like Jeff were always looking over your shoulder to see who was coming along behind you. One pretty, pouting twenty-something in a thong leotard asking him to explain the lateral pull-down machine and it’d have been all over.
Mind you, if she’d been staying on at the hotel, she wouldn’t have gone off with Jeff in the first place. The Triumph Hotel’s gossip network was far superior to the actual hotel network. It took over half an hour to have an omelette delivered to a guest’s bedroom via room service and only ten minutes for a juicy bit of news to travel all the way from the kitchens to the concierge desk, having reached the business centre and the restaurant into the bargain. The gossiping that would have gone on if Hannah had been seen walking out with the gym’s new manager would have been hilarious to behold.
After a year when she had gossiped with nobody, dated nobody and revealed not one item of information about herself to the naturally inquisitive staff, Hannah couldn’t have coped with seeing the floodgates of curiosity come rushing open. But she had her reference, her new job was lined up for when she returned from holiday and nobody could touch her for one carefree fling. ‘Indulge yourself,’ advised all the women’s magazines when it came to getting over unhappy love affairs. ‘Have a massage, treat yourself to an aromatherapy session.’ Jeff was her first AH (After Harry) treat. More fun than aromatherapy and less painful than a facial, but guaranteed to give you an inner glow that Oil of Olay couldn’t manage.
Happily unaware of his status as a reward for a year of celibacy, Jeff let more hot water flood into the bath and lay back in the bubbles. Trying not to let herself get irritated because he obviously had no intention of leaving, Hannah concentrated on rubbing moisturizer into her face.
She had been able to reshape her body with endless hours of exercising but her face remained stubbornly the same as ever: rounded with a pointed chin, slightly too-beaky nose and bright almond-shaped eyes the exact colour of toffee. With a sprinkling of amber freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones, the cumulative effect of sparkling eyes and the rippling nutbrown hair should have been that of a casually pretty woman. Attractive but no beauty, would be the conclusion if someone had described Hannah to a stranger.
But a simple description would leave out the very thing which transformed her. Hannah glowed with that fleeting, most unbottleable quality that people lacking it did everything to acquire – sex appeal. From the way she walked with that languid sway of her enduringly curvy hips, to the way she drank her tea, wide mouth pursing up softly around the china to take a first sip, screamed of sexuality. She didn’t do it on purpose: in fact, she didn’t have to do anything. Hannah Campbell, thirty-six-year-old hotel receptionist and spinster of this parish, had been born like that. And it drove her insane.
When her long shaggy hair was tamed into the gleaming knot she wore for work and her small tortoiseshell glasses sat on her nose, Hannah could look as stern as the headmistress of a school for delinquents. Which was why she’d never bothered to get contact lenses. Nowadays she wanted to be able to hide her natural sexuality, to conceal it with sedate clothes, fierce glances and Reverend Mother spectacles.
Sex appeal was all very well in its place but all it had ever given Hannah was Trouble, with a capital T. Being naturally sexy in her rural home town meant you either got an undeserved reputation as a complete slapper or you aroused rage amongst the local lads who didn’t take kindly to being constantly given the cold shoulder.
Sex appeal was all very well for Hollywood starlets, Hannah felt, but for normal women it brought sheer, unending hassle. Well, she amended, with a smidgen of guilty pleasure, her sex appeal had given her the delectable Jeff. But he had overstayed his welcome so it was time for Sexy Hannah to disappear and Ms Cojones of Steel Campbell to take her place.
She expertly coiled her wet hair into a scrunchie and fixed her visitor with the steely look she’d perfected when departing hotel guests insisted they’d had only two drinks in the hotel bar the previous night instead of the ten doubles itemized on their bar bill.
‘Jeff, you’ve got to get out of the bath and leave. I need to be out the door in three-quarters of an hour and I need time to myself. Come on, now.’
Responding to her schoolmarm voice the way he hadn’t responded to her gentle wheedling, Jeff climbed out of the bath, stood in front of her and stretched, his splendid naked body dripping water on to the black and white tile-effect lino.
Hannah couldn’t help staring. God, he was beautiful: from his short blond hair down to his big feet. Six foot of rippling muscle without a flaw anywhere. Poor Michelangelo would have killed to sculpt something like Jeff Williams.
Hannah gulped as she tried to concentrate on what she simply had to do in the next hour. Packing and sorting out her guide books. She wanted to learn something from this holiday and she’d hoped to spend a while reading her Let’s Go: Egypt so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of all the other people on the trip, people who probably knew about history and mythology…Then Jeff smiled a slow, lazy smile and traced one finger along her chest until it hooked under her towel and pulled, tumbling the towel to the floor along with her mental timetable.
Oh, what the hell, thought Hannah, letting her sex drive shift into fifth gear. After all those evenings trying to forget what physical pleasure had been like and watching endless re-runs of Inspector Morse, she deserved this. It wouldn’t take her that long to pack. She could read her guide book on the plane.
‘Lord! Would you look at the mess in here. I’m all for salads but you’ve really got to take them out of those awful little white plastic containers when you get them home. They leak everywhere. What’s this?’ Anne-Marie O’Brien squinted over her glasses at the supermarket label on the tub of couscous which had made an oily puddle in the middle of the otherwise spotless fridge. ‘Couscous? Messy, that’s what it is.’
Emma Sheridan said nothing as her mother searched for a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out in hot water and then zealously scrubbed the middle shelf of the fridge with the help of a bottle of antiseptic kitchen cleaner Emma had forgotten she’d possessed and had meant to throw out. An overpowering scent of pine disinfectant filled the room. It smelled nothing like any pine tree Emma had ever come across, unless pines were mating with bleach factories these days.
‘Much better now,’ Mrs O’Brien said, straightening up. She briskly rinsed the cloth out again, inspected the rest of the kitchen with narrowed eyes, then gave the melamine surfaces a quick squirt of cleaner, her every movement the work of an expert with a PhD in Cleaning the Home. Only then did she take the precious Tupperware and tinfoil-wrapped parcels and place them carefully in the fridge, giving her daughter a commentary on her actions at the same time.
‘Can’t have poor Peter eating that supermarket stuff. Proper dinners is what he should have. I know your father wouldn’t touch anything that had to be microwaved, but if I was away from him for a week, it’d be a different matter. Husbands! I’ve made lasagne that’ll last for at least two days, shepherd’s pie for tonight and these two are chicken and mushroom pies – I’ll put them in the freezer part. Emma, dear! Do you ever defrost this thing? It won’t do it itself. Never mind, I’ll just sort it out…’
Emma tuned out. Thirty-one-years of her mother had taught her that listening to the ‘nobody does things the right way, my way’ monologue would put you in a mental home if you didn’t tune out. Especially when the monologue was designed to tell you what a slatternly housekeeper/student/driver you were and how your poor husband would drop dead from salmonella if you didn’t start boil washing both the tea
