CHAPTER 1
It had been a long day, and Karen Mullings was too tired to care much about where she ate. She just needed dinner and her bed. She walked into the hotel’s restaurant and waited to be seated. The table for two was in the quietest corner, which suited her just fine. Although she had happily embarked on this solo European tour, and though she had enjoyed every city she had stayed in, she still preferred to hide away at dinnertime. It was a little sad that a grown woman would be alone for dinner every day, though she had no pressing need of a companion. After three aborted marriage attempts to men with whom she had not been in sync, she was happy to be alone. However, she did feel her aloneness most sharply in the evenings, which was why she more often than not called room service for dinner.
Today, however, she knew if she went up to her room, she would fall asleep without eating, and when she woke, both the restaurant and room service would be unavailable. So, she ordered the house special for the evening and a glass of red wine, and stretched her feet out under the table, letting the peace and quiet soak into her bones. After swallowing almost the whole glass of water thoughtfully provided for her, she hurried to the ladies’ room.
On the way out, she bumped into someone going in the opposite direction, almost falling over. Only his quick hands and steady feet kept her on her own. The arm around her, dangerously close to her bottom, was hard and muscled, his grip strong and sure at her waist. The man’s shoulders were wide, and he was taller than she was by a good six inches. His eyes were the prettiest blue she had ever seen, reminding her of the Caribbean Sea on a hot summer day.
“I … I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, pulling herself up to her full height and looking up at the stranger.
His full lips smiled at her, and his dimpled cheeks surprised her. “That’s okay. I’m glad to help. Are you all right now?”
He withdrew his hand from her back. They were hard, manly hands, long-fingered and heavily veined. She felt the loss immediately. It made no sense to feel that way, and it disturbed her.
“Yes, I’m fine. Thank you!”
She smiled in her turn and excused herself, hurrying back to her table. The food, when it was served, was hot, filling, and delicious as usual. She was glad of something to take her mind off the still unsettling encounter with the handsome, blue-eyed man outside the restroom. She savored a second glass of wine in lieu of dessert, then went to pay her bill. As she turned toward the elevators, her mystery encounter rounded the corner and their eyes met for the second time. Something like an electric charge shot up her arms and settled in her chest. He flashed those shocking dimples again, acknowledging her with a nod before walking out through the wide glass doors with his companions, two women and another man. She went up to her room in a daze.
After a hot shower, during which she tried to escape the thoughts of the dark-haired stranger with the sexy mouth and husky voice, she rubbed lotion into her skin and crawled into bed. She had enjoyed her day out and about in Amsterdam but was now thoroughly exhausted and hoped she would sleep undisturbed. Tomorrow, she would be visiting the Oude Kerk and the Dam Plein, and she knew she would need reserves of energy for the long walking and standing about.
Sometime during the night she awoke, shaking and wet. Then the dream came crashing in on her waking mind. She had been dreaming about the smiling stranger and the way his large man’s hands had brought her such pleasure while his dimples beamed at her. She rushed from the bed to the bathroom to relieve herself, hoping she could escape from the eroticism of it. Her relationships had all failed, even when she had thought she loved the men involved. Her heart had been bruised one too many times, so she was very wary of men and mistrusted her feelings for them on principle. To dream about a perfect stranger as she had done was unprecedented and extremely unsettling, even though she was very aware of her allure. When she did trust men, though, she was very willing to share the depth and breadth of her passion with them. She just needed a break, a chance to catch herself before she tried again. She took a glass of water with her back to bed and flipped through the TV channels until she found some mindless comedy to occupy her so that she grew drowsy again and fell back on her pillows.
Almost two hours away in Leeuwarden, Peter van der Meulen sipped a second glass of brandy and stared into the fireplace. He had not been able to get the woman in the restaurant out of his mind. That brief contact had fired his imagination and his desires like nothing else had in years, not since the earliest days with Alijd, who had died four years before after twenty years of marriage. The woman was everything Alijd had not been. She had been wearing jeans and a loose shirt with a scoop neckline, so Peter got a good up-close view of her chest. She looked to be about late thirties with beautiful brown eyes, a bright ravishing smile, nice long legs, and delicious-looking breasts. She was a little plump, which was exactly the way Peter liked a woman to be.
