The Reunion Lie

by Lucy King

  They’d all worked bloody hard over the last year and deserved this success, he realised more belatedly than he’d have liked. They deserved his appreciation too, and he couldn’t blame them for giving him a wide berth.

  So pulling himself together, he tapped his now empty glass and, once he had their attention, made a quick toast. Then to a smatter of applause, and a cheer or two, he apologised for being such a grumpy sod and ordered another bottle of champagne.

  With single-minded focus he concentrated on the conversation, made himself laugh and joke with his colleagues until eventually he found the wherewithal to relax.

  By and large he thought he was doing pretty well and that he’d be able to keep it up for another hour or so when he could head home and crash out. Until out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of blonde hair, a shimmer of green and the trace of a scent his brain thought it recognised. Something about the combination made his fingers tighten round the stem of his glass, the laughter die in his throat and his entire body tighten with what he didn’t know.

  Surely Zoe wasn’t here? She couldn’t be. Why would she be? Closing his eyes, Dan took a deep breath and gave his head a quick shake. Then he opened his eyes and braced himself before glancing around just in case.

  There was no sign of a blonde in a green dress. Of course there wasn’t. But God, now he was seeing her? Smelling her? He might not trust women but he’d always been able to trust his instincts. If those were about to let him down as well, then what was left?

  Dan set his jaw and gritted his teeth and wished he could rewind time and choose a different pub to meet Pete, because frankly the last twenty-four hours had been about as far removed from his generally smooth and calm existence as it was possible to be, and despite what he might like to tell himself his nerves were shredded.

  So much so that he didn’t know what he would be imagining next. Zoe right behind him? Her voice at his shoulder? Her touch on his arm?

  And then he froze all over again because now he could hear her saying his name and feel her touching his arm and even his imagination wasn’t that good. Which meant that he hadn’t been wrong and that for some unfathomable reason she was here.

  For a moment Dan felt a burst of satisfaction that his instincts hadn’t failed, a surge of heat at the thought of her standing so close behind him, and an almost irresistible urge to whip round and drag her into his arms, all of which he instantly doused because if it got out who she was then he didn’t stand any chance of being left alone tonight.

  So, bracing himself, he turned slowly round and tried not to draw in a sharp breath as the full force of her effect unleashed itself on him.

  That flash of green was in fact a tight strapless dress that moulded itself to her and showed off inches of lovely creamy skin. It was a stupendous piece of tailoring, he thought, running his gaze down her. It looked incredible on her but would look even better pooled at her feet in the shadows of his bedroom.

  Gritting his teeth against the bolt of desire that rocked through him, Dan dragged his gaze back up but it didn’t alleviate the tension gripping him. Her hair was up, pulled loosely back into some sort of fixture that allowed tendrils to curl around her face, and she was wearing the kind of make-up that made her eyes look all dark and smoky and smouldering and her mouth pale.

  Overall it was a good look on her. A sexy look. The kind of look that made him think all she’d have to do was crook her little finger and he’d be right there, willingly going wherever she went and doing whatever she asked of him.

  Which was not the idea, he reminded himself.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he muttered, telling himself to focus on what was important.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  She glanced around and frowned. ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere a bit more private?’

  ‘Great idea,’ he murmured, checking that they weren’t attracting attention, then taking her arm and leading her off.

  The sooner he got her out of here, the better. The picture of them kissing had obscured her face, otherwise they’d be surrounded right about now, but who knew how long it would be before someone made the connection? In fact he ought to put her straight into a taxi and send her on her way because hadn’t he thought only a little while ago that he didn’t want to have anything to do with her ever again?

  But instead he kept her close as he scanned the hotel lobby, not for the exit, but for a dark secluded spot well out of the way of prying eyes. And when he spied a couple of chairs partially hidden by a giant potted palm he didn’t even think about why he wanted to hear what she had to say.

  ‘This private enough for you?’ he asked, once she’d arranged herself on the wicker chair and he’d flung himself into the one opposite.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said with a smile that scrambled his brain. ‘Congratulations, by the way,’ she added, leaning forwards, so intoxicatingly close and within reach that for a second he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, eventually coming round to the realisation that she was referring to the award and not his mental descent into chaos. ‘So why are you here, Zoe?’

  ‘You weren’t taking calls and when I turned up at your office earlier your receptionist said you weren’t seeing visitors.’

  ‘How did you know where I’d be?’

  ‘She told me.’

  Dan frowned. What the hell? His receptionist had given him a mushy little smile this morning and had muttered something about love’s young dream before he’d put her straight but this kind of interference was going too far. Come Monday morning they’d be having words.

  ‘Don’t blame her,’ said Zoe, reading his mind with alarming ease. ‘I was rather persistent.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said dryly as the way she’d got him to help her out last night sprang to the front of his mind.

