by Unknown
When she resurfaced, Lloyd was standing, open-mouthed, at the poolside.
‘I’ll buy it!’ she called up to him, wiping water from her eyes and nose. ‘Do you think they’ll take an offer on the pool? I don’t want the house.’
He laughed, and watched her backstroke away, staring hopefully at her undies in case they had gone see-through. But Ellen had swum often enough in her faithful Sloggis to know that they preserved your dignity as well as – if not better than – a bikini.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she asked.
Lloyd gave her a wolfish wink. ‘No underpants. Besides, I prefer to watch.’
Ellen had a feeling it had a lot more to do with not wanting to ruin his hairdo before their meal, but she let it pass. Teasing him was too easy. ‘I’ll just do a couple of lengths and then I’ll be out.’ She crawled her way to the shallow end in smooth, easy movements, unspeakably relieved to have found a way of rinsing away the storm-gathering, nicotine-craving tension. A few more minutes in the courtyard cauldron and she would probably have either clouted smooth, calculated, sexy Lloyd or kissed him, and she wanted to do neither. She wanted him to sell her parents’ house ASAP so that she could fly away and find blue seas and pools all over the world to swim in.
So when she mounted the steps, tipping her head from side to side to rid her ears of water, she paused beside him. He was leaning against the west wall of the courtyard in one of his pretty poses, cooling off in the shadows. ‘You haven’t agreed to my terms yet,’ she reminded him, a thousand times more relaxed than she had been when she jumped in. Cooled by the water, her libido had snuggled back into its hidey-hole and refused to resurface.
‘I agree.’ The white smile beamed out of the shadows. ‘Do you really expect me to say anything else when you’re standing in front of me looking like that?’
‘Have you got a problem with it?’ she asked.
‘Only that I want to kiss you more than anything in the world right now.’ His eyes gleamed, but he didn’t move.
Ellen could hardly be surprised. He’d made his attraction to her very clear, and she was tramping about in wet underwear, although she no longer felt particularly sexy – just relaxed and cool-skinned for the first time all day.
She ducked her head away, squeezing water from her hair, and glanced at him again, thinking how different he was from Richard – the tongue-tied beach bum, who wouldn’t even notice whether a girl was wearing a microscopic bikini or a full-length drysuit if she made him laugh, who had no smooth banter or babe-magnet designer casual wear, whose only girlfriend until now had been Ellen, and who thought water sports were better than sex, not a form of it.
Apart from Gavin Grayson at the age of five (school playground, in exchange for a Frazzle), and Damian Atkins at the age of fourteen (by the ping-pong table in the youth club because her best friend was snogging his best friend), Ellen had only ever kissed Richard. She couldn’t imagine what another man’s mouth tasted like. She wondered whether their tongues and lips felt different.
She had no great desire to kiss Lloyd right now, but he was extremely attractive and looked as though he’d know what he was doing. She was also pretty certain that he didn’t want to fall in love, get married and have kids. He could make her knickers feel tight – sometimes – and was far sexier when he wasn’t talking. She could think of worse places to start. It might stop Richard creeping into her head so much.
‘Why don’t you, then?’ she suggested.
It was certainly nothing like kissing Richard. It was surprisingly gentle, for a start – his lips were soft and searching, moving slowly between hers. A cautious hand held her waist as though her skin was fine silk and another cupped her chin, the fingertips tracing the curve of her ear. As a practised seducer’s kiss, it was unexpectedly timid and passive.
Ellen watched his face as they kissed, the dark lashes closed against the tanned cheeks, the perfect skin still gleaming from the heat of the evening.
To her regret, her knickers didn’t tighten. Still sodden from the pool, they drooped like old-lady drawers and started to feel a bit chilly.
