What She Wants (52 page)

because Christy would know she was lying. She hadn’t picked them up until nearly four the other day.

‘Pity,’ he said lightly. ‘We could have had lunch. I do like your shirt,’ he added, one dark hand stroking the lapels of the traitorous blouse. ‘You wear the most interesting clothes.’ He was grinning at her, one hand still caressing the fabric of her blouse. He was so close that Hope could feel the heat of his breath on her face.

‘This is a very disturbing outfit,’ he said huskily. ‘I can’t imagine that I’d get any work done at all if I had to look at you all morning.’

‘You don’t have to look at me,’ Hope said stupidly.

Christy smiled slowly. ‘But I’d like to.’ Those eyes roved all over her, taking in the swell of her breasts, the full curve of her hips and the soft coral mouth trembling in anticipation. His head came closer to hers, closer, until his full mouth hovered just over hers, the glimmer of a smile curving up the edges.

Hope didn’t want to but she couldn’t help it. Her ‘I’m happily married’ spiel fell apart in her mind and she let herself be swept along on the intoxicating sensation of being inches away from the sexiest man she’d ever met. When Christy’s mouth plunged down on hers, she kissed him back. His hands joined together in the small of her back, pulling her close to him, moulding her to him. It was different from the kiss in the car. Then, they’d been constrained by space. Here, in a discreet corner half hidden by a tall hedge, there were no constraints. Christy held Hope’s quivering body against his, letting her feel the lean hardness of his body jammed up against her. She responded fiercely, winding her arms around his neck, running her hands through the soft curls of his hair, pulling him closer to her as if she were a deep sea diver dying for lack of air and he was a spare scuba tank.

The kiss seemed endless, Hope was lost in Christy’s deliciously probing mouth. Every inch of her body yearned for him, every inch leaned towards him like a flower reaching

for the sun. Her hands rippled through his hair, sliding down to his shoulders, delighting in being able to touch him. His hands left the relative safety of her lower back and slid down to cradle her buttocks. Hope couldn’t stop herself moaning as his fingers pulled her closer to him, leaving the most exquisite tingling sensation in her lower body. She wanted him, here and now. She wanted him to push her up against the wall and rip her clothes off, begging her to let him make love to her, crying out for her to say yes. Yes, yes …

‘Yes,’ moaned Hope dizzily as Christy’s lips burned down past her neck into the buttoned up cleavage of her glued-on shirt.

‘Yes?’ he said hoarsely. ‘You mean that?’

‘Yes, I know it’s wrong but I can’t help it,’ Hope wailed.

‘It’s not wrong.’ Christy’s expert fingers were rapidly undoing the buttons of her blouse and then his hands were inside, touching the fabric of her bra, one hand pulling it away to touch the sensitive skin of her breast itself. Hope moaned with lust as his fingers circled her nipple, tweaking and stroking until she was a volcano of excitement. She couldn’t remember being so turned on in her life. Every part of her strained towards him, liquid with desire …

The shrill ringing tone of Christy’s mobile phone made them both jump.

‘Jesus!’ gasped Christy, whipping a hand out from Hope’s blouse and searching inside his jacket for his phone.

‘Christy De Lacy,’ he said smoothly, recovering his savoir faire while Hope stood there, both her mouth and her blouse gaping.

‘Mr Wilson, of course we haven’t forgotten you,’ Christy was saying, switching into work mode at the drop of a hat. It was as if he hadn’t practically been having sex with Hope a moment before.

The exquisite sensation of being wanted by Christy vanished, to be replaced by the hard, cold truth that when duty called, he had been quite capable of shoving her aside. And, like an animal on heat, she’d blindly forgotten her duty to

her husband. What had they been doing? What had she been doing? Horrified, she buttoned up her blouse, picked up her coat from the ground where she’d dumped it in high passion, and ran to her car. So much for ‘I love my husband very much’, she told herself fiercely as she threw her belongings into the car. You’re nothing but a lying, cheating tramp, she cried, hurtling the car down the drive lest Christy race after her for a repeat performance. But there was no sign of him. No, she thought bitterly, he was back in character, playing the master of the Manoir universe to perfection, having no doubt forgotten his passionate snog with the stupid, wanton part timer from the accounts office. The stupid married woman, with a cuckold for a husband. Now Christy would look down on Matt, smugly thinking I had your wife, mate and it was all her fault. At that moment, Hope hated herself more than she ever had in her whole life. What had she done? At home, she stripped off her clothes and put on her oldest jeans and an elderly, deeply unflattering grey sweatshirt. She wanted to tell someone what had happened, to seek some sort of solace in the sisterhood of having someone say it was nothing, nothing had happened and, therefore, she had nothing to be guilty about. But she couldn’t reach Sam either in the office or on her mobile. In desperation, she tried Mary-Kate but the chemist phone was engaged. And Delphine knew Christy, which would make it harder to tell her. She sat at the computer and tried to compose a note to Sam but when she started explaining what had happened, the shame hit her again. Looking at those blank, cold little words describing what she’d done, he kissed me and I let him, I kissed him back, Hope knew she couldn’t bear to tell Sam how low she’d sunk. Sam would be ashamed of her and with reason. Miserably, Hope put on her WelingtOn boots and went outside to do the job she most hated: cleaning out the hen shed.

