Just like the conqueror he’d once spoken of.
He stopped at his door, turned her until the timber was at her
back, and pressed into her. Peered down on her. ‘Are you sure?’ he murmured.
She didn’t waste breath on words. Instead she pressed up onto
her toes and kissed him. Showed him how sure she was. Even though this was
totally out of character for her, even though she had to block thoughts of
anything more future than Sunday night from her mind.
She was sure about the next two days.
This was
her
reinvention, and
Zander Rush was an integral part of the new Georgia Stone. She’d never felt more
certain about anything.
He hemmed her against the door with his body, his heat, and
brought his hands to her face so that he could seal her acquiescence in. His
tongue and his lips worked a magic just like this entire city as the cool of the
earth soaked into her back.
She shivered. From delight.
‘Hot bath,’ he murmured, misunderstanding, and she wondered how
long a big tub like the one he had inside would take to fill.
‘Or hot blankets,’ she whispered, but thought of the blanket of
his scorching body on hers would do just fine.
He reached out with one hand, turned the doorhandle, and they
fell through into the fantasy interior.
NINE
They
never made
it to the bed, as it turned out. And the hot bath came quite a bit later. They
got about as far as the sumptuous pillow-filled conversation niche off to the
side of the room before passion got the better of them and, there, Zander made
the kind of love to her that she’d never experienced before. And would never
forget.
Worship.
There was no other word for it. He took the sort of care of her
body—with it—that she’d only ever dreamed might happen. Measured and thorough
and poignantly careful. Not tentative—she had enough aches and stretched muscles
to know that he’d challenged and pushed her to be the Georgia she’d never let
herself be, never needed to be, before. To roam far, far out of her comfort
zone. Safe in his embrace.
She lay on her back on the daybed in the balcony niche, her
head hanging back over the edge, and stared at the dark sky. Only it wasn’t
quite the deep black it had been when they’d first come out here, wrapped in
traditionally woven blankets, wrapped in each other. It was a deep blue now,
with hints of regular blue at the edges.
‘Remind me to get more sleep before having sex with a marathon
runner,’ she murmured. Stamina? Oh, my God... ‘It’s nearly dawn.’
Across her legs, the heavy heat of him stirred. ‘Don’t we have
somewhere to be at dawn?’
The balloon.
They’d come all this way to do the Cappadocian balloon
experience. Could she really justify skipping it to stay here in heaven with
Zander?
She sighed. Almost.
‘Come on... You don’t want to miss it.’ He slapped her thigh
gently and pushed himself into a sitting position. Dark or not, there was
nothing but sky to look in on them high up on the mountain face, but within the
hour the sun would be up and hot-air balloons would be rising over Göreme filled
with curious, binocular-holding tourists.
And they were supposed to be in one of them.
That was the only thing that got her moving.
They.
The fact that Zander would be with her. If he
wasn’t booked she’d have blown the whole thing off—dream or no dream.
She padded in silence into the room with him.
What exactly did one say after a night of no-holds-barred
sensual exploration?
‘Let’s get ready,’ he said, ‘and we’ll get moving.’
Huh. As good as anything, she supposed.
But he tempered the banality of the words by swooping down
behind her and latching onto her throat with his lips. For a bare heartbeat.
Then he was gone again, gathering up his scattered clothes and rummaging in his
suitcase.
She thought about running back to her room to change but,
really, when you’d been awake the whole time it qualified as the same day, so
slipping back into her day clothes felt acceptable.
Plenty of time to change later.
Though her eyes roamed back to Zander’s big beckoning bath. She
really hadn’t had much chance to get clean while they were in there. Quite the
opposite, in fact. She did her best to wrestle her secret, satisfied smile into
submission.
It wasn’t dignified to gloat.
The rush and bustle of getting out to Göreme’s airfield in the
still-dark of morning did a fine job of distracting her from thought, just as
Zander’s talented lips had done all night. Whether kissing her or murmuring
conversation. It hadn’t all been lascivious. They’d lain, tangled together and
curled in blankets, and talked about anything that came to mind until one or
other of them—or the conversation—had turned sensual again and then there was no
talking for quite some time.
On arrival at the open balloon fields, four enormous bulbs
glowed in the dim morning light. They lay, powerless, on their sides, and the
roaring gas fires slowly filled them upright. The palest of the four lit up like
its own sunrise.
