The thought made her smile. She could imagine him shirtless, working with a crowbar, muscles flexing and bunching. She wondered if he was wearing a tool belt. She was almost tempted to go up and see. But she didn't.
She was living in the moment-and the moment was here in the gallery, getting a grip on what she needed to do.
There would be time for Lukas later, she was sure of it.
And she was right. He banged on her door at seven and said, "Enough work," in an authoritative tone. "Come and eat."
"I have to change. Where are we going?"
"To my place," he said. "And as far as I'm concerned, you don't have to wear anything at all."
She took a shower and put on clean clothes and went upstairs, reining in her skepticism about Lukas's ability to cook. But he really had made dinner-spaghetti and meat sauce, a fresh green salad and crusty hot garlic bread.
She was amazed. Matt couldn't boil water. She'd given up trying to teach him how to do anything in the kitchen. It was easier to do it herself. But it was wonderful to actually have a man cook for her-even one who had her out of her clothes and back in his bed before she could offer to wash the dishes.
"That's what dishwashers are for." Lukas was busy yanking his own clothes off, his gaze devouring her nakedness.
"Yes, but you have to load them," Holly protested.
"Not now. We have better things to do."
They did. They made love until the wee hours of the morning. Then they slept, wrapped in each other's arms.
Living in the moment, Holly thought, could be addictive.
She would have liked to spend all day there. But Lukas was already up and shaved. He was fixing breakfast when she emerged from the bedroom, still tender in places she had almost forgotten about.
"Morning." He kissed her with lingering thoroughness, then said, "Gotta stop that or I won't be meeting the mayor this morning." He set a bowl of oatmeal and raspberries in front of her.
"You're meeting the mayor?" Holly raised her brows.
"More likely one of his flunkies. We're going over logistics for the reception at the Plaza." He shot back his cuff and consulted his watch. "And I'm going to be late. Will you be okay here?"
"Of course," Holly said. "I've got my work cut out for me."
"You don't have to," Lukas said.
"Oh? You got me here under false pretenses, did you?" A corner of her mouth twitched.
"Any way I could get you," Lukas said. He snagged a suit coat off the back of a chair and shrugged it on. "I'll be back by lunchtime."
Holly finished her breakfast, then loaded the dishwasher with last night's dishes and this morning's, then turned it on. She went back into Lukas's bedroom and straightened the bed, letting herself remember how they'd spent the night. Her cheeks grew warm just thinking about it.
"Live in the moment," she reminded herself. Lukas was heading uptown. It was time for her to get cleaned up and go to work.
She turned up in Sera's office half an hour later to ask for whatever material she had that she'd been saving for Jenn. "Lukas said I should get it from you," she told his assistant.
"You're the new gallery manager?" Sera's eyes were like saucers. A knowing smile lit her face.
Holly felt her own cheeks reddening. "Just for six weeks," she said. "Less if Lukas finds someone else."
"What happens in six weeks?"
So while Sera pulled up files and printed out material, Holly told her about the Peace Corps.
Sera's surprise was evident. "You're going away? For two years? And Lukas is okay with that?" she said doubtfully.
"It's not Lukas's decision," Holly told her.
"I wonder if he knows that," Sera murmured as she collated the material and put it in a folder.
Holly was sure Lukas knew it. She was sure it was exactly what he wanted. But she didn't say any of that to Sera. She just thanked her for the files and said she'd be back to pick her brain later.
The job, she discovered, was just as Lukas had said, not unlike teaching. The better you knew your students, the better job you could do. The same thing applied to the gallery. The more she knew about the artists and their work, the better job she could do promoting them with the public, and the more she could help them get the best out of the gallery and vice versa.
It was no hardship to get to know them better. They had stopped whatever they'd been doing on Saturday night to help her. She wanted to return the favor.
So besides going over the material Sera gave her, she went from studio to studio talking to the artists. She learned a lot about them, which she had expected. She also learned a good deal about Lukas, not just from what they told her, but from those blowup photos she hadn't had time to really look at the afternoon he'd first given her a tour.
They were photos of what she inferred were some of the mining sites where Lukas worked. They were blowups, of dirt and rubble and two dusty men, one much older, thin and wiry with gray hair buzzed close to his skull and wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end on his nose, the other lean, yet muscular, the ends of his normally sun-tipped locks even blonder in the harsh Australian sun.
They were candid shots, taken by friends, Holly presumed. But they captured well the relationship of Lukas and the old man. They were working together, talking together, standing together, covered with dust, their arms slung around each other's shoulders as they beamed at the camera. In the last shot they toasted each other with broad grins and pints of beer. Lukas looked as happy-and as satisfied-as she had ever seen him. And the pride in the old man's eyes was evident.
She understood very well why Lukas felt an obligation to see Skeet's foundation was a success. The rapport between them was obvious. It was beautiful.
It gave her a greater appreciation for Lukas than she'd had before. She'd known him as a boy and as a self-absorbed young man. She didn't see that here. She saw something deeper, something valuable.
What she saw there, she soon discovered, extended to the attitude of the artists toward the man who owned the gallery.
"He understands us," Charlotte told her.
"He listens," Teresa said. And she went on to tell Holly about how it was when she'd whined to him about lack of opportunities, that he'd said, "What would make it better?"
"I just babbled," Teresa told her. "Told him how wonderful it would be to have access to a North American market, to be promoted on the other side of the world. I didn't see it ever happening. I was just talking. But he made it happen."
"He lets us alone," Charlotte said. "He doesn't try to get us to do particular things. He never makes suggestions. Not even about how we display our work in his gallery. He's determined that it's ours, not his."
Not one person said, He's bossy. He's autocratic. He thinks he knows it all.
He certainly wasn't micromanaging her. He found her when he came back at lunchtime and asked if she wanted peanut butter and jelly or pâté de foie gras.
"What?" Holly was behind the desk in the main gallery reading over a spreadsheet.
He repeated it. "I've got peanut butter upstairs. Or I can take you out."
"I need to keep going. Jenn left a list of appropriate region-specific foods, but I have to find a caterer who can actually make them." It was a good idea to serve Australian, New Zealand and Pacific finger foods and desserts. But it was going to take a bit of effort to come up with a provider.
"Fine, but you have to eat," Lukas said, drawing her to her feet.
"I need to make phone calls."
"Right. Peanut butter and jelly it is."
He made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Holly had to give him that. But after he did he let her go back to work. He didn't turn up every ten minutes to make suggestions or to boss her around. There was the normal amount of noise in the gallery until about four o'clock, when the pre-opening hours closed to the public.
Then the banging and hammering began. Holly found she actually liked hearing it. She liked the images it called to mind. But when it stopped just after six, she found that her imagination was lacking.
Moments after it ended, Holly looked up to catch her breath at the sight of a sweaty, grimy, shirtless Lukas Antonides standing in her office doorway, wearing jeans-and a tool belt. Holly swallowed at the sight.
"Time to quit," he said.
"No more walls to knock down?"
"Not if I want the building to keep standing. Let's take a shower."
"Lukas!"