Simply Divine (8 page)

'Apologies for noise,' a decisive hand had written in blue-black ink. 'Can I take you out to dinner to say sorry?'

Jane's stomach plunged through the floor. Her knees shook. Should she ignore Tom out of loyalty to Nick? But Nick had let her down with his wretched caravanners' fondue. And what was the point of going out for dinner, piped up a Sensible Voice in her head, when there was a dinner all ready down here? She knew from experience that the putanesca sauce would respond well to treatment; if she added a little more tomato puree, only an

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interesting hint of smokiness would suggest how near it had come to disaster. The pasta was, well, just pasta. And there had never been anything wrong with the tomato ciabatta, the rocket salad and the Pouilly-Something.

Jane rushed upstairs before she could change her mind, knocked on the door and issued the invitation. 'It'll be ready in half an hour,' she said.

'Half an hour, then,' drawled Tom. 'Want me to bring anything?'

'Just yourself,' grinned Jane, instantly feeling mortified for sounding so cheesy. She was filled with a sudden terror that once he was across the threshold she'd be overcome with a form of socially maladroit Tourette's syndrome, telling him to 'sit ye down' and 'take a pew'.

Back in the flat, Jane threw herself against the door in an ecstasy of knotted-stomach guilt. Honestly, said the Sensible Voice. Anyone would think that you'd swung naked from the chandeliers, licked cream off his entire body and committed triple-chocolate adultery, the way you're reacting. You've only invited him to dinner. Jane pulled herself together. Half an hour, she thought, panicking. Five minutes for the food and twenty-five to make herself look more stunning than a 2,000 volt charge.

Twenty minutes later, Jane was standing despairing in the bedroom, having tried on and abandoned every outfit she possessed. He might think it odd she had changed, anyway, she thought, prising herself back into her jeans and white linen shirt. Ten minutes. She brushed her hair furiously, cleaned her teeth manically, re-applied her worn-off lipstick and gave herself another coat of mascara. As usual, it took longer to unclog her handiwork with a lash comb than it did to put it on in the first place. Five minutes. 'Aagh,' squealed Jane, giving herself a last slick

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of perfumeless Mum and a powerful blast of Chanel No 19. Three minutes. She rushed into the kitchen and uncorked the half-botde of champagne for Dutch courage. Shame I never got round to the food, she thought, eyeing the reproachful mass of pasta as she knocked back an entire flute in one.

Right on cue, there was a knock at the door. Heart thumping, Jane opened it to find Tom waving a bottle of Moet. 'By way of apology, as you wouldn't let me take you out,' he grinned. 'And it's cold, so we can drink it now.'

As Jane sloshed it unsteadily into two glasses. Tom went straight to the bookshelves. 'What's this like?' he asked, selecting
Callaghan: The Man and The Myth
and
The John Major I Knew.

'Not what you'd call a racy read,' said Jane. Even Nick had struggled with the Major book.

'But then,' she added, 'I'm not the one to ask. Politics isn't really my thing. Nick gets cross with me because he says all I care about are Cherie Blairs skirt lengths.'

'Cherie Blair's skirts are a crucial issue,' said Tom gravely. She had no idea if he was teasing her. 'Nick's away, I take it?' Was that a gleam in his eye? 'How did you know?'

'Elementary, my dear Jane. After you'd been up - and rightly, too - to complain about me, I simply put my ear to the floor and listened.' He grinned at her and emptied his champagne glass down his muscular throat.

'Yes. He's in Brussels.' She explained about the caravan-ners' fondue party. Tom raised an eyebrow.

He moved on from Nick's books to her own. Jane sent up a rare, silent prayer of thanks to her absent boyfriend for not allowing her room for her collection of bonkbusters. Those had been relegated to piles on the floor beneath the

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shelves while Nick had conceded a few inches of the shelves themselves to the battered old volumes of Keats, Yeats, Eliot and Shakespeare Jane had studied at university. Books that she still opened now and then to remind herself that she had once had a brain.

'It's when I read Yeats that I realise how hopeless it is to try and be a writer,' Tom sighed.

'Are you a writer, then?' Jane gasped. 'How
romantic.
What are you working on?'

Tom looked amused. I'm not sure it's all that romantic.'

Jane mentally kicked herself. How could she have sounded so jejune?

'It's about this serial killer driving around the Aberdeen ring road,' Tom elaborated. 'He's had a few lines of coke, his necrophiliac Alsatian's asleep in the back, and the man's bored, so he suddenly decides to follow this car and see where it's going. When the car stops at a service station, the killer gets out and does the business, as does the dog. This seems quite fun to them, so they start following another car at random, then strike again when it stops, then start following a van to see where that's going. And so on and so on until the man and the dog eventually drive off the Humber Bridge.' He stopped, and looked triumphantly at Jane. 'It's a sort of metaphor for our violent, haphazard society and the random nature of the choices we make in life. And death.'

Jane's heart sank. It sounded horrible.

'It's sort of
On the Road
meets
In Cold Blood,
so I thought I'd call it
Cold Road?
said Tom, beaming. 'What do you think?'

Jane screwed up her courage. 'To be honest, not much,' she said. 'Ghasdy, actually. I can't bear books like that.' She regretted it the moment the words left her.

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Tom turned back to the bookshelves. Jane noticed his shoulders moving up and down. He was evidently struggling with his feelings.

'I'm so sorry,' she gasped, touching him on the arm. 'I didn't mean

Tom whipped round. His eyes blazed and his mouth quivered. Jane realised he was laughing.

'That plot,' he grinned, 'was suggested by my agent the other day. He told me that that's the sort of thing I would have to start knocking out if I ever wanted to make any money.'

