by Jessica Hart
Phin had rested his hand against casually against my neck as we’d waited for the lifts on our way back from Trafalgar Square. I knew he was only doing it so that Michaela at Reception would see and pass the word around-she had, and I’d only been back at my desk five minutes when Ellie was on the phone demanding to know what was going on-so there was no reason for my nape to be tingling still, no reason for me to be tense and jittery.
But I was.
Well, I had to get on with it. Drawing a deep breath, I rang the bell.
The door opened as suddenly as a slap, and there was Phin, smiling at me, in faded jeans and a T-shirt. His feet were bare, his hair rumpled, and he was in need of a shave. He looked a mess, in fact, but all at once there wasn’t enough air to breathe and my mouth dried.
I badly wanted to retreat down the steps, but pride kept me at the top. ‘Hi,’ I said, horrified to hear how husky my voice sounded.
‘Hey,’ said Phin, and before I realised what he meant to do he had kissed me on the mouth.
It was only a brief brush of the lips, the casual kind of kiss a man like Phin would bestow a hundred times at a party, but my pulse jolted as if from a massive bolt of electricity. So that’s what it’s like being struck by lightning. I swear every hair on my body stood up.
‘What was that for?’ I asked unsteadily.
‘Just getting into character,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I hadn’t realised the perks of promoting G &G’s family-friendly image until now. Who would have thought it would be so much fun keeping Lex happy?’
He stood back and held the door open. ‘Come on in and see where we’re having our wild affair.’
We won’t be able to keep our hands off each other. I remembered Phin answering my stupid question about how we would go about having an affair. The moment we’re through the front door I’ll start kissing you, and you’ll kiss me back. You’ll fall back against the door and pull me with you…
Now I couldn’t help glancing at the door as I passed, couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to feel the hard wood digging into my back, the weight of Phin’s body pressing me against it, his mouth on mine, his hands hot and hungry.
I swallowed hard. I had no intention of giving Phin the satisfaction of knowing how that casual kiss had affected me, but it was difficult when I still had that weird, jerky, twitchy, shocked feeling beneath my skin.
It wasn’t a very big house. Clearly it had once been a cottage, but the kitchen had been extended at the back with a beautiful glass area, and on a sunny February morning it looked bright and inviting.
‘Nice house,’ I managed, striving for a nonchalant tone that didn’t quite come off.
‘I can’t take any credit for it,’ said Phin. ‘It was like this when I bought it. I wanted somewhere that didn’t need anything doing to it. I’m not into DIY or nest-building.’
‘Or tidying, by the looks of it,’ I said as I wandered into the living room. Two smaller rooms that had been knocked into one, it ran from the front of the house to the back, where dust motes danced in the early spring sunshine that shone in through the window.
It could have been a lovely room, but there was stuff everywhere. A battered hat sat jauntily on the back of an armchair. The sofa was covered with newspapers. Books were crammed onto a low table with dirty mugs, empty beer cans and a water purification kit.
I clicked my tongue disapprovingly. ‘How on earth do you ever find anything?’
‘I’ve got a system,’ said Phin.
‘Clearly it doesn’t involve putting anything away!’
He made a face. ‘There never seems much point. As far as I’m concerned, this is just somewhere to pack and unpack between trips.’
‘What a shame.’ It seemed a terrible waste to me. ‘I’d love to live somewhere like this,’ I said wistfully. ‘This is my fantasy house, in fact.’
‘The one you’re saving up for?’
The chances of me ever being able to afford a house in Chelsea were so remote that I laughed. ‘Fantasy, I said! I’m saving for a studio at the end of a tube line, which will be all I can afford. And I’ll be lucky if I can do that with London prices the way they are. But if I won the Lottery I’d buy a house just like this,’ I said, turning slowly around and half closing my eyes as I visualised how it would be. ‘I’d paint the front door blue and have window boxes at every window.’
‘What’s wrong with red?’
‘Nothing. It’s just that when I was a kid and used to dream about living in a proper house it always had a blue door, and I always swore that if I ever had a home of my own the door would be blue. I’d open it up, and inside it would be all light and stripped floorboards and no clutter…like this room could be if there wasn’t all this mess!’
