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‘You’ll have to get your own plane!’ Meg teased. ‘Keep it on standby …’
‘I did!’ he said. Meg blinked. ‘And for two months or so it was great. I really thought it was the best thing I had ever done. And then …’ He shrugged and got back to his laptop, one hand crunching numbers, the other picking all the little pieces of dill off the top of the blinis before eating them.
‘And then?’ Meg asked, because this man really was intriguing. He was sort of aloof and then friendly, busy, yet calm, and very pedantic with his dill, Meg thought with a small smile as she watched him continue to pick the pieces off. When the food was to his satisfaction there was something very decadent about the way he ate, his eyes briefly closing as he savoured the delicious taste entering his mouth.
Everything he revealed about himself had Meg wanting to know more, and she was enthralled when he went on to tell her about the mistake of having his own plane.
‘And then,’ Niklas responded, while still tapping away on his computer, ‘I got bored. Same pilot, same flight crew, same chef, same scent of soap in the bathroom. You understand?’
‘Not really.’
‘As annoying as your chatter may be …’ he turned from his screen and gave her a very nice smile ‘… it is actually rather nice to meet you.’
‘It’s rather nice to meet you too.’ Meg smiled back.
‘And if I still had my own plane we would not have met.’
‘Nor would we if you were lording it in first class.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Correct.’ He nodded. ‘But now, if you will forgive me, I have to get on with some work.’ He moved to do just that, but just before he did he explained further, just in case she had missed the point he was making. ‘That is the reason I prefer to fly commercially—it is very easy to allow your world to become too small.’
Now, that part she did understand. ‘Tell me about it.’ Meg sighed.
His shoulders tensed. His fingers hesitated over the keyboard as he waited for her to start up again.
When she inevitably did, he would point out again that he was trying to work.
Niklas gritted his teeth and braced himself for her voice—was she going to talk all the way to Los Angeles?
Except she said nothing else.
When still she was quiet Niklas realised that he was actually wanting the sound of her voice to continue their conversation. It was at that point he gave up working for a while. He would return to the report later.
Closing his laptop, he turned. ‘Tell me about it.’
She had no idea of the concession he was making—not a clue that a slice of his time was an expensive gift that very few could afford, no idea how many people would give anything for just ten minutes of his undivided attention.
‘Oh, it’s nothing …’ Meg shrugged. ‘Just me feeling sorry for myself.’
‘Which must be a hard thing to do with a mouthful of wild Iranian caviar …’
He made her laugh—he really did. Niklas really wasn’t at all chatty, but when he spoke, when he teased, when she met his eyes, there was a little flip in her stomach that she liked the feeling of. It was a thrill that was new to her, and there was more than just something about him …
It was everything about the man.
‘Here’s to slumming it,’ Niklas said. They chinked their glasses and he looked into her eyes, and as he did so somehow—not that she would be aware of it—Niklas let her in.
He was a closed person, an extremely guarded man. He had grown up having to be that way—it had meant survival at the time—yet for the first time in far too long he chose to relax, to take some time, to forget about work, to stop for a moment and just be with her.
As they chatted he let the flight steward put his laptop away. They were at the back of business class, tucked away and enjoying their own little world.
The food orders were taken and later served, and Meg thought how nice Niklas was to share a meal with. Food was a passion in waiting for Meg. She rarely had time to cook, and though she ate out often it was pretty much always at the same Italian restaurant where they took clients. They’d chosen different mains, and he smiled to himself at the droop of her face when they were served and she found out that steak tartare was in fact raw.
‘It’s delicious,’ he assured her. ‘Or you can have my steak?’
At the back of her mind she had known it was raw, if she’d stopped to think about it, but the menu had been incredibly hard to concentrate on with Niklas sitting beside her, and she had made a rather random selection when the flight steward had approached.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Meg said, looking at the strange little piles of food on her plate. There was a big hill of raw minced steak in the middle, with a raw egg yolk in its shell on the top, surrounded by little hills of onions and capers and things. ‘I’ve always wanted to try it. I just tend to stick to safe. It’s good to try different things …’
‘It is,’ Niklas said. ‘I like it like this.’
Something caught in her throat, because he’d made it sound like sex. He picked up her knife and fork, and she watched him pour in the egg, pile on the onions and capers, and then chop and chop again before sliding the mixture through Worcestershire sauce. For a fleeting moment she honestly thought that he might load the fork and feed her, but he put the utensils down and returned to his meal, and Meg found herself breathless and blushing at where her mind had just drifted.
