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He rolled back to kiss her. “I’m nothing without you.”
Zoe seriously doubted that, but it was nice to hear.
The day was fast passing, breakfast was not being served for much longer and sharing a shower seemed like the most efficient way of getting there quickly. Of course that did not prove to be the case.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” breathed Zoe, noticing Nick’s renewed arousal.
“It’s not my fault,” said Nick, drawing her wet body to him beneath the shower. “You just look so damn good.”
By the time they got out of the shower an early lunch was a better option than breakfast, and both badly needed food to replenish their strength.
“The second part of the wine-tasting course starts at three,” said Nick, checking the day’s schedule. “You know what that means?”
Zoe grinned. “We can go back to my room for a few hours?”
“You read my mind.”
“Of course,” Zoe pretended to be having second thoughts. “I do still have a lot to learn about food and wine and French stuff.”
“What did you have in mind?” asked Nick, eagerly playing along.
“Well, you know the game with the rewards for right answers and forfeits for wrong ones?”
Nick nodded, unable to suppress the huge grin that was spreading across his face. “Yes.”
“I’ve got some ideas for new rewards and forfeits that I think would really motivate me.”
If Nick’s grin had spread any wider then the top of his head would have come off. “Good. Cause it’s not just food and wine that the French are known for. There is some French stuff that I really think we should cover. Preferably in detail. Several times.”
Zoe finished her coffee and stood. “Come on, we’ve only got two and a half hours.”
Chapter Nine
On the one hand, Zoe’s training on how to be Vanessa Reese, did take something of a backseat in the final week before the meeting with Jacques Jourdan. On the other hand, she had never been more motivated and never been happier, and both those things, she was sure, helped her to learn.
Your mind is never more receptive to facts than when it is relaxed, you can’t properly absorb information if you are stressed and worrying about other stuff. Zoe was a natural stresser and worrier, if there was something to be tense and worried about, then she would be tense and worried about it.
But not right now.
There was nothing like frequent, luxurious and mind-blowing sex to really relax a body.
These days Zoe found herself laid back, chilled and satisfied. If she had been any more relaxed she would have slipped into a coma. She really didn’t have the energy for anxiety. Nick could barely keep his hands off her and she felt the same way about him. Their week at the vineyard had turned into the most self-indulgent holiday of her life. By day they alternated wine-tasting lessons with sexually-charged games that tested Zoe’s knowledge of everything she had learned so far from opera to sailing (and which tested the limits of Nick’s stamina and self-control almost as much), and by night they made love into the small hours.
Zoe had never had what you could call a ‘dirty weekend’. She did not believe that sex should be the be all and end all of a relationship and so had never enjoyed that purely sexual indulgence. The great thing about being with Nick was that he was the best of both worlds. While their relationship might have seemed to an observer to be defined by epic amounts of bedroom gymnastics, as the days passed they also got to know each other better as people, and the more Zoe got to know Nick, the more she got to like him. She loved his sense of humor, she loved that his favorite films were Laurence of Arabia and Airplane!, she loved that he opened doors for her wherever they went without even thinking about it – an old-fashioned gentleman.
With each passing day it became more and more clear that he was exactly the sort of man that she had always looked for and never found.
And since he was a man in whom she had a genuine and heartfelt interest (would she say ‘love’? The thought scared and startled her,) then the amount of wild, headboard-busting sex they were having was not shallow, it was an expression of their admiration for each other. A sweaty, exhausting, X-rated expression of their…love. And as it turned out, their love needed to be expressed a lot, as many times a day as they had the energy for. They expressed their love until they were sore.
There was a sliver of irrational guilt in Zoe still. Not because she didn’t have real feelings for Nick – she absolutely did – but because… sex between two people in love was not supposed to be like this. It sounded stupid to say, especially as everyone always told you that sex was best with someone you cared about. But, although people said that, it was tacitly acknowledged that that was just something people said, and that sex was really best in wild and frequently regretted one-night-stands. What Zoe and Nick had was a genuine relationship that happened to include ferocious, wild, animalistic sex that would have put teenage lust to shame. It was no reason to be guilty, in fact it was a reason to be proud, and yet Zoe could not help it – what had she done to get this lucky?
The week flew by in a delicious haze of wine and adult situations. It was unsettling to leave the little vineyard in which they had been so happy (although some of the other guests were probably glad to see them go), because it meant that the time had come for the final part of Nick’s plan. Everything that Zoe had spent the last three weeks learning (had it really only been three weeks?) was to be put into practice, and from what Nick had told her, a big part of the future of RothCo seemed to hang on it.
That was a lot of pressure.
If she was honest with herself, then there was a further reason that Zoe was uneasy about leaving the vineyard. It was here that she and Nick had realized their feelings for each other, but how much had those feelings been bolstered by their seclusion?
Was their attraction purely situational?
They had found themselves in the most romantic setting in the world, with huge amounts of wine, a lot of spare time and some very comfortable beds.
Would their burgeoning relationship survive in a real world in which there were no spreading vistas stretching off into the distance, in which they were not tipsy all the time, and in which they could not have sex multiple times a day. Had it been all about sex, and the veneer of relationship just a dream she had imposed over the top to make herself feel better about it? In short – would it still work between them, or would they now find they had nothing in common.
Perhaps Nick was wondering about those questions too, for he struck Zoe as being oddly quiet on their drive back to the city, as if there was something else on his mind.
“I’m starting to have doubts about this whole thing,” he confided, as they drove.
“What? Why?”
Nick seemed unwilling or unable to answer the question. “Just feels like… Wrong somehow. It’s a deception. It’s—a lie.”
Zoe nodded. “Well, yes. But that’s always been true. What changed?”
Nick shrugged. “Me? I don’t know. I don’t want anyone to get hurt, you know?”
Zoe frowned in puzzlement. “You think Jacques Jourdan will be hurt if he discovers that I’m not Vanessa? It’s just a business deal. I don’t think he was ever going to chat her up was he?”
Nick shook his head. “Well…. I don’t know. I mean, of course not, I… I just… Oh I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”
Zoe sat in silence a while before speaking again. “I will do my best. I mean, I know I’m not Vanessa, but I will do my best.”
Nick looked at her and forced a smile. “I know you will. You’ll be brilliant.”
They spent the night in Paris, back in the same hotel, but this time sharing a room. They had dinner together, they looked out across the nocturnal cityscape of Paris, and they made love long into the night – they were in Paris after all. There was, Zoe could not help feeling, still a tension in Nick, in the way he acted and spoke to her. It all dissolved awa
y when they slept together, but that did not make her feel any better, it just seemed to reinforce her fear that sex was all they had, and while it was great, it was not enough.
The following day was a blizzard of last minute preparations: clothes selections, quizzes and cramming.
