You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (3 page)

‘God, you walk fast,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you since Wardour Street.’

‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Neve ground out, as she came to a halt so she could stand there with her hands on her hips and glare at him.

In the glow of the streetlamps and the glare of neon signs, Neve could see that his hair wasn’t dirty but a glossy dark brown, and his skin had an olive tinge that suggested he’d tan at the first sight of the sun. Which wasn’t important right then. It didn’t matter how pretty he was when he had such an ugly soul.

Max spread his hands wide. ‘Look, I’m sorry I slapped your arse. It was inexcusable and it’s been pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that most women don’t have the same relaxed attitude to inappropriate touching as the girls in the office do.’

It was a really poor excuse for an apology. ‘You implied … you said …’

‘To be honest, I don’t know how cushiony your bum is, it was just a line. I really didn’t mean to upset you.’ Max sounded sincere and he was looking at her with a furrowed brow.

‘Fine,’ Neve said, though it was a very huffy kind of ‘fine’. ‘Apology accepted, I suppose.’

She started walking again. So did Max. Walking alongside her, as if they were friends.

‘So, where are you heading?’

‘I’m going to the tube,’ Neve said, because she didn’t have the guts to pointedly ignore him.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked casually.

If by some bizarre twist of fate, Max had decided that she’d do for the night, then he was going to be sorely disappointed. ‘Finsbury Park,’ Neve said tersely.

‘I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’

Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’

‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’

‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’

‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped her arse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”’

Neve could feel her mouth doing something very strange. It felt as if she was smiling, and when Max smiled back at her she could understand why the
Skirt
girls forgave him for being such an obnoxious flirt. It was a suggestive smile that stopped just short of being a leer, and when it was aimed in Neve’s direction, it made her feel as if she was sexy and desirable and worthy of it. In fact, it was such a good smile that Neve was powerless to resist its potent charm. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to miss the last tube.’

Threading their way through the bustle of Old Compton Street meant that they didn’t have to talk, and soon they entered the welcome warmth of the station. Neve always walked down the escalators (and up them too) so she didn’t even think to see if Max was following but lurched down the stairs, the strumming of a busker playing ‘Hey Jude’ getting louder and louder, until she stepped off with a shaky dismount. Max was right behind her, not quite touching her, but close enough to steer her in the right direction when she got confused between the northbound and southbound Piccadilly line platforms.

‘It’s so crowded,’ Neve complained as they stepped on to the packed platform. ‘It’s as bad as rush hour.’

Max cupped her elbow. ‘Let’s walk down to the end – more chance of getting a seat.’

As they reached the end of the platform, the train screeched into the station. Max had been right; there were plenty of empty seats. Neve plopped down and pulled off her woolly hat. ‘You should never get in the first or last carriage,’ she said. ‘If we had a collision with another train, we’d bear the full force of the impact.’

‘Well, I’m willing to risk it if it means I can get a seat,’ Max said, sitting down next to her and stretching out his long legs. He gave Neve a sideways look from eyes framed with those outrageously long lashes. ‘So, here we are.’

‘You didn’t want to go to Soho House with the others?’

‘Fancied an early night for a change,’ Max said with a smile that definitely verged on lecherous this time. ‘Normally I’m the last to leave but I have a breakfast meeting at the Wolseley with my agent. The man’s a sadist, always forcing me out of bed at some ungodly hour.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Neve said feelingly. Not about breakfast meetings with agents at very fancy London restaurants, but five days a week her alarm chirped insistently at six. She looked at her watch in dismay. ‘I’ve got to be up in five and a half hours.’

‘Not really much point in going to bed, is there?’ Max shifted in his seat so his arm and leg were pressed against Neve’s. ‘I’m sure we could find something else to do to pass the time.’

He said it lightly and with that cheeky little smirk so Neve decided not to take offence. She smiled instead, secure in the knowledge that there was every point in going to bed, alone, to sleep for a solid five hours. ‘So, why do you have an agent?’ she asked, mostly to change the subject. ‘Do all Editors-at-Large have one?’

‘Only those who write best-selling novels,’ Max revealed with just the slightest edge, like he couldn’t believe that Neve needed any clarification. ‘Well, technically I ghost-write them, but between you and me, Mandy isn’t going to give Iris Murdoch any sleepless nights.’

‘Well, Iris Murdoch has been dead for quite a few years,’ Neve murmured. However, Max was still looking at her expectantly, as if his bestselling novels merited more of a reaction. ‘I’m sorry. Who’s Mandy?’

Max stopped lolling in his seat and sat up straight. ‘
Mandy
,’ he repeated impatiently.

‘I can’t quite place the name,’ Neve said. ‘Is she one of those very famous people who don’t need to have a surname?’

He made a tiny scoffing noise. ‘Yeah, right. Mandy McIntyre. She’s only the most famous WAG in Britain.’

‘Hmmm – what does WAG stand for again?’ Neve asked. ‘I always forget but I know it’s something that doesn’t make sense.’

‘You don’t know what a WAG is? For real?’ Max asked incredulously. ‘Wives and girlfriends.
Footballers
’ wives and girlfriends.’

‘Oh! See, that’s the bit that I don’t understand. If they’re footballers’ wives and girlfriends, then really they should be called FWAGs. Though it doesn’t really roll off the tongue that easily.’ Neve mouthed the unwieldy acronym to herself a couple more times as Max stared at her. ‘No, it really doesn’t work. Anyway, I’ve never heard of her but I don’t watch much TV. So she writes novels, does she? Or you write them for her?’

