How to Get Over Your Ex (12 page)

If he spaced it out right.

Kisses... Those he could live off for a year.

She chewed her lip. ‘Should we go back in?’

Her reasons for changing classes were valid. The more he had to
put his hands on her, the harder it was going to be taking them off. ‘No. Let’s
just call it a night.’

‘Sure.’

Courteous but cool. It bothered him enough to glance down the
street for the nearest coffee shop. He saw the blinking LED sign a few blocks
down. So much safer than having her in his house. So much safer than a bar with
a few drinks under his belt. So much safer than the back of a black taxi,
pressed together for twenty minutes.

‘Let’s grab a coffee,’ he said and turned her west.

Georgia did her best not to flinch at the feel of Zander’s hand
at her lower back. It was just a courteous gesture. Unconscious. It didn’t mean
a thing. Even if it did feel more intimate and personal than the salsa clinch
they’d been in just moments before. Something about the way it failed to
entirely disengage even once she was fully moving...

It took a few silent minutes to get to the Tudor-style coffee
shop. Then a few more to get seated and settled and their drinks ordered.

She struggled to not be distracted by his long fingers tapping
on the tabletop—fingers that had traced her skin so beautifully just nights ago
and curled so strongly in her hair. But if she looked at his face she’d either
drown in his eyes or start obsessing about his lips.

All of which were entirely off limits to her now. Despite the
torment of the taste-test after the marathon.

So she fluctuated between looking at the place where a lock of
his hair fell across his forehead, a spot of fluff on his collar and glancing
around the room at the other patrons.

‘Tell me about Ankara.’

That managed to bring her eyes back to his. ‘Now?’

‘I know nothing about it and I’m going to be going with you.
Why is it so special?’

‘Cappadocia.’ Amongst other wonders.

He shrugged. ‘Old cities and ballooning. That’s it?’

She pressed forwards against the table. ‘Seriously? You can’t
understand why someone would want to float high above a city where houses and
chapels are carved into the rockfaces? Where entire communities used to live
underground to hide from invaders two thousand years ago? Cities that were
founded twenty centuries before Jesus?’

He just stared. ‘You’re serious?’

Excited warmth warmed her cheeks. ‘Where else could you do it?
It’s so intriguing...’

‘It’s not to put me off?’

‘It’s not about you at all.’
Lies!
‘It’s something I’d like to do. I saw it in a documentary years ago and I’ve
never forgotten it.’ And if Zander came along, bonus. Good things happened to
them when they got out of London. Things just tended to go south when they were
back in it.

His eyes burned into hers. Deciding. He slid his recorder up
onto the table. ‘OK. Tell me more.’

She did. For the next hour and a half. All about Göreme, where
she wanted to stay, all about Cappadocia’s extraordinary ancient lunar-scapes
and traditional villages and the amazing peoples that had lived there for forty
centuries. All about how it had wheedled its way under her skin all those years
ago.

‘And you can stay in these underground buildings?’

‘They carve them out of the side of enormous rock faces. And
they’ve been modernised. Electricity, water. They even have Wi-Fi. So you won’t
be slumming it.’

He’d been smiling for the last five or six minutes straight,
though she knew she wasn’t saying anything funny. His eyes practically glittered
looking at her.

‘What?’

‘You just...’ He struggled for the right words. And he turned
the recorder off. ‘You
love
life, don’t you?’

Generally, she just endured life. But maybe that was because
she’d been missing the best of it. ‘I love the possibilities. I love that you’ve
given me this opportunity and I’m going to do something I’ve always wanted to. I
couldn’t do this without you.’

‘Without the station,’ he clarified.

Right.
Just in case she was
thinking he was doing this for
her
. ‘Without
help.’

‘You might have got there by yourself. Eventually.’

‘Maybe not. I was this close—’ she pinched her fingers ‘—to
consigning myself to the role of wife and mother. That would have meant a lot
less flexibility and freedom for a really long time.’

He shrugged. ‘A different kind of adventure, perhaps?’

