Playing the Dutiful Wife. Carol Marinelli

fact was between here and LA Niklas had a lot to get done. ‘I have a lot of work to do.’ He didn’t have to justify his dark mood, but he did. ‘I have a meeting scheduled an hour after landing. I was hoping to use this time to prepare. It really is inconvenient.’

      ‘You’ll have to get your own plane!’ Meg teased. ‘Keep it on standby …’

      ‘I did!’ he said. Meg blinked. ‘And for two months or so it was great. I really thought it was the best thing I had ever done. And then …’ He shrugged and got back to his laptop, one hand crunching numbers, the other picking all the little pieces of dill off the top of the blinis before eating them.

      ‘And then?’ Meg asked, because this man really was intriguing. He was sort of aloof and then friendly, busy, yet calm, and very pedantic with his dill, Meg thought with a small smile as she watched him continue to pick the pieces off. When the food was to his satisfaction there was something very decadent about the way he ate, his eyes briefly closing as he savoured the delicious taste entering his mouth.

      Everything he revealed about himself had Meg wanting to know more, and she was enthralled when he went on to tell her about the mistake of having his own plane.

      ‘And then,’ Niklas responded, while still tapping away on his computer, ‘I got bored. Same pilot, same flight crew, same chef, same scent of soap in the bathroom. You understand?’

      ‘Not really.’

      ‘As annoying as your chatter may be …’ he turned from his screen and gave her a very nice smile ‘… it is actually rather nice to meet you.’

      ‘It’s rather nice to meet you too.’ Meg smiled back.

      ‘And if I still had my own plane we would not have met.’

      ‘Nor would we if you were lording it in first class.’

      He thought for a moment. ‘Correct.’ He nodded. ‘But now, if you will forgive me, I have to get on with some work.’ He moved to do just that, but just before he did he explained further, just in case she had missed the point he was making. ‘That is the reason I prefer to fly commercially—it is very easy to allow your world to become too small.’

      Now, that part she did understand. ‘Tell me about it.’ Meg sighed.

      His shoulders tensed. His fingers hesitated over the keyboard as he waited for her to start up again.

      When she inevitably did, he would point out again that he was trying to work.

      Niklas gritted his teeth and braced himself for her voice—was she going to talk all the way to Los Angeles?

      Except she said nothing else.

      When still she was quiet Niklas realised that he was actually wanting the sound of her voice to continue their conversation. It was at that point he gave up working for a while. He would return to the report later.

      Closing his laptop, he turned. ‘Tell me about it.’

      She had no idea of the concession he was making—not a clue that a slice of his time was an expensive gift that very few could afford, no idea how many people would give anything for just ten minutes of his undivided attention.

      ‘Oh, it’s nothing …’ Meg shrugged. ‘Just me feeling sorry for myself.’

      ‘Which must be a hard thing to do with a mouthful of wild Iranian caviar …’

      He made her laugh—he really did. Niklas really wasn’t at all chatty, but when he spoke, when he teased, when she met his eyes, there was a little flip in her stomach that she liked the feeling of. It was a thrill that was new to her, and there was more than just something about him …

      It was everything about the man.

      ‘Here’s to slumming it,’ Niklas said. They chinked their glasses and he looked into her eyes, and as he did so somehow—not that she would be aware of it—Niklas let her in.

      He was a closed person, an extremely guarded man. He had grown up having to be that way—it had meant survival at the time—yet for the first time in far too long he chose to relax, to take some time, to forget about work, to stop for a moment and just be with her.

      As they chatted he let the flight steward put his laptop away. They were at the back of business class, tucked away and enjoying their own little world.

      The food orders were taken and later served, and Meg thought how nice Niklas was to share a meal with. Food was a passion in waiting for Meg. She rarely had time to cook, and though she ate out often it was pretty much always at the same Italian restaurant where they took clients. They’d chosen different mains, and he smiled to himself at the droop of her face when they were served and she found out that steak tartare was in fact raw.

      ‘It’s delicious,’ he assured her. ‘Or you can have my steak?’

      At the back of her mind she had known it was raw, if she’d stopped to think about it, but the menu had been incredibly hard to concentrate on with Niklas sitting beside her, and she had made a rather random selection when the flight steward had approached.

      ‘No, it’s fine,’ Meg said, looking at the strange little piles of food on her plate. There was a big hill of raw minced steak in the middle, with a raw egg yolk in its shell on the top, surrounded by little hills of onions and capers and things. ‘I’ve always wanted to try it. I just tend to stick to safe. It’s good to try different things …’

      ‘It is,’ Niklas said. ‘I like it like this.’

      Something caught in her throat, because he’d made it sound like sex. He picked up her knife and fork, and she watched him pour in the egg, pile on the onions and capers, and then chop and chop again before sliding the mixture through Worcestershire sauce. For a fleeting moment she honestly thought that he might load the fork and feed her, but he put the utensils down and returned to his meal, and Meg found herself breathless and blushing at where her mind had just drifted.

      ‘Good?’ Niklas asked when she took her first taste.

      ‘Fantastic,’ Meg said. It was nice, not amazing, but made by his hands fantastic it was. ‘How’s your steak?’

      He sliced a piece off and lifted the loaded fork and held it to her. This from a man who had reluctantly given her a drink, who had on many occasions turned his back. He was now giving her a taste of food from his plate. He was just being friendly, Meg told herself. She was reading far, far too much into this simple gesture. But as she went to take the fork he lifted it slightly. His black eyes met hers and he moved the fork to her mouth and watched as she opened it. Suddenly she began to wonder if she’d been right the first time.

      Maybe he was talking about sex.

      But if he had been flirting, by the time dessert was cleared it had ended. He read for a bit, and Meg gazed out of the window for a while, until the flight attendant came around and closed the shutters. The lights were lowered and the cabin was dimmed and Meg fiddled with her remote to turn the seat into a bed.

      Niklas stood and she glanced up at him. ‘Are you off to get your gold pyjamas?’

      ‘And a massage,’ Niklas teased back.

      She was half asleep when he returned, and watched idly as he took off his tie. Of course the flight attendant rushed to hold it, while another readied his bed, and then he took off his shoes and climbed into the flight bed beside her.

      His beautiful face was gone now from her vision, but it was there—right there—in her mind’s eye. She was terribly aware of his movements and listened to him turn restlessly a few times. She conceded that maybe he did have a point—the flight bed was more than big enough for Meg to stretch out in, but Niklas was easily a foot taller than her and, as he had stated, he really needed this time to sleep, which must be proving difficult. For Niklas the bed was simply too small, and it was almost a sin that he sleep in those immaculate suit trousers.

      She