by Nikki Logan
There was no question about his heritage.
She was losing hours each day imagining herself with him, thinking about what it might be like to have him in her life on a more permanent basis.
But she’d cast him more as a lover than a—
Self-loathing, raw and all too familiar, washed through her and she battled the duelling desires. To be a Moore: Nathaniel Moore’s daughter, to have a decent father finally, someone she could relate to and connect with. And respect.
But to be Aiden’s sister...
All the saliva in her mouth decamped.
How could that possibly be? Surely her body would know, even if her mind didn’t?
She saw herself twisted back in his arms amongst the expensive coats, his tongue challenging hers. She remembered the rush of excitement and expectation as he’d slipped strong arms around her. She heard herself flirting wildly, putting a toe into the waters of the sexual attraction that raged between them.
And she pressed her palm to her suddenly roiling belly.
Shame flooded through her, but she could live with that. Kyle had made her out to be little better than a tramp at the end of their relationship—over-sexed and under-barefooted—and she’d managed to swallow the humiliation of that very public breakup and keep on surviving.
She could do it again. This time in private.
But rejecting Aiden now, after the promise she’d made him this afternoon.... If she cancelled Thursday on him, he’d demand an explanation. And rightly so. Except she just wasn’t free to explain. Nathaniel was out of the country this week with Laura, trying hard to mitigate the damage he’d caused—a very different thing from trying to save his marriage, Tash suspected—so she couldn’t call and drop a grenade into that careful work.
So that meant she had two choices—cancel or go ahead with the glass-blowing demo.
Could she keep him at bay for the time he was with her? Heat and danger were her friends in the hot shop. It was work for her; she could behave professionally. And he wasn’t about to force himself on her, right?
Surely, they could pass an hour in each other’s company without doing anything inappropriate.
Surely.
* * *
Aiden jogged down the old, paved, port road towards Tash’s studio. City council had established this part of town as an arts precinct decades before, back when artists were the obvious choice to sequester away in substandard buildings. They got tenants to keep an already seedy part of town from worsening and they also got points for supporting the very vocal art community.
Double win.
Maybe someone in council lacked foresight though, because you’d think they’d have put limited zoning on the waterfront precinct in case the social dynamic ever changed and they wanted to use the land for something else. It did change, and now rich people were buying up the old wool stores and converting them into creative, heritage-style accommodations left and right of the remaining artists. Squeezing them out incrementally. But the council couldn’t evict the arty set without causing office-losing scandal.
Tash didn’t lack foresight when she traded a pile of her best works for her quarter of the then derelict building. She had a great studio in what was fast becoming a great part of town. The artists and the wealthy mainly enjoyed a symbiotic relationship: the presence of the cashed-up residents made sure cafés and buses came to their part of town and that the precinct bustled even at night where it used to be a dark, port wasteland. And the artists loaned the area a whole bunch of cool-factor credibility.
‘Knock-knock.’
Aiden paused at the last door in the row, a heavy sliding timber thing that flaked enough to tell anyone passing that it was occupied by an artist. In case the hot air pumping out of it wasn’t clue enough.
Tash appeared in the opening a moment later, dressed in her usual glass-blowing gear—battered, closed-in boots, overalls and a T-shirt. Its sleeves were the only thing that was different from the first time he’d seen her all those weeks ago. That and the tiny leap of pleasure she failed to disguise before she got her expression under control and flooded it with caution.
Sigh. So they were back to caution. That didn’t bode well.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. Wouldn’t it be great if that were the reason for her wary expression?
‘I thought you might have changed your mind.’
Was that hope hiding behind her brown eyes? ‘Are you kidding? After working so hard to get you to let me come along in the first place?’
It was easy to joke but it really wasn’t all that funny. He was halfway through negotiations before he realised he didn’t know why he wanted to come so badly. It wasn’t just because he wanted to see the developing starfish—though that was what he’d told her. And it wasn’t because he wanted to see her again—though he very much did after he realised it could otherwise be a whole working week before he saw her again.
The closest he could get to his own version of truth—from somewhere way down deep—was because it was the one thing she’d told him he couldn’t have. Last time he’d stood here in her doorway. She’d seemed so shocked at the idea of revealing her craft. Her self. As if he’d asked her to strip naked and dance for him. And so it had intrigued him.
Actually, he thought she might have danced naked before she agreed to this.
And now he was imagining her naked. And she was staring at him as if he were deficient.
Awesome.
‘Well, here you are,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘Do you want to see the MooreCo pieces?’
Not really—he just wanted to stand here with her a moment longer acting like a total sap. ‘Sure. Lead on.’
She turned and he enjoyed the bonus view of her sexy hip-sway ahead of him. It helped force his mind back into more familiar, physical territory. He focused on the sensation.
‘This is the shoal taking shape....’
Three dozen tiny, silver-stained fish hung suspended from the studio roof, cleverly bonded together with invisible glass welds so that as the biggest pieces changed direction in the light ocean breeze the whole shoal seemed to follow, with fishy, military precision.
