He arrived a few minutes later in his usual casual blazer, T-shirt, and jeans. He was unshaven and his hair was a bit tousled, as if he hadn’t bothered to fix it since it was just Violet he was meeting. She wasn’t sure if that irritated her or if she wanted to run her fingers through his hair and smooth it into place.
“Shall we eat?” Jonathan asked, gesturing at the doorway to the hotel restaurant.
She nodded and let him open the door for her, lost in thought.
They got a table and sat down, ordering a pair of coffees. Jonathan glanced at the menu and set it down, then pulled a small tablet out of an interior pocket of his jacket. “I had scans made of our newest letters while we were flying,” he told her, tapping the screen. “Now that we’re here at the hotel, maybe we can figure out our next move.”
“Sure,” she said lamely, and fought a swell of irritation. Was he just going to ignore what happened between them last night? She couldn’t. Every time she looked at him, her gaze went to his mouth, and she remembered how he’d teased her cl*t with his tongue for what felt like hours. When he reached for his silverware, she gaped at his hands, remembering how those fingers had found just the right spot inside her to drive her mad with need.
“Do you have any ideas?” Jonathan asked, spreading his napkin on his lap.
Oh, she had ideas, all right. Violet watched his strong, blunt hands move to the table surface again. Those were distracting her. He said something else that she didn’t catch. “Hmm?”
“Violet? Any ideas on where we go next? I’ll follow your lead.”
She blinked. “Follow my lead?”
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing at her. “You seem distracted this morning.”
Why wouldn’t she be distracted? Irritation flared and she grabbed her own napkin-rolled silverware and tore the bundle apart. “Of course I’m distracted.”
“Thinking about the clue?”
Fuck the clue. “No,” she bit out. “About what happened on the plane last night.”
His gaze was steady, his face unreadable. “What about it?”
Her jaw dropped a little. “Well, it shouldn’t have happened, for starters.”
He shrugged.
A shrug? That was all she got? Violet fought back her temper as she patted her napkin in her lap. The waitress came by and brought coffee, and they were momentarily distracted with ordering breakfast. “Just toast,” Violet said, hating the snappish tone in her voice. God, she sounded like a bitch. When the waitress left, Violet wrapped her hands around her coffee cup—so she’d resist lobbing it at Jonathan’s oh-so-casual head—and frowned at him. “I feel like we need to talk about what happened.”
Again, he shrugged. “I’m listening.”
She ground her teeth at his casualness. “I just . . . I feel like friends with benefits is not the direction we want to head.”
“All right.” He picked up his cup and took a sip, then set it down and picked up his tablet again, studying the screen.
That was it? Violet clenched her fists. What about protests? Utterances of undying love for her? Didn’t he say he’d always loved her and wouldn’t stop? Hadn’t he vowed it just yesterday when he was between her damn legs? And now he just didn’t give a shit?
What the ever-loving f**k?
A horrible thought occurred to Violet. What if . . . what if he was disappointed in her? What if that was why he was so cool now? She tugged at the low neckline of her loose top, suddenly feeling self-conscious and dowdy. She wasn’t as thin and athletic as she’d been ten years ago. A few extra pounds—okay, twenty—had settled on her already hourglass figure and made her a little curvier than most. He’d picked up some damn impressive tricks in the last ten years and made her come like wild. But what if he had built her up in his imagination and now he found her performance lacking?
For some reason, that was like a stab in the heart.
It was like . . . when she knew Jonathan was still in love with her, she could hold him at arm’s length, until she was ready to let go of the past and accept him again. If she held on to her bitterness and anger for another year or two, she knew he wouldn’t give up on her. She’d been comfortable to hold him away. It was safe, and Violet liked safe.
But this new, casual Jonathan, who didn’t give a shit if they had sex or not?
This man was a stranger, and she didn’t know what to do. And she wasn’t sure she liked it. “All right?” she echoed. “That’s all you have to say?”
He looked up at her again. “What do you want me to say? I told you that you could call the shots. I said it was about you. If you don’t want to do it again, that’s fine.”
That was fine? He’d given her the best orgasm of her life and taken nothing for himself and that was fine?
“Okay then,” she said, feeling a bit lost. “Let’s go back to just friends.”
“Just friends,” he agreed.
Why did she feel like she was the one losing this battle?
“So . . .” Violet said after taking a steadying sip of her coffee. “We’re here at the hotel. We have a poem that talks about nothing in particular. What do we do?”
Jonathan shrugged again—a gesture she was beginning to hate. “I’m sure something will come to us. Maybe we need to explore the city. The poem mentioned wheels. Maybe we need to look for wheels of some kind.”
It was as good a lead as any. “Just looking for wheels seems rather vague to me. And if we don’t find the wheel my father referred to?”
“Then we wait here for a while and see what hits us. Something will pop up.”
He seemed so very casual about the entire thing. “So we just lounge around on a Greek island and enjoy the sun and sand? Is that what you’re saying?”
He grinned, a flicker of the old Jonathan rising to the surface. “Is that such a bad thing?”
It wasn’t, not really. Santorini was lovely from what she remembered, and the weather seemed to be nice today. “Do you think we should check out the ruins?”
“We’re not part of any sort of archaeological dig, so I don’t know if they’d just let us out there unless we pulled strings. We can, but if it wasn’t one of your father’s digs, it would seem strange for him to send us out there.”
That was true. She knew that he’d been heavily involved in the Akrotiri ruins for about five years, and then had abruptly changed his mind, heading for Spain instead. Why Spain, she hadn’t known and hadn’t cared. “So . . . we’re basically stranded at the moment.”