Which was the story of my life if you thought about it.
Metaphorically and literally, my whole life was a ripped dress.
‘Right. Well, this is embarrassing.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Not for you, maybe, but you’re not the one who just put herself out there.’
‘You weren’t broken-hearted?’
‘If we’re going for honesty here, then I’d like to know why you kissed me when you don’t even like me. I’m all for sex with no complications, but self-esteem demands it’s at least with someone who likes who I am.’
His gaze was steady. ‘Did you really think I would have had my hand up your dress if I didn’t like you?’
‘You’re a man. Men do that sort of thing all the time.’
He flipped on the wipers, cleared the snow from his windscreen and pulled back into the road. ‘Some men make decisions based on something more than a surge of testosterone.’
He shifted gears smoothly and the engine purred, loving his skilled touch. I sympathized.
I shifted in my seat so that I could look at his face. It was past six o’clock and anywhere else in the country it would have been dark, but in London it was as if someone had forgotten to turn the lights off. The place blazed like the runway at Heathrow airport. ‘Are you angry?’
It was a moment before he answered. ‘Thinking about you with Charlie makes me angry. Why the hell were you with him, Hayley? He constantly tried to make you someone you weren’t.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘When you got this job, did he help you celebrate? No, he got drunk.’
And Nico had driven me home.
As my sister had reminded me, it had been Nico who had dropped me safely at my door.
My heart hammered against my chest. It felt like a wake-up call because he was asking me the question I should have asked myself right from day one. ‘I know you disapprove of me.’
As usual his expression revealed nothing. ‘You don’t know anything, Hayley.’
He pulled up at a junction.
The lights were on red and I found myself looking at the flex of thigh muscle as he stopped the car. And then he turned his head and I glanced from his leg to his face. I felt like a teenager unable to stop staring at the best looking boy in the class. Right at that moment no one else existed for me. We could have been the only two people on an alien planet where lights blazed and the streets were empty.
‘I don’t want to talk about Charlie.’ His voice had a rough quality that rubbed over my nerve endings and made me shiver.
‘OK.’ It wasn’t exactly an eloquent response, but it was the best I could manage with him looking at me like that.
‘And just for the record, I can’t explain what happened at the wedding either.’ There was an edge to his voice. ‘It wasn’t like me.’
One look at Kiara’s face had told me that.
Now I couldn’t speak at all. My insides were quivery. Warmth spread through me because right now I was the woman he was with and I didn’t care what had happened before or what might come after.
The lights had changed, but he didn’t move and neither did I.
We were locked together by a shocking chemistry and a total inability to look away.
Honestly, whenever this sort of thing happened in the movies I rolled my eyes. Although admittedly in the movies the heroine was staring at someone like Ryan Gosling, which maybe made the whole ‘struck by lightening’ thing slightly more believable.
But I hadn’t ever imagined it could happen in real life to an everyday person like me.