'Ugh,' said Jane, relaxing a little. 'Well, I certainly wouldn't buy it.'

'Shock value equals publicity value apparendy,' Tom said. 'Frankly, I'd rather write a bonkbuster. I see you've got quite a collection.'

So he'd noticed the Jilly Coopers after all. Tom grinned as Jane poured him another glass of Moet foam with a wobbling hand.

'Yes, of course. I can see the plot now.' Tom stared theatrically at the ceiling. 'Impecunious writer takes flat for a few weeks above beautiful blonde who lives in basement with boyfriend who doesn't realise how lucky he is.' He paused. 'Writer meets girl over romantic dinner, falls in love but has to leave for New York the next morning.'

Jane buried her reddening face in the champagne.

She'd read about sexual tension before, although all it had meant with Nick was that she wanted it and he didn't. But here it was now, the real thing. The air between Tom and herself felt thick with energy. Jane imagined a white flash of electricity if she touched him, like the opening credits of the South Bank Show. By now, Nick had receded to the far outback of her mind. Not waving, not even

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drowning. Not, for the time being, at all.

She stole a glance at Tom from under her triple-mascara'd lashes. He had all the careless glamour of one of those singlet-clad models in the Calvin Klein ads, except that Tom's seemed genuinely effortless. His hair had obviously not seen a comb for at least a day and his jeans were ripped at the knee. The most convincing testament of all to his lack of vanity was the T-shirt proclaiming 'Some Idiot Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt'.

'I always wondered who actually bought those,' Jane said, breaking the crackling silence,

Tom looked down at his chest, surprised. 'Got it from a jumble sale,' he said. 'Quite like it, actually. I find the implication that people come back from London laden with exotic gifts unobtainable elsewhere rather romantic really.' He grinned.

'Er, would you like to eat?' Jane asked. After all, it was the whole point of the evening. Wasn't it?

Tom nodded politely. 'Love to. But can we talk a bit more first? I find it practically impossible to have a conversation over food. I'm always shoving my fork in my mouth at the exact time someone is asking me a question/

It was amazing. He wanted to talk to her. Jane racked her brains to recall the last time she had had a proper conversation with Nick. Or, come to that, the first time.

'We were talking about my bonkbuster, I believe,' Tom said lightly, igniting a Marlboro and gazing at her from between the slits in his narrowed eyelids. 'Now, where had we got to?' He stared at the ceiling again. 'Ah yes.' He blew a sequence of perfect smoke rings. 'Writer comes down for dinner with beautiful blonde, falls in love, but realises that as he is going away next morning and she has

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a boyfriend, it can never be.' He stopped, pulled a face and looked at Jane. 'Pity.' It was impossible to tell if he was serious. Nevertheless, disappointment flooded her.

'So.' Tom slipped from the armchair on to the floor and crawled across the rug to where Jane perched on the edge of the sofa. He looked into her eyes, took her face in his hands and touched her lips with his. 'So he steals a kiss anyway.' Jane's back locked rigid with excitement.

With a light finger, Tom traced the outline of her cheekbones and lips before slowly, deliberately, lowering his mouth again to hers.

Jane's brain flew round her cranium like a flock of disturbed sparrows. He couldn't do this to her. But, as his tongue gently slid between her acquiescent lips, she felt very glad that he had.

'Do you do this to everyone you've only just met?' she stammered as he came up for air.

'No, of course not. Anyway, we've met before.'

'What about your girlfriend?'

'Don't have one.' He was lying, Jane knew. So the girl on the stairs had been his agent, had she? 'More to the point, what about your boyfriend?' asked Tom wickedly. By now his hands had slipped inside her shirt. They were cool and dry, unlike Nick's, whose were always the temperature and moistness, if not the cleanliness, of the hot towels served in Indian restaurants. Tom's tongue, too, was miraculously free of the rivers of saliva that accompanied Nick's rare attempts at tonsil hockey.

'He's not here,' said Jane. Having decided that she would sleep with Tom, she felt quite calm now. What possible harm would one empty, brittle, mad, impetuous and utterly meaningless fling do? It was, anyway, Nick's fault for throwing her in temptations way. Wasn't it?

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Jane looked boldly into the clear eyes a few inches from her own. 'Let's just get something straight, shall we?' she said, as Tom's hand gently pushed down her jeans zip and started investigating her knickers.

'What?' mumbled Tom. 'I've got some condoms.'

'There's something else.'

Jane made no attempt to resist as he pushed her gently down on the rug. Thank goodness she'd hoovered it reasonably recently. And thank double goodness she'd shaved her armpits. As Tom's mouth moved down to her stiffening nipple she breathed in the heady scent of him -top notes of basil with a dash of salt.

'What?' muttered Tom. His tongue flicked thrillingly about her nipple. Jane gasped as every nerve in her body started singing the Hallelujah Chorus and her insides dissolved into molten metal.

'This is a one-night stand, isn't it?'

'Of course.' Tom looked up at her and grinned through his tangle of hair. 'This is far too much fun to last.'

'So you won't respect me in the morning?'

'I sincerely hope not.'

'That's all right then.'

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Chapter 5

'Wore that yesterday, didn't you?' Josh asked as Jane came into the office the next morning.

Jane ignored him. Who cared if she'd rushed out of bed at the last minute and thrown on the clothes still lying on. the floor from the night before? Josh was lucky she'd got them on the right way round. She sighed as her eye caught the clock. Tom would soon be leaving to catch his flight to New York. She would never see him again. Parts of her — very particular parts of her - regretted this intensely. But it was just as well, obviously. Last night had been a meaningless, mad and utterly shallow fling. But as meaningless, mad and utterly shallow flings went, it had been a good one.