‘Want to throw some at me?’
Pause. Long pause. ‘Actually, I was hoping you might help me out … in person. We have a couple of hours’ down-time tomorrow.’
Her spine stiffened again, just as it had started to relax. Being together racing around the suburbs of Melbourne on business she could handle. Being on the other side of a thick hotel wall was doable. Shopping together for a gift for his beautiful, talented wife …?
She got to her feet—all the better to roam around the room.
‘Together?’
He laughed again. ‘That’s the idea. Unless you want to phone in your advice like tech-support?’
Restricting themselves to phone conversations might be the best thing all round. Though she doubted that those few degrees of separation would do much to diminish the way he invaded her thoughts—awake or dreaming—it would at least spare her the confusion and frustration and risk of sitting across a table from a man she couldn’t in good conscience touch.
Not in the way her body wanted to.
She stalled him as her mind raced for a way out of this. ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘The markets?’
Say you’re busy. Say you have to work on a transcription. Say you’re feeling fluey.
A deep shudder left her in a rush of air. ‘Okay.’
She did a shabby kind of rain-dance across the carpeted floor of her suite. Honestly! She had the self-determination of a lemming.
When it came to Sam she had absolutely none.
‘Fantastic. Thank you, Aimee. I appreciate it.’
Sure he did. Why wouldn’t he? She was at his beck and call. And that was a dangerously familiar dynamic. But she pressed her fingers to her temple and took a deep breath. It wasn’t Sam’s fault she’d reverted to the bad old days. It wasn’t his fault the gravel of his voice turned her spine to jelly and her mind to hot, long, imaginary nights.
Not seeing him in person these past weeks hadn’t done anything to reduce the thing between them. Or the fact that indulging the thing wasn’t acceptable because of his wife. Because of Aimee’s own values.
But she’d committed to helping him—she wanted to help him. To do something to even the slate. Though this really wouldn’t have been her first choice.
As had become her norm, she took shelter behind her book. ‘My price for assistance will be knocking off some more of my interview.’
‘The pleasure of my company is not reward enough?’
It couldn’t be. She couldn’t let it be. She shielded those raw, strained thoughts behind her old friend flippancy. ‘You have an unattractively high opinion of yourself, Sam Gregory.’
His smile warmed the earpiece of her phone. ‘Looks like my days of trading on your hero-worship are well and truly over.’
Aimee frowned. A lesser man might, in fact, have acted on her sycophantic adoration—wife or no wife. A lesser woman might have let him. But for all he’d tried on the plane to get her to talk about The Kiss, Sam hadn’t once exploited the complicated emotions she had about the man who’d rescued her. He just wanted to clear the air.
‘You’ll always be my hero.’ That much, at least, she could say. Hand on heart.
‘And statements like that—’ he laughed ‘—are why I have an unattractively high opinion of myself.’
She grasped the humour he threw out and used it to climb out of the dangerous place they’d just found themselves in. It was safer all round if she didn’t go back to those days. Those feelings. ‘Just a pity all that talent doesn’t stretch to gift selection.’
He groaned. ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’
‘Well, you know you can always count on me for a healthy reality check.’
‘Something to look forward to tomorrow. I’ll meet you in the lobby at nine?’ he said.
‘Make it eight. Something tells me we’re going to need all the scouting time we can get.’ A loud noise from Sam’s end of the phone made her jump. There’d been a lot of rustling, too, as they spoke. ‘What are you doing, anyway?’
‘Shaving. I’m just out of the shower. That was the bathroom cabinet closing a bit too quickly.’
Her whole body flinched. ‘Oh … Okay.’
What exactly was she supposed to say to that?
Her ears grew acutely sensitive to every little sound in the next moments. The way the acoustics changed as he left the bathroom. The pad of his feet on the carpet. The flip of the lid of his suitcase and the rustle of him pulling out some clothes. Pyjamas, presumably.
Heat suffused her.
She turned to the big blank wall that stood as all that separated them. It formed the perfect canvas for her vivid imagination to paint him sauntering barefoot and damp across a suite the mirror image of hers, a fluffy white towel slung low on lean hips, the mobile phone at his ear the only other thing adorning him.
Every bit of saliva in her mouth decamped.
‘Well,’ she croaked, ‘I’ll let you go. I have some work to do tonight. See you tomorrow.’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, I still need to call Mel. Don’t want her to worry.’ His voice dropped in timbre. ‘See you in the morning, Aimee.’
She practically tripped over her tongue in her haste to end the call, then sat with the phone pressed numbly to her head long after Sam had rung off, her ears tuned, desperately, for any further audio hints from beyond the wall.
Just out of the shower.
While on the phone to her.
She wrestled free of the heated visuals that rushed at her like a line of football players and chewed her lip at a niggling afterthought. Having a conversation with someone while you were naked hinted at a certain kind of intimacy. Husband-wife kind of intimacy. Or oldest mate from childhood.
The latter suggested she’d assumed a genderless kind of role in Sam’s mind: totally nonsexual, like a sister or an old friend. The sort of non-wife woman you wouldn’t hesitate to have a phone conversation with while wandering around a hotel room in the buff.
Aimee frowned. She didn’t want to be genderless with Sam. She didn’t want to be his sister. Just because she wasn’t actively exercising her femininity on him it didn’t mean she wasn’t keen to remain feminine in his mind. She liked how sexy she felt when Sam was around. She’d had a lifetime of feeling otherwise. A child … and then a chattel.
But the other possibilities bothered her even more—on a much deeper level. There should only be three women that Sam felt comfortable getting naked with—even telephonically. His mother, his doctor and his wife.
And she was none of those.
Her mind whirled. Did it say something that she was the first person he’d called on stepping out of the shower? Or was he just getting her call out of the way before stretching out on that king-sized bed for a longer late-night call with his wife?
That set a whole extra set of visuals flickering past her consciousness, and she shut them down hard.
One way or another Sam’s unconscious behaviour was telling her something important about the nature of their relationship. Something that had alarm bells clanging deep in her psyche. Unless she was misreading this through inexperience? Maybe it was a Mars-Venus thing? Maybe guys truly thought nothing of getting naked while they had a woman on the phone, and Sam was just keen to relax after a long and chaotic day?
She let the phone slowly