  ‘It’s a new talent I seem to have developed.’

  ‘I didn’t see you earlier.’

  ‘No, well, I’ve only just arrived.’ She turned a little shifty. ‘I’m not exactly on the guest list.’

  ‘Gatecrashing?’ he said. ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘You should be. That’s not a talent I intend to develop.’

  ‘Are there any others I should know about?’

  She let those dark smoky eyes of hers drift down over him, and he felt his body respond wherever she lingered. His skin burned, his muscles tensed and he hardened where he had no business hardening in the middle of a work evening out. Then she slowly lifted her gaze, smiled slightly, as if she knew exactly the effect she was having on him and was wondering what she was going to do with it. ‘Possibly,’ she murmured.

  Dan swallowed hard and curled one hand into a fist and wrapped the other one around it in order to get rid of the itch to reach for her. ‘You have heard we’re no longer engaged, haven’t you?’ he said just in case she was here because of that.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said dryly. ‘Samantha was very quick to ring with that piece of information.’

  Dan inwardly winced. ‘Didn’t you get my voicemail?

  ‘Voicemail?’

  ‘I left a few.’

  ‘Oh, well, no. I don’t often answer the phone when I’m working. My sister Lily usually takes care of that, but she’s away.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to hear it from Samantha.’

  She waved a dismissive hand. ‘Don’t be. There’s absolutely no need to apologise. In fact I rather think I should be thanking you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I took your advice and finally told her where to get off.’

  An unexpected bolt of admiration made him suddenly smile. ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘I didn’t wait to find out.’

  ‘And how
are you taking it?’

  ‘I feel extraordinarily liberated.’

  She looked it. She looked sort of glowing. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he said gruffly.

  She smiled. ‘Thank you. So do you.’

  For a moment they just stared at each other, their gazes locked together, until Zoe blinked and the connection broke. His heart beating oddly fast, Dan shoved a hand through his hair and swallowed. ‘So what do you want, Zoe?’

  She took a deep breath and looked him straight in the eye. ‘OK, well, the thing is I rather think I want you.’

  His heart practically stopped. ‘What for?’ he said, his imagination instantly conjuring up a dozen different possibilities before he reined it in, because surely she couldn’t be wanting what he was wanting. No. It was probably advertising advice she wanted.

  ‘Some fun,’ she said, blowing that theory out of the water.

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Well, it’s sex I’m after, really.’

  Dan nearly swallowed his tongue. ‘Sex?’

  If she noticed his lack of original vocabulary, she didn’t mention it. Instead she looked at his mouth and nodded. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Anything else other than sex?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not especially. I don’t mind either way.’

  Barely able to believe he was having this conversation, Dan fought for composure. ‘You don’t seem the no-strings type.’

  ‘I’m not. Or at least I haven’t been. And that’s rather the point.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve got stuck in a bit of a rut, and a pretty boring one at that. I’ve been working too hard. I need to get out of it before I fossilise. I’m thirty-two, Dan, and I’ve never really had truly amazing sex, and I want some.’

  ‘What makes you think it would be truly amazing between us?’

  God, what was he, stupid? Zoe merely arched an eyebrow as if in perfect agreement with his silent self-assessment.

  ‘OK, forget that,’ he muttered. ‘Dumb question. How have you got to thirty-two without ever having had great sex?’

  She shrugged and tellingly flickered her eyes away from his for a second. ‘Oh, just unlucky, I guess.’

  Some kind of sixth sense told him that there was more to it than that, but Dan was in no fit state to work out what, let alone begin an in-depth intelligent conversation about it, which was good because as he no longer did the sharing of personal information he wasn’t particularly interested.

  All he could think about was how incredibly gorgeous she looked, how great she’d felt last night, how bemused—and disappointed—he’d been by her dramatic flight from the pub, and how much he wanted her.

  ‘So what do you think?’ she prompted.

  Dan’s mouth went dry and his blood roared in his ears and his brain struggled to formulate any thought that didn’t involve Zoe naked. If they slipped out the back and caught a taxi there, who would ever know? And God knew how long it had been since he’d had sex. ‘You really want this?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, if you do.’

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  She gave him a slow seductive smile. ‘I was hoping you might say that.’

  With his heart beating furiously and desire pounding through him Dan leapt to his feet, held out his hand and said, ‘Then you’d better come with me.’

  SEVEN

  When Dan made a decision he certainly didn’t hang about, thought Zoe, sitting in the back of a taxi a quarter of an hour later. He hadn’t even gone back inside to say goodbye to the people he’d been with. He’d just whisked her off to the cloakroom to retrieve their coats, then he’d bundled her into a taxi, given the driver his address and they were off.

