The Couple Behind the Headlines

by Lucy King

  With all that for inspiration, how could she fail?

  What he was doing here, thought Jack, frowning up at the bank of windows that ran along the length of Imogen’s first floor and shoving his hands through his hair, he had no idea.

  He hadn’t planned on dropping by. Quite apart from the fact that he’d decided it would be a good idea to leave it for a while before seeing her again and to give himself time to reestablish his equilibrium and fortify his self-control before she could destroy it totally, after the weekend he’d had he’d intended to drive straight home and crash into bed.

  So why had he made the detour to see if Imogen was home? Why was he so pleased to see her lights on? And why when he’d pulled over and parked outside had his pulse started racing like a teenager’s on a first date?

  Jack gave his head a quick shake, then rubbed a hand over his face and stifled a yawn. Did it really matter? He opened the door and levered himself out of the car. Was there really any need to make a big deal over it? Of course there wasn’t. After thirty-six hours in the company of a three-year-old girl he simply felt like a while in the company of a twenty-eight-year-old one and there was nothing odd about that.

  Nor was there anything odd about the unsteadiness of his hand as he jabbed a finger at the doorbell. That was simply down to chronic sleep deprivation and an unexpectedly tough weekend.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and listened to the echo of the bell ringing upstairs. A couple of minutes later he heard the sound of footsteps heading to the door and his pulse sped up.

  There was a pause while Imogen presumably checked him out through the spyhole, then the click of the lock and the sliding of the chain. The door swung open, and when he looked down at her, standing there with tousled hair, glowing cheeks, sparkling eyes and a wide, dazzling smile, Jack knew exactly why he’d come.

  ‘Hi,’ she said with a breathlessness he hoped came from pleasure at seeing him and not from skipping down the stairs.

  ‘Hi,’ he said a little hoarsely.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘I was passing. On my way home.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  Her grin widened beguilingly and for a second his mind went blank. ‘What?’

  She waved a hand vaguely. ‘Oh, nothing. I was hoping for a distraction, that’s all.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Ah, just a little problem I was grappling with. Most unsuccessfully. But it doesn’t matter any more. Come in.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She held the door wide open and stood back. ‘Go straight up and turn right.’

  Jack brushed past her, followed her instructions and found himself in the sitting room, which was so warm and calm and relaxing that his exhaustion seeped right away.

  Soft light from the lamps dotted around the room spilled over a pair of squishy-looking sofas and a battered leather armchair, all positioned round a low glass coffee table that was piled high with magazines, books and trinkets. A fire blazed in the fireplace, either side of which were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with books, files and photos.

  As a strange sense of contentment settled over him, Jack took off his coat and dropped it on one of the sofas, then turned. Imogen stood in the doorway, watching him with an expression that flickered between pleasure and longing, and wariness and uncertainty.

  ‘You look wiped out,’ she said.

  ‘You look gorgeous.’

  An eyebrow arched in disbelief as she glanced down at what she was wearing. ‘In this?’

  ‘In that.’ Whatever it was—and it could hardly be called glamorous—it hugged every beautiful curve of her body. ‘You look very strokeable.’

  She smiled and his hands began to itch with the need to reach out and show her exactly what he meant. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d better not. I’m driving.’

  ‘I see.’ Her smile faded and she seemed to deflate right in front of him. But suddenly she lifted her chin up and pulled her shoulders back. ‘You could stay,’ she said quickly, her cheeks going bright red. ‘For supper, I mean. And whatever …’

  Supper and whatever sounded like heaven. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Great.’ She gave him a wonky kind of half smile but she didn’t look away. Didn’t turn away, either. ‘I’ll just go and get that wine, then, and—ah—check on the chicken.’

  Which was, presumably, her cue to leave. But to his fascination and to her obvious consternation she didn’t appear to be going anywhere. Her eyes didn’t leave his. And as she continued to hold his gaze Jack heard her breathing shallow and felt a reciprocal quickening of his pulse.

