(Dedicated to my darling friend, the Dutch English teacher. Thanks for your assistance with the "couleur locale" for this story! Love you, sweetie!)
The day had been a long one, and Karen Mullings was too tired to care much about where she ate. She just needed dinner and her bed. She walked into the hotel's Italian restaurant and waited to be seated. The table for two was in the quietest corner, which suited her just fine. Although she had happily embarked on this solo European tour, and though she had enjoyed every city she had stayed in, she still preferred to hide away at dinnertime. It seemed to her a little sad that a grown woman would be alone for dinner every day, and while she had no pressing need of a companion, she felt her aloneness most sharply in the evenings, which is why she more often than not called for room service of an evening.
Today, however, she knew if she went upstairs to her room she would fall asleep without eating, and when she woke, both the restaurant and room service would be unavailable. She ordered the house special for the evening and a glass of sweet red wine, and stretched her feet out under the table, letting the peace and quiet soak into her bones. After swallowing almost the whole glass of water thoughtfully provided for her, she hurried to the ladies' room.
On the way out, she bumped into someone going in the opposite direction, almost falling over. Only his quick hands and steady feet kept her on her own. The arm around her waist, dangerously close to her bottom, was hard and muscled, the fingers long and strong. The man's shoulders were wide, and he was taller than she by a good six inches. His eyes were the bluest she had ever seen...come to think of it, she had never met a blue-eyed person before in her life. His eyes reminded her of the sea on a hot summer day.
"I...I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, pulling herself up to her full height and looking the stranger in the eye.
He smiled at her, and his dimpled cheeks surprised her. "That's okay. I'm glad to help. Are you all right now?" He withdrew his hand from her back, and she felt the loss immediately.
"Yes, I'm fine, thank you!"
She smiled in her turn, and then excused herself and hurried back to her table. The food, when it was served, was hot and filling, and delicious as usual. She was glad of something to take her mind off the still unsettling encounter with the handsome blue-eyed man outside the restroom. She savored a second glass of wine, in lieu of dessert, and then went to pay her bill. As she turned towards the elevators, her mystery encounter rounded the corner and their eyes met. Something like an electric charge shot up her arms and settled in her chest. He smiled again, acknowledging her with a nod before walking out through the wide glass doors with his companions, two women and another man. She went up to her room in a daze.
After a hot shower, during which she tried to escape the thoughts of the dark-haired stranger with the dimples, sexy mouth, husky voice, and hard hands, she rubbed lotion into her skin and crawled into bed. She was thoroughly exhausted and hoped she would sleep undisturbed. Tomorrow she would be visiting the Oude Kerk and the Dam Plein, and she knew she would need reserves of energy for the long walking and standing about.
Some time during the night she awoke, shaking and so wet she thought she had had a childhood accident. The dream came crashing in on her conscious mind, and she rushed from the bed to the bathroom to relieve herself, and to hope she could run from the eroticism of it. Her relationships had all failed, and her heart had been broken one too many times, so she was very wary of men, and mistrusted them on principle. To dream about a perfect stranger as she had done, then, was unprecedented and extremely unsettling, even though she was very aware of her allure, and when she did trust them, very willing to share the depth and breadth of her passion with them. She took a glass of water with her back to bed, and flipped through the TV channels till she found some mindless comedy to occupy her till she grew drowsy again and fell back on her pillows.
Almost two hours away in Leeuwarden, Peter van der Meulen sipped a second glass of brandy and stared into the fireplace. He had not been able to get the woman in the restaurant out of his mind. That brief contact had fired his imagination and his desires like nothing else had in years, not since the earliest days with Alijd, who had died four years before, after twenty years of marriage. The woman was everything Alijd had not been. She had been wearing jeans and a loose shirt with a scoop neckline, so Peter got a good up close of her breasts. In her mid-forties, she had beautiful brown eyes, a bright, ravishing smile, nice long legs, and delicious-looking breasts. She was a little plump, which was exactly the way Peter liked a woman to be.