He wondered who she was, how she came to be in Amsterdam, and why she was alone. She was the most alluring woman he had seen in years, and he found himself wanting to meet her again, to get to know her, perhaps even become friends. It was unexpected, this interest in a stranger. Peter was nothing if not conservative in public, and in fact, his few friends often had to encourage him to loosen up and enjoy himself. But this woman made him feel as though he were completely out of all control with the way he had been feeling since he got back home. Perhaps, for his peace of mind, he needed to forget her and get on with the business of his life. He had some tests to mark—the thought made him groan—and then he had to prepare for his next week’s classes. Monday was fast approaching.
He drained the glass and took it to the sink where he rinsed it and turned it over to dry before going into his office to begin the work that never stopped. He taught English in a nearby secondary school, and his pupils ranged in ability from the apparently terminally lazy to the impossibly brilliant, with a fair number of average Joes in between. He sighed as he picked up his pencil and began to mark the batch of tests he had stopped halfway through. He worked through the rest of that one and the next one before giving up in favor of some jazz and a book. He could wait to tackle the last two tomorrow during his non-teaching periods.
His job was a demanding one, despite some people’s perception that teaching was easy. Given that he was obliged by law to work until he was almost sixty-seven, he found he needed the holidays he took as often as he could to refresh him and help him stay the course. The visit to Amsterdam had been one such break away from the routine of his life, and he had enjoyed it to the max. His chance encounter occupied his thoughts greatly over the course of the next two months, during which he had no opportunity to do more than visit the occasional local museum or go out to dinner with a friend.
Despite his first intentions to forget her, he kept that chance encounter fresh in his memory, though he couldn’t say why he did so. He refreshed the vision of her in his mind often during his workdays which were of uniform length but not of equal challenge. On those days when he had long, unscripted time to himself, he chose to conjure her face as he marked papers or planned lessons. She became a welcome respite from the inanity of some of his colleagues’ chatter and a kind of beacon for the times when he felt lonely. He knew it was a fanciful and probably foolish way to occupy his mind, but there was no harm in it to anyone, and if it gave him a reason to smile, why should he regret it?
Two months later, on the annual school trip that brought him to London this year, Peter found himself standing in the British Museum, alone for the time being. His colleagues had gone off with the students they had brought with them, and he was making his way back to them from a restroom stop when he saw his mystery woman again. The sight of her brought him up short. She was transfixed by the work of art she stood before, her gaze rapt, and no doubt, by the earbuds in her ears, she was listening to a description of the piece she was looking at. She was in jeans snuggling up to her round bottom and hugging her long legs. Her top was loose, but he could clearly tell that her breasts were large and full. He felt himself grow warm as desire, unexpected and overwhelming, roared through him.
He stepped back, out of her possible line of vision, and tried to calm his body’s response to the sight of her. He couldn’t rejoin his party with anything resembling the hard-on that was threatening his peace of mind and his equanimity, not to mention the front closure of his slacks. He inhaled deeply and turned away from her to look at the artwork around him, trying to lose himself in the variety. When his body calmed, he turned sharply and walked away to the place he knew his colleagues had taken the students. Both of them were female, and the younger one eyed him speculatively, as though she knew something had transpired and only needed to look at him to be able to sum up his experience. The older one ignored him as she always did.
The students who had chosen to come on this tour were listening to the docent talk about the pieces in the gallery, and Peter paid as little heed as he needed to give the semblance of attention while his body remained totally aware of the fact that the mystery woman was once again occupying the same building as he was.
Is she an Englishwoman? Is she on holiday … again? Who is she?
When the docent moved on, he did, too, and found himself in the same gallery as his mystery lady once more. Her profile greeted him this time, and he fought to keep his eyes off her and on the works the guide was describing. He closed his eyes and breathed away the tightness in his chest. This is ridiculous, he thought angrily, and was about to turn resolutely away when her scent assailed him.
He was shocked to discover that he remembered it from that one brief meeting two months earlier. It had imprinted itself on his synapses, setting off electrical pulses that made his skin tingle with awareness, and his heart race. He looked around and discovered he didn’t have to look too far down to see into the most incredible coffee-brown eyes. The woman glanced up, and he knew she recognized him by the way her eyes widened. He felt obliged to speak, though he was at a loss as to what to say.
