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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 aREASON!
‘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 straight back to the last time they were together. At the time, her own situation had been what drove her, the need to escape from the yawning absence of family and love that Christmas had been throwing at her from every angle. He had been the perfect distraction, a reason to disengage from everything that was going on around her.
No such excuse this time. In fact, all sense of rationality warned her off. Yet still there was the voice in her mind breaking through, reasoning with her, working with that physical desire for him. Where, really was the risk? He’d be gone in a couple of days, maybe even sooner. She would return to her life again just as she had before, unscathed. Couldn’t she just step back into that moment again, enjoy a rerun of the delicious past encounter?
She let her own hand slide over his hot, damp skin, over hard muscle. He caught her fingers in his free hand as she reached his shorts. Her hand was drawn away and held still while he continued to stroke her, adding a third finger, increasing his pace, stretching and teasing until she could think of nothing else but the sensation. The steam room was forgotten, hotel was forgotten, self-preserving life rules were forgotten and she cried out against his neck as he took her over that delicious edge.
As consciousness began to slip back she realised shadows were moving outside the glass door, the heat was intense now and they were both dripping sweat. He withdrew his hand, not rushing, just as the door clicked open and a middle-aged couple took the bench opposite, vague outlines in the steamy air. She kept her head down as if they might by some super power know what they’d just been doing in here, stood up and tugged him by the hand out of the steam room and immediately turned left into the circular aromatherapy shower. He curled his arms around her waist, pulling her hot skin against his and she forced herself to STOP THIS RIGHT NOW. Her body might have been conquered by the heady combination of hot steam and his intoxicatingly expert touch but her mind still just about had a handle on reality.
‘What now then?’ he said, his voice was thick and she could feel his rigid erection hard against her. ‘We could go up to my suite.’
The way they had five years ago? She’d been there, done that and moved on.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, disentangling herself.
‘Really?’
‘It’s just not a good idea.’
He looked down at her, grin creasing the corners of his grey eyes.
‘You’re actually going to leave me hanging like this?’ He glanced downwards.
She gave him a sweet smile.
‘Of course I’m not, let me just fix that for you.’
She pressed the button labelled COLD and pushed him into the shower well.
CHAPTER THREE (#u17ebe9ad-b830-5ed5-bf34-d414995f94df)
He caught up with her by the exit, as she walked through the spa bar, cheeks still pink as she attempted to pull off a swift exit.
‘Dinner?’ he said, clearly not remotely put off by the cold shower.
She carried on walking, heading back through to the lobby while her heart made a mad sprint. Even without their history, he was asking her to dinner, and there was that niggling little question of when she’d last been asked out. Two years was it now? Liz would know, she was always trying to pressgang her into dates she didn’t want. But her heart could sprint as much as it pleased, there were rules to be adhered to here, rules that she lived by for very good reasons and Tom Henley was a clear-cut case.
For speed, she figuratively threw Liz at him as an excuse instead of giving him the full on broken down reason that dinner was a non-starter, not least because her list of life rules seemed to bring out the exasperation in those of her friends that knew about them.
‘It’s been lovely to see you,’ she breezed, ‘but my friend should be arriving any time now and I really need to get properly settled in the room. And then of course we’ll be busy, shopping, sightseeing, you know how it is.’
Her mobile burst into life in her jeans pocket and she fumbled it out. Perfect timing. The screen informed her it was Liz. Obviously she must have arrived at Paddington and was checking in with a progress report. She flashed Tom Henley a confident see-how-busy-I-am roll of her eyes, and picked up. The line was awful. She came to a standstill on the thick pile carpet and moved to one side of the corridor to let other guests pass. Tom Henley didn’t excuse himself, simply leaned against the wall and watched her with an amused expression in his slate grey eyes.
‘You sound like you’re shut in a fridge,’ Ella said.
‘That isn’t so far from the truth.’
She had to focus hard to hear Liz’s voice over the background crackle.
‘You’re where?’
Surprise made Ella forget herself and exclaim without thinking and she clocked, a second too late, his eyebrows raising almost imperceptibly.
There went her perfect excuse.
Liz’s voice was faint.
‘I’m in a train carriage somewhere between Newark and some other station at the ends of the bloody earth, waiting for someone to rescue me. And the buffet car’s just run out of coffee.’
