I’ll take you in and say I hung around because I figured you were into something big and I wanted to hand you to them on a platter. How does that sound?”

  Her dark eyes caught the light. The expression there showed she knew he was angry. He disliked himself for that because he could already tell anger scared her.

  “Okay,” he said. “That wasn’t what I wanted to say at all. You bring out the worst in me sometimes.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said.

  He fastened his right hand firmly over her mouth. “I know. You aren’t like any woman I ever met. Maybe there are millions of you in England, but I doubt it. You’re irresistible. You don’t have the greatest self-image, but you’re still irresistible.” He slackened his hand on her face, but brushed her moist cheekbone with the pads of his fingers. “Yes, you’re irresistible, damn it. I ought to be putting plenty of space between us but instead of that, I’m trying to figure out how to get as close to you as a man ever gets to a woman.”

  She breathed deeply. He meant physically close. Did men ever understand that women might be every bit as sexual as they were, but that they yearned for intimacy that went much further? She looked directly back into those eyes that shouldn’t be so blue that they almost hurt. She’d have liked to ask him if he understood about the kind of intimacy she was thinking about, but she couldn’t, not yet—perhaps never.

  He framed her face with his fingertips. So light. If she closed her eyes, would she know they were there? She’d know. Her face, then her ears and jaw. The fleeting caress descended the sides of her neck, and his thumbs settled below her collarbones.

  With the slightest pressure, he moved her backward from the curb, to a shallow corner where plate glass windows and white concrete blocks came together. She felt the cavernous inside of the airport behind her, but gradually it receded and all she felt or saw was Aiden.

  “We could probably check back with customer service now,” she said.

  Her breathless voice stroked him. “It’s too soon,” he told her. That kind of stroking excited a man, not always a convenient development.

  She looked up at him. “We could get the dressings on your wrists changed.”

  “We could. They’ll wait till we get to Chris and Sonnie’s.” The tight, semitransparent top she wore under her mostly unzipped leather jacket gave a sexy peek at her cleavage. Aiden didn’t like her in leather and revealing tops, but he liked her cleavage. He liked her heat. “I need to kiss you, Olivia. You don’t like public display, but there’s no one around.”

  She stared straight ahead, probably at the jumble of cheap chains against his chest. He wished she’d say something, but didn’t expect it.

  “You kiss me, Olivia,” he said. “That way I’ll know you like the idea.”

  She raised her chin, but not her eyes. “I like the idea of kissing you. I can’t believe I’ve done… What I did with you wasn’t like me. I don’t mean I didn’t enjoy it—I did—but I have never behaved like that before. The number of times I’ve relived every second and come close to…”

  “And felt aroused enough to climax all on your own?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t because it embarrasses you, or don’t because it’s not true?”

  She gripped his shoulders, rose to her tiptoes, and kissed him. A desperate kiss, deep and panicky.

  “Uh-uh,” he managed to say, holding her beneath her arms and enough away from him to part their lips. “You’re not going to kiss me to avoid dealing with your own feelings.” The heels of his hands pressed into her breasts. He wasn’t weary anymore.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, yes. You’ve changed me. I’m never going to be the same. No woman should walk around aware. I mean aware of herself sexually. I can’t get it out of my mind—you out of my mind. If I’m guilty of seeing everything that’s happening as if it’s out there somewhere rather than all around me, it’s because I’m too busy wanting to make love with you.” She stopped and her mouth remained open.

  “So we’re even,” he said softly. “I may not forget what’s happening out there. Business is business and it gets ingrained.” He didn’t want to talk anymore. Women needed it, the talk, and a wise man learned to give it to them, but hell, he’d like to be covering her, buried in her, in the quiet of a place where they couldn’t be found.

  She didn’t try to interpret the expressions that moved over his face. When he looked at her mouth again, she flattened herself against him, cradled his face, and urged him closer until he kissed her. He was no more leisurely or controlled than she had been. His breath rasped in his throat, and his hands moved over her back, over her bottom. His kiss demanded much more than just a kiss. Just a kiss? The way he used his tongue was more than a parody of what she’d said she’d like them to do. Her body tingled, and the sounds of the night turned to a buzzing in her ears.

  Aiden raised his head. “I am so damned aroused, I may explode, sweetheart.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, jerking her head forward and capturing his bottom lip between her teeth. He might be tall and lithe rather than overtly big, but still she had her arms full to surround his chest and back.

  He pressed a thigh between hers and she felt hot and weak. “Hold on,” he said. “We’re going to have to do something about this.”

  “Aiden.” No, she had to learn when to be quiet.

  “What?” he said, kissing her neck, kissing the tops of her breasts through her thin sweater.

  “Nothing.”

  He undid the jacket altogether and stroked her. “I asked you a question,” he said. “Finish what you were going to say.”

  Okay, she would. “You’d never have looked at me if we hadn’t met the way we did, would you? I’m not your type.”

  With his mouth in the hollow of her throat, he grew still. “You believe that?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  Aiden pressed the palm of his left hand against her stomach and slid downward until he could fold his fingers over her mound. “Because there’s nothing about you that would interest me otherwise?”

  “As a person, no. Why would there be? You didn’t choose to be wit
h me over someone else.”

  “No, that’s true.” He stimulated her through the pants he wished would fly away. “I didn’t choose you because I didn’t know I had you to choose.”

  “Oh, don’t, Aiden. I can’t think with you doing that.”

  “Don’t think. Thinking is definitely bad for you. Return the favor instead. For a man who just happened to meet you, I’ve developed a real addiction—to you, that is.”

  “Only… Aiden, you don’t know me at all, except as a woman who’s good in bed with you.”

  “Seems like a great place to start to me,” he said, and kissed her lips again. Anything for silence and a chance to do nothing but feel.

  “Men don’t like to talk during sex, do they?” she said.

  Aiden almost choked. He looked at her. “No,” he told her. “I don’t think many men like to talk a lot when they’re making love. We’re pretty goal-oriented. It’s a throwback to the days when we hunted the food and dragged it home. We had to be single-minded. Kill or be… No, not a good analogy, that.” Her wonderful smile warmed him and made him feel even sexier.

  A movement behind her, inside the glass, didn’t. A guy with a newspaper wasn’t making a good job of pretending to read. “Time out,” he said to Olivia. “I say we adjourn until we can lock a door and do whatever we want to do, for as long as we want to do it—without interruption.”

  She stiffened and turned around sharply.

  Aiden wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Consider that your charitable contribution for the night. You helped a bored guy pass a little time. I bet we helped him forget he was bored at all. Let’s see if we can get that bag now.”

  Walking past the man with the newspaper took more composure than Olivia would have expected to gather. Aiden helped make it easier by holding her close and scarcely looking away from her.

  “I want to get out of here,” she whispered.

  “So do I,” he whispered back. “And we’re going to.”

  The same woman was at the customer-service desk. “I didn’t write your name down,” she told Olivia when she saw her. “The computers are back up. You didn’t say your last name was Fitz something, did you?”