‘It’s not messy,’ Phin protested. ‘It’s comfortable.’
‘Yes, well, comfortable or not, we’re going to have to clear up before Imelda and the photographer get here.’
I started to gather up the papers scattered over the sofa, but Phin grabbed them from me. ‘Whoa-no, you don’t!’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll never find anything again if you start tidying. I thought we agreed the idea was to let readers see me at home?’
‘No, the idea is that readers have a glimpse of what their lives could be like if only they shopped at Gibson & Grieve all the time,’ I reminded him. ‘You’re a TV personality, for heaven’s sake! You know how publicity works. It’s about creating an image, not showing reality.’
Ignoring his grumbles, I collected up all the mugs I could find and carried them through to the kitchen. I was glad to have something to do to take my mind off the still buzzy aftermath of that kiss. I was desperately aware of Phin, and the intimacy of the whole situation, and at least I could try and disguise it with briskness.
‘We’ll need to offer them coffee,’ I said, dumping the dirty mugs on the draining board. ‘Have you got any fresh?’
‘Somewhere…’ Phin deposited a pile of newspapers on a chair and opened the fridge. It was like a cartoon bachelor’s fridge, stacked with beers and little else, but he found a packet of ground coffee, which he handed to me, and sniffed at a carton. ‘The milk seems OK,’ he said. ‘There should be a cafetière around somewhere, too.’
It was in the sink, still with coffee grounds at the bottom. I dreaded to think how long it had been there. Wrinkling my nose, I got rid of the grounds in the bin and washed up the cafetière with the mugs.
‘What sort of state is the rest of the house in?’ I asked when I had finished.
‘I haven’t quite finished unpacking from Peru,’ Phin said as he opened the door to his bedroom.
‘Quite’ seemed an understatement to me. There were clothes strewn everywhere, along with various other strange items that were presumably essential when you were hacking your way through the rainforest: a mosquito net, a machete, industrial strength insect repellent. You could barely see that it was an airy room, sparsely but stylishly furnished, and dominated by an invitingly wide bed which I carefully averted my eyes from.
Phin had no such qualms. ‘That’s where we make mad, passionate love,’ he said. ‘Most of the time,’ he added, seeing me purse my lips and unable to resist teasing. ‘Of course there’s always the shower and the sofa-and remember that time up on the kitchen table…?’
‘It sounds very unhygienic,’ I said crisply. ‘I’d never carry on like that.’
‘You would if you really wanted me.’
‘Luckily for you,’ I said, ‘I’m only interested in your mind.’
‘Don’t tell Glitz that,’ said Phin, his eyes dancing. ‘You’ll ruin my reputation.’
‘They’re not going to be interested in our sex life, anyway.’
‘Summer, what world are you living in? That’s exactly what they’ll be interested in! They’re journalists on a celebrity rag. I can tell you now this Imelda won’t give two hoots about our minds!’
I lifted my chin stubbornly. ‘The interview is supposed to be about you as a po
tential family man, not as some sex symbol.’
‘You know, sex is an important part of marriage,’ he said virtuously. ‘We don’t want them thinking we’re not completely compatible in every way.’
‘Yes, well, let’s concentrate on our compatibility in the living room rather than the bedroom,’ I said, closing the bedroom door. ‘We’ll just have to hope that they don’t want to come upstairs.’
Anxious to get away from the bedroom, with all its associations, I hurried back downstairs.
‘We’re going to have to do something about this room,’ I decided, surveying the living room critically. ‘It’s not just the mess. It looks too much like a single guy’s room at the moment.’
I made Phin clear away all the clutter-I think he just dumped it all in the spare room-while I ran around with a vacuum cleaner. It didn’t look too bad by the time I’d finished, although even I thought it was a bit bare.
‘It could do with some flowers, or a cushion or two,’ I said. ‘Do you think I’ve got time to nip out before they get here?’
