by Julie Cohen
‘Kathleen’s easier to be with.’
‘She’s not threatening to you because she’s successful, you mean. She has her little job and you’re the resident big shot. Whereas the minute I got promoted to creative director, you couldn’t leave me soon enough.’
‘Jane, I encouraged you in your career because that’s all you ever seemed to want.’
‘And as soon as I got what I wanted, you got scared because you couldn’t stand to live with someone who had the same status and earning power as you.’
His face was getting red.
‘Kathleen is a real woman,’ he shot back. ‘She’s sexy and beautiful and she’s interested in me more than her job. You were never interested in me. You floated around in your own work world and you never took the time to get to know who I am. You never cared about my comfort, or my needs, or—’
She’s sexy and beautiful … like a real woman. Despair and doubt grabbed hold of Jane’s guts and anger seemed like the safest route.
‘I get it now,’ Jane said. ‘You were looking for someone to bring you your pipe and slippers at the end of a hard day.’
‘I was looking for someone who gave a damn about anything besides herself and her career!’
‘I give a damn about plenty of things,’ Jane snapped.
‘Like what? Like who?’
‘Like my mother, and my brothers, and—’
And she stopped herself, her throat closing up.
Because she’d been about to say and Jonny.
Somebody knocked on the door.
Jane didn’t bother to look through the peephole this time; she was too preoccupied with emotion. When she opened the door a young man was standing there with a large bouquet of lilies and roses in his hands.
‘Jane Miller?’ he said. ‘Delivery.’
In a daze, Jane took the bouquet. Its scent immediately surrounded her. She closed the door. The bouquet was so big that she could barely hold it with her left arm as she opened the card that was attached to it.
She’d never seen Jonny’s handwriting before, but she recognised it right away—just as she’d recognised him and never realised it. It was neat and upright.
Dear Jane, I’m sorry for deceiving you. I didn’t mean to. I don’t want to lose you. Can we start again? Jonny.
It was a day for mixed emotions. Jane was flooded with both embarrassment and a huge, hopeless longing.
How on earth could they start again? Now that they’d crossed every barrier she had?
She pictured him at the florists’, writing out the card, tilting his head in that way he had. Maybe furrowing his forehead a little as he thought about what he wanted to say. Or maybe dashing off the note with practised malemodel charm, thinking he only had to make a little effort and a woman like her would fall all over herself to run back into his arms.
But she could see every bit of him in her mind: his blue eyes slightly narrowed, his lean body bent over the counter, his long fingers on the pen.
She’d already learned the written word could be deceptive. What did he mean, exactly, by losing her? Or by starting again? As friends? Lovers? Email buddies?
‘What are those in aid of?’
Staring at the card, she’d completely forgotten about Gary. She glanced up and saw his stranger’s face.
He looked jealous.
Her reaction to that wasn’t mixed at all; it was glee.
That probably wasn’t worthy of her, either, but somehow she didn’t care.
‘Oh, they’re from a man I had a date with last night,’ she said breezily. She inhaled deeply from the bouquet. The scent was feminine, beautiful. The sort of thing a man would give to a desirable woman. A real woman.
‘You had a date? Who with?’
The emphasis was just in the wrong place, so that the meaning was clear. Gary was wondering what kind of guy would ask out a career-obsessed woman scorned.
That ruined her glee at his jealousy, and turned it back into anger. ‘He’s a model,’ she said, and went into the kitchen to find a vase.
‘A model?’ She could hear Gary behind her. ‘Wait, hold on. Is he the model you’ve got for the Franco cologne campaign? The one you went out for lunch with yesterday?’
The jealousy was back in his voice, and it felt so good to hear it that she answered without thinking. ‘Yes, and then the two of us went out for dinner. Among other things.’
She glanced up as she said the last words, and had to suppress a smile because her ex-fiancé, the guy who’d dumped her out of the blue for a waitress, was red and white in the face and looked as if he’d been pounced on by a big green-eyed monster.
‘Of course that’s the reason I’ve been preoccupied all day,’ she purred, her words telling the truth but her tone putting a whole other spin on them. Gary’s face got redder and whiter.
The green-eyed monster was chewing him up and spitting him out.
It didn’t feel as good as she’d felt when she was with Jonny. But it felt pretty damn good, nevertheless.
‘I’ll go get those things I came for,’ he said, sounding muffled, and left the room.
Jane put the flowers in a vase, put them on the kitchen table, and sat there gazing at their lovely petals and breathing their dizzying perfume, trying to work out whether she should be feeling triumph or dread.
Pearce Grey Advertising Agency looked as if there wasn’t a comfortable chair in the place. Jonny recognised the type of business immediately; he’d done some consulting for a couple of software companies with the same aesthetic. He’d only stayed as long as it had taken to finish the job and then he’d gone back home to his own happily cluttered desk.
If he’d had to guess, before a couple of days ago, he’d have said his Jane would never feel at home in such a place. She was too spontaneous, too alive and warm to belong in a cold, minimalist office. Even when he’d first seen her he’d believed that her tailored suit and her scraped-back hair were a front, a professional mask to hide the real passionate woman underneath.
