She’s bound to get out the baby photographs and tell Gib about the time you took your knickers off in the middle of their sherry party.’
‘I was only three,’ said Phoebe as Gib raised an enquiring eyebrow.
‘At least Jed is spared that,’ said Lara, cheering up at the realisation. ‘You should have been a rebel, Gib, then they wouldn’t be so keen on inviting you to stay.’
Oh, dear, Phoebe sighed inwardly. She should have foreseen that her mother would start planning intimate family get-togethers. Now she would have to think up endless excuses as to why they couldn’t go down for the weekend until their supposedly perfect relationship had had time to fall apart convincingly.
But how could she think when Gib was sitting next to her, and she was aware of every time he lifted his glass or gestured, every time he turned his head towards her and his smile burned at the edge of her vision. Her shoulders were still tingling where his hands had rested. The image of how he had looked when he came out of the bathroom with his powerful shoulders and his bare, brown chest and his straight, strong legs shimmered in front of Phoebe’s eyes no matter how hard she tried to blink it away so that she could see the medallions of lamb on her plate.
Not that she could eat, anyway. She pushed the food distractedly around her plate and tried to decide whether she longed for the evening to end, or dreaded, because it would mean being alone with Gib again.
And that bed.
Phoebe gulped at her wine. She must stop thinking about Gib like this! Stop thinking about his mouth and his hands and his lean, hard body. If Kate and Bella were here, she was sure they would tell her that she was simply projecting her feelings for Ben onto Gib because he was handy.
Yes, that was all it was. She was trying to turn him into some substitute for Ben. Ridiculous, really. So all she had to do was concentrate on Ben and maybe her pounding pulse would calm down and the twitchy feeling would fade and the tight knot in her stomach would relax.
It was hard to think about Ben when she couldn’t see him, but once the pudding had been removed, the music struck up and bride and groom took to the little dance floor to much sentimental sighing from the other guests. This gave Phoebe the opportunity she needed, and she turned her chair like many of the other guests so that she could watch Ben holding Lisa close. He looked very contented, she thought. Not the most exciting man in the world, perhaps, but contented.
Where had that thought come from? Phoebe caught herself up with a frown. She had never found Ben at all dull before, so there was no reason to start thinking it now, just because he was so different from Gib, Gib with his gleaming blue eyes and his unsettling smile and his ability to make her furious and want to laugh at the same time.
Turning her back deliberately on him, she made herself focus on Ben, and after a while, as people were starting to move around, Gib got up and went over to talk to her parents. Phoebe was still staring determinedly at the dance floor, but she might as well have been looking straight at him, so acutely was she aware of every move he made. She was watching Ben, but all her senses were attuned to Gib as he sat down next to her parents. She didn’t need to see him to know that his alert, mobile face was lit with laughter, or that his hands were gesticulating as he talked.
‘Phoebe!’
She started as her mother came to take Gib’s empty chair. ‘Phoebe,’ she demanded in an urgent undertone, ‘what on earth do you think you are doing?’
From the other side of the room, Gib saw Phoebe stiffen and her chin came up at a combative angle. He didn’t know what her mother was saying to her, but it obviously wasn’t going down at all well. Phoebe’s face was flushed and there was a dangerous glitter to her eyes.
Murmuring an excuse, he got to his feet and went over. ‘Come on, Phoebe,’ he said as he held out his hand. ‘Let’s dance.’
Phoebe went without a word. She let him pull her into his arms and was glad of the excuse to hide her face in his throat. She felt ridiculously shaky all of a sudden. Gib held her tightly in a way that was at once comforting and disturbing. She was very aware of the hardness of his body, of the masculine scent of his skin, of the warmth of his hands through the silky material of her dress.
Gib could feel her trembling, and his expression was wry. Seeing Ben dancing with his new bride must have been the final straw for her today, and whatever her mother had been saying to her obviously hadn’t helped. Pulling her onto the dance floor had been an instinctive act to offer her an escape, but he hadn’t counted on how hard it would be for him. She was so warm and so slender, and her dress slipped distractingly over her skin beneath his hands. He could smell her perfume and feel her soft breath and the tickle of her eyelashes against his throat, the silky hair beneath his cheek.
A friend, he reminded himself. That was all he was supposed to be. A friend was what Phoebe needed right now, and he should be thinking about how much she was hurting rather than about how much he would like to take her back to that four-poster bed and make her forget all about Ben, and make her smile again.
In the meantime, she needed him to carry on the pretence, Gib told himself. If nothing else, it was a pretext to pull her closer, to kiss her ear and smooth his hand down her spine, feeling the dress shift tantalisingly over her bare skin.
It was just part of the act, after all. If he was really her lover, he wouldn’t want to let her go when the music stopped, would he? He wouldn’t want to take her back to the table and share her with everybody else. He would take her out into the summer night where he could kiss her properly in the darkness.
Almost without thinking, he found himself steering Phoebe out through the open French windows and onto the terrace. She didn’t resist, but when they came to a halt at last in the shadows, she pulled back to look at him, her eyes huge and dark in her pale face.
‘Thank you for that,’ she said with a crooked smile. ‘Mum and I were about to come to blows!’
Gib made himself let her go. ‘What was she saying to you?’
‘Oh, she came over to tick me off for ignoring you.’ The shadows hid the flush that crept up Phoebe’s cheeks as she remembered what her mother had said. She had been furious with Phoebe for sitting and mooning openly over Ben, as she thought.
‘You told us that you were over Ben,’ she had accused her. ‘You said that you were in love with Gib. It certainly doesn’t look that way from where we’re sitting,’ she had swept on when Phoebe had tried to protest. ‘It looks as if you’ve just been using Gib as a way to get back at Ben somehow. That’s not fair, Phoebe. It’s not fair to Ben and it’s not fair to Gib.’
There had been a lot more along the same lines. Trapped, Phoebe had been unable to explain that watching Ben had only been a way of not watching Gib.
‘Mum thought we’d had a row,’ she told him. ‘She’s afraid I’m going to lose you by being too uncompromising.’
‘Shall I tell her I like you that way?’ said Gib.
Her smile glimmered in the dusky light. ‘I’m not sure she would believe you. In Mum’s world, women are sweet and subservient and agree with everything their husbands say.’
‘Sounds like a parallel universe to me,’ he commented dryly.
‘Exactly. Anyway,’ Phoebe went on awkwardly after a minute, ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘Oh?’
‘After everything I had to say about you sticking to the script, I’m the one that’s made Mum suspicious,’ she said with difficulty. ‘She thinks I’m just using you and that I’m still in love with Ben.’
Sheila Lane was no fool, Gib thought, and she must know her daughter better than anyone. If she thought Phoebe was still in love with Ben, it was probably true.
‘We’d better convince her that’s not true, then, hadn’t we?’ he said, deliberately brisk. ‘What do you want to do? Another smoochy dance?’
Phoebe