by Hazel Osmond
Bill took the scalpel from its box and put it into Ellie’s hand. Jack saw Ellie’s jaw tighten. Quickly he manoeuvred Bill out of the room, talking rapidly to cover Ellie’s silence. He still wasn’t quick enough to stop Bill telling him a final anecdote about the early days of surgery. When Jack chanced a look back over his shoulder, Ellie was staring down at the scalpel lying in her hand as though it were a loaded gun.
Eventually Jack managed to hand Bill over to Lydia and walked back into his office.
It was empty.
‘Ellie?’
No reply.
And then Jack noticed a foot sticking out past the end of the desk.
‘Shit, Ellie,’ he said out loud, and got himself round to where she was lying.
She was entangled in the legs of her chair, her dress hitched up around the tops of her thighs. Jack lifted the chair off her and then knelt down at her side. He tried not to look at her thighs as he pulled her dress back down; it somehow seemed unfair. Placing his hand on her face, he felt how clammy her skin was.
‘Lydia, give me a hand here,’ he shouted towards the door.
He tapped Ellie lightly on the cheek. No response. She looked dreadful. What a bullying jerk he was. She told him she couldn’t do this and he’d made her go ahead and do it. Gavin was right: too much testosterone.
‘Lydia, are you there?’ he shouted again, this time more urgently.
Ellie stirred and moaned and opened her eyes and Jack saw them flare in shock. She sat up abruptly.
‘Hey,’ he said, holding her by the arms, ‘take it easy. You fainted. Don’t try to get up.’
Ellie pushed his hands away and, using the seat of the chair to help her, got unsteadily to her feet.
‘No, you shouldn’t be getting up yet. You look dreadful. Stay here.’ Jack tried to get hold of her again.
Ellie batted his hands away and started to move round the desk, clutching at it for support. Jack followed a couple of steps behind her.
‘Ellie, you still look really pale. Come and sit down.’ Jack put his hand on her arm and tried to steer her to a chair. ‘Lydia, where the hell are you? I need help here,’ he bellowed.
‘No, I’m fine, I’m going,’ Ellie said shakily, and removed his hand from her arm. She launched herself away from the desk and blundered towards the door, but only managed a couple of steps before Jack saw her knees buckle. He rushed towards her, just managing to catch her round the waist before she fell.
‘Lydia!’ he shouted, trying to get a firmer grip on Ellie, who felt like a deadweight, even to him. He struggled to turn her to face him and then half lifted, half dragged her over to the desk. Perching her bottom on it, he leaned her against his chest and got his breath back. Easier to carry when she was drunk than unconscious.
He was about to call for Lydia again when he stopped. Ellie felt soft against him, her breath warming a little patch of skin beneath his shirt. Damn it. He brought his arm round her waist and held it there, then bent and placed his face against her hair. Damn, damn, damn. Slowly he pulled Ellie to her feet so that her body was pressed right against his. It was completely the wrong thing to do. He should be lying her down, putting her in the recovery position.
But he didn’t want her to recover, not yet. And really, there was another position he would prefer to have Ellie in right at this moment.
Jack pulled her even closer and felt the breath catch in his throat. Her breasts were pressing into his chest, her thighs were on his, and together, those contact points were sending a surge of lust right into his stomach and then into his groin. He closed his eyes and rested his chin on the top of Ellie’s head. She was all softness and curves and he wanted to protect her.
He tentatively brought his other hand up to Ellie’s hair and ran his fingers through it. He wound a curl round his index finger, smiling at how silky it felt, looking at the reddish glint of her hair against his skin.
Nothing else in the whole building registered with him any more except the feeling of her body against his. Holding her like this probably put him in the same league as that serial fondler Jubbitt Junior. No, he was worse than that creep: even Jubbitt hadn’t leaped on Ellie when she was unconscious.
He should at least loosen his grip and sit her back down on the desk, but that meant losing how gorgeous the weight of her felt against him and how vulnerable she looked. He couldn’t move.
