Hey guys! Apologies for the super long wait, but i'm finally back on board with this story!! 

He barely had a foot through the front door when Inhee flew past him. Shirtless and running.

“Everything okay?” he called to her retreating back, knowing he should drag his eyes away from the curve of her waist and the smoothness of her skin, but finding that his moral compass wasn’t as refined as he’d always hoped. There was something about the way the light played on her skin, the way it seemed to glow, to luminesce…

“I’m sorry,” she called over her shoulder as she ran into her bedroom. “Spectacular timing. I’ll be right out.”

Nari was in a bouncy chair in the kitchen, wearing most of her last bottle, he guessed, and had clearly been hastily and inadequately mopped up by the kitchen roll on the counter. Inhee turned suddenly and he threw his gaze away—anywhere but at her. His mind was filled by the image of her bare skin, the sweep of her shoulder, the curve of her…

No. To ogle a shoulder was one thing, but there were lines he shouldn’t cross.

Instead he went into the kitchen and looked at Nari and at the dribble of milk trickling down her chin. With mock exasperation he grabbed a muslin square and started mopping. He kept it objective, detached. There was no need to pick her up, but it wasn’t really fair to leave her damp and uncomfortable either. If he was going to be spending more time with Inhee, he couldn’t ignore Nari completely.

Inhee emerged a moment later, pulling down a T-shirt to cover that last inch of pale flesh above her jeans.

“Thanks for doing that. I started, but I seemed to be getting messier from trying to clean her up. Seemed one of us should be clean, at least.”

“It’s no problem,” he said, holding out the muslin, handing back responsibility. His eyes were fixed just above her shirt, where shoulder met collarbone and collarbone met the soft skin of her neck.

And then it was hidden behind Nari’s soft dark haired head and he was forced to look away again. He wondered how he could pinch Nari’s spot, how he could get his lips behind Inhee’s ear, breathe in her smell as Nari was doing.

For another whole week, while he’d been putting in fourteen-hour days at the office, all he’d had to remember was that brief kiss on the cheek, the press of her soft warm skin against his, the fruity scent of her shampoo and the heat that had travelled from her body to his without them even touching. The long nights had been filled with plans he knew he would never be fulfilled: for picking up where that kiss had left off, for having her cheek against his again, but this time turning her, finding with his, scooping her up in his arms and heading straight for her bedroom, or the couch, or the kitchen table…

“I’m so sorry. I know I said I’d cook tonight, but I haven’t got started on dinner yet,” she said, bounding Nari and trying to snatch up tissues and muslins from the kitchen counter and shuffling dirty pots from the breakfast bar. “I just don’t know what happened to the hours.”

Nari was showing no sign of settling, so he grabbed ingredients from the fridge and tried to fire his imagination.

“You don’t have to do that,” she told him, still bouncing and rocking. “I’ll be on it in just a minute.”

“Don’t worry—let me,” he insisted. “I like to cook.”

She looked up at him in surprise. “Hidden depths?”

He took a few steps closer to her, pulled the muslin from her hand and stopped her rocking for just a minute. For the first time since that too-brief kiss on the cheek she met his eyes and he relaxed into her gaze.

“There’s a lot you don’t know.”

She wanted to find out, she realised. She wanted his secrets.

“I’m pretty sure that you’d rather not arrive home to a strange woman in your apartment, baby spit-up,