  Wondering if it would be entirely inappropriate to stride over, haul her into his arms and drag her to the floor, he saw her blink. Then sweep the tip of her tongue over her lips before letting out a tinkling little laugh. ‘It’s not fancy or anything,’ she said, her words tripping over each other so fast it occurred to him that she was nervous. ‘Just a roast. I often do them on the Sundays I’m around. Chicken, this time, obviously, otherwise why would I have said I’d better check on the chicken? And some vegetables. Carrots and leeks, from what I can remember. Oh, and potatoes, of—’

  Taking a couple of quick long steps towards her, Jack wrapped one arm around her waist, buried the other in her hair and put a stop to the torrent of words with his mouth.

  As he kissed her, hot and hard, he felt her melt against him, heard her moan, and the sound of it sent desire rocketing through him. She sighed against his lips, tilted her hips and pressed herself closer, and Jack thought he’d better stop before he lost all control.

  Reluctantly lifting his head, he drew back and stared down at her. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes glazed and her lips red and swollen and she looked so desirable he told himself that, whatever the initial reason for it, his decision to detour via here was the best move he’d ever made.

  ‘Thank you,’ she breathed.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Shutting me up.’

  ‘It was a pleasure.’

  ‘It was indeed. As you may have noticed, I tend to talk too much when I’m nervous.’

  He had, and he thought it rather adorable. ‘Are you nervous now?’ he muttered, faintly perplexed because he rarely found anything adorable.

  She leaned back in his arms and smiled up at him. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Good,’ he said firmly because he didn’t need to be thinking of Imogen as adorable.

  ‘I’ll just be a minute. Make yourself at home.’ Extricating herself from his arms, she backed away. Straight into the wall. She jumped and winced, then shrugged and flashed him a self-deprecating ‘ignore me, I’m an idiot’ kind of grin before disappearing through the door.

  The chicken was fine. Imogen, who was taking a wine glass from a cupboard and shaking her head in frustrated bewilderment, however, was not.

  She was twenty-eight, for heaven’s sake. She wasn’t naïve. Or inexperienced. So why did she have to be so gauche? Why did she have to rattle away like that in his vicinity? She’d always thought she’d got over that particular habit years ago, but she clearly hadn’t.

  And what exactly was it about Jack that reduced her to such a tangled bundle of nerves anyway? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know him, was it? And it wasn’t as if she had to worry about whether he was going to stay for more than just supper. The hungry way he’d been looking at her and the hot fierceness with which he’d kissed her moments ago gave her the impression that she only had to give him the nod and she’d be on the floor on her back and naked within seconds.

  Obviously his unexpected appearance at her door had thrown her more than she’d thought. When she’d first spotted him through her spyhole she’d been overwhelmed by a wave of delight, then relief at the realisation that she’d been presented with a solution to the problem she’d been mulling over without any success whatsoever.

  But when she’d seen him
prowling round her sitting room, her haven, his large body taking up such a great chunk of space and his presence wiping out all the air, her brain had kind of short-circuited. And then gone into complete meltdown when he’d told her he thought she looked gorgeous.

  Imogen felt a reluctant grin tug at her mouth as she ran her wrists under the cold tap and took a series of deep, steadying breaths. He must be completely shattered if he thought that, because without a scrap of make-up on and her oldest clothes she was not looking her best.

  She poured Jack a glass of wine, pleased to note her hands were no longer trembling, then pulled her shoulders back and headed into the sitting room. He was holding one of the many photos that sat on her shelves and staring down at it, the expression on his face so unfathomable that she instantly longed to know the reason for it.

  Her hours browsing the Internet, which hadn’t revealed as many in-depth personal details as she’d expected, had whetted her appetite and she wanted to know more. She shouldn’t, yet she did, so there’d be no giving of any nod and no tumbling to the floor and getting naked just yet.

  ‘How did the babysitting go?’ Imogen asked lightly, as if the mortifying previous ten minutes had never happened.