‘How long are you likely to be?’
She turned her body away toward the wall and tried to talk into the phone without moving her lips while Tom made no attempt whatsoever to avert his eyes or look busy. Instead he was watching her, a small smile touching the corners of his mouth. For Pete’s sake, where were his manners? He couldn’t have eavesdropped more openly if he’d grabbed her mobile and pressed speakerphone.
‘It isn’t looking good.’ Liz’s voice was apologetic.
Conscious of his eyes on her, she took a few paces away from him, out of earshot and lowering her voice just to be sure, although why she was bothering she had no idea. It was perfectly clear that her big fob-off was trapped in the snow somewhere up North.
‘You can’t give up,’ she pleaded through gritted teeth. ‘I need you here. I’ve bumped into some guy from my past, we had a…’ she searched for the right word. Just exactly what had they had? ‘…fling,’ she said eventually. ‘A few years ago. He’s asked me out to dinner.’
She couldn’t bring herself to mention their more recent steamy (literally) encounter in the spa. It had been a lapse of judgement, nothing more. He’d caught her off-guard.
‘And that’s bad because?’
‘Because I don’t do the past. You know I don’t.’
That attitude had afforded her a lot of face-saving and bravado in the past. It was tried and tested.
‘That’s just some stupid principle, Ella. It doesn’t mean you’re incapable of it.’
She might have known Liz wouldn’t see it her way. Her friend was forever trying to fit her up with blind dates.
‘You would say that though, wouldn’t you?’ she countered. ‘You and Alfie are on-again off-again so often I can’t keep track.’
‘That’s how the rest of us do it, Ella,’ Liz said patiently. ‘It’s called give and take. That’s how you get to know someone.’ A pause, then, ‘what’s he like?’
Ella glanced back down the corridor at him. Tom smiled at her and nodded and her stomach gave another of those small melty flips. She tightened her grip on the phone.
‘Too good-looking for his own good and won’t take no for an answer,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth. ‘What are the chances of you getting here tonight?’
Liz’s laughter was just audible over the crackly line.
‘Tonight? Try the whole weekend. Have you seen the forecast? Imagine a snowball in hell and then lengthen the odds. By a mile. I’m getting back home before we resort to eating the weak.’
‘For Pete’s sake, Liz!’
‘It’ll do you good,’ her so-called friend said. ‘When did you last have a date? And look at it this way, if it’s as bloody freezing there as it is here, at least you’ll have someone to share body warmth with to survive.’
***
A couple of days stuck in the snow in London had suddenly taken a very nice turn for the better.
‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ he said again, as soon as she pocketed the phone.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not? Your better offer is stuck in the snow somewhere for the rest of the weekend.’
‘That was a private conversation.’
He shrugged and grinned.
‘Yeah well, it was kind of hard to miss. Come on, you’re on your own now, I’m offering to buy you dinner. What exactly is it that you’re afraid of?’
‘I’m not afraid!’ she snapped.
‘Then what?’
She looked down at her fingers.
He watched as she took a deep breath before the knockback, not that he had any intention of taking no for an answer, no matter how many times or how many different ways she said it.
‘I don’t do the same situation twice,’ she said.
‘Living in the moment.’ he said, holding her hazel gaze. ‘Of course. I get that.’ That had been something else so enthralling about her all that time ago. Unlike him, with his mapped out future and responsibilities, she’d had no agenda, no grand life plan other than to squeeze every drop out of every single experience she had. The memory of what that had meant in bed made heat begin to simmer in his veins. ‘But still we didn’t part on bad terms back then. Where would be the harm in us having dinner?’
Gentle fob-off clearly wasn’t working so she cut to the chase.
‘I just have rules about that kind of thing,’ she blurted. ‘Life rules.’
He was staring at her as if he thought she might be insane.
‘Life rules,’ he repeated.
She emphasised each point by counting them off on her fingers.
‘I never go over old ground. I don’t do the same situation twice. The past is the past. I leave it there and I only ever look forward – which are actually all the same rule said in different ways but that’s how important they are to me’
She held his gaze boldly for a moment, giving him a chance to process.
‘What kind of nutty way to live your life is that?’ he said at last.
‘You can mock if you like but it’s actually stood me in good stead.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s nothing personal. We had a great time but it was over with five Christmases ago.’
