I’m not usually like that...like I was the night of the wedding. I don’t normally drink so much—’
‘Have dinner with me.’
Emily took umbrage at the way he said it, like a command instead of an invitation. Did he think she’d been sitting by her phone waiting for him to call? Well, she had, but that was beside the point. She wasn’t going to let him think he could call her out of the blue and get her to drop everything to have dinner with him—even if she had nothing to drop. ‘I’m not free this evening so—’
‘Cancel.’
Cancel?
What the hell? Why should she cancel something at his say-so? ‘I don’t think so.’
She was quite proud of the haughty I-haven’t-been-Superglued-to-my-phone-waiting-for-you-to-call tone in her voice.
‘Please?’
Emily let a small silence pass. Let him sweat it out, as she’d been doing for the last month.
‘Why do you want to have dinner with me?’ she finally asked.
‘I want to see you again.’ His voice was rough and smooth. Gravel dipped in honey.
He wanted to see her again? Why? He had a reputation as a playboy, perhaps not as wild and loose-living as some rich men, but he hadn’t had a relationship lasting longer than a few days.
Or, at least, none the press knew about. Since his best friend’s marriage, the media interest had shifted from Draco to Loukas. Before that, Loukas had been able to fly below the radar but now everyone was speculating on whom he would date next. Emily privately had been dreading seeing him with another woman in the weeks since the wedding. If he were involved with someone else then the task of telling him he was to be a father would be even more difficult.
‘Is that code for “sleeping with me”?’ she asked. ‘Because, if so, I think you should know I’m not that sort of girl. I’ve never had a one-night stand before and I—’
‘It wouldn’t be a one-night stand if we did it again.’
It was a good point. But she couldn’t sleep with him before she told him the result of their last encounter. Even thinking about that night in his arms made her insides do cartwheels of excitement. Listening to his voice was as good as foreplay. If he kept talking to her, who knew what might happen? ‘Just dinner, okay?’
‘Just dinner.’
‘Will I meet you somewhere?’
‘I’ll pick you up. What’s your address?’
Emily gave it to him while part of her mind was worrying about what to wear. Little black dress or colour? No. Not too much colour. Not red. Definitely not red. Red was too ‘come and get me’. Pink was too girl-next-door. Did she have time to do her hair? Should she wash and blow-dry it or just scoop it up and hope for the best? Not too much make-up. Subtle and classy was best. Which heels? She needed heels because he was tall—a pair of stilts, even. A night of craning her neck to maintain eye contact would send her muscles into spasm.
‘I would’ve called you before this but I was away on business.’
You still could have called me.
Was his ‘business’ a svelte blonde like the one she’d seen hanging off his arm when she’d searched him online? ‘Really?’
‘Yes. Really.’
Emily chewed at one side of her lower lip. Why had he called her? Hadn’t she put him off with her ‘marriage and kids’ manifesto? Why had she blurted that out anyway? It was a first date no-no. Although, strictly speaking, it hadn’t been a date at all. It had been a chance hook-up. An impulsive act she still couldn’t explain. ‘Why? I mean, it’s not as if I’m your type.’
‘Given your relationship with Allegra and mine with Draco, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any uncomfortableness about that night, in case we run into each other again because of our connection with them.’
There was going to be a whole heap of uncomfortableness when Emily told him what had resulted from that night. ‘Right...good thinking.’
‘I’ll see you at seven.’
Emily didn’t get a chance to say anything in reply for he ended the call. She stared at her phone, wondering if she should press redial, but then she realised he had a withheld number.
Her mother would say it was a sign.
* * *
Loukas clicked off his phone, placed it on his desk and leaned back in his office chair. He was breaking a rule by contacting Emily Seymour but he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind, or the memory of her touch out of his body.
One-night stands were meant to be exactly that.
One night.
He had occasional relationships but he always kept things casual. Casual worked for him. Casual meant no emotional investment. Casual meant no promises he couldn’t keep. He kept his relationships short, simple and based on sex.
But the sex didn’t get much better than what he’d had with Emily. He wasn’t sure what it was about her that had got him so worked up that night. She was cute in a girl-next-door way, with her petite frame and wavy shoulder-length hair that was neither blonde nor brown but a combination of the two. ‘Bronde’ she’d laughingly called it.
Her eyes were like a fawn’s. Bambi eyes. Toffee-brown and dusted with dark spots that looked like tiny iron filings sprinkled over pools of honey. Her skin was peaches-and-cream and silk, with a scattering of freckles over the bridge of her retroussé nose that reminded him of a dusting of nutmeg. She had a sunny smile, bright and cheery with an endearing little overbite, and well-shaped lips built for kissing...and other things. Those other things had just about blown off the top of his head.
It was true she wasn’t his type. But in another lifetime she might have been. In a parallel life where he didn’t carry guilt like convict’s chains. A life where every day he didn’t relive the stomach-churning moment that had changed everything for his half-sister Ariana and had made him even more of an outcast in his family than he had been before. Even after seventeen years, every time he saw a child’s bike his breath would stop and his guts would turn to gravy. If he heard the sudden squeal of brakes his heart would bang against his sternum like a wrecking ball. The siren of an ambulance sent his pulse sky-rocketing. He still lay awake at night hearing the crunch and crumple of metal and the piercing scream of a critically injured child...
Loukas knew he shouldn’t be seeing Emily again. He shouldn’t have hooked up with her in the first place. But, after having gone straight to the wedding from visiting Ariana in hospital after her latest bout of orthopaedic surgery, those chains of guilt had dug in with a cruel bite. He couldn’t undo the past. It didn’t matter how many times he relived that day. He had ruined his sister’s life and destroyed his mother’s second marriage in the process.
Emily’s smile had been like a bolt of sunshine at the wedding. Her creamy cheeks had blushed when she’d first met his gaze. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman who blushed when he looked at her. He avoided that type usually. But something about Emily had drawn his interest, with her dancing eyes, neat little ballet dancer’s figure and her cute clumsiness. Not to mention her adorable little bunny rabbit twitch where her nose would wrinkle up as if she had an invisible pair of glasses on and was trying to hitch them back up on the bridge of her nose.
He wasn’t going to offer her anything but a temporary fling. He was only interested in the here and now. He was in London for a week working on some software for one of the government’s security agencies. It was too good an opportunity to waste. A week-long fling to enjoy a little more of what they’d experienced that night. He would be upfront and honest about it. He wouldn’t dress it up as anything other than what it was. He would offer her a no-strings, no-promises fling and leave it at that, just as he did with any other woman he took