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‘Omigod thank you SO much!’
She breathed out a massive audible sigh of relief and flung her arms around him. He breathed in the scent of her hair and took full advantage of the opportunity to slide a hand around her slender waist. The faint smell of her shampoo clung to her hair, something light with an edge of coconut that made him think of holidays.
‘You’re very welcome,’ he whispered.
Layla jumped and disengaged herself from him with a quick pace backwards. What the hell was she doing, hugging the guests? Professional distance, that was the mantra peddled in all the training sessions. Then again, there were extenuating circumstances. It wasn’t every day your mother spent your life savings on a stupid dream and you assaulted a celebrity with your mobile phone. Really, could she be expected to maintain professionalism under that kind of pressure? She felt his eyes on her as she straightened the dark skirt and jacket of her uniform and began to move around the room, plumping up velvet cushions and checking the mini-bar, each little task restoring an air of efficiency that would hopefully hide her fluster.
When she turned back to him he was leaning easily against the back of the sofa.
‘Everything seems to be in order,’ she said. ‘Now my job is to make sure your stay runs as smoothly as possible. Any arrangements you might need, transport, food requests, laundry services, any problems at all, you can let me know.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Nothing is too much trouble.’
‘Really?’ he said, eyebrow cocked, holding her gaze a beat too long. There was a predatory smile on his lips and her stomach gave a slow and very deliberate cartwheel. He somehow managed to communicate an entire proposition in that one word.
He moved back to the sitting room area and sat down on one of the berry coloured velvet sofas, slinging arms along the back of it that were twined with muscle and the most powerful shoulders she’d ever seen.
‘Absolutely,’ she said, heat rising in her cheeks. ‘For the right guest at the right price, anything is doable. Room full of lilies? I’m your girl.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘When you barged in here unannounced I assumed you were a fan. I didn’t realise you were staff. I thought it was incredibly ironic, since I’ve been checked in here to stay away from them, that I’d ended up in the room with one.’
‘I’m not a fan,’ she said, then shrugged, ‘well I mean, I am, the whole world is a fan of yours really isn’t it? What I mean is, I’ve got my work hat on at the moment. Not my fan hat.’
Oh yes that sounded just bloody marvellous. Her cheeks burned as she caught the bemused expression on his face because he obviously thought she was saying that for effect, and in actual fact she’d blown her food shopping budget for a month on tickets to watch him play at Wimbledon the previous year. She was as smitten by him as the rest of the universe.
He was even hotter up close. Not that she’d thought that possible at the time. In all-white lawn tennis gear, with sweat tousling his dark hair and his lean muscular frame he’d been absolutely mesmerising.
And of course that had no bearing on the present. Dreaming about hot celebrities was one thing. Pure fantasy. The real world was a totally different ballgame. And unlike her mother Layla had no trouble keeping the two things separate.
‘I really must apologise that I wasn’t on hand for your arrival,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you quite yet.’
There had been a rushed meeting this morning to discuss and fine-tune the details of his last minute booking with them. It was standard practice when dealing with a guest as high profile as America’s tennis hero Matt Stanton. But when her shift had started this evening she’d been so busy getting out of earshot of the management and preoccupied with tracking down her mother that she’d come straight up to check the room the moment she arrived. As a result she’d missed any last minute schedule changes.
‘My people called ahead and circumvented check-in,’ he said. ‘I just came straight up here.’
‘And have you been shown around?’
It was somehow easier to deal with him when she kept herself in work mode. All those tried-and-tested and often-repeated stock hospitality phrases felt comfortingly familiar. She could hold her own when she was in work mode. Prided herself on it, actually, which was why the phone-throwing debacle was particularly toe-curling.
‘I can work out how to work the flat-screen TV and the hot tub controls, if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘I’m a veteran of hotel stays, I could probably even show you a thing or two.’ Matt glanced across the room at the mod-cons. ‘If it’s any consolation I only found out I was going to be staying here myself a few hours ago.’