‘That’s ours,’ Zander said, coming back to her side, his
digital recorder in hand.
They crossed to the enormous basket that was tethered to the
ground and Georgia said a quick whisper of thanks for its size. They might look
tiny in the sky but on the ground they were enormous.
She was entirely distracted and romanced by the lumbering bulbs
taking shape along the roadway. Looked as if their dawn flight would be a
balloon convoy. But while groups of ten and more waited for the other baskets
theirs was just the two of them and their pilot.
Nice work, Casey.
‘Are you my private?’ A uniformed American woman stepped
forward.
‘EROS radio station,’ Zander confirmed.
‘That’s you. Come on aboard and I’ll give you the pre-flight
information.’
By agreement, Zander recorded the whole safety presentation and
the pilot put on an extra-thorough show for the media. But by the end of it
Georgia certainly felt very sure about what to do if the balloon failed, and
absolutely certain that it would not. The whole thing was far more regimented
and controlled than she’d expected.
‘I get motion-sick,’ she volunteered out of nowhere and Zander
looked up, surprised.
‘We have bags,’ the unfazed pilot said ‘but you won’t need
them. You’ll see. It’s as though the planet is moving and we’ll be standing
still.’
Zander threaded his fingers through hers and the gentle gesture
filled her with the same golden glow that kept their balloon aloft. She
tightened her fingers around his as the pilot closed the door.
‘Ten minutes before sun-up,’ the pilot announced. ‘Let’s get
you guys in the air.’
Zander curled Georgia into his body and stood behind her
against the basket edge in the centre of the basket. She felt both sheltered and
protected.
The balloon didn’t rise straight up as she imagined it would
when the ground crew dropped their tethers—then again her entire experience of
hot-air balloons was from
The Wizard of Oz
. Instead,
it skirted along, centimetres above the ground, and slowly those centimetres
became meters and then Georgia got a sense of what the pilot had promised. As
soon as they had some height, it suddenly felt as if the earth had started to
treadmill below them and they were stationary, just hanging there in space.
The pilot gave the gas its voice and the entire balloon inhaled
the burst of flame, long and steady. It rose again. Then she killed the flame
and silence resumed; the only sounds were the clinking of guy ropes and the
distant squeals of the passengers in the balloon ascending behind them.
Theirs breathed enormous gulps between long silent stretches
and climbed and climbed in pace with the sunrise.
‘Do you want to describe what you see?’ Zander murmured against
her neck, crossing his strong arms around her and holding the running digital
recorder below her chin.
Golden light fingered out from the horizon and the deep blonde
colour of the earth began to glow with a vibrancy and a gentle kind of fire.
Georgia described the stunning scene, punctuated by the occasional breath of the
balloon, and full of words like
God
and
heaven
and
other-worldly
.
And
whole
and
healing
and
soul-breath
.
Zander and the pilot remained silent, letting her speak.
They flew over Göreme and then left it far behind as they
floated over the lunar-like deserts. A distant mesa grew bigger and bigger as
they approached but the pilot kept the balloon level though the others in their
convoy all lifted. Georgia’s adrenaline spiked and Zander’s arms tightened
around her, but at the last moment the pilot fired the lungs hard and their
balloon soared up and over the lip of the mesa and the vast plains of Anatolia
were revealed before them.
Tears filled Georgia’s eyes.
Zander recorded the balloon’s respiration as they drifted over
great clefts in the earth and the rolling, twisting, ancient tortures of the
granite and sandstone crust. He interviewed the pilot and got some close-up
sounds of the clanking guy ropes and a passing flotilla of geese, generally
capturing the atmosphere of this amazing experience for his listeners.
Though of course that was completely impossible to do.
This was as close to angel flight as she was going to get.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he murmured, back by her side
and pocketing the recorder.
She spoke before she thought. ‘Dying.’
He twisted around to look at her face. She laughed. ‘I mean
what it might be like after you die. Ascension. I’m thinking it would be like
this. So...gentle and supported. No fear.’
‘I didn’t know you were so religious,’ he murmured.
‘I’m not, generally. But it’s tough to be up here and not
wonder...’
They fell to silence, but Zander eventually broke it.
‘I remember wondering... I thought when I was young with so
many people queuing up for communion there must be something in it.’
She tipped her head half back and contacted the strength of his
chest. ‘You’re Catholic?’
