Tell her he had no idea and let her worry about that too?
‘So, are you nearly done in there?’
‘Yeah.’ He’d been staring blankly at the mosaic on the floor for the last ten minutes, with the water beating down on his back and no idea how he was going to get through this night. ‘I’ll be out in a minute, and there’ll be dancing and, y’know, amazing conversation and food and stuff. But not bed stuff. Not yet. I want to woo you first.’ Woo? Woo? Who in this day and age said woo? He was losing his mind.
‘You want another champagne?’ she asked.
‘That’d be good.’ Maybe he could drink his way out of this. Or drink Lena under the table. No sex after that, just hangovers from hell and a Lena who’d know he’d sabotaged the evening deliberately. That was assuming that he could get Lena to drink heavily in the first place.
Bad idea. ‘Actually, I don’t want another drink right now. Maybe later.’
He heard her sigh, clear through the door.
He could always say he’d come down with a contagious social disease. Trig shuddered and thunked his head gently against the mirror. Not sure he really wanted to explore that one.
An argument, then. A rip-roaring quarrel that ended with Lena relegating him to the doghouse. He and Lena had argument down to a fine art. There’d be muscle memory, and synapse memory and maybe she’d regain her memory and then it’d really be on.
But he didn’t want to argue with her either.
‘We should go out tonight,’ he said. ‘We should go out right now and see the sights. You could seduce me while we’re doing that. Or you could, y’know, get interested in the sights and leave the seduction for later. We could dine out, go dancing. Make it like a date. I bet you don’t remember any of our dates.’
Mainly because they’d never been on one.
‘I remember the first time you took me kite surfing,’ she offered.
‘It doesn’t count if your brother was there. Bodrum has a castle. They turned it into a maritime museum. Don’t you want to go and see the castle? I bet it has turrets.’ Lena liked turrets.
‘Would it make you lose the performance anxiety?’
‘Couldn’t hurt. It’d also help if you didn’t mention the performance anxiety.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Got it. So...sightseeing and then a dinner date?’
‘Yes.’ Maybe he could tire her out completely. Now there was a thought.
‘Should I wear my dress?’
‘Not for the sightseeing part.’
‘So, we’re coming back here before we go for dinner?’
‘Not sure.’
‘I’m taking that as a yes. We could have dinner here if we didn’t feel like going out again.’
Or not. He could arrange it so that they didn’t come back here. Avoiding that would mean avoiding the problem of Lena’s near nakedness while she got changed, not to mention the wearing of that frothy blue dress the saleswoman had persuaded him to buy this morning.
Lena in that dress in this place was just courting trouble. He eyed his reflection in the mirror and took a deep breath. ‘I’ll be out in a minute. And then we’ll go.’
‘There’s no hurry.’ She sounded a little bit wistful. ‘I still have to get changed.’
* * *
So it took her husband half an hour to shower, shave and throw on a T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans. So she’d changed out of the pretty blue dress and thrown on a pair of grey shorts and another one of those simple cotton T-shirts that her suitcase seemed to be full of, and then she’d helped herself to more nibbles and poured herself another champagne by the time he appeared.
Adrian Sinclair was worth the wait.
Lena watched from the hanging love seat in the courtyard garden as he padded through the room, his bare feet making no sound as he stepped out onto the tiles. She knew those feet, from surfboards of old, and she knew those big hands for she’d grasped them often enough as he’d reached down to haul her into a boat or up a cliff face. She knew what his hair looked like wet because she’d seen it wet a thousand times. She knew this man and loved him. And she knew he loved her.
He didn’t need to have performance anxiety. Not around her. She honestly had no idea why he would.
‘Ready to go?’ he asked, and she nodded.
‘We have a driver,’ she told him. ‘He’ll drop us off and pick us up wherever we want.’
Trig nodded.
‘Did you know that this place is still family-owned? About fifty years ago, the upkeep was sending the family broke and a terrace wall fell down, fortunately not on any guests, but they did find an iron strongbox buried in the footings. It was full of jewellery.’
‘Jewellery fit for a princess?’
‘Better.’ Lena grinned. ‘Jewels designed to placate a royal concubine. They sold three pieces, kept the rest, and it was enough to fully restore this place and run it as a luxury hotel until the hotel became profitable in its own right. Did you know that there are only ten guests here at any one time and eighteen permanent staff?’
‘I do now.’
‘And that they’ll shop for us if we tell them what we want?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Shoes. To go with the dress you bought me earlier. Which is glorious, by the way. I tried it on.’
‘Does it fit?’
‘To perfection.’
‘Not sure I got the colour right.’
‘I love it. It makes me feel like a dancer and I almost have curves.’ She’d never had curves. ‘Do you remember that dress you, Jared and Poppy helped me pick out when I was in year twelve?’
In the absence of a mother’s guidance, Lena had done her best with buying things like make-up and clothes, but the sheer choice that her father’s bankcard had provided had always overwhelmed her, and when it had come to choosing a dress for the school formal, Jared and Trig had just kept saying no. No to the little black dress because she didn’t have enough curves to pull it off. No to the A-line silk tunic with the psychedelic purple swirls because it was far too short and altogether too easy for someone to get their hands beneath it. And she’d been adamantly against any of the more feminine creations Poppy had urged her towards. Hard to embrace feminine clothing when she’d been so set on being one of the boys. She’d finally settled on a glittery red flapper creation with enough crystal beading hanging off it to sink a boat. ‘That dress was so wrong.’
‘That dress did not get my vote,’ said Trig as he slipped on a pair of shoes and pocketed his wallet. ‘It looked
