Curiosity then had her leaning forward in her seat to get a better view from the portal window, but she couldn’t make out anything besides what looked to be a thickly lush amount of greenery on either side of the airstrip.
The plane touched down with a bump and she startled, glancing at Theo to see if he’d noticed, but he was once more absorbed in his newspaper.
She smothered a wry smile. So much for a honeymoon.
The house was definitely not what she’d expected. Oh, it was huge and modern and clearly very expensive, perched as it was right on the edge of the beach, with three walls being madealmost solidly of glass. But it was the open plan nature of it that she hadn’t expected. As in, no walls, except for the bathroom.
Despite being more than large enough to accommodate dozens of actual rooms, there were no partitioning walls. There was a massive kitchen and living area, with a grand piano and a flat screen TV the size of a cinema screen, several sitting areas, all plush and fashionably chic, and then, there was a bed. Justonebed. It was towards the back of the large room, but it wasright therestaring back at her, inviting her, demanding to be lain in and used for making love.
Heat flushed her cheeks as she dragged her gaze away to the blackness beyond the windows. In the morning, she would see the ocean in all its daytime glory, but for now, there was just a hint of silver foam, frothing atop the waves that rolled towards them, the cacophony of their crashing to the sandy shore rhythmic yet not at all reassuring. If anything, it formed a drumbeat of need, echoing the thundering of her pulse, making her want more than she wished to.
‘This is it?’ Her voice emerged squeaky and high-pitched. She swallowed, trying to tamp it down.
‘Do you have a problem with it?’ he asked, in a way that was almost completely blanked of emotion, and yet she heard it anyway—because she knew him too well to miss it. Smugness. Hewantedto unsettle her. To make her uncomfortable.
She turned to face him, her eyes wide, but she shrugged, like it was no big deal. ‘It’ll do,’ she said, moving through the room, running a hand over the shiny top of the grand piano, then pressing a few keys. ‘Do you play?’
‘No.’
She sat down on the stool and held her fingers to the keys, closing her eyes a moment before she began to move her fingers, to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D, the song that she’d walked down the aisle to.
‘I forgot you learned,’ he said, his voice close by, so she opened her eyes to find him standing just in front of her, to the side of the piano, watching her with an intensity that made her blood fire. She ignored the insult buried in those words—the fact he’d forgotten she’d learned, when she couldn’t forget anything about him.
Bastard.
‘All my life,’ she said. ‘Well, until I was nineteen, anyway.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘I guess I’d learned enough.’
‘Do you still play for pleasure?’
Her lips twisted to the side. She hadn’t played since her mother had died. In the six months between her first and last heart attacks, she’d played for her often. Her mother had loved to hear Annie’s music—it had reminded her of Mary. Mary, who’d been a brilliant pianist, who’d taught herself by the time she was three to play Mozart. Mary, who’d been a legitimate prodigy, and left Annie to follow after her, never as good, of course, no matter how much she practiced. That didn’t matter, though. By the time she was proficient enough to play Mozart, her parents could close their eyes and pretend, for a little while.
‘No,’ she said, simply, when it was anything but.
‘You are very good.’
She let the praise fall into a little black hole in her chest—a place that could never be filled, no matter what was said. She was competent, but she was not gifted, and her competence was really just a byproduct of how much she’d cared, how much she’d wanted to gift her parents her piano playing, as a token of love to Mary, and of their love for the daughter they’d lost.
‘Why do you have the piano if you don’t play?’
‘It came with the house.’
‘Ah.’ She dropped her hands into her lap and looked around, then pulled her silky dark hair over one shoulder, toying with theends distractedly as she considered the room. ‘Was it all like this when you bought it?’
‘Mostly.’
She bit into her lip—now washed clean of the burgundy lip stain and returned to their natural dusky pink. ‘You didn’t think about walls? Extra bedrooms?’
His eyes probed hers, and she felt the spark of heat travel between them, felt it bloom in her belly then incinerate her whole soul.
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. Entertaining?’
‘There are twelve bunks downstairs, for staff,’ he said. ‘If you’re bothered by sharing a bed with your husband, you are welcome to use one of them.’