He could well imagine them glinting and bouncing prisms around MooreCo’s glass entry gallery. And their clients staring up at them from underneath. To replicate that view he crouched and examined the whole effect from below. Somehow, she’d managed to make looking at them from below feel like looking down at them from above. Like being under and above the water at once.
‘It’s extraordinary, Tash.’ The compliment was out before he thought it through. He usually liked to reserve his hand a little longer. Until it counted.
Apparently not today.
‘I’m contemplating another three dozen. It looks big here but they’ll be lost in your foyer.’
‘I can’t wait to see it installed.’
She struggled to disguise her smile. On one hand, it pleased him to have pleased her, but it disappointed him that she didn’t want to show him that. She wouldn’t even give him a hint of her pleasure. He thought something had changed between them after the paddle-boating.
Or maybe this was the universe giving him an out. Because he really shouldn’t be worried if a woman wasn’t emotionally forthcoming. What the hell use were emotions to him?
‘This is only the base element,’ she continued. ‘These are some of the hero pieces....’
The more she showed him, the harder it was for her not to reveal her pretty pink glow at his praise. Pretty soon, making her blush was all he could focus on. She fought it—inexplicably—but she was losing.
And that was definitely familiar territory. He loved a well-fought battle...as long as it came with a resigned surrender at the end. And not on his part. It was much safer to focus on the tantalising tingles than on the other feelings bubbling away below t
he surface.
The ones whispering at him to come here today. In case bending her to his will in this way might be catching.
Because that spoke of a desperation he wasn’t about to acknowledge.
She carried on with her impromptu tour of the glass pieces littering her studio.
He leaned on a workbench after they’d examined the final piece. ‘This is really going to blow our clients away. They’ll be late to our meetings because they’re standing down in the foyer, lost in your undersea world.’
Again with the pleasure. Until she dipped her head.
Why did she keep fighting it? Why not just go with it?
Every other woman he’d known just went with it. Some faster than others, admittedly, but ultimately they acquiesced. Persistence. He’d been raised with it on two fronts. A father who believed that reward only came from effort, and a mother who’d taught him, through example, the value of dogged determination. Whenever there was something she wanted, she just stayed the course and remained unmoved and—usually—things ended up going her way. She worked on the principle that if you ignored ‘no’ often enough eventually it became ‘yes’.
‘So, has our lesson started?’ he nudged, figuring that if the studio was going to be full of tense heat between them they might as well melt glass with it.
She looked him up and down. ‘You’re dressed okay.’
His wardrobe didn’t have a lot of grunge in it but he’d managed to pull together an old-looking sweater, jeans and boots. She didn’t need to know how much he’d paid to get that look in the first place.
‘How come I have to have long sleeves when you don’t?’
She lifted one critical brow. ‘I’ve been doing this all my life. You’re going to have sparks flying everywhere.’
‘Doesn’t that happen every time we get together?’
Her expression flattened. ‘Hilarious. You want to learn or not?’
‘Wow. Tough room.’
‘I need to know you’re concentrating before I let you near a vat of what is effectively molten lava.’
He forced his brows down. ‘I’m listening. Honestly.’
She thrust a face shield at him and slid regular goggles on herself. ‘This will stop your retinas from ulcerating,’ she murmured, leading him to the kiln that pumped intense heat back at him. At the last minute, she also tossed him a pair of enormous fire-retardant gloves. ‘And your skin from melting.’
‘Is this really necessary?’ he asked, feeling very much like a catcher in a baseball game.
She turned and glared at him. ‘Do you want to watch or not?’
Did she seriously think that a few layers were going to protect her? He held the ridiculous gloves up either side of him and she continued.
Since he was a silver-lining kind of person he cheerfully told himself that the face shield might mean he couldn’t smell her the way he wanted, but, in better news, it meant he could check her out without her knowing. He took full advantage of that as Tash slid the door open on the gaping maw of the furnace with hands covered in her own fire-retardant gloves. Then she turned to him.
‘Pass me that blowpipe.’ She nodded at a four-foot tube laid out on her workbench next to a medieval torture rack of tools. She took the pipe from him and raised it over her head, dipping it squarely into the middle of the orange glow within the furnace and turning it steadily, as if she were twisting up a forkful of spaghetti. After a hypnotic twist-a-thon, she backed up, withdrawing a blazing, deadly ball on the end of her pipe, turning, turning constantly. Her tanned shoulders flexed at the weight exchange as she lowered it down onto a waiting brace.
‘The bolus is two thousand degrees,’ she said, over the roar of the open furnace, turning it steadily. ‘To make it into a vessel I have to introduce an air pocket inside. The air does part of the work. Right now my hand’s job is just to keep the glass hot and moving.’
She did that, carefully and methodically. One hundred per cent focus. She squeezed a saturated sponge over the middle of the blow tube with her free hand, sending steam billowing up and around them both. It left a filmy sheen of moisture across her bare skin, droplets clinging to every hair on her body.
