‘They demand too much.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘They don’t listen to you.’
‘You don’t know that either.’
‘But I do.’ He said. ‘Five or six times on the telephone you said, “Mum, I’ve got to go.” Or, “I really have to go now…”’ He saw that she was smiling, but she was smiling not at his imitation of her words but because he had been listening to her conversation. While miserable and scowling and ignoring her, he had still been aware. ‘You do this.’ He held up an imaginary phone and turned it off.
‘I can’t.’ she admitted. ‘Is that what you do?’
‘Of course.’
He made it sound so simple.
‘You say, I have to go, and then you do.’
‘It’s not just that though,’ she admitted. ‘They want to know everything about my life…’
‘Then tell them you don’t want to discuss it,’ he said. ‘If a conversation moves where you don’t want it to, you just say so.’
‘How?’
‘Say, I don’t want to talk about that,’ he suggested.
He made it sound so easy. ‘But I don’t want to hurt them either—you know how difficult families can be at times.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘There are some advantages to being an orphan, and that is one of them. I get to make my own mistakes.’ He said it in such a way that there was no invitation to sympathy—in fact he even gave a small smile, as if letting her know that she did not need to be uncomfortable at his revelation and he took no offence at her casual remark.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to be.’
‘But…’
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ And, far more easily than she, he told her what he was not prepared to discuss. He simply moved the conversation. ‘What would you like to do if you could do anything?’
She thought for a moment. ‘You’re the first person who has ever asked me that.’
‘The second,’ Niklas corrected. ‘I would imagine you have been asking yourself that question an awful lot.’
‘Lately I have been,’ Meg admitted.
‘So, what would you be?’
‘A chef.’
And he didn’t laugh, didn’t tell her that she should know about steak tartare by now, if that was what she wanted to be, and neither did he roll his eyes.
‘Why?’
‘Because I love cooking.’
‘Why?’ he asked—not as if he didn’t understand how it was possible to love cooking so much, more as if he really wanted her tell him why.
She just stared at him as their minds locked in a strange wrestle.
‘When someone eats something I’ve cooked—I mean properly prepared and cooked…’ She still stared at him as she spoke. ‘When they close their eyes for a second…’ She couldn’t properly explain it. ‘When you ate those blinis, when you first tasted them, there was a moment…’ She watched that mouth move into a smile, just a brief smile of understanding. ‘They tasted fantastic?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wanted to have cooked them.’ It was perhaps the best way to describe it. ‘I love shopping for food, planning a meal, preparing it, presenting it, serving it…’
‘For that moment?’
‘Yes.’ Meg nodded. ‘And I know that I’m good at it because, no matter how dissatisfied my parents were with my grades or my decisions, on a Sunday I’d cook a meal from scratch and it was the one thing I excelled at. Yet it was the one thing they discouraged.’
‘Why?’ This time he asked because he didn’t understand.
‘“Why would you want to work in a kitchen?”’ It was Meg doing the imitating now. ‘“Why, after all the opportunities we’ve given you…?”’ Her voice faded for a moment. ‘Maybe I should have stood up to them, but it’s hard at fourteen…’ She gave him a smile. ‘It’s still hard at twenty-four.’
‘If cooking is your passion then I’m sure you would be a brilliant chef. You should do it.’
‘I don’t know.’ She knew she sounded weak, knew she should just say to hell with them, but there was one other thing she had perhaps not explained. ‘I love them,’ Meg said, and she saw his slight frown. ‘They are impossible and overbearing but I do love them, and I don’t want to hurt them—though I know that I’ll probably have to.’ She gave him a pale smile. ‘I’m going to try and work out if I can just hurt them gently.’
After a second or two he smiled back, a pensive smile she did not want, for perhaps he felt sorry for her being weak—though she didn’t think she was.
‘Do you cook a lot now?’
‘Hardly ever.’ She shook her head. ‘There just never seems to be enough time. But when I do…’ She explained to him that on her next weekend off she would prepare the meal she had just eaten for herself and friends…that she would spend hours trying to get it just right. Even if she generally stuck with safer choices, there was so much about food that she wanted to explore.
They lay there, facing each other and talking about food, which to some might sound boring—but for Meg it was the best conversation she had had in her life.
He told her about a restaurant that he frequented in downtown São Paulo which was famed for its seafood, although he thought it wasn’t actually their best dish. When he was there Niklas always ordered their feijoada, which was a meat and black bean stew that tasted, he told her, as if angels had prepared it and were feeding it to his soul.
In that moment Meg realised that she had not just one growing passion to contend with, but two, because his gaze was intense and his words were so interesting and she never wanted this journey to end. Didn’t want to stop their whispers in the dark.
‘How come you speak so many languages?’
‘It is good that I do. It means I can take my business to many countries…’ He was an international financier, Niklas told her, and then, very unusually for him, he told her a little bit more—which he never, ever did. Not with anyone. Not even, if he could help it, with himself. ‘One of the nuns who cared for me when I was a baby spoke only Spanish. By the time I moved from that orphanage…’
‘At how old?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Three, maybe four. By that time I spoke two languages,’ he explained. ‘Later I taught myself English, and much later French.’