The hens didn’t spend much time in their shed during the day, except when it was being cleaned out. Then, they abandoned their usual activity of pecking the ground for hours on end and arrived en masse to sit on their perches and look outraged at all the activity, clucking non-stop in disgust. ‘Stop complaining,’ growled Hope crossly, as she started shovelling out the floor which was a mass of straw and hen droppings. The smell was awful, but even worse were the maggots crawling from the eggs which flies laid in the midst of the droppings. Seeing those wriggling white bodies always made Hope feel nauseous. Well, she deserved to feel nauseous today. It was her punishment, her penance. Gritting her teeth, she shovelled fiercely. When she finally got through to Sam late that evening, Hope decided against saying anything. Not that Sam was a prude or anything, but Hope knew that infidelity was not like any other sin in life. It was such a taboo topic, not the type of thing people discussed. People who condoned all sorts of mad behaviour could be shocked by the thought of cheating on a partner. For all that Sam and Matt didn’t get on, she might be utterly stunned to find out that Hope had even toyed with the idea of cheating on him. Worse still, she’d be so disappointed in her sister, so Hope said nothing and they chatted idly for ten minutes. On Friday, Mary-Kate phoned to say she had the flu, so did Virginia, Delphine was getting it and that the Macrame Club on Saturday was therefore cancelled. Hope felt like crying. The weekend stretched dismally in front of her, with no adult company and no chance to blurt out her awful story. ‘You sound a bit fluey yourself,’ Mary-Kate said suspiciously. ‘I’m fine,’ lied Hope. After she hung up, she stared miserably out the window where the children were happily making mud pies and were

up to their eyes in dirt. They were utterly happy. She felt like hell but she had nobody else to blame but herself. There was only one option: she had to give up her job. She couldn’t bear the embarrassment of ever seeing Christy again. But how would she ever face Matt?

CHAPTER NINETEEN

‘Where’ll we go for dinner?’ asked Morgan as he and Sam wandered out of the cinema into the cool night air of Leicester Square.

‘Dinner?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve just eaten a mega bucket of popcorn. How can you be hungry? You must have a tape worm in there.’ She pointed at his lean belly in mock horror.

‘That’s my secret,’ he smiled. ‘Us blokes have to suffer to be beautiful, you know. Leg waxing, tapeworms, the whole business…’

Sam laughed. ‘I’d like to see your face if anyone waxed any bit of you. Like,’ she grinned evilly, ‘the bikini line.’

Morgan winced. ‘OK, you win. Women have it really tough, blah, blah, blah. But it’s not easy being a hunter gatherer.’

Beside him, Sam raised her eyes theatrically to heaven.

‘Besides, we decided we’d go out for a movie and dinner,’ Morgan added. ‘We’ve only done half of it. I’m keen on doing the dinner part too. I’m a growing boy and I need my food.’

‘Only if we split the bill,’ Sam interjected because this wasn’t a date precisely and she wanted to get the facts straight at the start. Morgan had phoned up the day before and said he fancied seeing the new Tom Hanks movie and asking if she wanted to come along too. Definitely not a romantic evening, Sam had decided, from his tone of voice. A casual tone of voice. Just a friend asking another friend for a night out. Which meant that the bill-splitting thing had to be sorted out.

