Today he stood in a button-down shirt tucked into trousers that did things I hardly understood to his powerful thighs. I only knew I couldn’t look away.
Once again, my heart beat so hard and so fast I was worried I might be ill.
But I wasn’t.
I knew I wasn’t.
I watched him rake his fingers through that dark hair of his, as black and as glossy as I remembered it, as if even the years dared not defy him. He listened to the mobile he held at one ear for a moment, his head cocked to one side, then replied in another spate of the lyrical Spanish that seem to wind its way around me. Through me. Deep inside me, too.
With my functional Spanish I could pick up the sense of the words, if not every nuance. Business concerns in Wales. Something about the States. And a fiercer debate by far about Japan.
He finished his call abruptly, then tossed his mobile onto the table next to him. It thunked against the hard wood, making me too aware of the silence.
And too conscious of my own breathing and my mad, clattering heart.
Javier Dos Santos stood there a moment, his attention on the papers before him, or possibly his tablet computer.
When he raised his head, he did it swiftly. His dark eyes were fierce and sure, pinning me where I stood. I understood in a sudden red haze of exposure and fear that he had known I was here all along.
He had known.
“Hello, Imogen,” he said, switching to faintly accented English that made my name sound like some kind of incantation. Or terrible curse. “Do you plan to do something more than stare?”
*****