‘Cushions?’ echoed Phin, horrified. ‘Over my dead body!’
‘Oh, don’t be such a baby. A couple of cushions wouldn’t kill you.’
‘Cushions are the beginning of the end,’ he said mulishly. ‘Next thing I know I’ll be buying scented candles and ironing my sheets!’
‘Sheets feel much nicer when they’re ironed,’ I pointed out, but he only looked at me in disbelief.
‘I might as well be married. I’ve seen it happen to friends,’ he told me. ‘They meet a fabulous girl, they’re having a great time, and then one day you go round and there’s a cushion sitting on the sofa. You know it’s the beginning of the end. You can count the days before that wedding invitation is dropping onto your mat!’
I rolled my eyes. I was feeling much better by that stage. I always find cleaning very comforting.
‘Oh, very well, it’s not as if we’re supposed to be married,’ I conceded. ‘You’ll just have to look as if you’re keen enough on me to be considering a cushion some time soon.’
‘I think I can manage looking keen,’ said Phin, and something in his voice made me glance at him sharply. Amusement and something else glimmered in the depths of those blue eyes. Something that made my breath hitch and my heart thud uneasily in my throat. Something that sent me skittering right back to square one.
I moistened my lips, and cast around wildly for something to say. ‘Shouldn’t you go and change?’ To my horror, my voice sounded high and tight.
‘What for?’ said Phin easily. ‘They want to see me at home, don’t they?’
‘Well, yes, but you might want to look as if you’ve made a bit of an effort. You haven’t even got any shoes on. You look as if you’ve just rolled out of bed,’ I said, and then winced inwardly, wishing I hadn’t mentioned bed.
‘That’s what we want them to think,’ said Phin. ‘And, now you come to mention it, I think you’re the one who needs to do something about your appearance.’
‘What do you mean?’ Diverted, I peered anxiously into the mirror above the mantelpiece. Anne and I had spent hours the evening before, going through the clothes heaped on my bed and trying to pick just the right look. It had to be sexy enough for me to be in with a remote chance of being Phin’s girlfriend, but at the same time I wanted it to fit with Gibson & Grieve’s new family-friendly image.
‘And you mustn’t wear black or white next to your face,’ Anne had said bossily. ‘It’s very draining in photographs. You want to look casual, but sophisticated, elegant, but colourful, sexy, but sensible.’
In the end we had decided on a pair of black wool trousers with a silky shirt I had worn to various Christmas parties the previous December. It was a lovely cherry-red, and I had painted my nails with Anne’s favourite colour, Berry Bright, to match. I had even clipped my hair up loosely, the way I wore it at the weekend. I thought I looked OK.
‘What’s wrong with how I look?’ I asked.
‘You look much too neat and tidy,’ said Phin, putting his hands on either side of my waist. ‘Come here.’
‘What are you doing?’ I asked nervously as he drew me towards him.
‘I’m going to make you look as you’ve just rolled out of bed, too. As if we rolled out of bed together.’
Lifting one hand, he pulled the clip from my hair so that it slithered forward. ‘You shouldn’t hide it away,’ he said, twining his fingers through it. ‘It’s beautiful stuff. I thought it was just brown at first, but every time I look at it I see a different colour. Sometimes it looks gold, sometimes chestnut, sometimes honey. I swear I’ve even seen red in there…it makes me think of an autumn wood.’
I was speechless-and not just because of his closeness, which was making me feel hazy. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I didn’t want to look into his eyes to see if he was joking or not. I was afraid that if I did I would lose what little grip I still had on my senses.
‘Very poetic,’ I managed.
‘But it’ll look even more beautiful tousled up,’ said Phin-and, ignoring my protests, he mussed up my hair before turning his attention to my shirt. ‘And, yes…I think we’ll have to do something about this, too. There are just too many buttons done up here, and they’re all done up the right way! That won’t do at all.’
Very slowly, very deliberately, he undid the first two buttons and looked down at me, his eyes dark and blue.