“Hello again,” he settled for, smiling faintly. He felt like a child, gawking longingly at candy in the shop window. He wished he knew why this woman brought out such odd and unsettling reactions in him.
“Oh, hello! Small world!” she replied, her smile a nervous reflection of his own.
“Yes, isn’t it?” What an utterly inane response! “Are you on holiday?” The question popped out without his permission, and he closed his eyes briefly, opening them again expecting there to be a sharp reprimand for his temerity.
Instead, the woman smiled at him and answered, “In a way, I suppose I am. My brother lives here, and I have just moved from the States. I’m a writer and freelance editor looking to enlarge my clientele. I’m taking in the sights and soaking up the culture.” Her smile widened charmingly, then she stuck her hand out and added, “My name is Karen, by the way. Karen Mullings.”
“Peter van der Meulen,” he said, taking her hand in his.
It was velvet smooth and very soft, the dark pigmentation of her skin tone contrasting warmly with his paler one. She was beautiful close up with dimples in her cheeks and a sexy mole above the left corner of her top lip. She had a few freckles scattered across her cheekbones, a fact that surprised him as he had thought only very pale people had them.
“It’s very nice to meet you again,” he added, reluctantly relinquishing her hand.
“Are you on holiday?” she asked in her turn.
“In a manner of speaking,” he returned with a laugh. “A busman’s holiday. My colleagues and I have brought some students over on a school trip. It’s an annual event in our school.” Immediately after he said it, he remembered why he was in the museum. “Which reminds me, I’d better catch up with my group.” He paused, then decided to go ahead and take the plunge. “But if you’d like some company, how about a drink later this evening?”
Karen didn’t respond immediately. In fact, she appeared not to have heard him, and he was just about to repeat himself when she spoke up.
“I’d like that. Thank you.” She gave him the name of her hotel, which he recorded in his handily secreted notebook.
“Eight o’clock good for you? We have to see to the students first.”
Karen smiled, her dimples flashing at him. “Eight will be fine. Thank you.”
Peter felt himself drowning in her eyes and clenched his hands into fists behind his back to bring himself back from the edge.
“I’m sorry, but I must rush off now,” he said. “See you at eight.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Peter was distracted, and it showed. Neither of his colleagues had witnessed his meeting with Karen, and he was glad of that, but he kept expecting the younger one, Anika, to accost him about his inattention. While she did look at him questioningly a time or two, she refrained from commenting, for which he was grateful, as he could not even think of a good lie to explain away his behavior. Mina, the older one, steadfastly ignored him. He suspected it was because he had snubbed her once when she seemed to be making advances he was not interested in accepting.
Mercifully, the tour ended, and they took their twelve students, along with the eight from the other group and their other colleagues, Miep and Jan, out for dinner at a local eatery in the neighborhood where the host families’ homes were located. He managed to keep his attention on his companions during the meal, enjoying the students’ buoyant spirits as they made amusing observations about the other patrons in the restaurant, about their teachers, and about each other. He had been lucky to be assigned to this particular group of students, all of whom were level-headed, intelligent, and witty. His colleagues he tolerated, as he did most of them at work, and they got along because they tolerated him as well.
There were very few people whom Peter trusted, but he managed to get along with everyone, mostly because he made himself invisible. He rather liked being the one most people overlooked, especially after Alijd’s death, when the natural reaction of his peers had been to smother him with attention in an attempt to keep him from brooding. Little did they know how odd his grief had been, and that he had been grieving her loss for years before she died.
He shook himself out of his reverie in time to participate in the review of plans for the next day. After more walkabouts, including enjoying the changing of the guard and the march along the Mall back to Buckingham Palace, they would return to their host families, participate in a local fun fair on Friday morning, and have the afternoon and evening to themselves. On Saturday, they were to return to Leeuwarden.
He saw that Karen was staying at the Tavistock Hotel, close to the Museum where they had met again. It seemed they were staying close to her. He asked directions from the father of their host family and was even given leave to borrow the family sedan to take himself off for his date.
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