professional life, and it was a very bad idea.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I guess we’d better get back to—’
Jay touched her arm, the bare skin of her wrist, and she stopped, arrested by the feeling of his flesh on hers again.
‘You’re doing wonderfully, by the way,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’
That was an odd thing to say, but she supposed it was meant as some sort of encouragement. ‘Thank you. I’m usually a very professional person.’
‘I know.’
His fingers were still wrapped around her wrist. He could probably feel every beat of her heart. As if he were touching, somehow, her life force.
Everything about him felt as if she’d known him for so, so long, maybe in a neglected corner of her mind where she paid attention to dreams and desires.
‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’ she blurted out.
She could see the mild surprise in his eyes. ‘I would love to. Do you mean just the two of us, or—?’
‘Just the two of us,’ she replied, before she could think through what it was she had just done, or the probability that he would reject her. When she’d first started out in advertising, she’d learned to let her impulses loose, even the crazy ones, even the ones that would never work in a million years. Because sometimes they did work.
But she hadn’t let her impulses loose for some time, now.
‘I mean, don’t worry if you don’t want to, I know you’re busy, and—’
‘I would love to.’
That brought her up short. ‘Oh.’ She swallowed, put some more poise into her voice, and said, ‘Well, that’s wonderful. How about eight o’clock?’
‘Fantastic.’ His smile was both genuine and perfect. He nodded back towards the restaurant. ‘Shall we go and be professional now?’
‘Definitely.’ She stepped through the ladies’ room door and joined him, walking back across the restaurant, wondering with every step what the hell she had just got herself into.
Four and a half hours later, she was still wondering. Except this time she was pacing the living room of her high-ceilinged, brick-walled loft, wringing her hands.
Half of her was remembering Jay at lunch that afternoon. How he’d smiled when he’d said yes to her date, his hand curled intimately around her wrist. And then the rest of the meal, where they’d stuck safely to talk about modelling and the campaign and more general chat, and Jane had felt more like herself.
Except for the moments when she’d watched him eat. Knife and fork, held in his long-fingered hands. It was silly to be aroused by watching somebody cut his food. But she was. His movements were economical, the tendons on the back of his hand flexing, his fingers agile.
Whenever he took a bite of his risotto, she had to consider his mouth. How his bottom lip was fuller than the top. How both lips curved upwards at the corners, in a sexy near-smile. How white and even his teeth were.
At one point he’d licked his bottom lip and she’d almost dropped her water glass because all she could think of was his mouth on her, his tongue in her mouth, how his hair would feel under her hands as she kissed him.
And then he’d looked at her and smiled, with that somehow warm and intimate look, as if he and she shared a secret from the rest of the world.
The man was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen in her entire life and she could not work out what he thought was going on between them. Unless he gave every woman this feeling, unless he had charm down to such an art that he appeared to be sincere in the most unusual way she’d ever encountered.
And what on earth was she going to do with him tonight?
Jane stopped pacing, sat down at her desk and opened her laptop, going straight to the Giovanni Franco cologne campaign files. She clicked on the notes her art director, Amy, had made for her when they were in the process of choosing Jay Richard as the model for the campaign. Maybe they would tell her something more about this man.
She skimmed the notes, picking up phrases as she went. ‘Client wants an easygoing attitude.’ ‘Warm face, which customers can relate to.’ Well, that was correct, and went some way to showing her that she hadn’t lost her mind. ‘Model not perfect, but appealing, likely to conform to image consumers would like for themselves.’ Jane snorted at that one. He looked perfect enough to her.
She called up one of his portfolio photos. He was leaning with one hand on a doorframe, wearing a slim-fitting long-sleeved T-shirt that emphasised the lean lines of his body. He was smiling just enough to dig a crease in his left cheek. He looked as if he was about to start a conversation, or reach out and touch the observer.
He looked nearly exactly as he’d looked when he’d stood outside the ladies’ room, talking with her.
Rationally, she knew it meant he’d been acting. But the familiar pose still made her warm, made her breath come faster.
‘Oh, crap,’ she moaned. ‘Why did I decide it would be a good thing to date a model?’
Her laptop made a ‘whishht’ sound and a little box popped up in the corner of the screen to tell her that Jonny Cole had logged into the chat program they sometimes used.
He’d probably emailed her earlier; he emailed her just about every day. But she’d been so busy this morning and this afternoon after lunch that she hadn’t had time to check any personal stuff, and whatever he’d sent was most likely buried in her inbox. And of course since she’d got home she’d been angsting.
But Jonny would calm her down. She opened her email application and began to scroll through messages, looking for his return address. Most of the stuff she had that wasn’t work-related was spam about stock tips and enlarging her penis. How she was supposed to find the single message that actually meant something …
Her laptop chimed. A glance told her it was Jonny hailing her. She abandoned her inbox and clicked on the chat icon.
Hello gorgeous! How are you?
She could see Jonny’s message appearing as he typed. Jane hadn’t seen Jonny in person for fifteen years, but she could remember well what he used to look like when they were kids and he would come over to her house nearly every day to play. He’d been a skinny boy with a brown bowl cut, knobbly knees, and round glasses. He was a lot more fragile than her four older, boisterous brothers; at times, his shyness had made him seem even more fragile than Jane was herself. Jane was used to being around bigger boys, but Jonny always liked hanging around with her more than with her brothers.
Whenever she pictured him now, at twenty-seven, she thought of him as a skinny man with the same bowl cut and round glasses, sort of like a grown-up Harry Potter. He was a self-described computer geek, but she bet he was cute.
It was typical of him that he called her ‘gorgeous’. Of course, he hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, either.
Before she replied, Jane glanced down at herself. She wore the skirt of her brown suit, and a shell top. Her light
