I will commute on weekends, but I need to be back in the saddle. I need to return to London. As do you. So that you can make good on the bargain you struck with me. Have you told your landlord that you will no longer be needing his flat? Or house? Or wherever it is you live?’
‘House. I’ve already told you that.’
‘My short-term memory can be occasionally short.’ The house she had shared with her so-called good friend. Of course he remembered! He remembered everything, every little detail. Too much.
‘And, no, I haven’t told my landlord yet. I can email him in the morning but you have to give me your word that you won’t renege on our agreement. I don’t want to find myself without a roof over my head.’
‘You did as you were asked. Naturally I will keep my end of the bargain.’
He was barely aware of ordering another bottle and, by the time they had finished eating, they were two bottles down and were making inroads into a third.
‘And what do you think our staged argument should be about?’ After a brief lull in hostilities, Milly picked up the thread of what they had been discussing earlier. The meal was finished, the bill paid; when she stood up, she had to focus, really focus, to stop herself from teetering on her unfamiliar heels.
He reached out to steady her and his hand remained there at her waist.
‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ Lucas murmured.
‘Maybe we could weave that in. Maybe you could turn me into an alcoholic.’
‘My mother would never buy it.’
‘Because I’m such a boring girl-next-door type?’
‘Where did that come from?’ He stopped dead in his tracks and spun her to face him. Of their own volition, his fingers sifted through her hair and brushed her cheek.
Milly was transfixed by that gesture. He was staring down at her and she experienced a weird, drowning feeling. He was right. She’d drunk too much. She couldn’t peel her eyes away from his handsome face.
‘You should stop looking at me like that,’ Lucas said huskily and Milly half-closed her eyes.
‘Like what?’ she breathed.
‘Boring girl-next-door types don’t look at men the way you’re looking at me...’
Milly reached out and tentatively touched his cheek, and was blown away when she realised that that was what she had been longing to do since...for ever. She let her hand linger there, feeling the roughened stubble on his chin, while her heart carried on beating like a sledgehammer inside her.
‘No,’ Lucas said shakily. ‘Come on. Carlos is waiting.’
And he meant it. However tempting she might be, he wasn’t going to make love to her. No way. The prospect enticed and, yes, frightened him in equal measure. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It disturbed and unsteadied him. It smacked of a loss of control.
‘I’m going to put you to bed as soon as we’re back.’ He was dismayed when she nodded and nestled against his arm. She smelled floral, clean, young.
‘So, tell me what vices you’re going to give me,’ Milly encouraged, at once sleepy and yet never so wide awake. She felt alive to everything: to the scent of him; to the rough feel of the linen jacket he had flung on before leaving the house; to the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed. ‘I’ve always thought it must be nice to have a few vices.’
Lucas wasn’t doing much thinking at all. He cleared his throat, shifted, failed to budge her...knew that he didn’t want to anyway, not really. The key thing was that he wasn’t going to make a move on her.
‘Not a cry I’ve often heard,’ he remarked drily.
‘I guess you heard what I was telling your mother about Robbie...having a crush on him. He was so cool when he was young.’
‘And now less so,’ Lucas reminded her shortly. ‘A loser, in fact.’
‘I bet you think that everyone’s a loser compared to you,’ Milly murmured, wriggling so that she could tilt her head and look him directly in the eye.
Her breath caught in her throat and her racing heart slowed, along with time, which seemed to stand still altogether.
Her kiss took him by surprise, reaching up on tiptoe as she did, and it was so sweetly, disarmingly innocent; the gentle, tentative probing of her cool tongue a breathless, feathery flutter against his lips..
He shuddered and stifled a groan. ‘This isn’t part of the deal,’ he muttered unsteadily.
‘I know. But remember those vices I wished I had? One of them was to just...let go, not take guys so seriously...’ She traced the outline of his jaw, could sense him wanting more against his will and that filled her with a heady sense of power. When he pressed a button so that opaque glass separated them from Carlos, she smiled.
So the big break-up was going to start tomorrow. And then, in a heartbeat, she would be back in London, back to reality... But, right now, this was her reality and why shouldn’t she grab it with both hands? If he pushed her away and stormed off in revulsion, then so be it, but deep inside she sensed that he wouldn’t do that.
‘You see them and you what...? Want to marry them?’
‘I see them and I start wondering how they would fit in on a long-term basis.’ Which was pretty badly in every case thus far, few though those cases had been. ‘Sort of, “hi, how are you? What are your thoughts on big families...?”’ She felt him shudder and laughed. ‘I know. You’re horrified. I bet you’d run a mile if a woman asked you a question like that. I mean, you gave your heart away and you got burned, right? So you’re not up to giving it away again.’
‘You got that right but, word to the wise, don’t mention that particular bone of contention to my mother. She might not quite see my side of the story.’
‘Oh, I won’t mention anything that might give her the wrong idea about us,’ Milly said with a hitch in her voice. She didn’t want to think about going. Not right at this moment.
What she wanted...
She covered his big hand with her much smaller one and guided it to her breast, and she felt him slip a little lower in the seat.
‘Hell, Milly! No. You...don’t know what you’re doing...’ But he kept his hand there, felt the rounded fullness of her breast, and wanted to do so much more that it was a physical ache. His erection was so hard that he could barely move.
‘I do know what I’m doing. For the first time in my whole life, I know what I’m doing.’ Her voice was insistent as she unbuttoned the top two pearl buttons of the dress, allowing him more access to her and loving, absolutely loving, the way he was making her feel. ‘I’ll be gone in a few days and I won’t be seeing you again... And...you make me feel...’
‘How do I make you feel, Milly?’ More than a handful. She was well endowed; if Carlos hadn’t been in the front seat, driving them slowly with an impeccable lack of interest in the goings on behind him, he would have taken her right here in the car.
‘Curious,’ she confessed with the honesty that was so much a part and parcel of her personality. ‘You make me feel curious.’
THE KING-SIZE BED that had been her hiding place for nearly two weeks seemed suddenly to have expanded until now she felt as though it was consuming all the space in the room. It was the only thing she could see.
Milly’s body was on fire. ‘Sexually daring and adventurous’ were not descriptions that could ever have been applied to her. The truth was that she had never felt particularly bothered by her lack of