by Lucy King
As a result he was in something of a quandary. If he stayed he’d undoubtedly be digging the hole he was in deeper, but if he left he’d potentially be adding another dimension to the story, because now he thought about it his departure could well be construed as him giving a damn about what Jasmine had done. Which he didn’t. At least not much.
So what should he do?
For a split second he hesitated while swiftly weighing up the pros and cons of each option, and then he made his decision. If he left, the outcome of the evening would be out of his hands, it could well end up in the press anyway and the likelihood was that his pride would end up dented all over again. But if he stayed, well, at least he’d be able to exert some sort of control over the proceedings.
Besides, the hole he was in was entirely of his making. Zoe had tried to dissuade him from the course of action he’d decided to follow but he’d been absolutely hell-bent on it, thick-headedly bulldozing through every one of her very valid objections, so if he really had the integrity he thought he did he owed it to her to see it right through to the end, wherever and whenever that might be.
He might even find it fun in a crazy kind of way, he thought, deciding he might as well try and put a positive spin on it. He’d been heading up his own company for the best part of six years, gradually handing over more of the creative work to his colleagues so he could concentrate on the business and management side of things and he’d been missing it.
So he’d go with the flow. Listen and watch carefully and respond accordingly. He’d follow Zoe’s lead, maybe set up a few of his own. Give it the one hundred per cent dedication he gave everything he did.
Aware that everyone was, at the moment, watching him, Dan squared his shoulders, looked Samantha straight in the eye and said, ‘I suspect I am.’
Zoe squeezed his arm in a gesture he presumed was meant to be reassuring but wasn’t, although what with the way it pressed her breast against his bicep it did give him the idea of keeping her close. ‘His fame precedes him,’ she said, with a mixture of misplaced enthusiasm and pride.
‘It certainly does,’ murmured Samantha, the hard glint in her eye and the air of bitchiness enveloping her reminding him that she was the sort of woman he couldn’t stand and certainly would never trust, even if he had had the ability to do so. ‘How long did you say the two of you had been going out, Zoe?’ she asked.
‘Six months,’ said Zoe dreamily, still clinging onto him and making his head swim a little with her proximity as he slid an arm around her waist and settled his hand on her hip. ‘Six long happy months.’
Despite the heat rushing along his veins as her warmth and her scent wound their way through him Dan couldn’t help shuddering because, God, real or not, six months now sounded absolutely terminal.
‘But six months ago weren’t you dating Jasmine Thomas, Dan?’ said Samantha silkily, and he felt Zoe stiffen at his side, although whether in response to his shudder, the thought he might have been two-timing her, or the fact that presumably she hadn’t prepared for this he had no idea.
‘I was,’ he said since there was no point in denying it.
‘Who’s Jasmine Thomas?’
‘An actress,’ supplied Harriet.
Having clearly spent a lot of the evening thinking on her feet, Zoe arched an eyebrow in an excellent portrayal of an indignant girlfriend, looked up at him accusingly and said, ‘You never told me about her.’
‘No, well, it’s not something I choose to dwell on,’ Dan said, wondering if the discomfort he felt whenever he was reminded of it would ever ease.
Samantha, on the other hand, he thought, catching a tiny flare of triumph in her eyes, looked about as comfortable as it was possible to be because she was clearly in her absolute element here. ‘She sold her story about your relationship to the press, didn’t she?’
‘She did.’
‘God, how awful,’ said Zoe, pity and sympathy written all over her lovely face and shimmering in her mesmerising eyes as she gazed up at him. ‘Why did she do it?’
‘I broke up with her.’ The minute a flowery wash bag had unexpectedly appeared in his bathroom a month after they’d started seeing each other and she’d stormed out accusing him of being a cold, aloof commitment-phobe.
‘So it was a spurned lover kind of thing?’
‘I guess.’
Zoe sniffed. ‘What a cliché.’
It wasn’t just a cliché, he thought darkly. It was also a pain, and frankly he was utterly fed up with the way that what Jasmine had done continued to linger. It had been six months ago, for heaven’s sake, yet it showed no sign of being today’s fish and chip wrapping. All he wanted was to forget about it, but he wasn’t being allowed to.
‘Didn’t you know?’ asked Samantha, snapping her focus round to Zoe.
‘Oh, well, we’ve been rather wrapped up in our own little cocoon of love, haven’t we, Honeybun?’ Zoe murmured, sliding her hand to his lower back and beaming up at him soppily.
‘We have.’ He dropped a quick hard kiss on her cheek and felt her shiver.
‘You’ve certainly managed to keep it extremely quiet,’ said Harriet.
‘Are you surprised?’ said Dan.
‘And what about all those other women?’ asked Samantha.
Zoe lifted her eyebrows a millimetre or two. Other women? she mouthed.
‘Smokescreens,’ said Dan.
‘So were you still dating this Jasmine woman when we met on that ski-slope in the Italian Alps?’ she asked, with a look that suggested he’d better have been telling the truth about his creative skills.