Everything was silent except for the soft sound of her breathing. He had no idea what he was going to say to Lydia if she walked in. And how was he going to explain himself to Ellie? Then he looked down at her face, the way her eyelashes lay against her cheek, the curve of her mouth.
Everything else could go to hell. She’d fallen into his lap; he’d be a fool not to stand here and hold her.
Too soon he felt Ellie start to stir and her eyes opened. She lifted her head, still half conscious and half not, and Jack groaned and tried to look away and concentrate on something calming, like icebergs or white doves. Icebergs, white doves. White doves, icebergs.
Nope, wasn’t working. Ellie made a little ‘Oh’ sound and the icebergs melted and the doves drowned.
Slowly he bent down, tilted his head slightly to one side and kissed her very softly on the mouth. He felt her breath against his lips and whatever had been making him behave himself vanished. He moved his hands down over her beautiful backside and kissed her on her soft mouth again, this time running his tongue along between her lips.
For an instant he felt Ellie’s mouth yield to his tongue and then her eyes finally focused. She looked appalled and shot back from him as though he had thumped her. Her chest was rising and falling in a way that was both alarming to him and deeply, deeply exciting.
‘No, no, no,’ she cried out, and before he could put out a hand to stop her, she had run out of the room, ricocheting off the doorframe in her panic to get away.
Jack stood there motionless for a while and then slowly turned and fumbled for a chair. He sat there until Lydia came into the room.
She looked concerned, puzzled. ‘Jack, are you feeling all right?’ she said.
‘Not really, Lydia,’ he replied, and then stood up and reached across the desk for Ellie’s notebook and the two halves of her pencil.
CHAPTER 21
Ellie sat in her office trying to disappear into the cool, white art pad on her desk. She hoped that if she stared at it long enough, the memory of what had happened would stop replaying in her head. So far that plan wasn’t working. Her heart was still thumping so hard she was surprised the people in the next office couldn’t hear it.
She reached forward and moved a pencil sharpener slightly to the left, a rubber slightly to the right and then put her hands back in her lap and resumed her staring. Jack Wolfe had been kissing her and it was as if bits of her dreams had come to life. Ellie put her hand out to move the pencil sharpener back to its original position and then stopped. My God, it had been such a wonderful kiss too. A millisecond longer and she did not know how she would have responded.
The red-hot shame of that thought made her want to get up from her chair and go and plunge her head into the mini-fridge. She concentrated on getting her breathing back into some recognisable pattern.
Everything would be fine if she could sit quietly and think about the cool, pure paper.
The building went quiet around her as people headed home. She wanted to go home too, but she was worried about bumping into Jack. Her hands fluttered up from her lap and started moving the pencil sharpener and rubber about again. She couldn’t forget how lovely Jack smelled and how warm he had felt. But mainly it was the look in his eyes that had been unsettling: not amused or mocking, just scorching.
She didn’t know how she was going to be able to cope with seeing him again.
And then suddenly there he was standing at the door.
Jack couldn’t remember the last time he had seen anybody look so terrified of him. Except Gavin when he had threatened to wrestle him naked. The sensible thin
g to do would be to go home now; apologise abjectly and go home. Blame it all on the moon or the weather.
Except that the instant he walked into her office and saw her, he wanted to feel her softness against him again. No, correction: he wanted to feel it wrapped all the way around him. What was the bloody point in pretending any more? It was a mistake, it was a mess, and he shouldn’t be doing it, but what the hell. There wasn’t any mess that couldn’t be sorted. He was fed up with tiptoeing around like some randy schoolboy, engineering chance meetings with her. Well, that was going to stop. You couldn’t get that close to somebody and then pretend nothing had happened.
Jack put Ellie’s notepad and bits of pencil on her desk and cleared his throat, feeling it was a show-off thing to do even as he did it.
‘Look, Ellie,’ he said, ‘I should apologise for what happened in my office. I was completely out of line. You weren’t even conscious.’