The curt discussion with his coach flashed back through his mind, accompanied by a twinge of resentment, and his mood darkened a little. Last week’s big kiss ‘n’ tell revelation in the gossip columns, so close on the heels of the last one but this time backed up by blurry but perfectly recognisable mobile phone pictures, had combined with his recent slip in playing form to make his sponsors antsy and his management livid. They’d taken advantage of a break between tournaments to assert some authority while they reassessed his coaching. A time-out in London was the apparent solution. And not the kind of time-out he usually enjoyed.
The tennis circuit allowed for precious little downtime and the humiliation of being packed off to a lesser-known London boutique hotel instead of a swanky five-star celebrity choice, along with the list of instructions to stay out of sight, keep to his hotel suite when not training, no partying, no girls, no socialising, no damned life, had brought on a hot surge of angry rebellion. He might have succumbed on the hotel choice, but that didn’t mean he had to give in on the rest of it – right? And a hot against-the-ludicrous-rules fling would be just the thing to prove he still had a stake in his own life, since just now it felt like every damned aspect of it was being controlled by someone else.
‘Have a drink with me,’ he said standing up and crossing the room to the mini-bar. ‘It’s past seven, I’m stuck in for the evening, might as well make the most of it.’
He gestured back at the two velvet sofas, facing each other over a low table. She didn’t move, simply hovered by the door with her damn clipboard held up in front of her.
‘I’m supposed to be working,’ she said.
‘Didn’t you just get through telling me that I’m pretty much your job?’ he said. ‘If I want something, you’re meant to arrange it – is that how it works?’
‘Socialising with the guests isn’t really allowed.’
‘Even if the guest in question has requested your company? Even after you stumbled into their room without knocking and threw a telephone at their head?’
He saw a faint smile touch her lips and sensed her weakening even before she spoke. Of course she was weakening, they always did.
‘Just an orange juice then,’ she said.
Play it right and he could have her by the end of the day.
CHAPTER TWO (#u4533b528-1a62-5f83-9a94-ab3bfa81edcf)
Layla walked over to the sofa and perched on the edge of it, keeping her clipboard on her lap. He crossed the room and handed her the juice. She watched as he poured himself a mineral water.
She stared at the glass in his hand.
‘Mineral water,’ she said.
‘What of it?’
She shrugged.
‘I just thought your drink of choice would be something a bit stronger. Mineral water doesn’t exactly say hellraiser, does it?’
He grinned as he sat down opposite her and raised his glass.
‘Neither does orange juice. We’re perfect for each other.’
The blush was back. She looked down at her glass and he checked her left hand with the briefest glance. Always best to size up the conquest before he started out, and in his experience single girls caused the least trouble. And trouble right now was the last thing he needed.
No ring. Heat began to course through his veins as he looked at her, the full upper lip, the graceful curve of her neck highlighted by the curl of her blonde hair just below the jawline.
‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘I’m working.’
‘So am I. I might not be playing a tournament right now but the tennis season is so long, practically all year round.’ He took a sip of the water. ‘Even when I’m not competing the training is still full-on.
‘I see.’
‘There are other vices that don’t affect my game.’
At least in his opinion they didn’t affect it. His coach and sponsors might not agree.
She looked him in the eye, a flash of something there that he couldn’t fathom. As if she was sizing him up.
‘You mean groupies?’ she said loudly, blue eyes narrowing.
She was bold, he had to hand it to her. Then again, she’d probably read the gutter press this week, along with the rest of the world.
‘Groupie is such an ugly word,’ he said. ‘Insulting somehow. Makes it sound like I take advantage of people and I can understand that because of the way the papers portray it, but that’s just not the way it is. I don’t have time for proper full-on relationships and I meet plenty of girls who feel exactly the same way as me. I’m single. I’m not doing anything wrong.’ He held her gaze steadily, waiting to gauge her reaction. ‘There’s a lot to be said for uncomplicated one-off flings,’ he said. ‘As long as both people know what they’re doing, know where they stand, I just don’t see what’s wrong with it.’
She gave a dismissive whatever-you-say shrug.
Uncomplicated. When did she do anything in her life that was that?
‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Who was it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘On the phone. Who was it? Husband? Boyfriend?’