‘Of course not,’ he said, rising to the challenge with the glimmer of a smile. ‘We broke up a good fortnight before I spied you in your skin-tight black ski-suit.’
‘My skin-tight black ski-suit?’ She frowned. ‘I thought you’d been as impressed by my mastery of the black runs as I’d been by your skill on the mogul field.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘It was definitely the sexy ski-suit.’
‘So it was the way I looked that made you ask me out to the nightclub that night?’ she asked, smoothly steering him back on track.
‘It was.’
Zoe tutted. ‘So shallow.’
‘Well, what can I say? You zoomed past me too fast for conversation. I just thought you were hot.’ He ran his gaze over her and felt the heat whip through him. ‘I still do.’
Her eyes darkened and she pressed a little closer and, his mouth suddenly dry, Dan lifted his pint to his lips and swallowed back a couple of large, much-needed gulps.
‘The feeling is, and was, mutual,’ she said a little huskily. ‘Obviously. Otherwise I’d never have gone to bed with you on our first date.’
Dan nearly choked on his beer.
‘Of course,’ she mused, ‘that particular moment of recklessness might have been simply down to all that grappa.’
‘Please don’t mention the grappa,’ he muttered, rubbing his chest and wincing. ‘I can hardly bear thinking about it.’
She smiled at him with fond nostalgia. ‘I’m not surprised, but then you were knocking it back like water.’
‘Something had to make up for the dreadfully cheesy song you requested and then insisted on dancing to.’
She mentioned a famously cringe-worthy hit of the eighties and her eyebrows lifted. ‘You told me it was your favourite.’
He shrugged. ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’
‘Were you really so keen to get me into bed?’ she said, adding a touch of wistfulness that didn’t sound entirely feigned.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think we were lucky the grappa didn’t impede your performance.’ She sent him a smile that shot straight through the length of him and curled his toes.
‘Nor yours,�
� he murmured, finding it all too easy to visualise Zoe on his bed and in his arms.
‘All in all it was quite a night, wasn’t it?’ she said softly.
‘It was.’
‘Oh, this is so romantic,’ sighed Harriet. ‘Zoe told us you were the yin to her yang, the east to her west and the north to her south, and I can totally believe it. You two are totally made for each other.’
‘We are, aren’t we?’ said Zoe, so warmly, so dreamily that for one horrible moment he thought she might actually mean it.
And if that wasn’t enough to set off alarm bells, amid the collective female sighs, through the sudden haze in his head and above the rushing of the blood in his ears he heard Samantha coolly say, ‘Zoe mentioned you were on the point of proposing, Dan, so tell us, when are you going to make an honest woman out of her?’
Oh, God, he thought, feeling a cold sweat breaking out all over his skin. How the hell could he have forgotten about that? When Zoe had brought it up, it hadn’t seemed relevant because he hadn’t planned on things going this far. But they had, and now he was going to have to propose because he couldn’t walk out and leave her hanging now. Having come so far it really wouldn’t be fair. Besides, he’d promised himself he’d see this thing through right to the end, and that was what he’d do.
Whether he’d be able to make it convincing, however, was an entirely different matter. An engagement of any sort wasn’t something he’d ever really contemplated, at least not recently. So he’d just have to do it plainly and quickly, as if he couldn’t wait to whisk Zoe off to celebrate properly and in private.
The words he never imagined he’d hear himself say were on the tip of his tongue when Zoe got there first. ‘Oh, he isn’t,’ she said a second before he said, ‘She’s right.’
Zoe’s eyebrows shot up and he couldn’t blame her because even he didn’t know why he hadn’t taken the out she’d given him. It had been tight but there’d been time, and one would have thought he’d have learned.
‘She is?’ she said faintly.
‘Well, it has been six months, and I am the yin to your yang.’
She swallowed hard. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘You know, you really don’t have to do this.’
‘Don’t I?’ he said wryly. It seemed to him he did.
‘No.’
‘Now that I think about it perhaps it is about time I made an honest woman out of you.’
She arched a sceptical eyebrow. ‘It’s way too late for that, don’t you think?’
‘It’s never too late to do the right thing,’ Dan said gravely, reminding her of her obligations now.
For a moment she considered. Then she nodded. ‘OK,’ she said, lifting her chin and taking a deep breath. ‘Let’s do it.’
He took her in her arms and pulled her close. ‘Zoe Montgomery, will you marry me?’
‘I’d love to.’
‘Great.’ He kissed her hard on the mouth. ‘Now, are we done?’ he said, staring down at her and thinking that now was definitely finally the time to leave.
‘God, yes,’ she said shakily.
‘Then let’s get out of here.’
* * *
Thank heavens that was all over, thought Zoe, slipping her arms through the sleeves of the coat that Dan was holding out and wondering if the shiver that ran down her spine was due to the chill of the evening or the fleeting brush of his fingers against her neck.
She didn’t think she’d ever experienced so many emotions in the space of such a short time and wasn’t sure she wanted to ever again because she was still trembling from the great tangled mess churning around her insides.