‘How?’
‘I had a friend who was English—I asked him to speak only English to me. And I—’ He’d been about to say looked for, but he changed it. ‘I read English newspapers.’
‘What language do you dream in?’
He smiled at her question. ‘That depends where I am—where my thoughts are.’
He spent a lot of time in France, he told Meg, especially in the South. Meg asked him where his favourite place in the world was. He was about to answer São Paulo—after all, he was looking forward to going back there, to the fast pace and the stunning women—but he paused for a moment and then gave an answer that surprised even him. He told her about the mountains away from the city, and the rainforests and the rivers and springs there, and that maybe he should think of getting a place there—somewhere private.
And then he thanked her.
‘For what?’
‘For making me think,’ Niklas said. ‘I have been thinking of taking some time off just to do more of the same…’ He did not mention the clubs and the women and the press that were always chasing him for the latest scandal. ‘Maybe I should take a proper break.’
She told him that she too preferred the mountains to the beach, even if she lived in Bondi, and they lay there together and rewrote a vision of her—no longer a chef in a busy international hotel, instead she would run a small bed and breakfast set high in the hills.
And she asked about him too.
Rarely, so rarely did he tell anyone, but for some reason this false night he did—just a little. For some reason he didn’t hold back. He just said it. Not all of it, by any means, but he gave
more of himself than usual. After all, he would never see her again.
He told her how he had taught himself to read and write, how he had educated himself from newspapers, how the business section had always fascinated him and how easily he had read the figures that seemed to daunt others. And he told her how he loved Brazil—for there you could both work hard and play hard too.
‘Can I get you anything Mr Dos Santos…?’ Worried that their esteemed passenger was being disturbed, the steward checked that he was okay.
‘Nothing.’ He did not look up. He just looked at Meg as he spoke. ‘If you can leave us, please?’
‘Dos Santos?’ she repeated when the steward had gone, and he told her that it was a surname often given to orphans.
‘It means “from the Saints” in Portuguese,’ he explained.
‘How were you orphaned?’
‘I don’t actually know,’ Niklas admitted. ‘Perhaps I was abandoned, just left at the orphanage. I really don’t know.’
‘Have you ever tried to find out about your family…?’
He opened his mouth to say that he would rather not discuss it, but instead he gave even more of himself. ‘I have,’ he admitted. ‘It would be nice to know, but it proved impossible. I got Miguel, my lawyer, onto it, but he got nowhere.’
She asked him what it had been like, growing up like that, but she was getting too close and it was not something he chose to share.
He told her so. ‘I don’t want to speak about that.’
So they talked some more about her, and she could have talked to him for ever—except it was Niklas who got too close now, when he asked if she was in a relationship.
‘No.’
‘Have you ever been serious about anyone?’
‘Not really,’ she said, but that wasn’t quite true. ‘I was about to get engaged,’ Meg said. ‘I called it off.’
‘Why?’
She just lay there.
‘Why?’ Niklas pushed.
‘He got on a bit too well with my parents.’ She swallowed. ‘A colleague.’ He could hear her hesitation to discuss it. ‘What we said before about worlds being too small…’ Meg said. ‘I realised I would be making mine smaller still.’
‘Was he upset?’
‘Not really.’ Meg was honest. ‘It wasn’t exactly a passionate…’ She swallowed. She was so not going to discuss this with him.
She should have just said so, but instead she told him that she needed to sleep. The dimmed lights and champagne were starting to catch up with both of them, and almost reluctantly their conversation was closed and finally they slept.
For how long Meg wasn’t sure. She just knew that when she woke up she regretted it.
Not the conversation, but ending it, falling asleep and wasting the little time that they had.
She’d woken to the scent of coffee and the hum of the engines and now she looked over to him. He was still asleep, and just as beautiful with his eyes closed. It was almost a privilege to examine such a stunning man more intently. His black hair was swept back, his beautiful mouth relaxed and loose. She looked at his dark spiky lashes and thought of the treasure behind them. She wondered what language he was dreaming in, then watched as his eyes were revealed.
For Niklas it was a pleasure to open his eyes to her.
He had felt the caress of her gaze and now he met it and held it.
‘English.’ He answered the question she had not voiced, but they both understood. He had been dreaming in English, perhaps about her. And then Niklas did what he always did when he woke to a woman he considered beautiful.
It was a touch more difficult to do so—given the gap between them, given that he could not gather her body and slip her towards him—but the result would certainly be worth the brief effort. He pulled himself up on his elbow and moved till his face was right over her, and looking down.
‘You never did finish what you were saying.’
She looked back at him.
‘When you said it wasn’t passionate…’
She could have turned away from him, could have closed the conversation—his question was inappropriate, really—only nothing felt inappropriate with Niklas. There was nothing that couldn’t be said with his breath on her cheek and that sulky, beautiful mouth just inches away.
‘I was the one who wasn’t passionate.’
‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘Well, I wasn’t.’
‘Because you didn’t want him in the way that you want me?’
Meg knew what he was about to do.
And she wanted, absolutely, for him to do it.
So he did.
It did not feel as if she was kissing a stranger as their lips met—all it felt was sublime.
His lips were surprisingly gentle and moved with hers for a moment, giving her a brief glimpse of false security—for his tongue, when it slipped in, was shockingly direct and intent.
This wasn’t a kiss to test the water, and now Meg knew what had been wrong with her from the start, the reason she had been rambling. This thing between them was an attraction so instant that he could have kissed her like this the moment he’d sat down beside her. He could have taken his seat, had her turn off her phone and offered his mouth to her and she would have kissed him right back.
And so she kissed him back now.
There was more passion in his kiss than Meg had ever tasted in her life. She discovered that a kiss could be far more than a simple meeting of lips as his tongue told her exactly what else he would like to do, slipping in and out of her parted lips, soft one minute, rougher the next. Then his hand moved beneath the blanket and stroked her breast through her blouse, so expertly that she ached for more.
Meg’s hands were in his hair and his jaw scratched at her skin and his tongue probed a little harder. As she concentrated on that, as she fought with her body not to arch into him, he moved his hand inside her top. Now Niklas became less than subtle with his silent instructions and moved his hand to her back, pulling her forward into his embrace. She swallowed the growl that vibrated from his throat as beneath the blanket he rolled her nipple between his fingers—hard at first, and then with his palm he stroked her more softly.
To the outside world they would appear simply as two lovers kissing, their passion indecent, but hidden. Then Niklas moved over her a little more, so all she could breathe was his scent, and his mouth and his hand worked harder, each subtle stroke making her want the next one even more. Suddenly Meg knew she had to stop this, had to pull back, because just her reaction to his kiss had her feeling as though she might come.
‘Come.’ His mouth was at her ear now, his word voicing her thought.
‘Stop,’ she told him, even if it was not what she wanted him to do, but she could hardly breathe.
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ she answered with his mouth now back over hers, ‘it’s wrong.’
‘But so nice.’
He continued to kiss her. Her mouth was wet from his but she closed her lips, because this feeling was too much and he was taking her to the edge. He parted her lips with his tongue and again she tried to close them, clamped her teeth, but he merely carried on until she gave in and opened again to him. He breathed harder, and his hand still worked at her breast, and she was fighting not to gasp, not to moan, to remember where they were as he suckled her tongue.
Meg forced herself not to push his hand far lower, as her body was begging her to do, not to pull him fully on top of her as Niklas made love to her with his mouth.
She hadn’t a hope of winning.
He removed his hand from her breast and prised her knotted fingers from his hair. Then he moved her hand beneath his blanket, his body acting as a shield as he held her small hand over his thick, solid length. Her fingers ached to curl and stroke around him, but he did not allow it. Instead he just flattened her palm against him and held it there. His mouth still worked against hers, and she tried to grumble a protest as her hand fought not to str
oke, not to feel, not to explore his arousal.
He won.
He smothered her moan with his mouth and sucked, as if swallowing her cry of pleasure, and then, most cruel of all, he loosened his grip on her hand and accepted the dig of her fingers into him. He lifted his head and watched her, a wicked smile on his face, as she struggled to breathe, watched her bite on her lip
as he too fought not to come. And he wished the lights were on so he could watch her in colour, wished that they were in his vast bed so the second she’d finished they could resume.
And they would, he decided.
‘That,’ Niklas said as he crashed back not to earth but to ten thousand feet in the air, ‘was the appetiser.’
She’d been right the first time.
He had been talking about sex.
* * *
She put on a cardigan and excused herself just as the lights came on.
As she stood in the tiny cubicle and examined her face in the mirror she fastened her bra. Her skin was pink from his prolonged attention, her lips swollen, and her eyes glittered with danger. The face that looked back at her was not a woman she knew.
And she was so not the woman Niklas had first met.
Not once in her life had she rebelled; never had she even jumped out of her bedroom window and headed out to parties. At university she had studied and worked part-time, getting the grades her parents had expected before following them into the family business. She had always done the right thing, even when it came to her personal relationships.
Niklas had been right. She hadn’t wanted her boyfriend in the way she wanted Niklas, and had strung things out for as long as she could before realising she could not get engaged to someone she cared about but didn’t actually fancy. She had told her boyfriend that she wouldn’t have sex till she was sure they were serious, but the moment he’d started to talk about rings and a future Meg had known it was time to get out.
And that was the part that caused her disquiet.
She wasn’t the passionate woman Niklas had just met and kissed—she was a virgin, absolutely clueless with men. A few hours off the leash from her parents and she was lying on her back, with a stranger above her and the throb of illicit pulses below. She closed her eyes in shame, and then opened them again and saw the glitter and the shame burned a little less. There was no going back now to the woman she had been, and even if there were she would not change a minute of the time she had spent with Niklas.
Playing the Dutiful WifeExpecting His Love-Child Page 3