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 partially 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.