He watched the brunette over by the bar snap to attention and stare directly at him. He toasted her with his bottle of beer and smiled. Well, he hadn’t seen that coming. He’d been half-watching her all night and he’d thought he’d had her pegged.
He didn’t know why she’d caught his eye. She wasn’t his usual type—extroverted and free-spirited—but there was something about her calmness and poise in a room full of chaos that had drawn his gaze.
But he still hadn’t been able to help looking over now and then, and the more he’d looked, the more he’d noticed the good bone structure, the fine features that weren’t arranged to make her conventionally pretty, but interesting.
He liked interesting.
She got up from her bar stool, straightened her black dress, adjusted the rope of large pearls circling her neck, then wobbled her way towards him.
He would have said she was heading straight for him, but halfway across the room she got distracted and veered off course until the blonde in the pink dress by the bar yelled something at her and she shook herself and started pushing her way through the heaving dance floor to where he was leaning against the wall.
He couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was glad it was the Audrey Hepburn girl, not Doris or Lara, who was teetering her way towards him. He put his beer bottle down on a nearby ledge and pushed himself away from the wall.
If he’d said women hadn’t approached him in bars before he’d be lying. So badly his pants would probably burst into flames. But there was something different about this girl. Instead of that hungry, almost predatory, look he’d come to expect, she was wide-eyed and uncertain. For some reason that made her approach all the more tantalising.
‘Incoming,’ his buddy Tom, and partner in crime, whispered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Which means I’m going to make myself scarce. In fact, now that the group at the bar is depleted a little, I might just see if Lara Croft would like to get into some one-to-one combat with me.’ And with a flash of a wicked smile he set off.
‘Good luck!’
Tom was going to need it. Lara had spotted him coming her way and was glaring at him, but that probably wasn’t going to stop him. Tom liked a challenge, and you didn’t get to be a hot up-and-coming record producer without being able to handle a few prickly customers.
He watched his friend’s progress for a few seconds then turned his attention back to the brunette. She was only a few steps away now, blocked by the people on the fringes of the dance floor, but then a groping pair stumbled off to one side and suddenly she was right in front of him.
‘Hi,’ he said, his smile growing wider.
‘Hi,’ she replied, and one ankle buckled a little beneath her before she found her footing again. And then she just stared at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with him. He found he liked that too. There was a hum of anticipation that was missing from a more direct approach.
He saw her ribcage rise as she hauled in some air and then she stepped forward and placed her hands on his chest. Her long-boned fingers were pale and delicate, but they packed quite a punch. A jolt shot through him, as if he’d been on a hospital trolley and someone had zapped him with a defibrillator.
Suddenly, things got very, very interesting.
In the background the music dimmed and someone turned the television up. An overexcited presenter was bouncing up and down in a bobble hat and scarf on the Embankment, and then the shot switched to the face of Big Ben. There was a heartbeat of silence before the chimes started, but Alex hardly heard them.
‘It’s midnight soon,’ she said and leaned in closer. He caught a whiff of her perfume, fresh and delicate with an undertone of spice. ‘So I’m going to kiss you.’
He wasn’t going to argue with that.
Well, not much.
Her face was inches away now, her eyes huge and dark. His heart was pumping wildly, throbbing in his ears. ‘Not if I get there first,’ he whispered and dipped his head to taste her lips, just briefly.
He heard her little gasp of surprise, and he decided he liked it, so he kissed her again, more deeply this time. She responded, a little hesitantly at first, which was intriguing, seeing as this had been her idea, but then her hands moved from his chest, skimming his torso through his T-shirt, until they were on his back, setting off a chain of tiny fireworks that were just as potent as the ones about to explode on barges in the Thames not half a mile away.
Big Ben’s bongs went uncounted and uncelebrated, at least by him and the mystery brunette, as they took what had started as a simple kiss and kicked it up a notch.
That moment of held breath when everyone waited for the twelfth chime was long over when they came up for air. People were dancing again, although he hadn’t been aware when the music had turned back on or even how long it had been playing. The brunette swayed slightly in front of him, her eyes closed, a tiny smile curving her lips, as he looked down at her.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked hoarsely.
She didn’t reply, just traced the lone dimple on his left cheek with her finger then kissed him again. Her hands slid lower to rest on his hips, and then he felt her lips purse. She pulled away, frowning. ‘You’re wearing furry trousers. What did you come as? Mr Tumnus? Because if you did, you should have a scarf. And an umbrella. Where’s your umbrella?’
He laughed. ‘No, nothing so exotic as a faun,’ he said. ‘I’m the back end of a pantomime horse.’
She smiled a serene little smile, as if that made perfect sense. ‘Peggy said there’d be a horse…but I can’t really remember how the horse was going to get here or why.’ She screwed up her face, as if she was thinking hard. ‘Where’s your head?’
He nodded in the direction of the bar. ‘Trying to chat up one of your friends,’ he replied.
Lara was still scowling. It looked as if Tom had struck out for once, but he probably wouldn’t mind too much. His motto in everything—especially when it came to women—was ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’.
The brunette looked over her shoulder, then turned to look him in the eye and thought hard for a moment. ‘I think I need to kiss you again. Three times is supposed to be lucky, isn’t it?’
He nodded, equally serious. It certainly was. And he hoped these cheap hired horse hindquarters were fire retardant, because the kiss that followed topped the previous two on the scorch-o-meter. That was the best kiss he’d had all year. And not just the one that had started. He’d included the one before that too.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked again.
She laughed loudly, indicated her black dress and string of pearls with a hand. ‘Don’t you know?’
He shook his head, smiling. A few wisps of hair had escaped from her neat bun thing and she looked totally adorable.
‘But I’m from Breakfast at Tiffany’s! Everybody’s seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s!’
He shrugged. ‘Not me.’
Her
