by Exley Avis
“It’s in Sussex,” he explained, holding the phone at arm’s length so they could both see pictures of an abandoned watermill beside a choked up stream.
“That’s my house!” Erika exclaimed, snatching the phone from him to enlarge the pictures of the kind of house she’d always dreamed of – miles from anywhere, overlooking a river and with space to build a rehearsal room.
Aiden’s ribs moved against her side as he laughed at her undisguised covetousness. “I know. I thought of you as soon as I saw it. It was a complete impulse buy. I’d gone to look at land on the coast and the agent had this on his books too.”
“It’s gorgeous.” Erika almost swooned with jealousy. “What’s it like inside?”
“Derelict. I’ve spent three years fighting for consent to convert it.” He reclaimed the phone and showed her pictures of the interiors and surrounding countryside. “It stands in fifteen acres, a couple of miles outside the village, and you can see the sea from the top floor.”
“Sounds perfect. I envy the person who ends up living there.”
“Then envy me. I wanted somewhere outside London for the weekends.”
Erika’s jealousy intensified and she groaned. “You’re so lucky. This corner would be perfect for a grand piano,” she said, pointing to a space in the old milling room where the outside wall had collapsed to give a view of the stream. “And the acoustics in these outbuildings would make a fantastic recording studio.”
She spent the next twenty minutes, going through the building room by room, describing how she visualised each one with reclaimed oak floors, a white kitchen and an attic bedroom with vaulted ceilings and huge windows looking out to sea.
Although her designs sounded remarkably similar to Aiden’s plans, he made his own suggestions, adding elements of old and new until Erika could clearly imagine herself walking from room to room and the way the light would flood in through the south-facing windows.
“When all this is over and I’m bankrupt, keep me in mind for the housekeeper’s job,” Erika said, only half joking. “I’d give anything to live there.”
“I’ll help you find something similar of your own and even work on the conversion,” Aiden promised, obviously assuming the case would go in her favour and that she’d be free to return to England.
“Thanks. That fantasy will keep me going over the next few months. But I pray I’ll be left with enough to buy food, let alone bricks and mortar.”
“You’ll have more than enough. I promise. Now pass my iPod out of your bag and I’ll let you finish your book in peace.”
He removed his arm from behind Erika’s head, lowered the back of his lounger, settled himself more comfortably and closed his eyes. The unmistakable lilt of one of her own ballads seeped out of Aiden’s headphones and Erika once more gave him full marks for attention to detail. Lulled by the soft music and an hour’s punishing exercise, Aiden’s body soon relaxed into sleep, his breathing deepening and the tension eased in his limbs.
Recognising the soft sighs that had always heralded sleep, Erika glanced across and wondered why she still remembered every little detail about him, when she’d spent the last five years doing her utmost to forget. Her rebellious subconscious had obviously cherished, wrapped and stored every tender memory and now threw them up to the surface where they glistened in the light of their renewed friendship.
If friendship was the best way to describe it.
She’d have to think about that some more, when her mind wasn’t quite so full.
Finally admitting defeat with her book, Erika let her arm fall sideways onto Aiden’s chest, expecting him to wake at her touch. When he didn’t, she let the back of her hand sweep a wide curve from the top of his shorts to his collarbone, his chest hair still damp but soft against her skin. On the third arc, Aiden caught her wrist very gently and enfolded her hand in his, before pressing it close against his chest right above his heart. He shifted slightly, making himself more comfortable, and let out a long sigh as his mouth curved in a sleeping smile that suggested a pleasant dream.
Rather than disentangle her fingers, Erika let them rest where Aiden held them, straining every nerve to pick up the rhythm of his heartbeat beneath her hand and asking herself how a relationship this easy and this perfect could have gone so horribly wrong.
All she needed was a red carpet underfoot, and a rank of photographers, and Erika felt she could have temporarily reclaimed her Hollywood self.
She and Aiden had reservations in the hotel’s main restaurant so they’d both dressed up for the kind of dinner Erika could never have afforded as a student. After trying on every dress in her wardrobe, she’d eventually settled on a midnight-blue silk gown that left her shoulders bare, clung to her body and ended not far above her knees. Not exactly the most appropriate clothing for a cold November evening in Yorkshire, but her performer’s instincts told her the night called for something dramatic.
When she’d split from Aiden, she’d been an impoverished student with barely enough money for an economy flight across the Atlantic. Tonight was all about showing him how far she’d travelled since – financially, emotionally and creatively – and that he’d been a fool to let her go. She needed all her best tricks.
Aiden had gone up to her room first to change and had arranged to wait for her in the bar, giving her every opportunity to make an impact. If there was one thing a thousand red carpet appearances had taught Erika, it was how to make an entrance and, as she walked in to meet Aiden, he reacted in exactly the way she’d hoped.
Light sparkling on the diamond droplets on her bodice first caught his attention, followed by the rustle of the full skirt around her slender legs as she walked very steadily toward him, imagining she was playing to a camera.