  Jack turned and looked up, then took the glass she held out. ‘Thank you. It was knackering,’ he said, regarding her thoughtfully. ‘But then you knew all along it would be, didn’t you?’

  Imogen hid a smile. ‘I did have an inkling.’

  ‘Because of these two?’

  She glanced down at the photo he was holding and nodded. ‘My nephew and niece. They’re five and three respectively. Gorgeous but tyrannical.’

  ‘You could have warned me,’ he murmured, putting the photo back.

  ‘And spoiled all your fun?’

  She sat at the end of one sofa while Jack settled himself into the armchair and grimaced. ‘It wasn’t fun. It was hell.’

  ‘Really?’ She frowned. He couldn’t mean that.

  ‘No, not really.’ He sighed, the grimace slowly morphing into a smile. ‘It was fine, but you are still a wicked wicked woman.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said demurely. ‘I do my best.’

  ‘You have a close family,’ he said, flicking a glance at the dozens of photos on the shelves.

  Imogen nodded. ‘Yes. It’s not that big, but we are close.’

  She thought she saw something flicker in the depths of his eyes, something that in anyone else she’d have suspected was envy, but couldn’t possibly be that in Jack. He seemed to value his solitariness highly—thrived on it even—so there was no way he’d ever want a noisy, messy family, the kind hers was.

  Or would he?

  Imogen blinked as the thought ricocheted round her head, and immediately warned herself not to go there. She was not going to try and inveigle her way into his psyche. She wouldn’t be welcome and she didn’t need to know his feelings about marriage or family or anything, in fact, other than whether he’d be up for a fling.

  ‘So what did you and Daisy get up to?’

  Jack rubbed a hand over his face and smiled, the shadows thankfully disappearing. ‘What didn’t we get up to? I thought I had a fairly short attention span but it’s not a patch on Daisy’s. We went to Regent’s Park, then the zoo and had an ice cream. And that was just the first hour.’ He shuddered. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again.’

  Imogen laughed. ‘She ran rings round you.’

  ‘She did.’

  And he didn’t sound entirely happy about the fact. ‘So I take it you’re not tempted to join the ranks of fatherhood just yet?’

  Jack’s hand froze mid rub, his gaze jerked to hers and he tensed. ‘No way.’

  At the vehemence in his voice curiosity spun through her hard and fast and made a complete mockery of her determination to stay away from his psyche.

  ‘What, never?’

  ‘Not planning to,’ he muttered, relaxing his shoulders, she thought, with rather more effort than was natural.

  Now she really was intrigued. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why would I?’ he said, taking a sip of wine, then sitting back, to all appearances the epitome of indifference. ‘You’ve seen my mother.’

  ‘Well, yes, but she’s not exactly typical, is she?’

  ‘Perhaps not, but she didn’t make for an idyllic childhood. Certainly not one I’d want to inflict on anyone else.’

  ‘Do you think you would?’

  Jack shrugged, and she had the feeling that this wasn’t the first time he’d had this conversation. ‘I work hard. I travel a lot. It could happen.’

  ‘But presumably there’d be another party involved.’ The hypothetical child’s mother, for instance, not that she particularly wanted to think about anyone else enjoying Jack’s considerable charms.

  ‘They could be worse, and I’m not prepared to take the risk.’

  No, well, she could see how having a mother like his might make a man wary of parenthood. At the memory of Jessica’s flamboyant behaviour on Friday evening, Imogen inwardly winced. While Jessica looked like fun, she couldn’t honestly admit she’d like her as a mother. And imagine having a grandmother like that.

  ‘I must say your mother didn’t look particularly maternal,’ Imogen murmured.

  ‘She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body,’ Jack said, and she wondered if he was aware of the bitterness that laced his voice. ‘The minute I was born she handed me over to her parents and carried on partying. She’s barely stopped since.’

  ‘So you were brought up by your grandparents?’ She’d read something about that on the Internet, but the details had been sketchy.