‘No, you still look horribly cool,’ he said, which must have been a lie because my heart was thundering in my chest and I was burning where those blunt, surprisingly deft fingers had grazed my skin. I opened my mouth, but the words jammed in my throat, piling into an inarticulate sound that fell somewhere between a squeak and a gasp. He was barely touching me, but every cell in my body was screaming with awareness and I couldn’t have moved if I had tried.
‘I may have to work a bit harder on this one…’ he went on and, bending his head, he blew gently just below my ear. The feel of it shuddered straight down my spine and clutched convulsively at its base. In spite of myself, I shivered.
‘Mmm, yes, this may just work,’ said Phin, pleased, and then he was trailing kisses down my neck, warm and soft and tantalising.
I really, really didn’t want to respond, but I couldn’t help myself. It was awful. It was as if some other woman had taken over my body, tipping her head back and sucking in her breath with another shudder of excitement.
My heart was thudding in my throat, and I could hear the blood rushing giddily in my ears.
‘You see where I’m going with this,’ murmured Phin, who was managing to undo another couple of buttons at the same time. ‘I mean, we did discuss how important it was to make it look as if we found each other irresistible, didn’t we?’
‘I think that’s probably enough buttons, though,’ I croaked as he started on the other side of my neck. His hair was tickling my jaw and I could smell his shampoo. The wonderfully clean, male scent of his skin combined with the wicked onslaught of his lips was making my head spin, and I felt giddy and boneless.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t resist as Phin steered me over to the great leather sofa. There was no way my legs were going to hold me up much longer, and as we sank down onto the cushions I felt as if I were sinking into a swirl of abandon.
‘OK, no more buttons,’ he whispered, and I could feel his lips curving against my throat. ‘But…I…don’t…think…you…look…quite…convincing…enough…yet.’
Between each word he pressed a kiss along my jaw until he reached my mouth at last, and then his lips were on mine, and he was kissing me with an expertise that literally took my breath away. Since I’m being frank, I’ll admit that it was a revelation. I’d never been kissed so surely, so thoroughly, so completely and utterly deliciously. So irresistibly.
I certainly couldn’t resist it. I wound my arms around him, pulling him closer, and kissed him back.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know who he was or
what I was doing, but I thought…Well, I don’t know what I thought, OK? The truth is, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just feeling, the slither of the satiny shirt against my skin, the hardness and heat of his hands on me as he pushed the slippery material aside.
Just tasting…his mouth, his skin.
Just hearing the wild rush of my pulse, the uneven way he said my name, my own ragged breathing.
Just touching-fumbling at his T-shirt, tugging it up so that I could run my hands feverishly over his smoothly muscled back, marvelling at the way it flexed beneath my fingers. I let them drift up the warmth of his flanks and felt him shiver in response.
What can I say? I was lost, astonished at my own abandon, and yet helpless to pull myself back.
Or perhaps I’m not being entirely honest. I was aware at one level of my sensible self frantically waving her arms and ordering me back to safety, but Phin’s body felt so good, so lean and hard as it pressed me into the sofa, and his mouth was so wickedly enticing, that I ignored her and let my fingers drift to the fastening of his jeans instead.
Afterwards, I could hardly believe it, but the truth is that there was a moment when I did know that I’d regret it later, and I still chose the lure of Phin’s hands taking me to places I’d barely suspected before. I succumbed to the excitement rocketing through me, and if Imelda and the photographer hadn’t arrived just then who knows where we would have ended up?
Except I do know, of course.
What I don’t know is whether that would have been a good thing or a bad thing. I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed it, though.
As it was, the piercing ring of the doorbell tore through the hazy pleasure and brought me right back to earth with a sickening crash.
I jerked bolt upright. ‘Oh, my God, it’s them!’
Frantically I tried to button up my shirt and shove it back into my trousers at the same time as pushing my hair behind my ears. ‘What were we doing?’
Phin was infuriatingly unperturbed. He was barely breathing unsteadily. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing my bit for our pretence-and with all due modesty, I think I’ve excelled,’ he said, and grinned as his eyes rested on my face. I dreaded to think what I looked like. ‘Now you really do look the part.’