at his watch, because it was now quarter past eight and Lily was never late.
Beating back the disappointment beginning to sweep through him, Kit swallowed hard and forced himself to focus on practicalities. If she wasn’t late, if she had gone, what would he do next? Go after her again and this time lock her up or something to make flight impossible? Leave her in peace until they got home? Or give up altogether?
As his stomach began to churn Kit exhaled slowly and told himself to calm down. He’d give her another fifteen minutes, then he’d put in a call, and, depending on whether or how she answered, would take things from there.
Thirty seconds later, however, the doubt over whether or not she’d left and what he’d do about it vanished because despite having his back to the entrance to the bar he knew Lily was there. He could feel it in the way his muscles tensed with awareness, the prickling of his skin, the overwhelming sense of relief that flooded through him.
Deliberately slowly he set down his beer, turned round, and at the sight of her his heart stopped. For a moment he felt winded. Blinded. Stunned. She was wearing a simple floaty black dress and sparkly flip-flops, and she was clutching a small black bag. Her neck was bare but big silvery hooped earrings hung from her earlobes.
Her dress wasn’t particularly revealing or overly clingy, yet something about her made his mouth go dry. It was as if she were sort of glowing from the inside out. Her dark hair shone in the soft light of the bar and her eyes gleamed and her mouth was curved into a barely there smile that had his pulse racing.
She looked... He racked his brains for a moment to find the right word. Serene. That was it. She looked serene.
While he felt anything but.
With his heart beating double time Kit watched as she walked over to him and for the first time in years felt a stab of panic because he didn’t know whether to kiss her mouth, her cheek, shake her hand or do nothing.
His indecision was as terrifying as the decision he had to make, and his palms went damp in a way that had nothing to do with the condensation that he’d felt on his beer glass.
With every step she took his head swam just that little bit more, until she stopped right in front of him and, thank goodness, took the decision out of his hands by reaching up and planting a soft, light kiss on his cheek.
Then she stepped back and smiled up at him, presumably completely unaware of how she was affecting him.
‘You look nice,’ she said, giving him a quick once-over that had heat shooting through him.
‘You look beautiful,’ he replied, once he’d managed to clear his head of her scent and unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
‘Thank you.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I booked a table.’
‘Great.’
‘Would you like a drink before we sit down?’
‘Would you?’
‘If you would.’
‘I don’t mind.’
Feeling as if a swarm of bees had invaded his body, Kit swallowed hard. For crying out loud, this was absurd. He was thirty-two. He ran a global multimillion-pound business. He was known for being decisive, intuitive and utterly ruthless when the situation called for it. Yet here he was, being rendered practically tongue-tied by the prospect of an evening with his ex-wife. His totally calm and in control ex-wife. Who was expecting not a drooling idiot of a dining companion, but a possibly difficult conversation that he’d insisted upon.
Telling himself he really had to get a grip, with superhuman effort Kit pulled himself together. ‘Let’s just go straight to the table, shall we?’ he muttered, taking her hand and practically marching her across the bar and out onto the sand.
This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date.
As she followed Kit to the table that sat at the water’s edge and was set for two Lily tried to concentrate on the mantra rolling around her head and not on the electricity that emanated from the connection of her hand with his and was zapping through her, but it was proving no more helpful now than it had when she’d been getting ready.
After going back to her room earlier this afternoon and taking a cold shower, which hadn’t done much to obliterate the hundred or so grasshoppers that had seemed to have taken up residence in her stomach at the thought of the date—no, dinner—with Kit, she’d decided that while donning armour was a must, mainlining tequila probably wasn’t the way to handle the evening. She was in a jittery enough state as it was and with alcohol loosening her already iffy inhibitions who knew what might happen?
Once she’d made that pleasingly mature decision, she’d called her sister and after that, well, she hadn’t known what to think about anything.
As she’d dialled the number she’d been planning to tear a strip off Zoe for revealing her whereabouts to Kit of all people. She’d been going to say she understood that her sister was at a heightened level of happiness at the moment, but that she had to realise that not everyone was in search of the same, and that she certainly wasn’t looking for it with Kit. She’d even been prepared to counter-argue the excuse of Kit’s powers of persuasion she was sure Zoe was going to give.
What she hadn’t been prepared for, however, was her sister’s declaration that she thought Kit still had feelings for her, that he’d said he might still love her and that that was why she’d told him where she was. To give them the opportunity to see whether they had a second chance. Or something.
In something of a daze Lily had hung up, and it was then that she’d descended into the kind of emotional turmoil she’d spent so long avoiding, her head teeming with questions such as ‘Could he?’ ‘Did he?’ and her heart beginning to swell with what she had the awful suspicion might be hope.
Which made such a mockery of everything she’d spent the last five years trying to convince herself of that it was no wonder she’d worked herself up into such a state. For the best part of the next couple of hours she’d paced up and down her room wondering whether her sister had got it right and then trying to figure out that if she had, what she—Lily—wanted, if anything, and what, if anything, she felt.
Before she knew it it was half past seven and she still hadn’t dried her hair. Bafflingly none the wiser about how she felt about any of it, she’d put it to the back of her mind while she got ready, and there it had stayed until she’d seen him standing at the bar, nursing his beer and looking so familiar and so gorgeous that her heart had turned over and her brain had turned to jelly and she couldn’t think about anything at all.
So she’d schooled her features into a neutral arrangement that she hoped masked the craziness that was going on inside her head, had taken a deep, steadying breath and told herself to remember what dinner was about.
But, heavens, it was difficult to focus when her head was filled with the look on Kit’s face when he’d turned and seen her. She didn’t think she was wearing anything particularly astonishing but from the heat in his eyes she felt as if she were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Perhaps on the planet.
It