He wondered who she was, how she came to be in Amsterdam, and why she was alone. She was quite the most alluring woman he had seen in years, and he found himself wanting to meet her again, to get to know her, perhaps even become friends. It was unexpected, this interest in a stranger. Peter was nothing if not conservative in public, and in fact his friends often had to encourage him to loosen up and enjoy himself. But this woman made him feel as though he were completely out of all control with the way he had been feeling since he got back home. Perhaps, for his peace of mind, he needed to forget her, and get on with the business of his life. He had some tests to mark – the thought made him groan – and then he had to prepare for his next week's classes. Monday was fast approaching.
He drained the glass and took it to the sink where he rinsed it and turned it over to dry before going into his office to begin the work that never stopped. He taught in a nearby secondary school, and his pupils ranged in ability from the apparently terminally lazy to the impossibly brilliant, with a fair number of average Joes in between. He sighed as he picked up his pencil and began to mark the batch of tests he had stopped halfway through. He worked through the rest of that one and the next one, before giving up in favor of some jazz and a book. He could wait to tackle the last two tomorrow, during his non-teaching periods.
Two months later, Peter found himself standing in the British Museum alone for the time being. His colleagues had gone off with the students they had brought with them on this trip, and he was making his way back to them from a restroom stop, when he saw her. The sight of her brought him up short. She was transfixed by the work of art she stood before, her gaze rapt, and no doubt, by the earbuds in her ears, she was listening to a description of the piece she was looking at. She was in jeans, snuggling up to her round bottom and hugging her long legs. Her top was loose, but he could clearly tell that her breasts were large and full. He felt himself grow warm as desire, unexpected and overwhelming, roared through him.
He stepped back, out of her possible line of vision, and tried to calm his body's response to the sight of her. He couldn't rejoin his party with anything resembling the hard-on that was threatening his peace of mind and his equanimity, not to mention the front closure of his slacks. He inhaled deeply, and turned away from her to look at the artwork around him, trying to lose himself in the variety. When his body calmed, he turned sharply and walked away to the place he knew his colleagues had taken the students. Both of them were female, and the younger one eyed him speculatively, as though she knew something had transpired and only needed to look at him to be able to sum up his experience. The older one ignored him, as she always did.
The students who had chosen to come on this tour were listening to the docent talk about the pieces in the gallery, and Peter paid as little heed as he needed to give the semblance of attention, while his body remained totally aware of the fact that the mystery woman was once again occupying the same building as he was. Was she an Englishwoman? Was she on holiday...again? Who was she? When the docent moved on, he did, too, and found himself in the same gallery as his mystery lady again. Her profile greeted him this time, and he fought to keep his eyes off her and on the works the guide was describing. He closed his eyes, and breathed away the tightness in his chest. This is ridiculous, he thought angrily, and was about to turn resolutely away when her scent assailed him.
He was shocked to discover that he remembered it from that one brief meeting two months earlier. It had imprinted itself on his synapses, setting off electrical pulses that made his skin tingle with awareness, and his heart race. He looked around and discovered he didn't have to look too far down to see into the most incredible coffee-brown eyes. The woman glanced up and he knew she recognized him by the way her eyes widened. He felt obliged to speak, though he was at a loss as to what to say.
"Hello again," he settled for, smiling faintly. He felt like a child, gawking longingly at candy in the shop window. He wished he knew why this woman brought out such odd and unsettling reactions in him.
"Oh, hello! Small world!" she replied, her smile a nervous reflection of his own.
"Yes, isn't it?" What an utterly inane response, he thought angrily. "Are you on holiday?" The question popped out without his permission, and he closed his eyes briefly, opening them again expecting there to be a sharp reprimand for his temerity. Instead, the woman smiled at him and answered,
"In a way, I suppose I am. My brother lives here, and I have just moved from the States. Until I can find a new position, I'm taking in the sights, and soaking up the culture." Her smile widened charmingly, and then she stuck her hand out and added, "My name is Karen, by the way. Karen Mullings."
