Antonia picked up her fork and cut off a piece of egg. “I might take a walk before I start writing.”

He joined her with his fork. “What are you writing?”

“Nothing important,” she said after a hard swallow. She didn’t want to talk about her book with him. Not after she’d decided to base one of her characters on him.

“I’m also writing something not important,” he replied.

She sat up straighter. “Like what?”

“It’s a dumb paper.”

“An academic article?”

He exhaled harshly. “Not exactly, I just finished rewriting one of those. This is just a conference paper.”

Antonia nodded. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to write anything for school,” she admitted. “I like to keep my master’s thesis far back in the recesses of my mind.”

He shot her a crooked grin. “What was it about?”

“It was fifty-something pages of nonsense,” she said recalling the all-nighters she pulled to get it done. “I wrote about Zora Neale Hurston.”

“I love her writing,” he said. “I usually assign my students her essay, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me.’”

The fact that he was so well-read was just as attractive as his naked torso sitting at the breakfast table. Of course he’s well-read, she thought, returning to her side of the plate. He’s a literature professor. “I wrote about her anthropological work.”

Aiden nodded in appreciation. “That sounds very interesting. Was it her field research in the American South or the Caribbean?”

He was actually listening to her. She had a fleeting memory of Derek and his phone. Always with that phone. “Mostly in the South. I found her folklore research exciting.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “That’s right. She was able to incorporate local color in her writing because of her research. I don’t think people appreciated it at the time, but it’s truly valuable work now.”

“Yes!” Antonia agreed. “That was part of my argument.”

“Of course,” he said, taking another bite. “You can’t talk about her fiction without addressing all of the grunt work she did. Reading about her gives me hope for Ireland.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, we have our own language problems, you know. No one spoke Irish for the longest time, but it’s making a resurgence,” he said with a full mouth. “My little niece is going to a language camp this summer. I certainly didn’t have that growing up.”

“I didn’t know that. I know nothing about the Irish language.”

He tilted his fork at her. “And that’s what the feckin’ Brits wanted. It’s not the same as black oppression in the states, but we’re still rebounding from a lot of cultural thievery here in Ireland.”

Antonia had stopped eating at this point, leaning forward and getting an impromptu history lesson. “Really?”

“Well, if you think about it, there are some interesting parallels between the black experience and that of the Irish people.”

“None of that Irish slave nonsense, though?” Antonia asked.

He chuckled as he shook his head. “Oh lord no. Anyone who spins that yarn is trying to wind you up.”