normal.
And how normal was it to be a virgin at twenty-eight?
Maybe it was the hot water, but Lotty could feel herself beginning to glow. Perhaps she would never have the nerve, but she was allowed to dream, wasn’t she?
She wanted to dream that she got out of this bath and went downstairs. In her dream, Corran was in the kitchen. Perhaps not the most romantic of settings, but it was the only room she had seen properly. Besides, there was something about all that tough masculinity in a domestic setting that appealed to her.
So, yes, he was in the kitchen, doing something ordinary. Cooking. Chopping something. Not onions or garlic, but something not quite so pungent. Tomatoes, perhaps. His head was bent and he was totally focused on his task, but when she appeared in the doorway, he lifted his head.
And he smiled.
Lotty had never seen Corran smile, not properly, but she knew it would be slow and sure, like the rest of him, and she shivered at the way it warmed the granite face, creasing his cheeks and curving that cool mouth.
Come here, he said, and in her fantasy his voice was dark and low and urgent. All the breath leaked out of Lotty’s lungs just imagining it. It was a voice that would brook no disobedience, and it would never occur to her not to do exactly as he asked. So she would cross the kitchen towards him without taking her eyes off his and…
No, wait, what was she wearing? Lotty rewound a little. If she was going to have a fantasy, she might as well get it right, and she didn’t want to lose her virginity in the jeans, camisole and raspberry-pink cashmere cardigan, which was all she had had to wear in the evenings for the last week. She certainly didn’t want to be wearing her grungy work clothes.
Just a towel? She wouldn’t have the nerve, Lotty decided. No, if this was a fantasy, she didn’t have to be limited to the contents of her rucksack, did she? Her suitcase that was still sitting at Glasgow Station contained a Japanese print silk robe. She could wear that.
Satisfied, Lotty mentally slipped into the robe. Beneath it, she was naked and the silk felt cool against her bare skin. Ah, yes, now the fantasy was well back on track.
Come here, Corran said—again—and she walked towards him, the robe fluttering around her legs. She stood in front of him, and he reached wordlessly for the belt, tugging it gently so that the robe fell open.
Would he gasp at her beauty? Lotty considered and rejected this regretfully. She just couldn’t imagine Corran gasping at anything. But he might smile again, mightn’t he? A slow smile that started in his eyes and made her heart thump as he put his hard hands at her waist and drew her towards him.
And then—oh, then!—he would lower his head and—
‘Lotty!’ The door flew open and Corran charged into the bathroom.
Gasping with shock, Lotty jerked upright out of the water and slapped her hands to her shoulders to cover her breasts. ‘What are you doing?’ she shrieked.
‘I thought you had drowned!’
He’d called her name. He’d knocked on the door. Silence. And then he’d remembered how tired she had been, because of him. He’d gone cold, picturing her sliding beneath the water, too tired to rouse herself, and he’d panicked, bursting into the room, convinced that he would find her limp and lifeless, desperately trying to remember resuscitation techniques.
And there she was, her eyes huge and frightened, her shoulders bare, and Corran’s eyes had taken on a weird life of their own and were ensnared by the wet, glowing body in the bath, skidding from clavicle to earlobe to elbow to the arms clamped firmly over her breasts.
‘I did knock,’ he said, but his voice seemed to come from a long way away. He was disgusted with himself. He knew he had to get out of there, but he couldn’t move. He didn’t know whether he felt light-headed with relief or cold with anger.
Anger was easier to deal with. ‘Why the hell didn’t you answer?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t hear. I was d-daydreaming.’
The tiny stammer jolted Corran back to himself. I still stammer a little when I’m nervous, she had said.
She shouldn’t be nervous of him, but what else could she feel when he had stormed into the bathroom and was standing there, staring at her? Mortified, Corran forced himself to move at last. Turning his back on her, he strode for the door.
‘Well, since you’re alive after all, dinner’s ready,’ he said curtly.
‘I—I’ll be down in a minute.’
How long was it going to be before he got the image of Lotty in the bath out of his mind? That luminous skin, the wet, lovely slope of her shoulders. Her short hair was spiky, the grey eyes wide and startled, and a pulse had hammered in the bewitching hollow at the base of her throat.
Corran glowered as he drained the pasta. He’d been alone too long. The last thing he needed right now was a complication like Lotty.
She appeared a few minutes later, modestly covered in jeans and a cardigan. Not her fault that the soft pink wool seemed to hug her arms enticingly, reminding him of the bare skin beneath, or that the top she wore beneath the cardigan emphasised the delicate line of her clavicle.
Corran dragged his eyes away from it. ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said stiffly.
‘No, it was my fault,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you and I might well have fallen asleep if you hadn’t checked, so thank you.’
An awkward silence fell.
‘It must have been some daydream,’ he said to fill it. ‘I was quite loud.’
A wash of colour swept up Lotty’s throat.
Her eyes slid from his as she pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Something smells good,’ she said, pointedly changing the subject, and Corran’s interest was perversely piqued. What did a woman like Lotty dream about? he wondered.
Who did she dream about?
Well, it was none of his business, he reminded himself as he turned the pasta in the sauce. And he didn’t care anyway. He had to remind himself of that too.
‘Spaghetti bolognaise,’ he told her, plonking the pot onto the table. ‘I can only cook three dishes. This isn’t going to be a great gastronomic experience for you.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Lotty, who was still jittery from the shock of Corran bursting into the bathroom. One moment she’d been dreaming that, and the next he’d been there, looking furious, and reality had slapped her around the face. This was no ardent lover. This was a man with far more on his mind than her pathetic little fantasies.
In one of those gruff acts of kindness that kept catching her unawares, he’d retrieved her rucksack from the barn and put it in her room. She felt a little better once she was dressed in the outfit she’d worn every evening on the walk, but she was still desperately aware of Corran moving around the kitchen and her breathing kept getting muddled up. His presence seemed to be sucking all the oxygen from the air. The only other person Lotty knew who had that same compelling presence was her tiny autocratic grandmother.
