Jay did not like that.
‘Relax,’ he said acidly. ‘I’m not going to sack you just because our shoulders happen to touch.’
She tensed. He could feel it. But not because she was cowed.
‘That’s a relief,’ she retorted. ‘Is it all right if I have it in writing?’
Jay smiled to himself in the dark. That was his Zoe, coming out fighting.
‘On your desk Monday morning,’ he assured her.
He stretched comfortably, letting his arm extend along the back of her seat. She sent him a sideways look. He caught the turn of her head. ‘I’m counting on it,’ she said coolly.
And she turned in the seat so that she was almost facing him and his fingers did not reach her shoulder.
Oh, yes, she was fighting her corner, all right. Jay watched her as they flashed through intermittent light from the dark ened streets.
‘So who’s the friend?’ he said lazily.
He felt her jump. He saw the bright glint of eyes before her lashes veiled them.
‘Oh—Suze.’
‘Ah, Susan. Of course.’ It was stupid to be relieved that the friend’s flat she went back to did not belong to man. It had nothing to do with him who she dated, after all. But he was relieved. He couldn’t deny it.
‘She’s my oldest friend. She brought you to our party,’ she reminded him.
‘I remember. She must be quite a bit older than you.’
Zoe sighed. ‘I’m twenty-three. Suze is twenty-four.’
‘Ah, but Susan was born forty. A sophisticated forty.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘Which makes her about five years younger than my friend Hermann. Otherwise I’d be worried by the age difference.’
Zoe chuckled involuntarily. ‘I know what you mean.’
He looked at her curiously. He wished he could make out her expression. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had much in common.’
‘You’d be wrong. We went to school together. We’ve seen each other through a lot.’
‘Ah.’
He badly wanted to say, Does she know you’re a virgin, too? But he couldn’t. Not with Petros sitting in front.
‘In fact, I shared the flat with her for a few months after college. But then—’ She stopped. ‘Well, stuff happened.’
He was intrigued. But Petros stopped him pursuing that one, too. Next time, Jay thought savagely, he was going to bring his own car.
Zoe leaned forward. ‘Just here, on the left. Leave me on the corner, if you like. It’s only a step.’
‘I always see my dates indoors,’ said Jay firmly.
‘But I’m not—’ She stopped, gave a quick look at the back of Petros’s head, and subsided. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.
Did she not want to sully his reputation for being irresistible? Jay was touched—and rather annoyed. He had been to a lot of parties with women like Susan Manoir. He knew what the men there were like. He did not want Zoe Brown to think of him as just another high-gloss stud, he found.
The chauffeur parked at the end of the street. Jay leaned forward and touched his shoulder.
‘Wait. I may be a few minutes.’
‘Sure thing.’
Jay walked Zoe to a solid redbrick Edwardian block. She brought out a key, turned to him with her hand out.
‘Thank you for seeing me home.’
He ignored the hand. Instead he took the key from her. ‘Inside the door.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m not going to be mugged by a mad overnight cleaning lady. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in apartment blocks with carpeted corridors.’
‘It won’t if you’re not on your own,’ he agreed. He unlocked the door and waved her in ahead of him. ‘Go on.’
She hesitated a moment. Then shrugged. ‘You have an over-developed sense of responsibility.’
‘So Susan gives you a key,’ he said as they got into the old brass-studded elevator.
‘She keeps wanting me to move back in.’
He could ask now. ‘Why did you move out in the first place? You obviously still get on well. Didn’t like her boyfriends?’
Zoe looked startled. ‘Of course not.’
‘Well, then?’
The elevator arrived at Suze’s floor. The ceiling lights were dimmed discreetly. They walked down thick-piled carpet. It was all very expensive and absolutely silent. They stopped at the door.
‘Well?’ persisted Jay.
Zoe rubbed her eyes tiredly. There was something about him that was implacable, somehow. She gave a deep sigh, stopped rubbing her eyes, and gave up her attempt at family discretion.