‘Sufficiently Catholic to have had mass at my wedding, but not
to get up early every Sunday for one.’
He was close enough and smart enough to interpret the total
stillness of her body—as still as the balloon felt in space—correctly.
‘You’re married?’ she whispered.
The pilot shifted away to the far corner of the basket. If she
could have climbed out to check the rigging at the crest of the balloon Georgia
thought she would have.
Zander was as stiff as she was now. ‘No.’
Part of her sagged with relief, but she didn’t let it show.
‘But you were married?’
That was a hell of a thing to be finding out now.
‘Actually no.’
She turned her back on the spectacular view and looked up at
him. ‘But you had a wedding mass?’
His face tightened. ‘We had one scheduled.’
‘It didn’t go ahead?’ This was too important a moment to be
playing word games.
‘No. It was... The wedding was cancelled.’
Oh.
‘You broke it off?’
His brows dropped. ‘Why would you assume it was me?’
Because no woman in their right mind would jilt a demigod? ‘I
don’t know. Only that you’re not very pro wedding.’
Though suddenly that particular prejudice made perfect sense if
he’d had a broken engagement in his past.
The gas flame belched and they rose slightly.
She tried again. ‘Was it mutual?’
Zander looked out to the now blazing dawn horizon. ‘No.’
Empathy washed through her. If anyone could understand the
awfulness of being rejected, she could. Though she knew now that she’d never
loved Dan. And Zander had clearly loved his fiancée. So how much more would that
have hurt. ‘I’m sorry.’
What else could she say? Better to know now than find out
later? Just because she considered Dan’s rejection of her proposal a dodged
bullet didn’t mean that was how Zander felt. And judging by the tightness of his
expression and his general close-mouthedness on the subject of marriage...
Would it ever have come up if not for his slip up?
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘No. She and her bridesmaids fled England while the ushers were
doing the friend-of-the-bride/friend-of-the-groom thing.’
Georgia’s jaw dropped. ‘She left you at the altar?’ Didn’t that
only happen in movies?
He nodded. ‘Even her parents weren’t aware.’
Oh, my God
. ‘Zander, I don’t know
what to say.’ Not about how awful that must have been for him. Not about the
raging anger towards a woman she’d never met for hurting him so badly. Or the
raging jealousy that was suddenly surging through her for some stranger he’d
loved enough to marry.
‘There’s nothing to say.’ He shrugged, but it was the least
casual thing she could imagine. ‘It’s ancient history.’
‘When was this?’
‘Right out of uni.’
Fifteen years wasn’t ancient. ‘You were young.’
‘And stupid as it turns out.’
She slid over to stand beside him so they could both look out
at the beautiful, healing landscape below. ‘It’s not stupid to want to spend
your life with someone. It’s brave.’
And that was an odd word to have chosen.
He digested that for a moment. ‘I wasn’t brave. I think I did
it because it was the right thing to do.’
‘How long were you together?’
‘Four years. Since final year at school. We both enrolled at
Lincoln.’
Excellent. High-school sweetheart,
too.
‘You must have loved her a lot.’ Maybe he still did? It would
explain a lot.
He thought about that. ‘I think it was one of those
break-up-or-get-married moments. So I proposed.’
‘And she broke up.’
‘Pretty much.’
‘In the worst imaginable way.’
He slid his eyes down to her. ‘Strength of character wasn’t one
of her strong suits. She had very dominant parents.’
That wasn’t a woman she could imagine him admiring. ‘Hurting
you was easier than facing them?’
Dark brows folded. ‘Seems so.’
Cappadocia whizzed by beneath them.
‘Well, I guess now I understand your cynicism about marriage.
And your reaction after the promo went so wrong.’
He looked at her for the first time in minutes. ‘I had to face
two hundred of our family, friends, and neighbours, and tell them Lara wasn’t
coming. The idea that I’d set someone else up for the same public
humiliation...’ He shook his head.
That stole her breath every bit as much as the moment the
balloon had played chicken with the sharp slope of the mesa. Her stomach lurched
the same, too. In crystal-clear replay she saw the moment in the elevator all
those months ago that he’d seen her distress, turned and shielded her from
prying eyes with his body, and then helped her slink, unseen, from the parking
garage. That was a foundation moment for her. And for him it had all been about
sympathy.
‘Is that what the whole Year of Georgia thing is about?’