‘My mother,’ she said shortly. God that made her sound like some saddo spinster who still lived at home with her parents. Whereas it was in fact the other way round. Her mother was the one sponging off her.
He didn’t look particularly judgemental. Maybe he had an insane parent tucked away somewhere too. Then again, who was she kidding? He was bound to have rich parents who’d poured money into his tennis career. She pictured him as a toddler wielding a racquet that was bigger than he was and a small twist of envy jabbed at her ribs. He would have had all the opportunities that a supportive family could give you. There was the difference between them. He had the world at his feet and she was one step away from the gutter.
‘Makes sense. You need a relative to invoke a tantrum that size.’
‘It was NOT some tantrum. I’m twenty four, not four. It was anger. Pure, white hot, tear-her-head-from-her-shoulders anger.’
He pulled a face.
‘Wow. Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you.’
She managed a smile and groped for a potted explanation before he could pigeon-hole her as scary freak.
‘She’s cleaned out my savings account and disappeared across the world on some ridiculous mid-life crisis trip.’ She pointed her pen at him. ‘The States. Your neck of the woods. I was trying to talk her down but she was already at the airport, tickets in hand, and nothing was going to stop her.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m normally a pretty level-headed person, I just lost it, that’s all. I’d been saving for years.’
Exasperation twisted her stomach again, this time with a sense of defeat that made her want to crash her head down on the coffee table next to the sofa. Her mother would be airborne now, winging her way across the Atlantic, and Layla might just as well have withdrawn her savings from the bank and chucked them in the bin for all the likelihood she had of ever seeing them again.
‘For what?’
She shrugged.
‘A place of my own.’
The chances of achieving that dream now were non-existent, certainly for the next few years. For some reason saying it out loud invoked a surge of despair that made her throat feel suddenly tight and achy. She swallowed like mad and bit her lower lip, hard to distract herself. She was absolutely not going to lose it in front of a stranger. Especially a stranger who had everything. He probably had half a dozen places of his own on various different continents.
‘Just you and your mom then?’ he said. ‘Any other relatives? Married, single, other?’
The only good thing about that question was that it distracted her from her misery. Was he actually sizing her up as a prospect? Good grief, was this how he operated – checking out his prey in a few quick sentences to see if they had strings attached or not? He was looking at her in a boldly appraising way that made her stomach feel like melty marshmallow, as if he could see right inside her. She took a calming sip of her orange juice.
‘Single,’ she said.
He continued to look at her expectantly. She would have loved to be the kind of confident person who felt no need to fill deliberate pauses in conversations, but the age-old need to be liked and respected had total control when it came to holding her tongue.
‘I don’t have time for relationships,’ she heard herself elaborating. He was nodding encouragement. ‘I’ve been trying to get on at work, save some money up for a flat.’ A rueful laugh bubbled out of her. ‘Not that I’ve actually got any savings anymore. And this job isn’t exactly nine-to-five. Socialising takes a bit of a back seat.’
‘Ah the job again,’ he said, sitting back a little on the sofa. ‘So there’s really no limit to any request I might make?’
A calming wave of relief that the conversation was back on a professional footing made her breathe easier.
‘Nope,’ she said, giving him an enthusiastic smile. ‘No limit. We had an actress not long ago who took a whole floor for her entourage and had every room repainted candy pink. Or on a lesser scale, scented candles in the room are a biggie. Or banks of flowers on every surface. No request too great, too off-the-wall, too diva … ’
She trailed away with the PR spiel as he continued to watch her, his gaze holding hers absolutely steady, the expression on his face like the cat who was about to steal the cream.
‘And what about more…personal requests.’
His eyes creased at the corners, the lopsided smile that had melted the hearts of the nation’s women played at his lips.
Her heart began thundering as if she’d just taken the four-storey hotel stairwell two at a time. He was coming onto her. Wasn’t he? Why on earth would someone like him look twice at someone like her? If it had been anyone else self-doubt might have won the day and she would have dismissed the idea out of hand, but then this was Matt Stanton. The track record of his personal life spoke for itself, he’d bedded more women than she’d had hot coffees.