She focussed her entire attention on him, not a difficult task because he looked so gorgeous in his sharply-cut, charcoal suit and white shirt. The costly fabric moulded to every solid, perfectly-formed inch of him, making him even taller and broader – if that were at all possible – and Erika was afraid her legs would buckle with lust.
Aiden appeared even more overawed by the sight of Erika and watched her cross the room, his eyes drinking in every detail of the tightly-cut dress that accentuated her generous breasts and her long, long legs in sheer, black stockings.
“You look amazing,” he breathed, taking her hand and kissing her lightly on each cheek. “You’re more beautiful every time I see you – if that’s possible.”
“Thank you.” Erika sat down beside him on a sofa that was tucked away in a very discreet corner of the bar. She registered every gorgeous element that went into making up Aiden’s handsome whole and fought the overwhelming compulsion to lay a trail of kisses across his bare throat. “I’d forgotten how well you wore a suit.”
“You approve then?”
“It’d be impossible not to.”
Suddenly, his well-cut clothes were nothing but a distraction and Erika couldn’t help imagining the sight of that expensive jacket crumpled on the hall floor and his trousers dropped somewhere at the foot of the bed.
The first line of her mental resistance crumbled and her fingers itched to unbutton his shirt. The last time she’d seen him naked there’d only been a towelling robe to contend with. How much more exciting would it be to take off this tailor-made gift wrapping, piece by piece?
Her sex gave a jolt of pleasure.
“I ordered champagne,” Aiden said, breaking into Erika’s fantasy. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Lovely.” She crossed her legs, accidentally-on-purpose letting her calf rest against his and feeling his muscles flex. She allowed herself a secret smile. If she’d intended using seduction to keep Aiden in line, she was winning every battle too easily and she half wished he’d put up more of a fight.
Aiden picked up a glass to disguise his confusion and defy the near-irresistible urge to run his hand up Erika’s leg all the way to her stocking tops.
Although calling Aiden a leg man would have been wildly
inaccurate because he’d always been equally infatuated with every inch of Erika’s body, as she knew only too well. From his quickened breathing, and the fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off her, Erika assumed that some infatuations ran more than skin deep and that Aiden’s reactions were now being dictated from a place somewhere below his waist, not by rational thought.
Erika raised her glass. “Here’s to winning the first battle against Marty. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything more from your people.”
Aiden’s expression fell and Erika guessed that, whatever he’d heard, it wasn’t good news.
“I’d hoped you wouldn’t ask tonight. I didn’t want to spoil the evening.”
“What’s happened?” She put her hand on his knee but there was nothing seductive about the gesture. She touched him because she needed to ground herself and hold onto something steady before the anticipated shock sent her reeling. “Tell me.”
“They’ve found the contract and your copyright may have been assigned to one of Marty’s companies.”
Panic rose like the bubbles in her champagne and she struggled not to cry. “Please tell me it isn’t true.”
“We don’t know if it’s the right contract yet,” Aiden hurried to say and took her hand, grasping it tightly as he tried to soften the blow. He wanted to be honest with her but felt she wasn’t strong enough to take the unvarnished truth. “It’s only my interpretation of it and I could well be wrong. I know my way around a construction contract but this is a highly specialised area. The entertainment lawyers are looking at it right now. They’ll call us tomorrow.”
Erika gulped down her drink, conscious that Aiden hadn’t yet let go of her hand. She read a hundred different things into his expression but the one she clung onto was his confidence.
“You really think we can beat Marty, don’t you?” she said.
“I know we can. Even though the contract is a blow, we still have far more leverage from his financial records than we’d hoped for. And there’s no telling what the technical people will find when they open the rest of the files. Your chances of reclaiming your music, money and freedom are increasing by the hour.” He made his voice emphatic.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“I never have and I never shall. If I’d thought it was a hopeless case, I wouldn’t have wasted my time driving all this way north.”
This, in itself, was a very easy lie to spot. Aiden hadn’t driven two hundred miles just to help her through a financial crisis. The last two days had shown that he also had unfinished business where their relationship was concerned, and that it was now up to Erika to decide how that business concluded.
She let out a long sigh and braced her shoulders, drilling down deeply into the reserves of strength that had sustained her over the past five years. She gave herself a stiff, mental talking to.
“As I see it, I have two options,” she thought out loud. “Firstly, I can sit here worrying about my contract for the next thirty six hours, but that won’t achieve anything and it certainly won’t solve anything. Alternatively, I can enjoy the rare treat of time to myself. A quiet meal with an old friend. Intelligent conversation. A glass of champagne without some gossip mag speculating whether I have a drink problem. It’s the first time I’ve been away from Marty in five years. I don’t intend wasting these precious hours thinking about him.”
“I’m happy to distract you,” Aiden offered, reassured by her resilience and smiling wickedly. His eyes carried promises his body could most definitely keep and his lips parted slightly, begging to be kissed.
Erika couldn’t resist.
With a courage built out of relief and champagne, she slipped her hand around the back of Aiden’s neck and pulled him toward her. Her mouth brushed his gently, feeling it soften and respond, the privacy of their corner tempting her into deepening the kiss when Aiden ran his tongue around her lips and leaned in to her.