  And thank God for it because she’d been on the verge of spontaneously combusting for a while now and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could contain herself. That electrifying conversation they’d had in the hotel lobby had been so hot she was surprised the wicker chair she’d been sitting in hadn’t gone up in flames. At one point she’d even vaguely looked around for the location of the nearest fire extinguisher.

  At the time she’d thought Dan had been equally affected—he’d certainly seemed as rapt by her as she’d been by him—and she’d half expected him to grab her the minute they’d got into the taxi.

  But he hadn’t. He’d immediately turned to stare out of the window and hadn’t said a word since they’d pulled away so what was going through his mind now she had no idea.

  Under normal circumstances Zoe didn’t have a problem with silence. On the contrary, generally she was a huge fan of the stuff. But this silence was deafening and vibrating with a weird kind of tension and she felt as if she were sitting on knives. The edge to him she’d noticed earlier was still there, filling the foot or so between them in the taxi and making her stomach quiver with anticipation and her skin prickle.

  It was all so excruciating, and growing even more so with every mile the taxi ate up that eventually Zoe couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Clearing her throat, she turned slightly to face his profile.

  ‘Did you know that the first white line in the road appeared in this country in nineteen twenty-one?’ she said, her voice sounding weirdly loud in the inky darkness of the back of the taxi.

  ‘What?’ Dan muttered, not taking his eyes off whatever held his fascination, which really wasn’t that much of a surprise since it was undoubtedly more interesting than her stab at conversation.

  Not that she cared about that particularly. Given that exhibitionism had never been part of her plan, as far as she was concerned anything was better than the alternative of jumping into his lap and wrapping herself around him, and, as numbingly boring and unsexy as traffic planning might be, the more she concentrated on the lines in the road, the less she thought about the lines of his thighs and the less her fingers itched with the urge to get acquainted with them.

  ‘The first white line in the road appeared in this country in nineteen twenty-one,’ she said again and silently dared him to look at her.

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘It did. Such a simple thing,’ she mused, ‘and yet did you know that white lines can save up to eight times as many lives as a speed trap?’

  ‘Can they?’

  ‘So the statistics show. Filter lanes can reduce accidents by as much as twenty per cent on some stretches of road.’

  ‘How interesting,’ he said, sounding as though he thought it anything but.

  ‘I find it fascinating,’ she said, ‘but then I find any kind of statistical analysis fascinating.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  At the tightness of his voice and the flatness of his tone, Zoe frowned. Dan hadn’t budged an inch. He was still sitting there with his arms folded staring resolutely out of the window, his jaw tight and his brow furrowed.

  In light of her less than scintillating conversation, was he regretting his decision to take her home? It was entirely possible, of course, but she wasn’t giving up without at least a bit of a fight. So what might he find interesting? she wondered. What would capture his attention and get him to look at her?

  She racked her brains for a moment before seeing a billboard flash past and having something of a light-bulb moment.

  ‘Take underwear, for example,’ she said.

  There was the tiniest of pauses. ‘Underwear?’ he said.

  ‘Women’s underwear in particular.’

  She thought she heard him blow out a breath. ‘What about it?’ he muttered.

  ‘When men buy their wives or girlfriends underwear, seventy per cent of them go for red lace with bows and stuff hanging off it and holes in unusual places. Ninety per cent of women prefer white or black. That’s a lot of unused underwear
sitting at the back of drawers and a lot of disappointed women. I should think there’s an advertising opportunity for you in there somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Of course,’ she added conversationally, ‘for five per cent of women it’s irrelevant anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they don’t wear any underwear at all.’

  ‘Five per cent?’

  Zoe nodded. ‘Five per cent.’ Surely it had to be about that?

  ‘Draughty,’ he murmured, still resolutely staring out of the window.

  ‘It can be,’ she said, and with a little wiggle deliberately pulled the hem of her dress down.

  That got his attention. And that of the taxi driver if the spluttered cough that came from the front seat was anything to go by.

  In the ensuing thundering silence she heard Dan inhale slowly, deeply, as if bracing himself, and then watched as he slowly twisted round, his eyes landing on her thighs before travelling up the length of her and finally meeting her own.

  And then it was her turn to draw in a sharp breath because the fierce hunger in his expression, the desire blazing in the depths of his eyes and the rigid tension radiating off his body was just about rendering her boneless. Oh, he wasn’t regretting his decision, she thought dazedly. He wasn’t regretting it at all.

  ‘You’ll catch your death,’ he said, his eyes glittering dangerously and his face all dark and tight.

  ‘Want to warm me up?’ she suggested, although he was doing a pretty good job of that with just his gaze.

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Then what are you waiting for?’

  Dan cast a quick glance at the taxi driver before turning back to her and practically pinning her to the seat with the intensity of his gaze. ‘Privacy.’

  She pouted. ‘Party pooper.’

  He gave her a glimmer of a smile. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’