PLAYING DIRTY WITH THE HOT CEO

chapter 14

The next morning, when I come down, Titus is already up, sitting in the armchair, feet propped on the coffee table, his laptop on his knees.

“Morning,” I say, surprised. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I don’t usually have more than five or six hours. I thought I’d get the emails out of the way so we can go out early.”

“Oh,” I say, pleased, “okay. Maybe you’d like to have breakfast out?”

“Yeah, sure. Where are you thinking about going today?”

“Exeter first. I thought we’d go to the cathedral, and the Roman ruins. Then take a drive up to the moors again.”

“Sounds great.” His gaze lingers on me for a second longer than necessary before he looks back at his screen. I’m wearing shorts again, my favorite ones that I have to admit are quite short and tight, with a bright pink V-neck tee that has little daisies around the neckline.

He’s also wearing shorts—khaki cargo ones—and the gray T-shirt I washed for him yesterday. Wow, he has great legs, with sturdy thighs and impressive calves, all covered with a sprinkling of masculine hair.

“You’re giving me goosebumps again,” he points out without looking up, and I chuckle and walk out to the kitchen. “That’s what you get when you expose your legs like that,” I call back, and I hear him laugh.

I smile as I get ready to go out, happy at the thought of having the whole day with him. It’s not long before he announces he’s finished answering his emails, and he closes his laptop, retrieves his keys, and then we head out of the house.

“Are you sure you don’t mind driving?” I ask. “I’m happy to, although my car is a lot less impressive than yours.”

“We might as well enjoy the comfort,” he says, unlocking the Range Rover, and I have to agree. The leather seats and pleasurable ride make it much more attractive than my old, rattly second-hand car.

He heads out of town and picks up the A38, and then it’s a twenty-minute drive into Exeter. We drive through St. Thomas and over the River Exe, and I direct him to a central car park. We get out and walk slowly down the high street past all the usual stores, then turn off down a side road, and end up at St. Catherine’s Chapel.

“Oh!” he says, staring at the red-stone building that sits just off the main pedestrian walkway. “Wow.”

“This chapel and the almshouses were built in 1457 to house thirteen poor men,” I tell him as we step down into the small building. “But there are much older remains here. Those two posts mark where a Roman timber watchtower stood. The Roman fort was built here to house the Second Legion Augusta in AD50.”

“Holy s**t, seriously?”

“Yeah.” I smile at his obvious wonder at these relatively common English buildings. “And there are the remains of a fourth-century townhouse, too. It was bombed in 1942, unfortunately. They decided to leave it here as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the bombing.”

“I can’t believe you can just walk around it and touch it.” He grazes his fingers against the ancient wall.”

“Come on,” I say. “If you like this, the Cathedral’s going to blow your mind.”

We continue walking along the pedestrianized area, and less than a minute later, we come out onto the Cathedral Green. We stop for a moment, and I let him take in the full beauty of the building.

“It’s a cathedral because it’s the seat of a bishop,” I explain. “Its official foundation is listed as 1133, and the two towers are both Norman, but the rest of it was rebuilt in the thirteenth century in the Decorated Gothic style. Let’s go around to the west end, to the main entrance, and you’ll be able to see what I mean.”

We walk slowly along the path, circling the stone building. Titus hasn’t said anything yet. I think he’s genuinely taken aback at the beauty of it. Even though he’s been to London several times, I have the feeling he hasn’t spent a lot of time sightseeing. And although St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey are amazing, I love Exeter Cathedral, which sits surrounded by rolling lawns.

“How come it wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War?” he asks.

“It was hit during the Baedeker Blitz in 1942. A bomb destroyed the chapel of St James, and there was a lot of other damage, but as you can see, most of it was untouched.” I take him to one side of the path approaching the cathedral, and he looks at me, puzzled. “We’re standing on top of a Roman military bathhouse,” I tell him, and his jaw drops. “It was in the middle of the legionary fortress. They found the remains when they started constructing an underground car park in the nineteen seventies.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. They backfilled it with sand at the time so it would be protected for future archaeologists, but nobody’s got around to excavating it yet.” I smile. “Come on. Let’s look inside.”

I’d expected it to take us about ten or fifteen minutes to walk around the building, but Titus is so fascinated that it takes us nearly an hour. He’s awed by the nave, especially when I tell him it’s the longest uninterrupted medieval vaulted ceiling in the world. He loves the thirteenth-century misericords or wooden seats, the fourteenth-century minstrels’ gallery, and he spends ages looking at the famous Astronomical Clock that’s supposedly the source of the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, which has a small door below the face for the resident cathedral cat to hunt mice.

By the time we come back out, we’re both hungry, so we cross the Green to a café that has seats outside overlooking the view. We go inside and order a cooked breakfast and coffee, then come back out and sit at a table with an umbrella.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“I think it’s amazing.” He studies the cathedral, then drags his gaze away and looks at me. “You’re amazing,” he says.

I laugh. “Well, thank you.”

“I mean it. You’re the perfect guide. You have fantastic knowledge of the area. I don’t mean this to sound patronizing, but I’m really impressed.”

I blush, because I can’t help it, glowing all the way through at his compliment. He notices, and I wonder whether he’s going to apologize for embarrassing me, but he just smiles. Encouraged, I lift my gaze to his and meet his eyes, and he doesn’t look away. There’s heat within them, and immediately I know he’s thinking about what I look like naked.

We’re attracted to one another. It’s not just because either of us is on the rebound. The connection began all those years ago, when I was sixteen, and it’s still there now, an invisible thread that’s drawn us together through the years, and that’s continuing to wind around us, slowly pulling tighter with each minute we spend together.