She’d been a fan of his for years. It wasn’t just his skill and grace on the tennis court, it was the same thing that afflicted the rest of the female species. Women fell at his feet, at which point he picked them up, had the time of his life and then dropped them again just as abruptly. Most infuriating of all, that bachelor-playboy persona seemed to make him all the more desirable.
None of them seemed to mind. Even the kiss n’ tell stories were, when you got right down to it, ultimately complimentary, this morning’s offering a perfect case in point. She thought back to the morning tabloids – My hot aeroplane encounter with Mile-High Matt splashed across the front pages with accompanying grainy mobile phone pic of his naked and very muscular butt.
‘If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I’m not a groupie,’ she heard herself say, thinking of her mother’s insane mission to follow a has-been rock group to another continent. No way was she being categorised alongside that.
Rock stars, tennis stars, it was all interchangeable. What it amounted to was basking in the fringes of someone else’s celebrity, as if the excitement in their lives would somehow rub off on your own supermarket-shopping nine-to-five-daily-grind existence.
‘I don’t care if you are or not,’ he said. ‘The popular press might have it down differently but whether you believe it or not that’s not the single characteristic I look for in a woman.’
‘But you’ve known me for five minutes,’ she protested.
He shrugged.
‘Why does that have to be a negative? If you think about it for a moment you’ll see it opens up a world of possibility. There’s no background hangups to get past, no baggage to talk over and get in the way, no irritating friends and family members to get along with. No hoops to jump through. Just you and me. This room. And whatever we want it to be.’
He leaned forward, reached a tentative hand out and stroked a finger gently across her cheek, the lightest of touches which sent sparks of heat flying through her.
OMG Matt Stanton just touched my cheek!
This was exactly the kind of situation her mother had chased since before Layla was born, and now it had simply presented itself to her as if by magic. An unexpected surge of righteous in-your-face defiance caught her by surprise. Dull and boring, was she? Life passing her by? The hottest man in world tennis had just propositioned her without needing so much as a hint of encouragement. She wasn’t even dressed up for Pete’s sake, she was wearing the usual hideous charcoal grey hotel uniform, name badge pinned to her lapel, happy-to-help smile pasted on her face. Not a leather bustier in sight.
Hot on the heels of the defiance came an idea that was so wildly outside her remit that it made her feel dizzy and she held her glass of orange juice tightly in both hands and took a calming sip of it to steady herself.
Her life as it stood at this moment in time wasn’t exactly scaling the dizzy heights of success, was it? Her mother’s parting words gnawed at her pride and self-belief deep down on a base level. Maybe she could have brushed them off if she was holding down some high-flying job and living an upwardly mobile life in a flat of her own, but the fact was, she wasn’t even close. However hard she might try to crush it, there was a tiny bit of her that wondered whether her mother might actually have a point when it came to life. What exactly had twenty four years of striving for respectability got her?
It had been no picnic staking a claim for common sense and normality in the middle of the chaotic one-crazy-minute-at-a-time lifestyle of her mother. Since reaching adulthood the desire for a place of her own had reached dizzying heights, the need for proper roots and security driving her on to work ever longer hours.
And just where exactly had it got her?
For the first time she could remember, looking into the melting brown eyes full of suggestion, with the day becoming crazier by the minute, she questioned her own judgement and beliefs.
Thanks to her mother she was as far away from saving a deposit up as ever. She had a tiny rented studio with sparse shared facilities and a job that left hardly any surplus at the end of the month for savings. The endless grind of that wore her down. Her friend Lucy, one of the many waitressing staff, had a buzzing social life which she lived to the full, never knowing or caring what the next moment might bring. Layla rarely had time or funds for any of that.
Why not do something outside her comfort zone for once? Her comfort zone hadn’t exactly delivered much in the way of comfort so far. The thought of doing something reckless and impulsive felt suddenly very exciting, as if she would be stepping outside her own nightmare of a life into a glamorous unpredictable world where anything could happen. For a moment there she actually weakened.
And then reality bit her squarely on the arse.