Ellie made a funny little noise that might have been a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’. Jack squinted at her, but she didn’t say anything else.
He started again. ‘I’m sorry, Ellie, for how it happened, but not that it did happen.’
He saw her lower her eyes. She seemed to be finding her art pad fascinating. Well, she was going to listen to this next bit whether she wanted to or not. He took a step nearer. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks. It was going to happen sometime, you know that.’
No response.
‘It’s madness, I know. I mean, I’ve never mixed work … and …’
Ellie flinched and Jack stopped, stumbling over the cliché. He should have known that he couldn’t get away with that with Ellie. She’d picked up on how it made her sound like she was some kind of passive thing that he could either choose to treat as a colleague or a theme park ride. He groped around for something better to say, but Ellie blurted out, ‘Forget it, Jack. It was nothing. Forget it.’
There was a pleading tone to her voice that should have made him nod and turn round and leave the room. Instead it made him want to prove to her that she was wrong. He wanted to haul her out of the chair and taste her on his lips again.
‘Sorry, I can’t do that,’ he said flatly, and saw her drop her gaze back to that damned pad. So she wanted to look at it? Right. He reached for a pen and started to write across the pad. ‘This is my address,’ he said as he wrote. ‘I’m going home now and I’ll be there all evening. I want you, Ellie. I’m sorry if that scares you, but I do. If you want me … well, that’s where you’ll find me.’
In any other circumstances the look on her face would have made him laugh. It was terror mixed with complete bewilderment. Perhaps she was worried about what would happen to her at work if she took him up on his offer … or if she didn’t.
‘Look, I’m not a complete bastard, Ellie. I’ll understand if you don’t come round. I won’t mention this again … I’m not the kind of man who … If you do or don’t want to do anything about this, it won’t make any difference to anything here. Understand? Somehow we’ll work around it.’
She didn’t look convinced, was still peering at him as though he were some particularly poisonous creature.
‘At least think about it before you decide “no”.’ He gave what he hoped was a self-deprecating laugh.
He couldn’t do any more; it was up to her now. He had no idea if she was going to rip the paper into shreds once he had gone. All he could do was go home and wait.
Jack had barely left her office before Ellie reached across and tore the page off the art pad and threw it into the wastepaper bin. Women who slept with people at work were stupid; women who slept with people who were their boss were suicidal. It always ended in tears. And with Jack that was almost guaranteed. She would just be a new sensation for him, a flavour that he hadn’t tried before.
That was even before she thought about that worrying air of detachment that hung about him. No doubt he would stay sitting on the emotional sidelines whatever happened and that would be that. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be hurtling towards heartbreak and misery, followed swiftly by the search for a new job.
She ignored the voice in her head telling her that she was going to have to move on anyway now, even if she didn’t end up in Jack’s bed.
She got up, put on her jacket, picked up her bag and left the office. As she entered the lift, she told herself that she was doing the right thing. She walked through reception, now thankfully empty of Rachel, and then left the agency and hurried towards her bus stop.
She wasn’t going to think about it any more. She was going to go home, enjoy her holiday and then work out how to persuade Lesley it was time for a move.
She wasn’t going to become another notch on what was bound to be a bedpost already whittled down to match-stick proportions.
Ellie raised her chin. A warm breeze blew along the street and a smell of something cooking reached her. The evening sun glinting off the office buildings made everything look bright and exciting, and around her the sound of traffic ebbed and flowed. That tingle of anticipation that always hit her when she came out into a London evening started in her stomach and worked its way down to her toes and up into her chest. Everything in life was sitting out there waiting for her to grab it with both hands.
Including Jack.
Ellie walked on towards the bus stop for a few more paces and then stopped. Timid and stale, Sam had said. And out there was a glittering, dangerous man who wanted her. It would be madness to go back on her decision, though. Complete madness.
But the way his mouth had felt on hers had sent a spark of lust right down her body. She could still feel the heat of his hands on her bottom.