‘There was trouble at home. My young brother was running wild. My mother needed reinforcements.’
She unlocked the door. It led straight into the main room. It was in total darkness, the furniture just ghostly shapes. From the kitchen there was the quiet hum of a fridge defrosting itself. Apart from that the place was silent.
Jay did not wait to be invited in. He pushed the door closed behind him and hunted down a table-lamp without much difficulty.
‘Is Susan in?’ he asked softly, switching it on.
‘Don’t expect so.’
Zoe slid off her strappy sandals and padded over the polished wooden floor into the internal corridor. She was back inside a minute.
‘No. Her bedroom door’s open and there’s no one there. She’s either still clubbing or she’s gone off to meet Hermann somewhere. They were talking about Paris.’
‘Good,’ said Jay. He stopped whispering. ‘You can give me a coffee and tell me the rest of this saga.’
Zoe was genuinely taken aback. ‘You can’t drink coffee at this hour.’
Jay grinned. ‘Watch me.’
She shrugged. ‘Fine, if that’s what you want. But you’ll never sleep.’
Jay’s eyes gleamed. ‘You don’t know me well enough to say that.’
Something flickered in Zoe’s stomach at the careless intimacy of that. It implied that she might—that she could—
She did not want to think about that. She flung up her hands. ‘Okay. Okay. Your choice! Your nightmares! Just don’t blame me.’
‘I won’t.’
She went into the small kitchen area and filled the kettle. Jay followed her, and sat down on one of the pine chairs at the table. He watched her rummage deep in the cupboard under the microwave until she found a small cafetie`re.
‘You do know this place well, don’t you?’ he said thoughtfully.
Zoe straightened, reaching into the fridge for a packet of ground coffee. ‘I live in hopes I’ll move back one day,’ she said unwarily.
‘When you’re no longer needed as reinforcement?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Your father is dead? Abroad? In prison?’
Zoe put down the foil pack so suddenly that coffee skittered across the pristine work surface like fingerprint powder. ‘Prison?’
‘He’s the natural reinforcement,’ he pointed out. ‘Not you. If he’s not around, there has to be a really good reason.’
She gave a harsh choke of laughter. ‘There is. She’s called Saffron. Nearer my age than Mum’s, with a heart like a calculator.’
Jay digested this in silence.
She shook her head. ‘Damn. Why did I say that?’
Jay looked at her flushed face as she shovelled the spilt coffee into the cafetie`re with jerky movements. She seemed really furious with herself.
He said gently, ‘Because you needed to, at a guess.’
Zoe put down coffee and cafetie`re, and stood back. She was looking at the mess on the work surface with something like horror. As he watched she put up both hands and pushed her hair back, pulling so tight he could see the pale skin stretching over he temples. Her hands were shaking.
‘I don’t know what’s got into me tonight,’ she said in a suffocated voice. ‘I never say things like that. Mum always wants me to slag off Saffron and I won’t.’ She whipped round, hands on the work-top behind her, and gl
ared at him. ‘Did you put something in my drink?’
Jay raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said dryly. ‘I always carry truth serum with me.’
At that, she smiled reluctantly. ‘Sorry. Stupid of me. Just that tonight—’
‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘Tonight has been strange.’
If she had been sitting opposite him at the kitchen table he would have taken her hand then. But she wasn’t. She was three feet away, staring at him as if she could not imagine how she had let him in here.
‘Weird. I’d never have thought of having coffee with you after midnight in a million years.’
‘Gee, thanks, Zoe. You’re just great for the ego.’
She brushed aside his wounded ego without apology. ‘Well, not like this, I mean.’
The thought flittered across his brain that he had never before sat across a kitchen table at four in the morning with a woman who worked for him. Still less asked her to tell him her life story. He dismissed it.
‘So, what else do you need to get off your chest?’ he said lightly. ‘Lives at home. Doesn’t want to. Dreams of getting away…’
‘It’s not like that—’ she began. But then the kettle boiled and she had to concentrate on making the coffee.