Lloyd pulled away, his eyes fluttering open as he smiled, then let out a low growl and tilted his head to the other side to swap nose positions. Now his mouth applied more pressure as he sought out her tongue with his, his chin so much softer than Richard’s goatee bristle. Ellen felt her lips yield automatically, allowed her body to be pulled closer to his and tilted up on her toes, but she felt hollow inside. His body was very different from Richard’s – taller and less solid, wider at the shoulder and narrower at the hips. When she reached up, she felt a thick, clean mop of hair, not the downy stubble of a balding buzz-cut. The beginnings of his erection – the same familiar, shifting prod – was higher up because he was so much taller, nudging her in the belly rather than the crook of her groin. As it stirred and grew it moved her navel ring from side to side as if it was a miniature door-knocker being rattled.
She tried kissing him back harder, hoping to kick-start something within her, but the only throttle she pressed was his as his tongue leaped enthusiastically in response, probing deeper, his body sliding against hers, the once-gentle hand slipping to her arse and encountering a damp buttock – the erection positively leaped to attention, rattling her belly ring like a hammer on a gong.
Ellen pulled away, wondering what in hell was wrong with her. It wasn’t unpleasant kissing him, but it felt no different from getting a shoulder rub while tasting a new wine. In return, he seemed far too eager to pummel her fibroids and down her in one.
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’ She held him at arms’ length, her elbows locking as he tried to lunge forward again. ‘Shall we go and eat?’
‘Sure.’ He let her go reluctantly and flicked on the big white smile.
She turned away, wishing she had just told the truth, that she didn’t want to kiss him any more because her experiment had failed, and that while she was actually quite hungry, she was just as happy to go home and eat alone because they had nothing in common, and there was probably some good TV on. At least she’d save him the restaurant bill, so that his wallet wasn’t dented even if his pride was.
But Ellen was Jennifer Jamieson’s daughter, and while Jennifer would certainly not approve of showing your date your underwear then kissing him to see if you fancied him before the meal, she believed in good manners. She had spent years teaching her daughter to be ladylike, gracious and considerate, battling to soften the tomboy edges. It would, Ellen thought, be very bad manners simply to ask Lloyd for a lift home. She would have to spin out her table-talk and try her best to put him off gently by dessert.
She smiled coolly at him over her shoulder as she pulled on her skirt. ‘I warn you, I eat like a pig and have no table manners,’ she started as she intended to carry on, ‘and I’ll probably ogle all the waiters.’
Standing on the splashed paving stones beside the pool, watching her stoop down to fetch her clothes and sandals, Lloyd was tempted to stop at his mother’s house on the way to the restaurant and warn her that there might be a family wedding imminently.
The moment Lloyd swigged back his first glass of champagne at the Duck Upstream, it was abundantly clear that he couldn’t hold his drink. ‘You are,’ he told Ellen, in an undertone, his accent half-way between mink and manure, ‘the most fantastic thing to come into my life since Seaton’s International.’
That was when Ellen discovered that she had misinterpreted Lloyd Fenniweather’s smooth, mock-toff banter. He was not as posh as he made out, nor as worldly wise. The smooth-slicker act – and it was an act – rapidly came unstuck in vino veritas, and his egotism grew gargantuan.
‘I love this place,’ he told her, looking cockily around the room. ‘It used to be such a dump, but Pat and Gina – they’re the new owners – have turned it around totally. I’d like to own somewhere like this some day – as a hobby, of course. I plan to retire at forty.’ His accent was slipping like a teenager�
�s makeup now, revealing the soft, fresh-faced local burr beneath the wised-up drawl.
The Duck Upstream was, as Pheely had warned, a gourmet pub rendered so pretentious by its current owners that it would make New York feel unfashionable, London feel unhistorical and Paris feel like a bad cook, or at least that was its smug belief. When trading as the plain old Pheasant, it had attracted a strong local and tourist following, eager eaters returning again and again for the legendary home-made sausages, the freshly barbecued trout and the beef and ale pies. Now villagers rarely if ever ate there, and most of the custom came from London and overseas. The car park looked like a prestige motor showroom, the coat rack was a small designer boutique and the dining room resembled Harrods’ fine furniture repository.
Ellen hated it. Lloyd clearly thought he had brought her to Mecca-on-the-Wold.