Where was it written down that she always had to do the sensible thing?
Well, there were other ways to make a decision. She could let fate decide. Taxis were impossible to get in this part of London at this time of night. If one came along before her bus, it would be a sign that she should go and find Jack. She was perfectly safe; there was no way there would be a taxi free within the next few minutes. Soon she would be safely on the bus and at least she could comfort herself that, for a few seconds at least, she had toyed with doing something she’d regret later.
Anyway, she wasn’t even certain she could remember the address he had written on that art pad. So even if by the wildest chance a taxi did turn up, she’d never be able to find her way to his flat.
She stuck her arm out.
There was a screech of tyres and a volley of beeping horns as a taxi executed a kamikaze U-turn in the middle of the road. Its yellow ‘For Hire’ sign shone brightly.
‘Where’d you wanna go, love?’ shouted the driver.
CHAPTER 22
Jack opened the door to his flat and Ellie’s pulse leaped way off the scale. When she had played this scene in her head in the taxi, she had never got any further than ringing his doorbell, but now there he was with his jacket off and his tie undone and his shirt sleeves rolled up and he looked much bigger and more dangerous than she remembered.
Ellie was vaguely aware of a huge window behind Jack that looked out on to the river, of a pale-wood floor and a huge black sofa. Everything else was a bit blurry.
What on earth was she thinking? She couldn’t do this.
‘I-just-came-to-say-I-can’t-do-this-and-I’m-sorry-but-I-have-to-go-home-now.’ She took a step backwards.
‘Oh, no, you don’t.’ Jack reached out, grabbed her by the arms and pulled her inside the flat.
His hands were so warm that she could feel them through her jacket. It brought a tight feeling to her chest.
Then she saw him take a step nearer and could not stop herself from looking up into his face. Suddenly the fear that he would see how much he affected her didn’t seem to matter any more. His grey eyes were filled with such longing that it felt as if he had actually reached out and caressed her.
Jack started to undo her jacket and Ellie stood there and let him, unable to think what else to do. She, Ellie Somerset, was st
anding in Jack Wolfe’s flat. She had come here for the express purpose of having sex with him. Putting it into words like that spooked her, and as Jack finished with the buttons and started to push the jacket down her shoulders, she made a little move away from him.
Jack put his hands on her shoulders, like he was about to give her a pep talk. ‘Relax, Ellie. You did the difficult bit deciding to come here. Just relax now.’
‘No, Jack, I can’t stay, honestly … I … I … don’t have the qualifications for this … I …’
‘Nice try, Ellie,’ he said, and pulled her jacket right off, ‘but this is one thing you can’t wisecrack your way out of.’
Ellie heard her jacket fall to the floor and Jack was standing right up close. He smelled intoxicating. Then, without warning, he pushed her gently against the wall and his mouth was on hers, soft but insistent. She felt his arms go round her and pull her closer in and the heat between her legs spiked all the way up into her belly. His tongue was pushing between her lips and she opened up and let him in. As his tongue touched hers, she found herself touching it tentatively back with her own.
‘Bloody hell, Ellie,’ he said accusingly, breaking his mouth from hers, ‘you’ve been eating liquorice.’
‘Yes, in the taxi,’ she gasped, as she felt his leg move between hers and nudge them further apart. ‘I … I had garlic chicken for lunch and I couldn’t find any mints, so—’ Jack bent to kiss her neck and Ellie felt her throat constrict and she was unable to say anything else.
Jack’s mouth found its way back on to hers, and this time when she touched his tongue, she heard him make a little sound that vibrated through her and set off an unbearable urge to cling on to him and push her hips against his groin. In response she felt his hand cup her breast through her dress. He gently rubbed her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and Ellie didn’t seem to have internal organs any more, just meltwater. She tried to pull his shirt free from his trousers so that she could feel his skin, but had no strength. Jack’s hand and mouth were tormenting her so that all she could think about was trying to get hold of a sensation that was dancing and shifting in a maddening way.
