All Work and No Play (16 page)

Jonny flung himself back in his chair and pulled up his email application. He opened a blank message, addressed it to Jane, and typed faster than he’d managed all night.

Jane,

It wasn’t an act. None of it was an act at all. I’m so in love with you I can’t think straight and the only way I can stop myself from falling so much more in love
with you that I’ll never escape again is to pretend to you that I don’t love you, even when I’m showing everybody else that I do.

He stared at the words on the screen.

How could he fix this mess? Was there some little action he could go back and change? The original email he’d sent, their meeting at lunch, the inadvertent cybersex session? The exhilarating moments when they’d been joined physically, closer than he’d felt to anyone before?

Even when he’d been making love with her, when it had seemed perfect and wonderful and his dreams come true, it had been going wrong.

His finger hovered over the mouse button to send the email to Jane. After all the deception and the misunderstandings, was the truth going to make anything any better?

Jonny pictured her sitting in that bare flat, at her desk, reading his email. He saw her biting her lip and her expressive eyes filling with worry.

She wanted him. But it was because of how he looked, and despite how she felt. And if she didn’t love him back, there was no point opening up his heart, because that wasn’t going to be fixed easily, either.

He deleted the email, unsent, and clicked back on his
word-processing program. He had a lot of work to do, and he certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep.

They were in a tree, dangling their legs, except they were all grown up. She wore her silk dress and Jonny’s shirt was half open, unbuttoned at the top, his blue tie pulled askew. His hair was tousled but it wasn’t from styling. It was from her fingers.

Her mouth felt raw from kissing. Her body was on fire. Jonny took off his glasses and his eyes were bluer than the sky surrounding them.

‘Tell me your fantasy,’ she said to him. A puff of breeze caught her hair, blew through her bare toes, and made her feel as if she could fly.

‘It’s you,’ he said, and he reached for her.

He touched her and there was music. Hazy and compelling as a heartbeat, filtering through the leaves. Jane slid forward on her branch so she was close to him, close enough to dance. She raised her face to his and kissed him one more time.

And then they were falling down, and the limbs of the tree were hitting the ground before them, hitting with dull thuds.

Just before they reached the ground Jane sat up straight in bed, her heart racing and her body barely able
to believe that she wasn’t falling through space, and she wasn’t in Jonny’s arms.

‘Stupid dream,’ she muttered, pushing her hair back from her face. It was tangled and damp with sweat. She kicked aside the covers and swung her legs out of bed and she heard the dull thuds from her dream again.

It was the door. ‘Just a minute,’ she called, and found a pair of pyjama bottoms on her bedroom chair. The first time she put them on backwards so she had to sit on her bed and put them on again.

Whoever it was was knocking on the door for the third time by the time she finally got to it. When she opened it, it was Jonny.

He had on jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt and his dark-rimmed glasses and despite all this he looked so much as he had in her dream that she couldn’t do anything but stare at him in surprise.

‘Sleeping in?’

His voice was cheerful, a complete contrast to how he’d left her last night, or the low passionate tones of her dream. He held out a cardboard cup with a plastic lid to her.

‘Skinny latte with chocolate. It should wake you up.’

Jane didn’t take it. Instead she attempted to push back her hair again, but it was too much of a rat’s nest. That should teach her to use hairspray.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked.

‘Bringing you your favourite coffee?’ He held it closer to her.

‘Why else?’

‘We’ve got a date, remember?’

She frowned, thinking back. ‘No. I don’t remember.’

‘We’re going away for the weekend.’

Comprehension dawned. ‘You mean, what you told Gary and Kathleen? But that was a lie, right?’

‘Nope.’ He nudged a suitcase on the floor with his foot. ‘We’ve got a train in forty-five minutes.’

‘Why?’

Jonny shook his head. ‘Take the coffee, and let me in, and I’ll pretend I’m not insulted by your being so appalled that I want to go away with you for the weekend.’

She took the coffee and stood back to let him in. He picked up his bag and another cup of coffee from the floor and strode inside. Jane tried not to think about how awful she looked.