Neve was trying not to sound too disapproving that some girlfriend of a footballer could get a book deal, when she knew of at least three would-be novelists with good degrees from good universities who were working for minimum wage and couldn’t even get a short story published. She guessed that she’d managed to keep her outrage to herself because a faint smile was tugging at the corners of Max’s mouth.

‘Well, Mandy and I go way back,’ he said. ‘I interviewed her for
Skirt
and we really hit it off so she asked me to ghost her memoirs.’

‘Oh, she must be quite old if she’s already had a memoir published.’

‘She’s twenty-two,’ Max said. ‘Then, after Mand’s autobiography, we wrote a
Style Guide
and now I’m working on her fourth novel.’

‘But I thought you said that you wrote them together?’ It was all very confusing, especially when you’d had too many white-wine spritzers.

‘The publisher came up with an idea about a young girl who’s working in a supermarket when she starts dating a footballer, then Mandy and I brainstormed some scenarios, I fleshed it out and three novels later, we’ve sold over a million books. The series has been translated into twenty-three different languages and it’s in development with a film production company,’ Max said proudly. ‘You
must
have read one of them. Every woman I know has secretly read at least one of them.’

‘Look, I don’t read that kind of novel,’ Neve said – and immediately realised how snotty she sounded, if the curl of Max’s top lip was a good indicator. She frantically tried to backtrack. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very fair; I mean, you do all the work and she gets all the credit and the royalties.’

‘Not
all
the royalties,’ Max demurred. He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you know who she is? Have you just come out from under a large rock?’

‘The truth is, I’m not really that interested in celebrities,’ Neve explained carefully. ‘It just all seems rather superficial, and anyway, I have to do a lot of serious reading for my job, so—’

‘What is your job?’ Max demanded rather belligerently. ‘I suppose it’s something completely worthy and
un
superficial, like finding a cure for cancer or solving world hunger.’

She hadn’t said that
he
was superficial so there was no need for Max to be quite so snippy. ‘I work at a literary archive,’ Neve informed him coldly. ‘I’m the senior archivist.’

‘What? Like a library or something?’

‘It’s not the least bit like a library,’ Neve snapped. ‘And safeguarding literary papers for future generations is actually a very worthwhile and rewarding job.’

‘If you say so,’ Max said dismissively. ‘Sounds kinda boring to me.’

Neve was saved from having to tell Max she didn’t appreciate his philistine views on her choice of career by the train pulling into Finsbury Park station.

As soon as the train came to a halt she was out of her seat and through the doors before they’d even finished opening. She then lurched up the stairs in shoes which had now officially become Instruments of Torture, and would have tried to run down the long tunnel that led to the street if she wasn’t stuck behind a man wheeling a large suitcase behind him.

It wasn’t long before Max caught up with her, though Neve couldn’t imagine why. If their positions were reversed, she’d have skulked on the platform for several minutes until she was sure he’d gone.

‘Is this going to be the pattern for our relationship?’ he asked, body-blocking the Oyster card reader so Neve had to yank him away before somebody intent on swiping their ticket hit him. ‘I say something mildly controversial, you storm off in a huff and then I’m forced to chase after you so I can say I’m sorry?’

‘We’re not in a relationship,’ Neve reminded him. She was resolved that this time, she wouldn’t smile or let herself by swayed by Max’s effortless but considerable charm, but God help her, she found herself smiling.

‘Fine. You’ve apologised.
Again
. Isn’t that your bus?’

They both watched the W7 sail around the corner. ‘Of course, instead of apologising, we could kiss and make up instead?’ Max suggested lightly.

They were standing in front of the London Underground map, hands shoved into respective pockets. Neve looked up at Max to see if he was joking, because, quite frankly, he
had
to be joking. Men who looked like Max and had glamorous jobs and were on first-name terms with WAGs didn’t kiss girls like her. ‘You want to kiss me?’ she asked tremulously.

‘Well, it will be a nice ending when I tell little Tommy the story of how we first met,’ Max said, and Neve wasn’t just smiling, she was giggling, even though, as a rule, she didn’t giggle. ‘The question is, do I kiss you here or at your front door after I’ve walked you home and just before you invite me in for a coffee?’

Neve frowned. This whole situation was running away from her. She was just starting to get the hang of light flirtation and now Max had raced ahead to kissing and … ‘For a coffee?’

‘Are we really doing this?’ Max sounded exasperated. ‘Not for a coffee. For this.’

His hands were out of his pockets and around her waist before Neve had time to blink or pull in her tummy. All she could do was watch Max’s face get nearer and nearer. The kiss was inevitable but she still thought she was imagining it when Max’s lips brushed against hers.

Neve didn’t pull away, but she didn’t move closer; she just stayed absolutely statue-still to see where this was going to lead.

‘I love your red lipstick,’ Max murmured, as if they were already alone in her flat and not standing outside a tube station with the wind whistling around them and discarded take-away containers and fag ends at their feet. ‘It’s so sexy.’

Neve knew it was just a line to get into her knickers, though if Max could see the firm-control reality of them, then he’d have wished he hadn’t bothered, she thought sadly. She opened her mouth to say something, to tell Max the red lipstick was just false advertising, supplied by Celia, but her words got lost when Max lifted his thumb to her mouth and slowly and deliberately wiped it away.

‘What did you do that for?’ Neve touched her fingers to her lips, which were tingling as if he’d been kissing her for hours.

‘Because I want to kiss you again and I don’t think red’s my colour. I usually go for the pinker shades,’ Max said, and Neve wondered how many girls he’d practised on before the right words came tumbling out of his mouth without him even having to think about it. He’d undoubtedly kissed a lot of women, really knew what he was doing, so why not treat this whole confusing encounter as an educational experience?