Jay sniffed the rich air appreciatively. ‘Kaldi, you’re my man.’
Zoe looked up, confused. ‘What?’
‘Kaldi. Ethiopian shepherd. Supposed to have discovered coffee.’
‘You mean it wasn’t Sir Walter Raleigh?’
‘Hey, English pirates didn’t discover all the recreational drugs of choice,’ he said, reaching for the cafetie`re.
Zoe searched a cupboard, failed to find mugs, and opened the dishwasher. She hooked out a couple of elegant black and gold mugs, sniffed them, decided they were clean, but ran them under the hot tap just to be certain.
‘High housekeeping skills,’ murmured Jay, entertained.
Zoe was practical. ‘No, but I know Suze. I don’t want to add salmonella to this evening’s new experiences.’
She banged the mugs down on the table between them. He pressed the filter down through the coffee sludge. Zoe was turning back to the fridge, but for some reason she stopped, mesmerised. He was doing it very, very slowly. With relish, even. Her colour rose inexplicably.
‘You look as if you’ve done that before.’
He gave her his wicked up-and-under look. ‘My speciality.’
She swallowed. ‘Yes. Well. Er—milk?’
He declined. Flustered, she spent a great deal longer than was necessary poking around in the fridge for juice. By the time she came up for air he had set a chair for her opposite him.
‘So talk!’ he commanded, taking the juice away from her.
She sank onto the chair, watching him pour first her juice then his coffee.
‘That poor man outside in the car—’
‘Believe me, he won’t be complaining. The longer I stay out, the more he earns. At triple time,’ Jay told her, amused. ‘Talk.’
She huffed a bit. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said candidly. ‘I don’t know how I came to tell you anything in the first place.
‘So you said. I guess it’s just timing. Look on me as your friendly neighbourhood busybody, if it helps. Pretend we’re leaning on the back fence.’
She looked at him. He was devastatingly attractive, with his smooth dark hair faintly tumbled and those spectacular cheekbones.
Zoe’s lips twitched. ‘Oh, yes, I can just see the hairnet.’
‘Hold that thought,’ he said, unoffended. He drank some coffee. ‘So run it past me again. You’re twenty-three. Yet you still live at home. You look like a dream. Your friends all think you’re a raver. You ought to be a raver. And yet you’re a virgin.’
She stiffened. But his tone was so utterly dispassionate that all her defensiveness fell away from her. She bit her lip.
‘Yes.’
‘And,’ said Jay shrewdly, ‘you’re not happy about it.’
Zoe winced.
His voice softened. ‘Want to tell me why?’
‘Well, like you said—everybody thinks I’m a raver.’
His brows twitched together. ‘Don’t understand.’
Zoe struggled to explain. ‘I have friends. Good friends. They think they know everything there is to know about me. And I’ve got this big secret—’ She spread her hands eloquently. ‘It’s like I’m cheating. All the time.’
He shook his head, still bewildered. ‘Cheating how?’
‘Living a lie,’ she said impatiently. ‘And I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Ah. I think I begin to see.’
He swirled the coffee in his mug.
‘Let’s look at this another way. What was it that turned you off men? Something traumatic?’
Zoe sighed. ‘There you go. That’s why I’ve never told anyone. Nothing turned me off men,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’m not off men. Some of my best friends are men.’
‘Well, then—’
‘If I told Suze now, she’d think I’d suffered some big tragedy. Been beaten up or something. It’s not true. No man’s ever hurt me. No one’s ever let me down. I just— never got round to sex.’
‘Never got round to it?’ Jay found he was speechless.
Defensiveness crept back. ‘I was busy.’
‘But what about all those men you know? Quite apart from your own hormones, what about the other side of the equation? They can’t all have been busy, too?’
‘Ah.’ Zoe looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘Well, you see, they all thought I’d got someone else.’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t get my head round this. How did they think you had someone else? How come you didn’t have someone else?’