‘I’m not appalled,’ she said. ‘I’m just surprised. I thought you’d made up that date on the spur of the moment to annoy Gary. Which worked spectacularly, by the way, and thank you.’

‘I did. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it would be a good idea for us to actually go away.’

Really go away somewhere romantic with Jonny? Jane
thought about spending the entire weekend close enough to touch him without being able to, and she was simultaneously filled with longing and despair.

She shook her head a bit to clear it of memories and the traces of her dream, which seemed to be hovering around the corners of her mind. It didn’t work.

‘Why? Do you think Gary will actually try to check up on us?’

‘You’re the one who knows him best,’ Jonny said. He didn’t sound very pleased about the fact. Jane decided it was superfluous to tell him she couldn’t possibly know Gary very well, if she’d never suspected him cheating on her until it had been rubbed in her face.

‘I can always just not answer my phone,’ she said instead.

‘Not good enough. It’s safer if we get out of London.’ He sat down at her desk and turned on her laptop. ‘Have you done a software update on this lately?’

‘What? No.’

He glanced down at the baseboard. ‘Wireless broadband, excellent. There’ll be enough time for me to do a quick update while you go get showered and packed. I’m guessing your RAM needs defragging, too.’

‘Jonny, I don’t need you to—’

His smile was so sudden and so warm that she couldn’t continue.

‘Jane, let me update your computer. I’m good at it, and I’ll enjoy doing it for you. And let me take you away for the weekend. I’m hoping I’ll be good at that, too.’

‘But
why
do you want to go away with me?’ she asked, finally, in desperation, feeling as she had in her dream, falling off the tree.

‘I want to start again,’ he said. ‘I feel like we’ve messed all of this up, somehow, and I want to forget about this act we’re putting on and just be you and me for a little while. It’s the same thing you asked me last night on the balcony. Only for longer.’

‘You want to go away as friends,’ Jane said. Again, she had the odd feeling of two opposite emotions warring for supremacy. This time it was both relief and disappointment, and the combination made her stomach do a distinct roll, as if it couldn’t decide which way to go.

‘Sure,’ he said, smiling. ‘Go and get ready.’

In the absence of any clear-cut response, she went towards her bedroom to follow Jonny’s request. Near the door, she stopped and turned around.

‘You’re trying to save money,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you pay to take me away for the weekend.’

‘Okay,’ he said, already typing away on her laptop. ‘You can pay for your train ticket. I won’t let it bother my manly pride.’

Jane stood in the door, considering Jonathan Cole, her
childhood friend, whom, apparently, she was going to spend a totally platonic weekend with.

And wondered how she could be so turned on by somebody fixing her computer and talking about his lack of manly pride.

Jane peeped up over the screen of her laptop. Across the train table, Jonny was bent over his own keyboard, his eyes behind his glasses intent. Every line of his body and face appeared totally focused on what he was doing; she could hear his fingers flying over the keyboard.

She’d made it a condition of their trip that she would be able to do some work. There was a meeting with Giovanni Franco and his team on Monday afternoon, where the team would present the mock-ups of the campaign using some of the photographs of Jonny, and, though everything was going smoothly, with Franco’s reputation as a tricky client she wanted to make sure the presentation was extra-carefully put together, especially as neither Allen Pearce nor Michael Grey, the agency’s partners, could be there because they were both at a conference in New York.

Jonny had shrugged and smiled in that easygoing way she’d seen so little of the night before. ‘Fine with me, I’ve got a book to finish,’ he’d said. So as soon as they’d boarded the train at Euston they’d both broken out their
laptops and sat across from each other at the table, working the entire time.

Well, at least she’d pretended to be working the entire time. Jonny was distracting. Not that he was doing anything, aside from getting them coffee every now and then. He’d tried to talk with her once or twice, but she’d pretended to be too involved in what she was doing to reply.

But his knees weren’t far from hers underneath the table. Every once in a while he rested his left hand on the table next to his laptop, and, though it was pathetic, the sight of his hand not even doing anything made her think of him holding her, stroking her back as they danced, giving her pleasure. It tempted her to take his hand and rub it against her cheek, just to learn better how his fingers felt, the knuckles and sinews and strength.

