Nikolas and. she hoped, some food.
She found both waiting for her in the small shaded courtyard off the kitchen. And something else.
'What's this?' she asked, nodding at the bright yellow scooter standing at the ready between Nikolas's outstretched jeans-clad legs.
His eyebrow lifted. 'This? Strangely, it's a Honda-evidently, they're quite the thing in Europe these days. Phillipe's, not mine. He's been kind enough to lend it to me. though. Hop on-I want to show you something.'
She sauntered toward him. arms folded across her middle, where her stomach had begun to growl uncontrollably. 'Is there food in there?' She nodded at the cooler lashed to a small metal ledge on the back of the scooter.
'There is. A repast fit for a-do pardon the expression- king.' He held out his hand, waiting with supreme and annoying confidence and a smile tugging irresistibly at his lips.
How
His smile blossomed and his eyes grew smoky behind sleepy black lashes. Bracing the scooter with his feet, he pushed himself back and up onto the pillion seat and lifted his hands from the handlebars. 'She's all yours,' he murmured, laughing softly.
''There was a young lady from Niger…who smiled as she rode with a tiger…'' Rhia muttered under her breath as she settled onto the front part of the seat. A seat which seemed very small, suddenly, altogether too small for two people to sit on at the same time. At least, not without a great deal of body contact.
'What's that?' His voice was a furry growl so close to the nape of her neck that it made shivers cascade in rivers down her back.
'Nothing,' she breathed. She tested the reach and the foot pedals, then started up the motor and clicked into gear.
'That's right, you do like to be on top, don't you?' Nikolas murmured in her ear as she guided the scooter skillfully out of the courtyard. 'I'll have to keep that in mind.'
What had she been thinking? Thoughts that made her scalp sizzle. With him sitting so close behind her, she felt as if she'd been wrapped in a Nikolas-cocoon, steeped in Essence of Donovan. His heartbeat thumped against her back, his body heat melded with hers, his scent filled her head with sultry, sweaty images of tangled bodies… hers and his in wicked disarray…
Her jaws locked and her eyes squinted as she fought to keep her attention focused on the operation of the scooter as it grumbled impatiently through the farmhouse grounds. It whined with excitement as she accelerated down the lane, and came to a purring stop where the dirt lane met the paved road. 'Where to?' she asked in a voice that held strange vibrations not caused by the scooter.
'Left.' Nikolas said.
'Right,' she said, and pushed off, accelerating into the turn. And felt his arms come around her and hold on tight.
'Watch it,' she muttered desperately between clenched teeth. 'Do you want us to have an accident?'
His laughter rippled down her spine. 'My love, it's precisely in anticipation of that possibility that I'm hanging on to you for dear life.'
'That had better not be a criticism of my driving, Donovan.' With a grim smile she shifted gears and the scooter leaped forward. The wind snatched the breath from her lungs and forced Nikolas to reply in a shout.
'Not at all. I'm more than impressed, actually.'
'I had one of these things when I was in high school,' she shouted back. 'Well, not a Honda-a Vespa, oddly enough. My father bought it for me for my sixteenth birthday Oh, hell-' She broke off as her rapidly drying hair began to whip in the wind, lashing her neck and, she was sure, Nikolas's face as well.
She let go of one handlebar to try to corral her hair, and felt his hands there already. Felt his hands, both of them, gather her hair and gently twist it…lift it away from her neck.
'Mmm, your hair smells good,' he murmured. Something-his lips, his mouth, his breath-brushed her nape.
Her spine contracted involuntarily; shivers shot through her like Fourth of July sparks. And to her embarrassment, the scooter's idling engine chose that moment to sputter and die.
For a long moment, Nikolas didn't reply. Something in her voice… How could he have made this confident, capable woman sound so desperate? So vulnerable? What was driving him. lately, that he kept behaving in ways so out of character for him-or. for the Nikolas Donovan he'd always thought himself to be?
The thought made him smile. It was what Phillipe's maman had called it. on those rare occasions when he'd gotten into mischief during his stays with Phillipe's family.
He let out a short gust of laughter and lifted his arms away from Rhia. shifted so there was space between his body and hers. As if he'd released a switch of some kind, the scooter's engine immediately snarled to life, and as it shot forward, this time he held on to the scooter instead of its driver.
Listening to his good angel, he managed to maintain the distance and keep his hands away from Rhia for the rest of the trip, leaning close only to make his voice heard as he guided her along the familiar route. Strange, though…the more space he put between his body and hers, the more he felt himself drawn to her. compelled by that same odd magnetism he'd felt first in the kitchen of Phillipe's flat in Paris. An attraction he felt certain even now had very little to do with sex-although it did affect him in some of the same ways…
At Nik's direction, Rhia turned the scooter off the paved road and onto a dirt lane that soon dwindled to a rock-studded track. The track wound downhill through thickets of oak trees and pines and around and between outcroppings of granite boulders through which, now and then, she caught glimpses of a meandering river. Finally, obeying another tap on the shoulder and hand gesture from Nikolas, she pulled the scooter into a little clearing of hard-packed earth and turned off the motor.
Still straddling the bike and trying without much success to finger-comb her hair into order, she said. 'What is this, the local make-out spot?' It was very quiet, and in the stillness she could hear no sounds of people or vehicles, only the rush and chatter of the river.
Nikolas, who was unbuckling the cooler from the rear of the scooter, didn't look up but merely smiled. 'Patience, luv. You'll see in a minute.' He lifted the cooler and beckoned with his head. 'Coming?'
She drew a shuddering breath, pocketed the key and followed him. Her shoes crunched over a carpet of oak leaves, acorns and pine needles. The air was warm and smelled of pine and earth and…something else. Something that tugged dusty memories from half-forgotten shelves.
She nudged the memories to the back of her mind and kept her eyes on Nikolas as he walked ahead of her down the bumpy but well-trodden path. It gave her such pleasure to watch him. He moved with the effortless grace of a leopard-a black leopard, she thought, as the wisp of a breeze lifted and toyed with his glossy black hair. A strange excite-ment shimmered all through her, and at the same time there was a heaviness in her heart. Which, she reflected, was the way she always felt now, being around him-or even just thinking about him-this terrible mixture of joy and despair, pleasure and pain. And she thought that if this was what falling in love was like, she was glad she'd managed to avoid it for so long.
Up ahead where the path curved around a pile of boulders, Nikolas had paused to wait for her, smiling with a touch of an odd eagerness and endearing self-consciousness. As she caught up with him he tilted his head toward the vista that had come into view just beyond the rocks.
The question hovering on her lips died there, and she said. 'Oh, wow,' instead.
Ahead of them the river ran wide and shallow, chuckling over rocky patches and lying quiet and leaf-dappled beneath trailing branches of the weeping willows that lined its banks. It would have been a lovely spot even without the towering structure that spanned the river's width a hundred yards or so upstream-a stone bridge, it appeared to