Then she’d frozen him out, completely and suddenly. No calls, no emails, never online, no response to his flowers or note. She was acting on her statement that she never wanted to see him again. And while she had a good reason because their date had unintentionally turned out to be a disaster, he hadn’t thought she’d be capable of such a total shutdown. He’d thought what they shared was more genuine than that.
But after what he’d heard this morning, he couldn’t help but wonder now, as he strode through Pearce Grey, whether Jane did belong to a place like this after all. All appearance, no substance.
A man in a suit gave him directions to her office. A whole side of it was plate glass, and even before he got to the door he could see her, sitting at her desk and poring over papers and photographs. She was wearing black and twisting a strand of hair around her finger.
He stopped, just for a moment, with his hand on the doorknob, and watched her.
Her surroundings were one thing. That little gesture, her hair round her finger, proved Jane was another.
He hoped.
Jonny opened the door and stepped in. Jane’s head lifted and their eyes met.
He was glad to see her. Just her presence was enough to make his heart beat faster. He thought he saw, for a split second, an answering gladness in her face, before it froze into a wary expression.
‘Don’t you have a shoot now?’ she asked.
They weren’t the most welcoming words in the world, but at least it was a good sign that she knew what he was supposed to be doing. It implied she cared.
Then again, it was her job to care about the shoot. Not to care about him.
‘Coffee break,’ he told her as he closed the door behind him. ‘I decided I needed to see you more than I needed caffeine.’
Since Jonny had had to flag down a taxi and take it halfway across London in traffic to get here, he thought the photographer had probably already finished his coffee and was waiting for the model to get back. It
wasn’t worrying Jonny much.
She stood, stiff behind her desk. ‘I thought I made my feelings pretty clear the last time I saw you.’
Jonny walked up to the desk. With the furniture as a barrier between them, she stood firm where she was. He remembered how she’d fallen into his arms outside the restaurant, and then how she’d dodged him when he’d wanted to touch her, when she’d found out who he really was. She was doing her best to look impassive, but there was a tell-tale flush on her cheeks and her eyes weren’t quite steady on his.
She was reacting to him, all right. He just wished he could be sure why.
‘Yes, Jane,’ he said. ‘You made your feelings very clear indeed. You never wanted to see me again, nor, apparently, to talk to me on the phone or communicate with me online.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, her voice cold.
Jonny put his hands on her desk and leaned forward on his arms. With Jane standing so firm, this meant that his face was inches from hers, close enough for him to smell the flowery scent of her hair. He looked straight into her grey eyes.
‘So maybe you can explain to me why you’re telling everyone that we’re sleeping together,’ he said.
CHAPTER SIX
JANE’S eyes widened with surprise. He thought he saw something else there, too.
‘I’m not,’ she said.
He didn’t vary his stance, still close to her.
‘That’s funny, because it’s common knowledge, apparently, and I haven’t told anybody.’
‘Neither have I.’ Her pointed chin thrust forward in a stubborn gesture he remembered from when she was a girl arguing with her four brothers. It was a gesture she’d used even when she was wrong.
‘Well, then, there are two other options,’ he said. ‘Either somebody hacked into one of our computers and read the chat we had the other night, or the tourist who took our photograph outside the restaurant has been circulating it among people we know.’
‘I doubt that—’
‘I agree. Both of those are extremely unlikely. Which means that, since I haven’t told anybody, you have.’
Jane folded her arms across her chest. ‘I told you, I haven’t said anything about our—about what we did.’ Her cheeks flushed.
She was digging in her heels, and his confrontational stance probably wasn’t helping him get at the truth. He stopped leaning on the desk and instead sat on a corner of it, facing her. Still close to her, but more casual.
‘I don’t mind if you told people,’ he told her. ‘I loved making love with you and if we were in a relationship I’d shout it from the rooftops. But I can’t figure out why you’d tell anybody about what happened, after you were so angry about it.’
Jane frowned. ‘Who said something to you?’
‘Thom came to the shoot bursting with the news.’
Bursting was an understatement. Thom had practically been shouting with excitement that Jonny had had sex with somebody, and, moreover, somebody that Thom had—supposedly—introduced him to. Jonny didn’t think he’d ever heard so many ‘excellent’s and ‘way to go’s in his life.
Jonny had had to steer his agent into a quiet corner and warn him in the strongest terms not to spread the news around. Even after that, Thom had been grinning so widely and making so many broad hints that Jonny was sure the photographer, the assistant, the make-up and hair woman, the stylist, the lighting guy, and all the other random people who seemed to hang out at photo shoots for no reason whatsoever knew that he’d got involved with the creative director of Pearce Grey.
‘He said he’d had a phone call from someone here at the agency,’ Jonny added. ‘And I’m sorry if I’ve been jumping to conclusions, but it seems logical that the information came from you.’
‘Stated just like a good logical software developer,’ Jane said, but her flushed cheeks had gone pale, and he could definitely see now that she was looking sheepish.
‘Who’d you talk to?’ he asked gently.
‘Gary,’ she said, and she sank into her chair with a sigh.
‘Your ex?’
