LITMIR.BIZ

       NINE

      They never made it to the bed, as it turned out. And the hot bath came quite a bit later. They got about as far as the sumptuous pillow-filled conversation niche off to the side of the room before passion got the better of them and, there, Zander made the kind of love to her that she’d never experienced before. And would never forget.

      Worship.

      There was no other word for it. He took the sort of care of her body—with it—that she’d only ever dreamed might happen. Measured and thorough and poignantly careful. Not tentative—she had enough aches and stretched muscles to know that he’d challenged and pushed her to be the Georgia she’d never let herself be, never needed to be, before. To roam far, far out of her comfort zone. Safe in his embrace.

      She lay on her back on the daybed in the balcony niche, her head hanging back over the edge, and stared at the dark sky. Only it wasn’t quite the deep black it had been when they’d first come out here, wrapped in traditionally woven blankets, wrapped in each other. It was a deep blue now, with hints of regular blue at the edges.

      ‘Remind me to get more sleep before having sex with a marathon runner,’ she murmured. Stamina? Oh, my God... ‘It’s nearly dawn.’

      Across her legs, the heavy heat of him stirred. ‘Don’t we have somewhere to be at dawn?’

      The balloon.

      They’d come all this way to do the Cappadocian balloon experience. Could she really justify skipping it to stay here in heaven with Zander?

      She sighed. Almost.

      ‘Come on... You don’t want to miss it.’ He slapped her thigh gently and pushed himself into a sitting position. Dark or not, there was nothing but sky to look in on them high up on the mountain face, but within the hour the sun would be up and hot-air balloons would be rising over Göreme filled with curious, binocular-holding tourists.

      And they were supposed to be in one of them.

      That was the only thing that got her moving. They. The fact that Zander would be with her. If he wasn’t booked she’d have blown the whole thing off—dream or no dream.

      She padded in silence into the room with him.

      What exactly did one say after a night of no-holds-barred sensual exploration?

      ‘Let’s get ready,’ he said, ‘and we’ll get moving.’

      Huh. As good as anything, she supposed.

      But he tempered the banality of the words by swooping down behind her and latching onto her throat with his lips. For a bare heartbeat. Then he was gone again, gathering up his scattered clothes and rummaging in his suitcase.

      She thought about running back to her room to change but, really, when you’d been awake the whole time it qualified as the same day, so slipping back into her day clothes felt acceptable.

      Plenty of time to change later.

      Though her eyes roamed back to Zander’s big beckoning bath. She really hadn’t had much chance to get clean while they were in there. Quite the opposite, in fact. She did her best to wrestle her secret, satisfied smile into submission.

      It wasn’t dignified to gloat.

      The rush and bustle of getting out to Göreme’s airfield in the still-dark of morning did a fine job of distracting her from thought, just as Zander’s talented lips had done all night. Whether kissing her or murmuring conversation. It hadn’t all been lascivious. They’d lain, tangled together and curled in blankets, and talked about anything that came to mind until one or other of them—or the conversation—had turned sensual again and then there was no talking for quite some time.

      On arrival at the open balloon fields, four enormous bulbs glowed in the dim morning light. They lay, powerless, on their sides, and the roaring gas fires slowly filled them upright. The palest of the four lit up like its own sunrise.

      ‘That’s ours,’ Zander said, coming back to her side, his digital recorder in hand.

      They crossed to the enormous basket that was tethered to the ground and Georgia said a quick whisper of thanks for its size. They might look tiny in the sky but on the ground they were enormous.

      She was entirely distracted and romanced by the lumbering bulbs taking shape along the roadway. Looked as if their dawn flight would be a balloon convoy. But while groups of ten and more waited for the other baskets theirs was just the two of them and their pilot.

      Nice work, Casey.

      ‘Are you my private?’ A uniformed American woman stepped forward.

      ‘EROS radio station,’ Zander confirmed.

      ‘That’s you. Come on aboard and I’ll give you the pre-flight information.’

      By agreement, Zander recorded the whole safety presentation and the pilot put on an extra-thorough show for the media. But by the end of it Georgia certainly felt very sure about what to do if the balloon failed, and absolutely certain that it would not. The whole thing was far more regimented and controlled than she’d expected.

      ‘I get motion-sick,’ she volunteered out of nowhere and Zander looked up, surprised.

      ‘We have bags,’ the unfazed pilot said ‘but you won’t need them. You’ll see. It’s as though the planet is moving and we’ll be standing still.’

      Zander threaded his fingers through hers and the gentle gesture filled her with the same golden glow that kept their balloon aloft. She tightened her fingers around his as the pilot closed the door.

      ‘Ten minutes before sun-up,’ the pilot announced. ‘Let’s get you guys in the air.’

      Zander curled Georgia into his body and stood behind her against the basket edge in the centre of the basket. She felt both sheltered and protected.

      The balloon didn’t rise straight up as she imagined it would when the ground crew dropped their tethers—then again her entire experience of hot-air balloons was from The Wizard of Oz. Instead, it skirted along, centimetres above the ground, and slowly those centimetres became meters and then Georgia got a sense of what the pilot had promised. As soon as they had some height, it suddenly felt as if the earth had started to treadmill below them and they were stationary, just hanging there in space.

      The pilot gave the gas its voice and the entire balloon inhaled the burst of flame, long and steady. It rose again. Then she killed the flame and silence resumed; the only sounds were the clinking of guy ropes and the distant squeals of the passengers in the balloon ascending behind them.

      Theirs breathed enormous gulps between long silent stretches and climbed and climbed in pace with the sunrise.

      ‘Do you want to describe what you see?’ Zander murmured against her neck, crossing his strong arms around her and holding the running digital recorder below her chin.

      Golden light fingered out from the horizon and the deep blonde colour of the earth began to glow with a vibrancy and a gentle kind of fire. Georgia described the stunning scene, punctuated by the occasional breath of the balloon, and full of words like God and heaven and other-worldly. And whole and healing and soul-breath.

      Zander and the pilot remained silent,

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