‘Whatever,’ Morgan said. ‘Anyway, I owe you for dinner at your place.’ They walked in companionable silence, Sam struggling to keep up with Morgan’s long-legged lope. Normally, people had to hurry to catch up with her. They wandered round Soho looking for somewhere to eat and ended up outside a suitably dimly lit Italian restaurant which promised lots of dishes ‘like Mama used to make’. ‘They’ve never tasted my mother’s cooking, then,’ Morgan joked as they went in. ‘She’s a highly talented woman but the kitchen is not her forte. My father has to do all the cooking because she can’t boil water.’ Sam was surprised. ‘You never usually talk about yourself.’ ‘Hello,’ breathed a very un-Italian looking blonde waitress who smiled admiringly up at Morgan. ‘Table for two? No problem at all.’ She found them a table then handed Morgan the menus, almost reverently. Sam watched, half-amused, half-angry. The only positive sign was that Morgan didn’t appear to notice the waitress’s wide-eyed admiration. ‘I don’t talk much about myself because there’s not much to talk about,’ Morgan shrugged when they were alone again. ‘I’m very dull.’ ‘Our waitress doesn’t think so,’ Sam said impishly. ‘Nor does Tanya in the shop near us, or any one of the trails of women I see smiling goofily at you all the time.’ ‘Jealous, Ms Smith?’ Morgan had a piercing gaze when he wanted to use it: his face became more hawkish than usual, narrowed eyes staring at her curiously over that long nose. For one crazy moment, Sam almost thought he wanted her to be jealous. That he wanted her to say ‘yes, I’m jealous as sin of any woman who looks crossways at you.’ But he couldn’t, she was sure of it. Morgan, for all that she loved his company, wasn’t interested in her, not in that way. She

was most firmly a platonic friend, someone he liked but would never fancy, someone he could talk to when he was having a break from the Tanyas and Mirandas that waved to him when he stepped out his front door. Granted, he didn’t pay them any attention. In fact, he was rarely more than friendly to them, really, even though they looked at him with undisguised lust as if they’d love to rip his suede jacket off his lanky frame and trail long nails over his muscles.

But best of all, there had been no sign lately of the youthful, doe-like Maggie, the girl who’d rushed into Morgan’s arms that evening. Sam dared not ask about her but hoped that her absence meant she was out of Morgan’s life for good.

She took a long, cool sip of water.

‘It’s hot in here,’ she said, fanning herself with her hand.

Morgan grinned at her, eyes crinkling up in amusement.

‘Stop grinning and start talking,’ she said. ‘You’re far too secretive you know. You could be on the run from Interpol for all I know, or on the FBI’s most wanted list.’

He nodded. ‘There’s a reward out for my arrest, obviously. Not much but enough to, say,’ he considered it, ‘redecorate your apartment and buy a nice car, I imagine.’

‘A stand up comedian, I should have guessed,’ Sam laughed. ‘No, really, tell me about yourself.’

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, and then looked a bit blearily at her.

‘Did it ever occur to you that when people don’t talk about things, it’s because they don’t want to talk about them?’

‘Yes,’ Sam replied equably, ‘but I still ask. I’m direct, you know.’

He laughed. ‘There are chief inspectors in Scotland Yard who are less direct than you are. Right, get your notebook out, Inspector, what do you want to know?’

Sam felt herself go hot again. What she wanted to ask was about his relationship history, how many women he’d

gone out with, if he had ever lived with anyone or been married. But she couldn’t ask that sort of thing because then, he might realize she was interested in him. God forbid. How humiliating that would be. As if Mr Serial-Dater-of-TwentySomething-Nubile-Blondes would be interested in a thirty-nine-and-eleven-months-year-old tough cookie. He hated tough cookies. Sam did what she always did: when in a difficult situation, discuss work. ‘You aren’t an internet millionaire, I checked,’ she said. ‘So what do you do?’ And how come you have the money to buy the house next door? was the unspoken question. ‘You mean, how did I manage to buy the house next door to you?’ Morgan said solemnly. She bit her lip and burst out laughing. ‘I confess, that was my real question.’ The waitress arrived with their meals. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ the waitress asked, gazing at Morgan. He favoured her with a warm, engaging smile that made Sam go weak, as well as want to slap the waitress for impertinence. ‘No thanks, everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Sam said crossly, digging her fork into her pasta. ‘That woman was all over you like a cheap suit. They throw themselves at you. It’s shameless.’ She twisted her fork viciously. ‘She was simply doing her job,’ Morgan said in astonishment. ‘She has to ask if everything’s all right. What are you on about?’ Sam stared at him. Did he honestly not have a clue? Did he think that other men spent their lives with women giving them the sort of longing looks that chocoholics gave Snickers bars? ‘Oh nothing,’ she said. ‘Go on, you were going to tell me about your job.’ ‘I was a venture capitalist,’ Morgan said, mopping up sauce with his bread roll. ‘I was a partner in a firm in the