‘Don’t be coy. When are you going to see him again?’
‘I’m not.’
Gemma’s jaw dropped and her cup clattered in the saucer. ‘What? Are you insane? Why on earth not?’
Abby set her jaw and reminded herself that she was doing the right thing even though her body, which clearly agreed with Gemma, was doing its damnedest to get her to change her mind. ‘Well, for one thing, I didn’t leave my phone number.’
‘Idiot,’ said Gemma, who gave her number to pretty much every man she met, with limited success. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d make such a schoolgirl error.’
Abby shook her head. ‘No error,’ she said. ‘I did it deliberately.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘It seemed a bit desperate,’ she said pointedly.
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said Gemma sagely, ‘and, believe me, if you don’t try and snap him up someone else will.’
‘Then they’re welcome to him.’
Gemma frowned. ‘Do you regret it?’
‘Not for a moment. Why would I? I feel fabulous. Martin? Martin who?’
‘Then you’re nuts, you know that?’
‘Look,’ said Abby, getting up to refill her cup from the urn, ‘if Leo wants to get in touch he can get hold of my number and call me easily enough—it is on my website after all—but there really wouldn’t be any point even if he did.’
‘If the night was as great as you say it was it seems to me that there’s a mutually very good point indeed.’
‘It wouldn’t go anywhere.’
‘How do you know that, you pessimist?’
Abby sighed and thought about the information she’d dug up on him after half an hour on Google, some of which had been so well buried—although how he’d managed that she had no idea—she’d very nearly missed it. ‘Because he’s about as emotionally repressed as they come.’
‘Ah,’ said Gemma with a slow nod of dawning realisation. ‘Right. I see.’
‘So it doesn’t matter how great he is in bed,’ said Abby. ‘He’s not my type at all.’
‘Well, OK, but don’t you think you may be jumping to conclusions? I mean, you don’t exactly know him very well, do you? At least not in anything other than the physical sense.’
‘I get the feeling you could have known him for years and still not really know him.’
‘That’s true of most men, I should think.’
‘Possibly, but, as you so astutely pointed out, I was keeping my eye on him last night and the entire time he was there but not there if you know what I mean.’
‘Keeping his distance.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It was work.’
‘True, but Jake said it was impossible to know what he was thinking, and what about the weird way he was watching me?’
‘Yes, that was odd.’
‘And then there’s his reputation. That doesn’t come from nowhere. There has to be a basis for it.’