‘Tonight is really special.’ He fixed the Demerara eyes on her and burned every calorie in them. ‘You are so sexy. I bet you never thought you’d meet somebody like me while you were here, did you?’
‘No – not exactly,’ she said awkwardly.
‘We’re going to be so good together.’ He winked roguishly and squeezed her knee with a sweaty hand.
Before Ellen could think of a polite brush-off, an eager hostess had swept in on them like a magpie on a pair of glittering earrings.
‘Everything all right, so far?’ she asked, in an affected voice, thrusting menus into their faces.
‘Divine, Gina.’ Lloyd blasted her with the white smile. ‘This is Ellen – you’ll be seeing a lot more of her. She’s just moved into the village.’
Gina thrust out a paw and arranged her face in a wince-like smile; the Mallen-streak hair and antique jewellery created a theatrical counterpoint to her chi-chi restaurant.
Ellen shook her hand. ‘And I’m about to move out again, as soon as Lloyd has sold the house.’
Lloyd let out a little growl. ‘We’ll see about that.’
‘Well, enjoy!’ Gina winced her way into a muted gay laugh. ‘We like to make our diners feel like members of our special family.’ She swooped off through a swinging door to scream at her staff for failing to spot that Lloyd’s glass was at a low ebb.
‘Lovely woman,’ Lloyd purred, giving Ellen a hot look and raising his glass to his lips before he remembered that it was empty.
Rather than go for all-out, wallet-stealing pretension, like the nearby Eastlode Park, the Duck Upstream claimed to encourage a ‘friendly, convivial dining experience’, but Ellen found nothing convivial about the hushed library-reading-room atmosphere, the purse-lipped waiting staff and the modern minimalism that had stripped the old pub of its character.
Diners like she and Lloyd started off (like children in the infant’s class) by reading their menus over a cocktail and an appetiser in the Mallard Drawing Room – the old pub saloon, now with natural plaster walls and a seagrass floor scattered with uncomfortable glossy green sofas that required muscular legs to stay on board. Ellen braced her calves to stop her bum sliding off and dipped her head to avoid a nearby spiky flower arrangement as she read the menu and worriedly watched Lloyd order more champagne. ‘Don’t you think you should go slow if you’re driving?’
‘I thought I might leave the car here and pick it up in the morning,’ he murmured, with a suggestive wink. ‘Seen anything you fancy?’
Ellen gripped her menu. Not you, I’m afraid, she thought wretchedly. Oh, God, why do I get myself into these things? Excited, flirtatious Lloyd was about a fifth as sexy as smarmy, calculating-agent Lloyd. Smarmy Lloyd, in turn, was hardly sexy at all compared with irritated, pretentious Lloyd. And that Lloyd, it transpired, didn’t really exist at all. She had made him up to satisfy her desire for a little low-level sexual tension.
‘We’ll have to come here on a Wednesday next time – they have a fantastic pianist, really romantic,’ he said cheerfully, as he read the menu. ‘Shall we start with oysters?’
‘I’m allergic to seafood,’ Ellen lied. ‘I think I’ll just have the warm sardine salad.’
He smiled indulgently and patted her knee again. ‘I hate to tell you this, Ellen, but sardines live in the sea.’
‘I can eat fish.’ She gave him a withering look.
He tilted his head and smiled playfully. ‘I love all your curious little ways. You are a creature of mystery.’
He was sounding more and more like Austin Powers. Ellen felt mildly sick.
‘What’s endive?’ he asked, as he read down the list.
‘Posh word for disgustingly bitter lettuce,’ she said distractedly, checking her watch for the fifth time and wondering how much longer she could stick it out.
‘Can you cook, Ellen?’ He looked up through sugar-spun brows.
‘I do toast,’ she said honestly.
He laughed far too much at this, white teeth revealing no fillings and the pinkest of healthy gum. The waiter sallied forth with another glass of champagne and an order pad. Lloyd plucked the glass from his hand and aimed it at Ellen’s. ‘I do toast too. Let’s toast us.’
A nearby American couple who had been frantically earwigging, let out loud ‘Awwwws’ and raised their glasses too.