‘I didn’t tell him that we’d slept together. Not in so many words. But I might have hinted a little.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I really didn’t think he’d talk to anybody else.’
Jane had told her former fiancé about them? Maybe it was wrong, but the fact sent a burst of hope through Jonny. She wouldn’t tell Gary about her love life unless she was serious about it and saw it going somewhere, right?
He wanted to take her hand, which was lying on the desk in front of him, but he restrained himself until he knew better what she was thinking.
‘Why did you tell Gary?’
‘Because I—’ She pushed the stray curls of hair back from her face. ‘I know I shouldn’t have. But he was lording his new relationship with Kathleen over me, making me feel about two inches high. And then your bouquet showed up. So I just told him.’
Jonny looked at her face, the rueful expression. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. ‘You told him to make him jealous?’
‘Well, yeah. I mean, he’s going out with a waitress. And you’re a—’
He definitely didn’t like where this was going. He stood up, feeling anger flushing his own skin. ‘You told him because I’m a model?’
‘I told him because you sent a bunch of flowers to me after I’d told you I didn’t want to see you again,’ Jane shot back.
‘And did you tell him that you didn’t want to see me again?’
She bit her lip. ‘I didn’t get to that part.’
It was turn for Jonny to cross his arms over his chest. ‘Let me get this straight. You told him that we were having an affair, to pay him back, because sleeping with a model gets more points than sleeping with a waitress?’
‘This really isn’t any of your business,’ Jane said, doing that chin thing again. ‘It’s between me and Gary.’
‘I’d say it was completely my business when Gary goes on to spread a rumour that you and I are having a relationship. An untrue rumour, now that you’ve frozen me out.’ He found that he was pacing the floor in front of her desk, and stopped and looked her right in the eye. ‘Jane, I hate deception. I hate it.’
‘That should have occurred to you when you were deceiving me about who you are.’
He threw his hands up in the air. ‘I told you, I sent you an email telling you about the whole thing. Haven’t you read it yet, or have you been too busy trying to think of ways to get your fiancé’s goat?’
‘I haven’t seen it.’
Her stubborn refusal to admit this basic, factual point drove him even crazier.
‘So let me get something straight,’ he said, ‘because I didn’t quite get the full truth the other night. Did you have sex with me just because of the way I looked? Not because we knew each other or had feelings about each other?’
‘I—’
She didn’t need to answer; he could see the truth in her eyes. She looked guilty as sin underneath her defensiveness.
‘And you were asking me for my sexual fantasy so you could apply it to a guy who you thought was a total stranger to you? Which means, essentially, you were cheating on me with me?’
‘You didn’t exactly get the worst end of the bargain,’ Jane said. ‘And besides, I wasn’t cheating on you; we weren’t having a relationship.’
‘Jane, I’m not a player. I wouldn’t share these intimate details about my desires with you if I didn’t have any feelings about you. I thought you knew me better than that.’
‘I’m beginning to realise I don’t know you at all.’
‘No. Instead you judge me on my appearance. And then use my job—a job I told you I don’t even like—to score points off your boyfriend.’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘You’re just the same as everybody else.’
The words echoed around inside him as if he were suddenly a hollow, painful space.
‘Jonny, shh.’
He hadn’t been looking at her; he’d be
en staring at blank air, overcome by yet more disillusion. He realised now that Jane had a finger to her lips and was making trying-to-be-subtle gestures with the other hand at the plate-glass office wall. Through which at least four people were staring, watching the two of them argue.
‘Let them look,’ said Jonny, but when he glanced back at Jane, her skin was white to the lips.
‘You really care that much about what your colleagues think of you?’ he said, more gently this time.
‘My job is all I have left, Jonny,’ she whispered, and her voice was so small and so vulnerable despite the stubbornness she’d just shown him that he felt a fierce surge of protectiveness, even through his anger.
‘I didn’t think Gary would tell anyone,’ she continued, ‘but now that he has it must be all over the agency. I hadn’t even told people we’d broken up. And now they must think I—’
‘Let’s give them something to really think about,’ said Jonny, and before he could think better of it he was on her side of the desk and was doing what he’d wanted to do since he’d walked in the door, which was taking her in his arms and kissing her.
He might be disappointed with the way Jane perceived him, but her kiss was another thing. Her lips were just as soft and warm and receptive as he remembered, that cupid’s bow mouth parting underneath his to let him taste her sweetness.
In his arms, she was the girl of his dreams.
She hesitated for a split second, and then she curled her arms around his neck. He felt one of her hands thread through the hair on the back of his head and felt her body curve towards his.
Jonny wanted her even more than he had the other night. He wanted to remove every single stitch of her clothing and continue from where they’d left off. He wanted to look in her face and laugh with her as they gave each other pleasure and then afterwards hold her and talk.
He wanted to do all of that even though, down deep, he knew he was still angry with her.
For right now, he kissed her. He held her delicate face in one hand and with the other he spanned the curve of her waist. His tongue touched hers, and, though this kiss was gentler, it was fuelled by the memory of them together, desperate and hungry, kissing as if their lives depended on it as they made love.