She would have loved to be the kind of confident person who felt no need to fill deliberate pauses in conversations, but the age-old need to be liked and respected had total control when it came to holding her tongue.
‘I don’t have time for relationships,’ she heard herself elaborating. He was nodding encouragement. ‘I’ve been trying to get on at work, save some money up for a flat.’ A rueful laugh bubbled out of her. ‘Not that I’ve actually got any savings anymore. And this job isn’t exactly nine-to-five. Socialising takes a bit of a back seat.’
‘Ah the job again,’ he said, sitting back a little on the sofa. ‘So there’s really no limit to any request I might make?’
A calming wave of relief that the conversation was back on a professional footing made her breathe easier.
‘Nope,’ she said, giving him an enthusiastic smile. ‘No limit. We had an actress not long ago who took a whole floor for her entourage and had every room repainted candy pink. Or on a lesser scale, scented candles in the room are a biggie. Or banks of flowers on every surface. No request too great, too off-the-wall, too diva … ’
She trailed away with the PR spiel as he continued to watch her, his gaze holding hers absolutely steady, the expression on his face like the cat who was about to steal the cream.
‘And what about more…personal requests.’
His eyes creased at the corners, the lopsided smile that had melted the hearts of the nation’s women played at his lips.
Her heart began thundering as if she’d just taken the four-storey hotel stairwell two at a time. He was coming onto her. Wasn’t he? Why on earth would someone like him look twice at someone like her? If it had been anyone else self-doubt might have won the day and she would have dismissed the idea out of hand, but then this was Matt Stanton. The track record of his personal life spoke for itself, he’d bedded more women than she’d had hot coffees.
She’d been a fan of his for years. It wasn’t just his skill and grace on the tennis court, it was the same thing that afflicted the rest of the female species. Women fell at his feet, at which point he picked them up, had the time of his life and then dropped them again just as abruptly. Most infuriating of all, that bachelor-playboy persona seemed to make him all the more desirable.
None of them seemed to mind. Even the kiss n’ tell stories were, when you got right down to it, ultimately complimentary, this morning’s offering a perfect case in point. She thought back to the morning tabloids – My hot aeroplane encounter with Mile-High Matt splashed across the front pages with accompanying grainy mobile phone pic of his naked and very muscular butt.
‘If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I’m not a groupie,’ she heard herself say, thinking of her mother’s insane mission to follow a has-been rock group to another continent. No way was she being categorised alongside that.
Rock stars, tennis stars, it was all interchangeable. What it amounted to was basking in the fringes of someone else’s celebrity, as if the excitement in their lives would somehow rub off on your own supermarket-shopping nine-to-five-daily-grind existence.
‘I don’t care if you are or not,’ he said. ‘The popular press might have it down differently but whether you believe it or not that’s not the single characteristic I look for in a woman.’
‘But you’ve known me for five minutes,’ she protested.
He shrugged.
‘Why does that have to be a negative? If you think about it for a moment you’ll see it opens up a world of possibility. There’s no background hangups to get past, no baggage to talk over and get in the way, no irritating friends and family members to get along with. No hoops to jump through. Just you and me. This room. And whatever we want it to be.’
He leaned forward, reached a tentative hand out and stroked a finger gently across her cheek, the lightest of touches which sent sparks of heat flying through her.
OMG Matt Stanton just touched my cheek!
This was exactly the kind of situation her mother had chased since before Layla was born, and now it had simply presented itself to her as if by magic. An unexpected surge of righteous in-your-face defiance caught her by surprise. Dull and boring, was she? Life passing her by? The hottest man in world tennis had just propositioned her without needing so much as a hint of encouragement. She wasn’t even dressed up for Pete’s sake, she was wearing the usual hideous charcoal grey hotel uniform, name badge pinned to her lapel, happy-to-help smile pasted on her face. Not a leather bustier in sight.
Hot on the heels of the defiance came an idea that was so wildly outside her remit that it made her feel dizzy and she held her glass of orange juice tightly in both hands and took a calming sip of it to steady herself.
Her life as it stood at this moment in time wasn’t exactly scaling the dizzy heights of success, was it? Her mother’s parting words gnawed at her pride and self-belief deep down on a base level. Maybe she could have brushed them off if she was holding down some high-flying job and living an upwardly mobile life in a flat of her own, but the fact was, she wasn’t even close. However hard she might try to crush it, there was a tiny bit of her that wondered whether her mother might actually have a point when it came to life. What exactly had twenty four years of striving for respectability got her?
It had been no picnic staking a claim for common sense and normality in the middle of the chaotic one-crazy-minute-at-a-time lifestyle of her mother. Since reaching adulthood the desire for a place of her own had reached dizzying heights, the need for proper roots and security driving her on to work ever longer hours.
And just where exactly had it got her?
For the first time she could remember, looking into the melting brown eyes full of suggestion, with the day becoming crazier by the minute, she questioned her own judgement and beliefs.
Thanks to her mother she was as far away from saving a deposit up as ever. She had a tiny rented studio with sparse shared facilities and a job that left hardly any surplus at the end of the month for savings. The endless grind of that wore her down. Her friend Lucy, one of the many waitressing staff, had a buzzing social life which she lived to the full, never knowing or caring what the next moment might bring. Layla rarely had time or funds for any of that.
Why not do something outside her comfort zone for once? Her comfort zone hadn’t exactly delivered much in the way of comfort so far. The thought of doing something reckless and impulsive felt suddenly very exciting, as if she would be stepping outside her own nightmare of a life into a glamorous unpredictable world where anything could happen. For a moment there she actually weakened.
And then reality bit her squarely on the arse.
What was she doing? Was this the kind of thought that travelled around her mother’s brain on a loop? She was under no illusions about how exciting and interesting she was when put up against the draw of fame and fortune, her mother had spent her whole life illustrating that very point. She had no truck with fame or celebrities and was she really about to be seduced by the very thing she’d spent her whole life abhorring?
She grimly ignored the delicious flip flops going on in her stomach as he smiled at her and forced herself to put her glass down on the table. She stood up, put a few paces between them and swallowed hard to channel calm and squash the surge of you’re-not-turning-him-down-are-you disappointment that had begun to rise in her stomach to replace the butterflies.