It was actually quite a surprise she was still standing. There’d been a point when Dan had clearly decided to up the ante on the charade front, and what with all those little squeezes and kisses he’d bestowed on her and the warm smiles and the hot looks he’d given her her legs had gone all shaky while her stomach had dissolved, and she’d thanked God that he’d had such a firm hold on her.
She’d been even more grateful of it when the litany of women in his life had been mentioned and a totally irrational shaft of white-hot jealousy had scythed through her, nearly wiping out her knees. That had just been weird and not a little disturbing because none of this evening had been for real and she really shouldn’t have been affected by any of it.
She wasn’t a fantasist, she reminded herself, making a start on doing up her buttons and trying not to stare at the sliver of taut tanned stomach that was briefly exposed just above the waistband of his jeans when Dan shrugged on his own jacket and his shirt rode up. She was a realist.
And yet ever since he’d taken her in his arms and ‘proposed’ she’d been secretly wondering what it would be like to feel like that for real. To have someone feel like that about her for real, to want to marry her for real...
Shaking her head to dispel the uncharacteristic flight of fancy, Zoe pulled herself together. She was being absurd. She was exhausted, probably. Hormonal, possibly. Stressed out, definitely. And that was why she was casting a man she barely knew in the role of white knight.
Maybe, though, she could get to know him a bit better, she thought, fixing the last of her buttons and feeling her spirits perk up at the idea that this needn’t be goodnight. Maybe she could buy him a drink to say thank you for helping her out. Maybe they could move on to dinner. And maybe they could see what happened after that.
OK, so she’d never actually asked anyone out before, but honestly, after months of disastrous on-line dating experiences and after everything she’d been through this evening that was hardly the Mount Everest of challenges, was it? He was single, she was single and they clearly fancied the pants off each other.
So she could do this, she told herself, her pulse now racing so fast it was beginning to make her dizzy. The advantages of asking him out vastly outweighed the disadvantages. Back in the bar he’d said he hadn’t wanted to let her go, so the odds of him saying yes were stacked hugely in her favour. The risk of potential humiliation was so minimal as to be negligible. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Nevertheless as she turned to face him her mouth went dry, a ball of nerves stuck in her throat and no amount of swallowing hard did anything to alleviate either. ‘I can’t thank you enough for your help,’ she said a little huskily.
Straightening his lapels and then fixing his shirt collar, Dan looked over at her and gave her a faint smile. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘You were amazing.’
‘Not half as amazing as you. Did you really think up all that stuff on the spot?’
‘The general premise I borrowed from my sister and her ex, but some of the details might have got a bit distorted.’ The feelings were all her own though...
‘Well, in a weird kind of way it was fun.’
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘You really didn’t have to propose, though.’
‘I thought it rounded things off rather nicely.’
‘It did.’
He tugged at the cuffs of his shirt beneath the sleeves of his jacket and glanced up at her. ‘So was it worth it?’
‘The whole charade thing? I don’t know yet. I guess I’ll have to process it all and see.’
‘It doesn’t seem to me that they’re worth wasting any more energy on.’
Hmm. ‘Were you bullied at school?’ she asked.
‘No.’
Of course he wasn’t; why would he be? ‘Then it’s easy for you to say.’
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shrugged. ‘Maybe. But my sister was. Bullies are generally cowards and Samantha’s no different.’
‘She’s a bitch.’
‘She is. She’s also jealous of you.’
/> A moment’s silence fell as Zoe stared at him in speechless astonishment. ‘She’s jealous of me?’
He nodded. ‘Deeply.’
‘What on earth would she have to be jealous about?’
‘Well, you’re beautiful, brainy and successful, so there’s a start.’
Once again Dan’s words struck her dumb, only this time it wasn’t astonishment that flooded through her but delicious languorous warmth. Did he really think her all that?
‘I should also think she’d give her eye-teeth to have half your entrepreneurial spirit,’ he continued with a little conspiratorial smile that did even crazier things to her temperature, ‘because I happen to know that the Shipley Estate is broke.’
‘Oh dear, is it?’ she said, knowing that even without the distraction of the heat swirling through her veins she’d have failed to drum up much sympathy. ‘Badly?’
‘Stonily.’
‘Hah,’ she said instinctively then blushed. ‘Sorry. That’s not very charitable, is it?’
‘But entirely justifiable.’
The conspiratorial smile deepened and his eyes kind of twinkled and her head began to swim at the realisation that for the first time in longer than she could remember someone was wholly on her side. He’d been on her side. Pretty much all evening.
So determinedly putting Samantha and her cronies from her mind, Zoe took a deep breath and braced herself because they might not be worth wasting her energy on but Dan very possibly might be.
‘Look, Dan,’ she said, sounding far cooler than she felt with all the stuff hurtling round inside her, ‘would you like to go for a proper drink or get a bite to eat or something?’
He paused, arched an eyebrow at her and grinned. ‘Are you asking me out on a date?’
Despite all her earlier self-assurances, at the hint of amusement in his voice her confidence in his answer and herself suddenly faltered, and Zoe felt her cheeks redden with enough warmth to heat the whole of London. ‘I guess I am.’