‘Good?’ Niklas asked when she took her first taste.
‘Fantastic,’ Meg said. It was nice, not amazing, but made by his hands fantastic it was. ‘How’s your steak?’
He sliced a piece off and lifted the loaded fork and held it to her. This from a man who had reluctantly given her a drink, who had on many occasions turned his back. He was now giving her a taste of food from his plate. He was just being friendly, Meg told herself. She was reading far, far too much into this simple gesture. But as she went to take the fork he lifted it slightly. His black eyes met hers and he moved the fork to her mouth and watched as she opened it. Suddenly she began to wonder if she’d been right the first time.
Maybe he was talking about sex.
But if he had been flirting, by the time dessert was cleared it had ended. He read for a bit, and Meg gazed out of the window for a while, until the flight attendant came around and closed the shutters. The lights were lowered and the cabin was dimmed and Meg fiddled with her remote to turn the seat into a bed.
Niklas stood and she glanced up at him. ‘Are you off to get your gold pyjamas?’
‘And a massage,’ Niklas teased back.
She was half asleep when he returned, and watched idly as he took off his tie. Of course the flight attendant rushed to hold it, while another readied his bed, and then he took off his shoes and climbed into the flight bed beside her.
His beautiful face was gone now from her vision, but it was there—right there—in her mind’s eye. She was terribly aware of his movements and listened to him turn restlessly a few times. She conceded that maybe he did have a point—the flight bed was more than big enough for Meg to stretch out in, but Niklas was easily a foot taller than her and, as he had stated, he really needed this time to sleep, which must be proving difficult. For Niklas the bed was simply too small, and it was almost a sin that he sleep in those immaculate suit trousers.
She lay there trying not to think about him and made herself concentrate instead on work—on the Evans contract she had just completed—which was surely enough to send her to sleep. But just as she was closing her eyes, just as she was starting to think that she might be about to drift off even with Niklas beside her, she heard him move again. Her eyes opened and she blinked as his face appeared over hers. She met those black eyes, heard again his rich accent, and how could a woman not smile?
‘You never did tell me …’ Niklas said, smiling as he invited her to join him in after hours conversation. ‘Why is your world too small?’
CHAPTER THREE
THEY PULLED BACK the divider that separated them and lay on their sides, facing each other. Meg knew that this was probably the only time in her life that she’d ever have a man so divine lying on the pillow next to hers, so she was more than happy to forgo sleep for such a glorious cause.
‘I work in the family business,’ Meg explained.
‘Which is?’
‘My parents are into real-estate investments. I’m a lawyer …’
He gave a suitably impressed nod, but then frowned, because she didn’t seem like a lawyer to him.
‘Though I hardly use my training. I do all the paperwork and contracts.’
He saw her roll her eyes.
‘I cannot tell you how boring it is.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘Good question. I think it was decided at conception that I would be a lawyer.’
‘You don’t want to be one?’
It was actually rather hard to admit it. ‘I don’t think I do …’
He said nothing, just carried on watching her face, waiting for her to share more, and she did.
‘I don’t think I’m supposed to be one—I mean, I scraped to get the grades I needed at school, held on by my fingernails at university …’ She paused as he interrupted.
‘You are never to say this at an interview.’
‘Of course not.’ She smiled. ‘We’re just talking.’
‘Good. I’m guessing you were not a little girl who dreamed of being a lawyer?’ he checked. ‘You did not play with wigs on?’ His lips twitched as she smiled. ‘You did not line up your dollies and cross-examine them?’
‘No.’
‘So how did you end up being one?’
‘I really don’t know where to start.’
He looked at his watch, realised then that perhaps the report simply wasn’t going to get done. ‘I’ve got nine hours.’
Niklas made the decision then—they would be entirely devoted to her.
‘Okay …’ Meg thought how best to explain her family to him and chose to start near the beginning. ‘In my family you don’t get much time to think—even as a little girl there were piano lessons, violin lessons, ballet lessons, tutors. My parents were constantly checking my homework—basically, everything was geared towards me getting into the best school, so that I could get the best grades and go to the best university. Which I did. Except when I got there it was more push, push, push. I just put my head down and carried on working, but now suddenly I’m twenty-four years old and I’m not really sure that I’m where I want to be …’ It was very hard to explain it, because from the outside she had a very nice life.
‘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.