lips twitched. ‘Milk, or lemon?’
‘You choose,’ he essayed flatly. ‘Tea is tea, whatever way you drink it.’
‘I doubt if the connoisseurs would agree with you,’ declared Laura, setting out three cups and saucers. ‘Tea used to be regarded as quite a ritual. It still is, in other parts of the world. China, for instance.’
‘Really?’
He didn’t sound as if it interested him greatly, and she guessed her line in small talk was not what he was used to. He evidently enjoyed the kind of sexual innuendo Julie employed to such effect. But Laura wasn’t experienced in innuendo, sexual or otherwise, and, aware of how she had monopolised the conversation at dinner the previous evening, she knew she had to guard against being boring.
Then, remembering her hair, she started towards the door. That was something that couldn’t wait any longer, and she paused, uncertainly, when he asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I—won’t be a minute,’ she answered, loath to admit exactly where she was headed. ‘Um—help yourself; and Julie, too, if you want.’
‘I’ll wait,’ he said, leaving the door, to pull out a chair from the table, and straddle it with his long legs. ‘OK.’
Laura hesitated a little bemusedly, and then nodded. ‘Of—of course.’
Brushing her hair entailed going upstairs again, and as she stood at the bathroom mirror, tugging the bristles through the tangled strands, she felt a helpless sense of inevitability. The last thing she had expected was that she would have to face another one-to-one encounter with Jake so soon. Her assessment of the day ahead had already gone badly awry, and she hoped the rest of the weekend was not going to prove as traumatic.
There were men’s toiletries on the glass shelf above the handbasin, she saw, with an unwelcome twinge of trepidation. No doubt they were responsible for the spicy smell of cologne that lingered in the atmosphere, the unfamiliar scents of sandalwood and cedar. There was a razor, too. Not some sophisticated electrical gadget, as she would have expected, but a common-or-garden sword-edge, with throwaway blades. The man was a contradiction, she thought, frowning, hardly aware that she was running her fingers over a dark green bottle of aftershaving lotion. He was rich, and sophisticated; he wore handmade shirts, and Armani jackets, and he drove a Lamborghini. All aspects of the lifestyle to which he was accustomed. And yet, he had seemed genuinely pleased with the simple meal she had served the night before, and he had dried the dishes afterwards, as if it was a perfectly natural thing for him to do.
She realised suddenly that she was wasting time. It was at least five minutes since she had come upstairs, and, apart from anything else, the tea would be getting cold.
The hairpins she usually used to keep her hair in place were in the bedroom, and although she wouldn’t have minded waking Julie, it was going to take too much time. Instead, she found the elastic headband in the pocket of her dressing-gown that she sometimes used when she was pottering about the garden, and, sliding it up over her forehead, she decided that would have to do.
Going downstairs again was harder, but she steeled herself to behave naturally. After all, so far as Jake was concerned, she was just Julie’s mother: a little eccentric, perhaps, and obviously nervous with strangers.
He was still sitting where she had left him, but he got politely to his feet when she came into the room. However, Laura gestured for him to remain seated, and he sank back on to the chair, stretching the tight jeans across his thighs.
Laura knew her eyes shouldn’t have been drawn to that particular area of his abdomen, but somehow she couldn’t help it. He was disturbingly physical, and her stomach quivered alarmingly as she endeavoured to pour the tea.
‘W—would you like to take Julie’s up?’ she ventured, the spout hovering over the third cup, but when she reluctantly glanced round at her visitor Jake shook his head.
‘I doubt if she’d appreciate being woken at this hour, do you?’ he remarked, his dark eyes intent and wary. ‘When she’s not working, she considers anything short of double figures the middle of the night. But you must know that yourself.’
Not as well as you, I’m sure, Laura was tempted to retort, but she restrained herself. After all, it was really nothing to do with her how they chose to live their lives, and just because she was finding the situation a strain was no reason to blame Jake.
However, he seemed to sense her ambivalence, for as she set a cup of the strong beverage in front of him he said quietly, ‘What’s wrong?’ and the anxieties of the last fifteen minutes coalesced.
‘I—beg your pardon?’
‘You don’t have to be so formal, you know,’ he told her, making no attempt to touch his tea. ‘I asked what was wrong. Do you resent my getting up so early? Would you rather I had stayed in bed?’
Yes. Yes! The simple answer sang in Laura’s ears, but she couldn’t say it. Not out loud. Besides, she wasn’t even sure she meant it. It might be reassuring to pretend she would rather avoid talking to him, and quite another to consider the reality of doing so. The truth fell somewhere in between, and she was too conscientious to deny it.
‘I—I—don’t mind,’ she said at last, not altogether truthfully. ‘Um—would you like some sugar? I—know men usually do.’
‘And how would you know that?’ enquired Jake, still holding her gaze, and she knew a sudden spurt of indignation.
‘Why shouldn’t I? Just because I’m not married, doesn’t mean I haven’t had any experience where men are concerned,’ she retorted, resenting his implication, and then could have bitten out her tongue at the recklessness of her words. She had no idea whether Julie had told him of the circumstances of her birth. And if she hadn’t…
But Jake was speaking again. ‘I know about that,’ he countered mildly. ‘You had Julie while you were still in high school. And I didn’t imagine that was an immaculate conception.’
Laura flushed then, his cool, faintly mocking tone reminding her of how inexperienced she was when it came to his kind of verbal sparring. But she refused to let him think he had disconcerted her, and, squaring her shoulders, she added crisply, ‘I am almost forty, you know. Why do young people always think sex wasn’t invented until they came along?’
‘Is that what they think?’ Jake arched one dark brow, and, wishing she had never started this, Laura nodded.
‘You tell me,’ she responded tautly. ‘It’s your generation I’m talking about.’
‘My generation?’ Jake pressed his left hand against his chest, his expression mirroring his amusement. ‘Dio, how old you think I am?’
‘It doesn’t matter how old you are,’ declared Laura, trying to steady the cup of tea in her hand. ‘All I’m saying is, you shouldn’t jump to what you think are obvious conclusions.’
‘Did I do that?’
‘Yes.’ Laura drew a trembling breath. ‘And I wish you’d stop answering everything I say with a question of your own. We—we hardly know one another, and I—I don’t want to fall out with you.’
‘Fall out with me?’ Jake adopted a puzzled expression.