She shrugged. ‘Our old friend timing, I suppose. My parents started to break up just as I was doing my first public exams. Then, when I was at university, I came home a lot because my brother and sister were still at school and—’ She bit her lip. ‘My mother went onto an alternative clock, making breakfast at midnight, that sort of thing. Someone had to keep the household fed and laundered.’
‘Reinforcements,’ he said, enlightened.
She flushed. ‘If you like. Anyway, the boys at university all thought I had a boyfriend at home. And the boys at home—when I saw them—thought I had a boyfriend at college. So did my sister. And I always had plenty of friends who were men, sort of in the general crowd. So nobody noticed the difference.’
His eyebrows hit his hairline. ‘But what about you?’
She looked surprised. ‘I told you. I was busy.’
‘Very few adolescent girls are so busy they fail to notice that they fancy the pants off the man of their dreams,’ he said dryly.
She flushed deeper. ‘Maybe I’m just cold hearted.’
‘Do you think so?’ he said ironically. ‘Then what’s all this about?’
He leaned forward and touched a gentle forefinger to the corner of her eye. It came away with a teardrop on the tip.
Zoe was horrified. She blinked rapidly.
‘That just because I’m tired,’ she said defiantly.
‘And wound as tight as a spring about to break,’ he agreed amiably.
She leaped up. ‘No, I’m not. I’m nowhere near breaking point,’ she said fiercely. ‘Nowhere near. Do you hear me?’
He titled his chair back and looked at her ironically. ‘Sure. That’s why you’re shouting, is it? So I can hear you?’
Zoe stopped dead, as if he had shot her.
She looked at his lounging body. Suddenly all the implications of the scene rose up and hit her in the face. This was a man who was so sexy his female staff e-mailed him love letters. They were alone in the flat while the stars glittered outside. She was young and attractive and unattached. What was more, she—in his phrase—fancied the pants off him.
And they were on opposite sides of the kitchen table while she shouted and he glared.
Suze would have been in his arms by
now. It was too much! Any minute now she was going to cry, Zoe thought. She stumbled over to the counter and tore off a great wad of kitchen paper. She blew her nose loudly.
Jay got to his feet.
‘Hey,’ he said, touched. ‘It’s no big deal.’
‘I’m tired,’ said Zoe again loudly. She blew her nose harder.
He skirted the table and put an arm round her. She resisted for a moment. But he was strong and, heck, half of her wanted to feel what it was like to be in his arms anyway. She let him pull her against his body. It felt like a rock.
Or, no, like sun-warmed earth, solid and fertile. She buried her face in his shoulder for a moment. It did not feel natural—she stood awkwardly, all elbows and knees, and her feet were in the wrong place. But he did not seem to notice. And he smelled like heaven.
Only a moment, she promised herself. She rubbed her face against the linen jacket a little, savouring the scent of sandalwood with a deep underlying note of healthy male skin. She hoped the movement was unobtrusive. Pathetic, or what?
And if she was going to be that pathetic, she might as well go the whole hog.
‘Okay,’ she said into his jacket. ‘So what do I do?’
Jay smiled. She could feel him smile, even with her face against his shoulders. Did he smile with his collarbone, for heaven’s sake? How much did she not know about men’s bodies that she had never realised?
‘Back fence gossips don’t give advice,’ he said smugly.
He put his other arm round her. Purely for comfort, of course, thought Zoe. And she had been held lots of times. Kissed lots of times. Only somehow she had never felt so naked in a man’s arms before. Crazy, when she was still dressed from head to toe. But he knows more about me than anyone else in the world, she thought.
It was a sobering thought. It brought her upright. Though it felt like death to leave that unemotional embrace.
She grabbed some more kitchen paper and blotted her eye make-up carefully.
‘Sorry. That was stupid.’ She sniffed. Then said in a stronger tone, ‘You’re not just a busybody. You’re not my therapist.’
The Millionaire's Virgin (Mills & Boon By Request) Page 42