“We could always skip dinner,” he offered, his breath soft against her face but Erika stopped his lips with another kiss to silence the thought.
“That would never work for me. You know how I love to eat.”
“Room service then?”
“What, after I went to all this trouble dressing up?”
Aiden smiled slowly. “In my experience, a woman only dresses up because she wants to be undressed.”
Erika didn’t argue in case she fell too squarely within his theory. “Perhaps I dressed to please myself, not you.”
“So why choose black stockings – which you know I adore – and the kind of dress that forces me to imagine what’s underneath?”
“Are you imagining right now?”
“Remembering might be a better word.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. “With a little bit of fantasy thrown in.”
The air around them crackled and Erika’s heart clenched in expectation. Given the time, she would have relished spending the entire evening flirting with Aiden but thirty-six short hours (and counting) honed her attention and she drove straight to the point.
“What do you really want from me, Aiden?” she asked. “Apart from the obvious.”
“There’s no easy answer to that.”
“Then simplify it for me. Money? Flirtation? Bragging to your friends about sleeping with Erika Fenn?”
“None of the above.” He downed his champagne, giving himself a few precious seconds in which to think. “Forgiveness, would be a start. But friendship, would be better.”
“And after that?” She stared at him, trying to fathom his motivation. “You might not be lying but I suspect you’re not telling me the whole truth either. I don’t have time to waste. Straight answer.”
Aiden pushed his lips together, holding back the words until he had them organised inside his head.
“I want you back in my life,” he said simply. “Finding me in bed with another woman drove you out to America. I’d hoped that freeing you from your contract would bring you back to England… and to me.”
The answer knocked Erika off balance – going further than she’d expected – and her breath failed momentarily. “As a friend?”
“If all else fails. But I was hoping for more.”
She panicked. Time had been slow to anaesthetise her against the pain of their first break-up and she doubted her heart would survive a second wounding. An intolerable loneliness had engulfed her and it had taken months to claw her way out of it. The upcoming fight with Marty threatened to break what remained of her spirit and she’d have nothing left over to deal with another split from Aiden.
She couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t sink without trace this time.
“It’s been over between us for too long,” she therefore told him. “There’s no going back. This is only harmless flirtation. A chance for you to make amends.”
“I told myself the same thing, but the minute I laid eyes on you again, I knew it wasn’t over.”
“It is for me.”
“Is it?” His look warned her not to lie to herself. “You can read my mind, even before I know what I’m thinking myself. When you touch me, it’s as if a missing part of me has been returned and your pulse falls into step with mine. The line between us was always blurred and, when we broke up, each of us was left with a hard, jagged edge. Those edges would still match as perfectly now as they did back then.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Because it always was.” His shoulders tensed and he couldn’t meet her eyes. “…until I ruined it.”
There was no denying this, but times had changed.
“You’re talking about someone you knew a long time ago,” Erika said, “but I’m a different person now. How can you be sure it would still work?”
“Instinct.”
“Wishful thinking,” she corrected him.
“Maybe.” He shrugged but didn’t look convinced. “But there’s nothing wrong with holding out hope.”
Since first meeting Aiden all those years ago
, Erika had gone through every emotion – from bottomless love to deepest hatred – but that didn’t mean she could now lie, or even let him carry on with false optimism.
“No.” She made herself sound adamant, even though her resolve skipped a beat. “It’s too big a step. Meeting you again has been about nostalgia and neglected physical needs.”
“You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s just sex and memories.”
“It is for me.” She willed him to believe her. “All I can think about right now is the fight I’m facing to keep my music. Even without that, I don’t know if I’d have the strength to involve myself with you again.”
Aiden laced his fingers through Erika’s and pulled her hand close to his chest where she felt his heartbeat through his shirt. As he’d predicted, her pulse picked up the rhythm of his heart and slowed, losing its turbulence.
“I’m not talking about going back to where we left off,” he said. “We can take it as slowly as you like. Start fresh and see where it goes.”
“Right back to heartbreak,” she thought out loud, indecision writ large across her face.
“Why? You can’t deny there’s still a connection between us. We’re finding it hard to keep our hands off one another. Why else would you have kissed me?”
“That’s different. Of course there’s physical attraction, but you’re talking about a relationship. Love, commitment, trust and everything in between.”
“Then let’s start with the sex and work up from there.”
“What!” The suggestion came so unexpectedly Erika could barely gasp out a reply.
“You heard. And don’t pretend you’re shocked. You have a body made for sin and the other morning proved you’re still no angel. If this weekend is about sex and memories, why don’t we play to our strengths?”
Devilment sparked in his eyes as he waited to see whether she’d take the bait. The hook snagged somewhere close to Erika’s libido and embedded itself, releasing the dam burst of desire she’d held back since first seeing him that evening.
Where would be the harm, she asked herself? After all, he took sexy to a whole new level and it would be a shame to waste it, particularly as they only had thirty six hours to play with.