This place wasn’t just a place. It was an…experience. A sense of completion, of arrival. A realm in time and space she’d never seen approximated, let alone replicated. An amalgam of nature’s pristine grandeur and man’s quest for the utmost in beauty and comfort. But all this would have been nothing without him.
It was being with him that made it embody heaven.
During the past weeks they’d made real fires, collected ripe fruits and vegetables, eaten their meals in the apartment-sized kitchen or in the cool barbecue house and held their after-dinner gatherings and entertainment in its lounge or in the huge pergola terrace.
She’d watched him play tennis on the floodlit court with the tireless Gustavo, swim endless laps in the half-Olympic-sized pool, drooled over his every move, longed to tear off her cast and shed her aches and throw herself into that pool after him…
“Ready for your punishment?”
She twinkled up at him. “Is it too heinous?”
He looked down at the salad bowls in his hands. “Atrocious.”
“Gimme.” She took her bowl, set it in front of her. And gaped. Then she crooked a challenging smile up at him. “It’s colorful, I’ll give you that. And…odorous.” She tried not to wince as she picked up her fork. “And I didn’t know these food items could go together.”
He sat down across from her. “I didn’t hear any objections as I tossed them into each other’s company.”
She chuckled. “I don’t even know what said food items are.”
His glance said her delaying tactics weren’t working. “Eat.”
She took a mouthful, trying not to inhale the stench, trying not to have what produced it hit her taste buds, to slide directly into her throat. Then it did hit, everywhere. And…wow.
She raised incredulous eyes to him. “You better get this patented. It’s a-maaazing!”
He raised both eyebrows in disbelief. “You’re just trying to prove nothing can gross you out, that I didn’t and wouldn’t succeed in punishing you, ’cause you can take anything.”
“What am I, twelve?” She wolfed down another huge forkful.
He crooked his head to one side, considering. “So you like it.”
“I love it,” she exclaimed, mumbling around the food she’d stuffed into her mouth. “I can do without the smell, but it actually lessens as you eat, or your senses forgive it for being coupled with the delicious taste. At first I thought it was rotten fish.”
“It is rotten fish.”
She almost choked. “Now you’re pulling my leg.”
“Nope.” The wattage of the wickedness in his eyes reached electrocuting levels. “But if you like it, does the label matter?”
She thought about that for a second, then said “Nah” and stuffed another forkful into her mouth.
He laughed as he began to eat his own serving. “It’s actually only semi-rotten. It’s called feseekh-sun dried then salted gray mullet. It’s considered an acquired taste-which you must be the quickest to ever acquire-and a delicacy around here. It came to Catalonia with the Berbers, and they brought it all the way from Egypt. But I bet I’m the first one to mix it with a dozen unnamed leafy greens and the wild berries Gustavo grows and collects and gives to me to consume, assuring me they’re the secret to my never needing any of our esteemed colleagues’ services.”
“So you can give me rotten and unidentified food to consume, but you balk at my walking faster than a turtle.”
“The rotten ingredient has proved through centuries of folk experience to have potent antibacterial and digestive-regulating properties. It and the rest of the unidentified food have been repeatedly tested on yours truly, and I’m living proof to their efficacy. I haven’t been sick a day in the last twenty years.”
Her eyes rounded in alarm. “Okay, jinx much?”
He threw his head back on a guffaw. “You’re superstitious? You think I’ll get deathly sick now that I’ve dared tempt fate?”
“Who knows? Maybe fate doesn’t like braggarts.”
“Actually, I think fate doesn’t like gamblers.” Something dark flitted across his face. Before she analyzed it, he lowered his gaze, hid it. “Since I’m anything but, I’m a good candidate for staying on its good side. For as long as possible. That brings us back to your hare tactics. Maybe you don’t have loose components inside your brain to be shaken and stirred, but running like one, if you stumble, you have only one hand to ward off a fall, and you might injure it, too, or end up reinjuring your arm. And though your first trimester has been the smoothest I’ve ever heard about, probably as a compensation for what you’re already dealing with, you are pregnant.” She did forget sometimes that she was. Not that she wanted to forget. When she did remember, it was with a burst of joy, imagining that she had a life growing inside her, that she’d have a baby to love and cherish, who’d be her flesh and blood, the family she’d never had. If there had been one thing to thank Mel for, it was that he’d somehow talked her into conceiving that baby. But because she had no symptoms whatsoever, sometimes it did slip her mind.
“Okay, no hare tactics.” Her smile widened as she repeated his term for her jog. “But since I have no loose components, you must tell Consuelo to stop chasing me around as if I’ll scatter them.”
He turned his head to both sides, looked behind him. Then he turned back to her, palm over chest with an expression of mock horror. “You’re talking to me?”
Her lips twitched. “You’re the one who sicced her on me.”
“A man can start a nuclear reaction, but he surely has no way of stopping it once it becomes self-perpetuating.”
“You gotta call her off. She’ll brush my teeth for me next!”
“You really expect me to come between her and her hurt chick? I may be lord of all I survey back at the center, but here I’m just another in the line that marches to Consuelo’s tune.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” She chuckled, loving how he could be so alpha and capable and overriding and yet be totally comfortable letting another, and a woman, have the upper hand where she was best suited to take it. She cocked her head at him. “Families are very matriarchal here, aren’t they?”
He tossed her a piece of breath-freshening gum then piled their bowls in one hand and raised the other, ring and middle fingers folded by his thumb, fore and little fingers pointing up. “Women rule.”