His words sank in. If marriage was an adventure, then shouldn’t
you enter into it with someone that you’d want to be adventurous with? Discover
new worlds with? Fly across a lunar landscape with. Her breath tightened up. She
said the first thing that came into her head in order to stop anything more
inappropriate appearing there.

‘Is that what you think marriage is? An adventure?’

‘I used to.’ He pressed his lips together the moment those few
tiny words voiced.

The unexpected glimpse into his past was tantalising. She
wanted more immediately. ‘Is that why you created the Valentine’s promo?’ she
fished. ‘To celebrate marriage?’

His answer was fifty-per-cent snort. ‘Definitely not. I created
the promo to cash in on the leap year commercialisation. Nothing more.’

Well, that was depressingly cynical. ‘You don’t think matrimony
is worth celebrating?’

‘On the whole I think marriage is highly overrated.’

She stared at him. ‘I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.
Otherwise you’d have been snapped up ages ago.’

One expressive eyebrow lifted. ‘You don’t think I’d have done
the snapping?’

‘You strike me as a man who gets what he wants. If you wanted a
wife in that big lonely house of yours there’d be one there now.’

He drained the last of his second coffee. ‘You have a very high
opinion of my desirability. Not everyone would agree with you.’

His staff perhaps? ‘Maybe you work too hard keeping people at a
distance...’

‘You’re here.’ He tossed it out like a challenge. ‘I can’t seem
to shake you at all.’

His light words filleted her neatly along her ribs. Although,
she could see he wasn’t saying them to be cruel. In fact, if anything, he looked
more engaged and more intent than ever. And positively mystified.

‘I’m particularly uncaring about societal niceties,’ she
murmured. ‘I’m sure there’s been a hundred not-so-subtle hints I should have
been taking.’

If she weren’t so busy looking for hints that he might be more
interested than he was letting on. Maybe than he even knew, himself. But for
every sultry look, for every gentle touch, for every unexpected waterside kiss
there was a frown, pressed lips, words like
professional
and
aberration
. And
ill-equipped
.

They kind of cancelled each other out.

‘Besides,’ she braved on, ‘I’m not your target market.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Really? Who is?’

She looked around. A lone woman sat reading a thick book in the
far corner. Her perfectly manicured nails were the exact same shade as her
shoes. ‘Her. Maybe...’ She looked around for someone else. ‘Maybe her?’

Two glamour queens in one coffee shop. Convenient.

Zander looked around far more subtly than she had. ‘They’re
both very attractive.’

Of course that would be the first thing he noticed.

‘And stylish,’ he went on.

‘And well educated.’ She nodded to the woman with the thick
hardback. ‘She’s reading Ayn Rand.’

‘And that’s who you think my target market is? Stylish
intellectuals?’

‘I can see either one of them in your house very easily.’ Much
as it galled her to admit it.

His grey eyes pierced her. ‘Can you see them sitting on the
side of a weather-beaten old track for an hour making conversation with the
locals while waiting to hand me an energy drink?’

She just stared. Because, no, she couldn’t.

‘So maybe my target market isn’t as clear-cut as you think?’
His chin rested on his steepled fingers and he lifted it enough to tilt his
head.

Maybe not.

‘It’s a moot point, anyway,’ she breezed. ‘If you’re not
actually
in
the market.’

He started to answer that but then changed his mind. His mouth
gently closed again without making a sound.

‘So three weeks before the underground cities?’ he hedged,
after a moment.

‘And two dance classes before then.’

‘What about my garden?’

She studied him. This man was more baffling than any of the
complex scientific mysteries she’d studied at university. His garden had sat
there, untouched, for years. Now suddenly he wanted it to progress immediately?
‘What about it?’

‘Don’t you want to see how it’s progressing?’

Did she want to see what some other lucky sod got to create
with? ‘When it’s done.’

It was never too late to implement some self-restraint.

That triggered a couple of lines between his brows. ‘Guess I
should trade in my dancing shoes and get onto a visa for Turkey, then.’

‘Ten minutes and ten pounds at Heathrow.’ She nodded. ‘I
checked.’