‘That’s so I can put my lips to the tube safely.’
Wait... ‘You’re going to suck that thing?’
She snorted. ‘That’s a fast way to kill yourself. No, I’m going to blow it. But I can’t start until the shape is better.’
She reached for one of the torture-rack tools, a thick, burned wad of drenched newspaper. At least it once had been; it was mostly charcoal now. With nothing but her bare hands, she slapped the saturated newspaper to the underside of the molten mass and cupped it, shaping and polishing the glowing glass ball until he practically forgot she had newspaper in her hand at all. It was as if she were stroking the glass into compliance with her bare touch, persuading it to be what she wanted it to be. Massaging it with her courage and mastery.
His entire body responded, imaging her artist’s hands polishing the shape of his muscles, massaging his flesh into compliance. Persuading him with her proficient touch.
He gritted his teeth against the sensation.
You just want what you can’t have.
Damned right he did. But he wasn’t a total creep. He wanted her to want him just as badly. She couldn’t be totally indifferent to him, not when he was so very aware of her.
Could she?
He distracted himself with conversation. ‘Don’t you have better tools?’
‘If you walked into a hot shop two millennia ago you’d see very similar tools. Sometimes the old ways are just the best.’
The shifting facets in the glowing, molten mass hypnotised him as she worked it around and around until it looked as if she were polishing a ball of toffee. Aiden stepped up hard behind her and laid a gloved hand on her shoulder so she knew he was there.
The blowpipe lurched as she fumbled a turn.
‘What would happen if you didn’t keep it moving?’ he asked.
‘Um...’ She rounded her shoulders and got the momentum under control again. ‘It would start losing form the moment the inertia stops.’
‘Would it drop off?’
‘Keep distracting me and we’ll find out.’
She was right. Manipulating a kilo of volcanic eruption was not the time to be peppering her with questions. He stopped talking and concentrated on watching over the top of her head.
She twirled for a few minutes longer and then lifted the whole thing higher, pivoted it sideways onto on its brace and placed the end of the pipe to her lips. He didn’t see her shoulders rise or her ample chest expanding with breath, but he saw the bolus expand a little. Just a little. Just enough.
Looked as if it was going to be a fat little sea star.
It was like watching a bagpipe player. Steady and controlled. And watching her lips working the end of the pipe so expertly gave him a personal heat that had nothing to do with the roasting warmth coming off the three furnaces in the room.
Pervert.
He forced his attention off Tash and onto the shape beginning to form on the end of the tube. She swung the whole thing sideways and onto a pair of braces with a seat in between them. With two thousand degrees practically sitting in her lap she kept the thing moving, horizontally, on the braces and started working with some of the tools. A cupped block that gave the blob a pear-shaped bottom—ah, his favourite shape—and a pair of nasty-looking pincers that trimmed and poked and shaped and cut as the whole thing endlessly spun.
Twirl, snip, twirl, snip. Every cut liberated more of the creature within the glass and she tapped the edges of each leg to open some space between them. They spread joyously outwards with the force of the spinning.
His body twitched again.
God, there was somet
hing so sexy about her proficiency. And her focus. And the sheen of sweat on her body amid the roasting heat swilling all around them. It made it near impossible to concentrate on what her hands were doing.
He moved behind her again and leaned down until his eyes were at the same level as hers. Conveniently, that meant curling his torso around her somewhat.
The turning and snipping faltered. ‘What are you doing?’ she choked, low and concerned, twisting towards him just slightly.
‘I want your eye level. I want to see it how you see it.’
He wanted to feel what she was feeling—if he couldn’t be felt. But the first thing he wanted was to not remain separate from her for a moment longer while this sensual display was going on.
‘It’s like there’s actually a mental connection between you and the glass and your hands are just there to preserve the illusion.’
Her back cranked straighter and her shoulders set. ‘You think I’m just willing the glass into shape?’
‘Right now, I think you could talk it into doing anything just to please you.’
* * *
Tash stood violently and scooped the blowpipe and nascent starfish up with her, dislodging Aiden’s clinging presence as she went. His words carried a payload of subtext and none of it was appropriate given what she knew.
Thought she knew.
But, oh, my God, if she was right...
She plunged the starfish back into the reheating drum to boost its temperature and to buy herself a few moments away from him. She was used to the furnace’s scorching heat, but its extremes kept him safely back.
‘Can you please pass me one of the glass straws on the work table?’ she asked back over her shoulder. All business.
Colour—that was what this piece needed. And space—that was what she needed. Adding colour to the molten piece required lots of twisting and turning and Aiden simply couldn’t stand that close while she did that or she’d take his eye out with the end of her pipe.
Tash pulled the starfish out of the drum and transferred the emerging shape onto a glass rod for easier handling, and then she fired up the blowtorch and took the orange colour stick from Aiden’s waiting hands. She exaggerated every movement so that he wouldn’t have an opportunity to step that close again.
