How she’d had no real base, no family ties, and most of all how she made that seem liberating instead of lonely.
She looked away, and he followed her gaze back across the glassy surface of the swimming pool.
‘For a while I stayed with my Gran at this time of year but now I just go wherever the mood takes me,’ she said. ‘Last year I waitressed in a hotel in the Lakes – the Christmas lights were just the prettiest thing ever, but it was freezing cold. Even more than this. The year before that I did charity work in a soup kitchen and the year before THAT I was working my way round France.’
She counted off the Christmases on her fingers. He only needed one finger for his last four Christmases. Every single one had been the same.
‘And this year?’
‘I’m doing this weekend with my friend Liz. She entered some competition on the back of a breakfast cereal packet. It’s supposedly for Christmas shopping, all expenses paid and some spending money thrown in. But I’m going to try and drag her round the sights a bit. Shopping’s not really my thing.’
‘What about after this weekend?’
‘Well then I’m working again. I’ve got a waitressing gig back in Cornwall. In Looe. I lived there for a while with my Gran. Brilliant time for earning, Christmas, if you’ve got nowhere else you need to be. My speciality is unsociable hours. When this weekend is over I’m booked up right through Christmas and New Year, I’ll barely have a minute to think. Whereas you’ll probably be having cocktails at sundown and a leisurely break – right?’ She sat back in her lounger and looked at him with interest. ‘Come on then, give me a rundown of your last four Christmases.’
‘Well I don’t need to use my fingers to count them off, if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘Touch down in Barbados a few days before Christmas. Catch up with friends and family. Head back after New Year.’
His tone was throwaway, unenthusiastic. Then again, mustering up excitement when you’d done the same thing year on year since you were a kid couldn’t be easy.
‘Your life is one big déjà vu,’ she said, and seeing the fed-up expression on his face she couldn’t resist adding, ‘And where’s the fun in that?’
There was a spark in his eyes as he held her gaze a moment too long and smiled, and she realised, too late, that he’d considered that comment a flirt. She whipped her eyes back down to her magazine, feeling warmth rise in her cheeks. She really ought to get her mouth under control and get this encounter over with right now.
‘I’d better get back,’ she said. ‘Check my phone, see when Liz is getting here.’
She tossed the magazine onto a low wicker table and climbed off the lounger, being careful to swing her legs off onto the floor first to avoid giving an impression of beached whale. And since she really didn’t have the confidence or the heeled wedges to pull off flouncing out in a bikini, she settled for wrapping the towel around her hips sarong style. She could feel his eyes on her as she walked away from him and then, just as she thought she was home-free, in her fluster she managed to take the left turn toward the crystal steam room instead of the right turn into the ladies’ changing room.
The option was there, of course, to scuttle back the other way, thereby losing the unruffled poise she was doing her best to channel. But he’d shown no sign of following her so instead she opened the glass door and sat down on the tiled bench in the small square room, letting the hot mist wash over her skin. She could while away five minutes in here and then nip off to the showers with her poise intact.
She had the steam room to herself and she sat back with a sigh on the bench and leaned her head against the smooth tile of the wall. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the soothing scent of the aromatherapy oils clinging to the steam.
And then the glass door slid open and closed, letting the steam clear a little, and she was looking through the mist right at him.
Oh hell.
***
He ignored the empty bench opposite and instead sat down next to her. Up close the steam was clearer, she could see tiny droplets of water clinging to his hair.
‘I thought you were heading out?’
Heat was pulsing through her that wasn’t entirely down to the steam room.
‘Changed my mind,’ she said airily. ‘Thought I’d have a quick steam first.’
As if she were a carrot or a stem of broccoli.
A pause that was long enough for her to wonder if he might actually just want to sit in silence next to her and take in the relaxing facilities, and then his deep voice echoed slightly in the tiled room.
‘You ever think about it, what it was like back then?’
From time to time, when she couldn’t sleep, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.
Her heartbeat had leapt into instant thundering mode. Instead of answering, mad laughter cackled forth at the utter craziness of the situation.
‘Ahahahaha! It?’ she questioned preposterously. He didn’t so much as flinch.
‘Us,’ he clarified. ‘You ever think about us?’ He lifted a hand and tucked a damp stray curl of hair behind her ear. ‘I do.’
Her pulse was going crazy at his light touch and part of her, the part she really needed to crush into submission here, wanted to go with the flow. What the hell, let him go ahead, just to see if his kisses were as bone-melting as she remembered. She made a last-ditch effort to hang on to sense.
Rules, Ella, think about your life rules. They’re there for a REASON!
‘Tom,’ she said, speaking slowly in the hope that it would make her voice steady and that he might actually listen to what she was saying. His thumb continued to stroke her jaw lightly. Her stomach was pooling with heat that had nothing to do with the steam. ‘You’re here for – what – a couple of nights while you wait for your plane to be rescheduled? If what you’re hoping for is some kind of rerun, it’s just not going to happen. I’m not that kind of girl,’ she said. ‘I never really was.’
‘Where would be the harm?’ he said. ‘What would be the big deal? It’s not like we haven’t been here before.’
And of course he had a point. Any reservations had been discarded five years ago. They’d been intimate on such an intense level that maybe it was really no leap at all to pick up where they’d left off all that time ago.
She drew in a breath, ready to list all the reasons why, actually, it was a big deal. How it would be a regression, how it couldn’t possibly end well, and then he stopped all planned protestations with a kiss. His hand slid back from her jaw to cradle the nape of her neck, his tongue slipped softly against hers and her stomach dissolved like melting toffee.
His hand slipped to her bare thigh, began stroking its way higher. Her mind followed it, inch by slow inch, although her eyes were tightly shut. He reached the delicate skin of her inner thighs and then his fingertips teased their way beneath the edge of her bikini bottoms. She gasped into his mouth as he slid two fingers inside her in one smooth movement and she felt him smile.
‘Tell me again, why this is a bad idea,’ he whispered, the ball of his thumb now beginning to circle her most sensitive spot, while his fingers continuing their slow rhythmic grind in and out. The sweet friction made her feel weak. Reasons jumbled into a mess of words in her mind.
‘I don’t do second-time-rounds,’ she managed. ‘Of anything. It’s kind of like a personal rule of mine.’
‘Still living in the moment then?’ he said, holding her gaze. ‘You haven’t changed.’ He smiled, moved his lips to her ear. ‘No one around but us,’ he whispered. ‘I could have you right now and no one would see.’
The recklessness of it all had its own seductiveness, it took her