I took a deep breath.
‘Well, same here, essentially,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I was the new girl and you were the old hand with a reputation I didn’t know about at the time. I was vulnerable and I needed a friend, and you made me feel like a twat. Well, not you, to be fair. Everybody else. All I got all week was “Oh, God, you let Crowley charm your pants off. Well, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last.” Really lovely introduction to my new career, that was.’
Contrition was written all over his face, with its drooping mouth and its glistening eyes. I wanted to reach out and stroke his cheek and say, ‘There, there.’
‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, holding out a hand and taking one of mine, ‘I wanted to call you. But you seemed pretty anti. Well, once Tilda and Miles got their hooks into you.’
‘They only told me what you were like. Don’t blame them.’
‘What, you don’t think they might have their own agendas? Tilda’s my ex, and Miles fancies you.’
‘What?’ I hadn’t been party to either of these nuggets of information.
‘She won’t talk about it, and he won’t admit it, but come on. Isn’t
it obvious?’
‘To you, maybe. But you’re a dirt-digger. You see sleaze in everything.’
‘I see what’s in front of my nose,’ he said. ‘And right now, my nose likes what it’s seeing.’
I laughed despite myself. Tom had just shifted my perceptions of all my office relationships, but he’d done it very charmingly and I was less dismayed than I might have been.
‘So all that…was a misunderstanding, then?’ I said, wanting to believe it.
‘Classic romcom,’ he said. ‘She thinks this, he thinks that, neither of them are right, it all works out in the end.’
‘And is this the end?’
‘This,’ he said, kissing my knuckles with a decorous flourish that went well with his Victorian-style outfit, ‘is the beginning.’
Chapter Three
I won’t lie. I had considered the possibility that Tom might end up in my room and had set-dressed accordingly. My supermarket magazines were all in the recycling, replaced on the bedside table by a selection of intellectual heavyweights from my university reading list. All discarded, inside-out garments had made it into the laundry bin, and my perfumes and makeup were impeccably arranged on the dressing table, with no open eyeshadow trays or capless lipsticks.
The bed was not only made – it smelled of summer meadows. Or so the linen spray I’d used claimed. To be honest, it smelled more like the time I tried to boil up potpourri in a saucepan as a child, to see if you could make soup from it. (You couldn’t.)
Tom didn’t notice the order of things, though, having eyes only for the fringed shawls pinned to the wall and my unworn Victorian-style corset on its little dressmaker’s stand.
‘Whoa, you should’ve worn that tonight,’ he said, supporting my hobbling self over to the bed, where I collapsed gratefully.
‘I’m saving it for a special occasion,’ I said.
‘Isn’t a date with me special enough?’ He turned to me and pouted.
‘I couldn’t be sure at the time of dressing,’ I said, smiling crookedly at him. ‘But perhaps it might turn out to be corset-worthy, after all.’
‘Oh, the pressure,’ said Tom, swooping down to join me on the bed. ‘I have to be corset-worthy.’
‘You have to earn that lovely fob watch you’re wearing, anyway.’
He took it out and dangled it in front of me. The light from my cheap chandelier twinkled on the gold engravings.
‘Got it at the antiques mart,’ he said. ‘Of course, it doesn’t work. But I don’t need a watch to tell me the time.’ He winked and leaned forward to take off his boots.
‘Oh, don’t take the boots off yet,’ I said, my voice dying away in embarrassment as I realised how eager I sounded.
He raised his eyebrows.