Ellen steadied hers as it took a side impact from Lloyd’s and decided she had two options. She either nipped to the loos now, threaded her way through the window (that was this week’s expert ruse) and fled, or she got extremely drunk.
‘Madam?’ The waiter was tapping his pen on his pad.
Ellen felt a growl in her belly after a week of eating nothing but beans on toast. Casting Lloyd a thoughtful look, she reminded herself that he was (a) selling her house, (b) physically very attractive and (c) paying. What the hell? She was a grown woman. She drained her champagne and requested a top-up at the same time as picking out her sardine starter, a steak and as many side orders as she could find listed.
‘I’ve lost my hunger for anything but your eyes,’ Lloyd told her, in a low purr, as soon as the waiter had gone. ‘But do I love a girl with a healthy appetite – just so long as she knows how to burn it off afterwards.’
Ellen smiled weakly.
‘And you certainly look as though you know how to keep fit.’ He ran his eyes over her body. ‘I bet you work out all the time.’
‘I prefer mental workouts these days,’ she said.
‘Oh, me too!’ His accent was rougher now than a farmhand’s. ‘When I’m down the gym, I always go mental.’ He waited for the big laugh, and when it failed to materialise, he let out one of his sexy growls. ‘Relax, Ellen baby. Enjoy yourself. It’s not every day you meet someone you want to work out with as much as this, if you catch my drift.’ He drew a loose strand of hair back from her face and stroked her neck. ‘I can’t wait to kiss you again. I bet you feel the same way, don’t you?’
Ellen snatched the fresh glass of incoming champagne gratefully and took a swig, working a few things out in her head. It is not his fault, she told herself. It would be the same with anybody.
She’d been right in thinking it was too soon after Richard to start seeing other men, however casually. She hadn’t actually been on a date with a stranger since she was sixteen, and the rules had been different then. You went to the cinema, a disco or a party and didn’t really talk to each other. You just waited for the lights to go low and ‘Careless Whisper’ to come on, then snogged each other. All she’d really wanted from Lloyd, she now suspected, was a snog – nothing more. She’d wanted to pick up where she had left off thirteen years ago and build from there. Initially, when faced with Lloyd’s obvious good looks, she had liked the idea of snogging him. Now she’d done it, she felt as if she’d eaten too much chocolate – guilty and sick and not nearly as satisfied as she had hoped.
Lloyd, by contrast, had barely lifted the foil from the fruit-and-nut. He was anticipating at least a one-night stand, if not a great deal more. As far as he was concerned, the snogging had barely begun.
While one waiter whisked towards Ellen and Lloyd with two appetisers
the size of hula-hoops, which he described floridly as ‘aubergine mini-bagels drizzled in oregano-infused oil and topped with pimento tapenade’, another was ushering in a large party to try their luck on the green helter-skelter sofas.
Glad of the distraction, Ellen watched as he held open the door, bowing and half kneeling like a medieval courtier, to admit Ely Gates, who strode in with his puddingy wife. Behind them came the lofty, jowly Sir St John with Hell’s Bells marching to heel, and to the rear the three children of the combined party – Godspell the Goth, a small, dark-eyed youth, who had to be Enoch Gates, and finally, scowling furiously, Spurs.
Those luminous silver eyes glared around the room as he stalked into it, landing on Ellen and kicking her right to the back of her chair before they moved past her without a glimmer of recognition. This time, the G-force made her reel in shock, because she suddenly recognised why she’d been attracted to Lloyd in the first place. Spurs Belling made her feel recklessly sexual just by looking at her. Men like Spurs, those rare X-factor hooligans with a wild spirit and heartbreaking magnetism, had so much sex-appeal that they made Ellen combust on impact. On the day she had wriggled through the attic window, the knowledge that Spurs was watching had made her blood boil with excitement. And she’d met Lloyd while she was still glowing in its candescence.
Men like Spurs were the reason Ellen’s love for Richard had always been compromised, despite their years together. Richard made her feel warm inside, but she secretly craved the sort of intense heat he could never spark. And poor Lloyd just left her cold.