He pushed his glasses up his nose every now and then, too. That shouldn’t be sexy, but it was. It was an automatic gesture that made him seem so human, and it made Jane want to push their computers aside and jump across the table and kiss him senseless.

And then, of course, she could smell him. Not an overt scent, just Jonny, in the air she breathed. If Giovanni Franco could bottle his scent as a cologne, they wouldn’t need advertising to sell it.

Overall, it was a good thing that she’d insisted on
working, even though she wasn’t being very efficient. She could only imagine how lust-sodden she’d have been if she hadn’t had something to distract her from her friend Jonathan Cole as they sped through the English countryside towards the Lake District.

Her laptop made a soft chime, and she looked down at it in surprise. On the screen was a message:

Twenty minutes till Penrith. Do you think we’ve worked enough yet? J.

She glanced back up at Jonny, who met her eyes and gave her a cheeky smile and, hell, she didn’t just want to throw herself across the table and kiss him—she wanted to throw herself across the table and grab the front of his sweatshirt and drag him off to the cramped and no doubt disgusting train toilet and have wild and frantic sex with him.

I’ve just got to finish this slide show.

After typing that she vowed to keep her attention on the screen for the next twenty minutes.

Well, at least he knew why Jane was so successful at her job. For the entire three hours and twenty-six minutes of
their journey she had beavered away on her laptop, and every time he’d tried to catch her eye or start a conversation she’d appeared to be completely absorbed in what she was doing. A couple of times he’d caught her glancing in his direction, but immediately she was looking back at her computer as if it had never happened.

His own concentration wasn’t so good. He’d typed plenty, but he was pretty sure it was gibberish. He’d managed maybe an hour of solid work, but then he’d gone to get them a coffee and noticed how Jane studiously avoided any eye contact or any appearance of even noticing him, and it occurred to him that her dedication to work was just a little extreme. Extreme enough to be interpreted as trying to avoid talking with him.

Sitting across from her was a pleasure in itself. He could imagine the two of them working together, stopping to share a smile, exchange thoughts and solve problems together. It could be that way once they had recovered the ease between them. Which, of course, might never happen.

Jonny pushed up his glasses, shut down his laptop, and folded it up as he recognised the long curve approaching Penrith station. If she wanted to work, that was fine. If she wanted to avoid talking to him, that was less fine, but he could handle it. He had her for the entire weekend,
after all, and she wasn’t going to be able to avoid him for ever.

Meanwhile, he would be as friendly as he could be. Jane waited until the very last minute to shut down her own laptop and pack it away.

‘Get a lot done?’ he asked her.

She shrugged. ‘There’s still a lot to do. Giovanni Franco’s team like to have absolutely every “t” crossed and “i” dotted.’

‘Sounds like a lot of work. Is it worth it?’

‘The contract is one of the most prestigious going right now.’

‘I meant, is it worth it to you? It’s a Saturday, after all.’

Jane’s eyes were expressive enough so that he could tell that she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Of course.’ She slipped her laptop into her case. ‘You’ve been hard at work, too.’

‘Yes, but I’ve got to make a lot of money in the shortest time possible. Plus, writing is a flexible job. I can take a few days off to enjoy myself, as long as I make it up another time.’

‘My job isn’t like that. The team is depending on me to nail the contract, and I have to do whatever it takes to make that happen.’

‘What about you? Aren’t you depending on yourself, too, to make yourself happy every once in a while?’

‘I’ll be happy when this contract is all sewn up.’ She reached up to take down her bag from the overhead rack, but he beat her to it.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said.

‘When are you going to figure out that I like to do things for you?’ He handed her the bag. ‘I wouldn’t mind making you happy, either.’

‘Amy tells me you did a wonderful job with the photos. That makes me happy.’

She was shut up tighter than a clam, determined not to give an inch. He tried one more time. ‘Is it really only work that makes you happy?’