But it was still sitting on his desk.
He drew in breath while doing up his fly. He glanced around the room, listening to silence while buttoning the button.
No noise.
No sign of Simone.
He moved back to the steps up to his bed.
On the nightstand were her choker, bangle and earrings. And over the chair in the corner Simone’s dress was thrown, her heels on the floor, her Bendel bag close to her shoes.
All where he’d put them.
He looked to his side of the bed, and the shirt he’d worn the day before and tossed to the floor the previous night was gone.
He pivoted and strode to and through the door, down the hall and down the stairs.
He didn’t have to go to the driveway to ascertain if her car was still there.
He saw her through a set of doors at the back by the pool.
She was sitting in a chair at a patio table outside, wearing his linen shirt, her back to him, a mug on the table in front of her, knees drawn up, heels to the seat.
Stellan moved that way, glancing toward the kitchen as he did to see a mostly full pot of coffee.
Simone was making herself at home—his kitchen, his coffeepot, his patio furniture, his shirt.
His breath started coming easier.
He only noticed when he got out the door that her head was bent and her arm was moving.
On bare, thus silent feet, he walked to her, got close and stopped dead.
Against her thighs she had a large, top-ringed sketchpad.
On it were blocks of different sizes made of precisely drawn lines and in them in black and white was a series of carefully crafted, intensely interesting, utterly distinctive drawings intermingled with white shapes filled with text.
And white bubbles filled with dialogue.
Fascinated, eyes locked on the pad soaking in all he could see, he took another step toward her.
“Darling—”
He immediately took a step back when she jumped violently in her seat, the pen she was using went flying, hitting the deck, and her head whipped around so fast, she had to have strained something.
She slammed the sketchpad to her chest and puffed out, “Jesus, Stellan, you scared the hell out of me.”
“Good morning,” he murmured, staring into her makeup-free face, her short hair messier than the purposeful mess she normally styled it in, her pad moving up and down with the rapid rise and fall of her chest, thinking, on his deck, in his shirt, after a night spent in his bed (even if it was a morning after he did not fuck her), she’d never looked as shatteringly pretty.
“Morning,” she mumbled, took in a deep breath and shared, “I made coffee.”
“I noticed.”
She held the pad to her chest and continued to look up at him but said nothing more.
“I saw it, Simone, you don’t have to hide it,” he told her gently.
She pulled the pad away from her chest, flipped the cover over quickly, hiding away what was inside, and then made a move as if to get out of her seat, saying, “I’ll get you some coffee.”
“I can get my own coffee.”
“Then I’m just going to—”
He put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down into the chair.
She resisted a second, then sank to her ass.
He moved to stand at the arm of her chair, looking down at her.
“What is that?” he asked, dipping his head to the pad she again had protectively clutched to her chest.
“Just doodles,” she lied.
“It didn’t look like doodles to me,” he replied.
“Well, they are. It’s something I do when my head’s a mess to clear it, just not think of … I guess … anything.”
“May I see?” he requested.
She shook her head and reached for her coffee with the pad still tight to her chest. “They’re just nonsense.”
They were absolutely not nonsense.
“It looked like a graphic novel,” he noted.
She turned her attention to the pool, sipped coffee, swallowed, and told the pool, “It’s just a load of nothing.”
“Do you carry it with you everywhere?” he asked.
Still talking to the pool, she answered, “I keep it in the car for when … you know,” she cleared her throat and set her mug back down, finishing what she was saying like she’d missed a variety of words, “at the ready.”
“You leave it in your car?”
“I take it out when I’m home.”
“Ah, and you’re home now,” he stated meaningfully.
That bought him her eyes, her temper clearly snagging, and she snapped, “Apparently. At least for a month.”
“This would be getting to know you, Simone,” he pointed out. “You sharing your ‘nonsense’ with me.”
“It’s not interesting,” she told him.
“Now see,” he whispered, “that’s a lie.”
“It really isn’t,” she clipped.
“Everything about you is interesting,” he told her the truth.
“Everything about Sixx is interesting,” she shot back.
“No,” he drawled. “Everything about Sixx is excruciatingly boring.”
Waking up thinking she’d left him only to find she hadn’t, but when he approached her, having her shut him down, shut him out of something he sensed was important … no, crucial to understanding her, had put him in a certain mood—not a good one—and the words came out.
And it was the wrong thing to say.
She was up out of her chair and rounding the seat, moving away from him and doing it rapidly, indeed before he could make a move or even blink.
And she was speaking while she was escaping. “I’m going to get dressed, and then, if you’ll—”
Stellan could move fast too, and he did, catching her elbow.
She halted and her eyes shot to his. “As I was saying, if you’ll trust me to go home alone and get my stuff, I’ll go do that now.”
“I’d like to go with you.”
“I’d like you to take your hand off me.”
“Not until you return to your seat, we talk through what’s somehow become a rocky start to our first morning together, and we decide what’s on for the rest of our day.”
“Oddly, if I can’t go home and get my stuff by myself, I’m feeling like being in your house together … but alone.”
“Not oddly, darling, I’m not feeling that same need.”
Her eyes squinted. “If you think I can’t take you to your ass, you’re very wrong.”
“You cannot.”
“Try me.”
“Sweetheart, we’ll wrestle, but I’d prefer we do it somewhere more comfortable, not on the pool deck.”
“Stellan—”
He pulled her closer. She resisted fully that time, but she didn’t take it past resistance.
With her career, she had to have moves.
But she was not stronger than him.
So when he got her close enough, he said low, “You don’t have to show me if you’d rather not.”
“I’d rather not,” she hissed.
“And I apologize for that remark about you being boring. It was unnecessary as well as untrue. I woke up to you gone, thought you’d left, broken your promise already, and last night had not ended as I’d hoped.”
“I agreed to your month thing.”
“You did, and I’d hoped for that. But I’d further hoped that would be celebrated with mutual orgasms, not me brooding into the fire and you passing out on my chest and then stumbling half-asleep through taking off your clothes while I helped you before you fell into my bed for the first time. Regardless, I shouldn’t have said what I said. When annoyed or frustrated, I can be biting. I’d hoped you’d learn that, perhaps, the last day of our month together, after, of course, I spent the thirty days prior convincing you to try happiness with me. Not within hours of this exercise we agreed on for getting to know one another.”
He heard her take in a deep breath through her nose.
“Shall we try this again?” he suggested.
“What?” she asked.
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
She was not ready to let it go and shared that by replying acidly, “Can I get you some coffee now?”