  He nodded, but his jaw was tight. ‘And a string of au pairs.’

  ‘What was that like?’

  Jack shrugged and she could see shutters slamming down over his eyes, instantly masking anything of importance. ‘My grandparents did their best.’

  ‘And the au pairs?’

  ‘Marginally better.’

  Imogen frowned. ‘What about your father?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Do you know who he was?’

  His mouth twisted into a humourless smile. ‘Oh, yes. He was a fellow pupil at my mother’s very expensive but surprisingly lax boarding school. He was shipped off to the States the minute the pregnancy became apparent, and stayed there.’

  ‘Do you see anything of him?’

  ‘No.’

  That seemed a shame. Her father and brother got on brilliantly and, she knew, deeply valued their relationship. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why would I? I’m the product of an accident. A reckless mistake.’ He shrugged as if it was all neither here nor there. ‘Anyway, he married years ago and has his own family now.’

  And that was quite enough of that, thought Jack, not liking the note of resentment that tinged his voice one little bit.

  He might not have a crystal-clear idea of why he’d dropped by this evening, but it definitely hadn’t been for a discussion about his childhood. Never mind that it was remarkably easy to talk to Imogen. Careless talk could cost him an emotional fortune and he had the deeply uneasy feeling that all she’d have to do was probe a bit further and he’d end up horizontal on the sofa spilling it all out while she made sympathetic noises and took notes on an imaginary clipboard.

  Which meant it was time to change the subject, he thought, stifling a shudder at the image, because he had no intention of spilling anything out. There was no way in hell he was going to elaborate on the trauma of the years of maternal neglect that had been inflicted on him when he’d been young. The aching loneliness. The constant awareness that he didn’t matter. That his mother was more interested in the social scene than her son and that somehow the blame for her indifference must lie with him. That he simply hadn’t been good enough.

  No, he had no desire to dwell on the past. No desire to go into the strict and critical attitude of his grandparents, who’d been terrified that, if they weren’t, genes would out and th
at he’d grow up to be as flighty and irresponsible as his parents.

  And he certainly had no desire to let in all the old feelings of inadequacy and hurt and confusion that had coloured his childhood and were now banging at the door of his conscience.

  So he did the only thing he could under the circumstances and went in search of distraction.

  He let his gaze run over Imogen, and as his body tightened with need, Jack leaned forwards and set his glass down on a pile of magazines on the coffee table. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about families,’ he murmured, shooting her a smouldering smile and not taking his eyes off her for one second.

  Imogen swallowed and her breath caught. ‘No?’ she said with a huskiness that scraped across his nerve endings. ‘Then why did you come?’

  In one fluid move, Jack was on his feet and came down on the sofa right next to her. Her mouth dropped open with a little O of surprise and the banked flames in her eyes flared to life.

  ‘I came for this,’ he muttered, pulling her into his arms and reaching for the zip of her top as his mouth captured hers.

  As his hands slid over her body, his heat and strength wrapped around her and his mouth devoured hers, Imogen closed her eyes. Part of her thought she ought to be outraged at the admission that he’d only popped by on the off chance of a booty call. Another, far greater part, was so pleased he’d decided to put a stop to her interrogation that she didn’t care.

  Because her heart had started twisting and aching for the lonely confused boy he must have been and she didn’t want it to. She didn’t want to want to seek out his mother and shake her by the shoulders until she acknowledged what a wonderful man her son was. She didn’t want to envy her brother or think about marriage and family or Jack in that context. All she wanted was more of this. More of the incredible way he made her feel and spectacular sex.

  So she shut it all off and gave herself up to sensation. To the hands roaming over her skin and deftly removing her clothing. To the weight of his body pressing her back into the sofa and the feel of his muscles beneath her hands. To the heat of his mouth on her throat, her breasts and then blissfully lower. To the sound of his harsh breathing and the thundering of her heart. And then to the glorious feel of him sliding into her and casting her into a fierce whirlpool of pleasure.