He considered her. Then smiled. ‘You’re really excited.’

There was something looming on her horizon and every cell in
her body told her it had something to do with Turkey. It had been swaying her
away from Ibiza almost the moment she agreed to Spain. Making her look east.
Agitating subconsciously for her to change her mind. And then, the moment she’d
made her decision, this odd kind of emotional hum had commenced and it had been
slowly building ever since.

Ankara. Cappadocia.

Something was going to happen there. Something life-changing.
Something that felt almost fated. Briefly she wondered how she ever would have
found her way there if not for the disaster that was her botched proposal, if
she hadn’t met Dan before that. And suddenly everything started to feel
very...

Meant.

Excited?
About standing on the edge
of something so huge and new?

‘You have no idea,’ she breathed.

* * *

Georgia
stood at the door to the
curtained-off change area in the dance studio and hovered awkwardly in the
doorway. Possibly she hadn’t thought this through as thoroughly as she might
have.

Imagine that.

‘Off you go...’ the woman behind her nudged. Emma. A friendly,
motherly sort. A total born-again about belly dancing, given she’d only been
coming a few weeks herself.

Georgia took a deep breath to quell her nerves. Maybe belly
dancing wasn’t the best choice to get away from the close body contact with
Zander, the brushing and heated touching. Salsa was, at least, a partnered
thing. It wasn’t Zander sitting on a seat in the corner watching her wiggle and
jiggle and cavort around semi-naked.

Even if it was very prettily semi-naked.

Turned out one of the things this class loved the best was a
newcomer. A newcomer who turned up in the middle of a semester and in a
tracksuit. The lesson of the day went on hold and all the women helped rifle
through the dress-up box of spare belly-dancing bits to put a full costume
together—educating her the whole time about each piece’s name, purpose, and
heritage—then they thrust them at Georgia and thrust her into the change
room.

Zander sent his digital recorder in with one of the ladies to
capture the sounds of the excited chaos and was cooling his heels out in the
dance area, getting the necessary permission forms all ready for their
return.

Georgia glanced in the mirror. Her full, beaded skirt fell from
her hips down to brush the floor and the matching top-piece they’d selected for
her was equally modest—no worse than the vest tops she often wore at home in
summer—cupping her small breasts and cascading stringed coins down in a V to
point at her exposed belly button. She’d never before mourned her slim build—in
fact her curvier friends had envied her for it—but standing here amongst
the luscious curves and generous breasts and gorgeous outfits of the other women
in the class she’d never wished more to be curvier. Rounded instead of flat.

And Zander was about to get an eyeful of all that flatness.

Emma pinned Georgia’s face veil up behind her ear and gave her
a shove.

‘Out you go, love. Get it over with.’

Then they all rushed out, ankle bells ringing, dragging her
along in their bright, jangly wake.

Zander’s eyes locked on her the moment she stepped out. How he
spotted her amongst so many disguised, Technicolor women was a mystery. Unless
he was just looking for the only boyish figure in the room.

She shrivelled up inside, instantly. This had to be her most
foolish of fool-moments...

The woman he’d given his digital recorder to returned it to him
with a flirty smile, and he flirted right back. In fact, from that moment on he
seemed to become entranced by every other woman in the room and—God love
them—they enjoyed his presence just as much. Far from being shy about the
presence of a strange man in this heavily female environment, the room full of
housewives, teachers, and bank clerks dressed in little more than sexy pyjamas
lapped it up, escaping into their dance personas and focusing their attention on
the only man in the room.

They weren’t gratuitous—they seemed respectful of the
awkwardness of Zander’s position—but they were thorough. They zeroed their
efforts on him and unleashed the full force of the moves for his benefit.

He grinned his way through the whole thing.

But avoided looking at her at all.

Small mercy, perhaps, given how hot she flamed and how
stumbling her movements were. But she’d signed up here for a reason—actually two
reasons—and she wasn’t in a hurry to go back to the close, breathy, partnered
clinch of salsa nor to be doomed for ever to being
not cut
out for seduction.