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I did my best to look haughty. “The wire-wool pads you use to scour your pans? Aren’t you mixing yourself up with Charlotte?”
“What?”
“I thought she was cleaning up your apartment these days.”
Gideon looked a little embarrassed. “That’s … that’s not quite correct,” he muttered.
“Huh! In your place I’d feel bad about it too,” I said. “Give me the hat, please, Madame Rossini.” The hat, a monstrous creation crowned with pale pink feathers, would at least look better than that hair. Or so I thought. A glance in the mirror showed that I’d made an unfortunate mistake.
Gideon was still laughing.
“Can we get moving now?” I asked crossly.
“Take care of my leetle swan-necked beauty, do you ’ear me?”
“Don’t I always, Madame Rossini?”
“You must be joking,” I said, out in the corridor. I pointed to the black scarf he was holding. “No blindfold today?”
“No, we can do without that. For reasons we both know,” Gideon replied. “And because of the hat.”
“Do you still think I’m about to lure you around a corner and hit you over the head with something?” I straightened my hat. “And by the way, I’ve been thinking about that again, and it’s my belief that there’s a perfectly simple explanation for the whole thing.”
“Which is?” Gideon raised his eyebrows.
“You imagined it all after the event. While you were lying unconscious, you were dreaming about me, and so you decided later that it was all my fault.”
“Yes, that possibility has occurred to me, too,” he said, to my surprise. Then he took my hand and made me walk on. “But, no, I know what I saw.”
“So why didn’t you tell anyone that—apparently—I had lured you into a trap?”
“I didn’t want them to think even worse of you than they do already.” He grinned. “Well … do you have a headache?”
“I didn’t really drink all that much,” I said.
Gideon laughed. “No, sure. Basically you were stone cold sober.”
I shook his hand off. “Could we please talk about something else?”
“Oh, come on! Surely I’m allowed to wind you up a bit! You were so sweet yesterday evening. Mr. George really thought you were totally exhausted when you went to sleep in the limousine.”
“For two minutes at the most,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I’d probably dribbled or done something else terrible.
“I hope you went straight to bed.”
“Hm,” I said. All I remembered, vaguely, was Mum taking all four hundred thousand hairpins out of my hair, and how I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. After all, he’d gone off to have a good time with Charlotte, Raphael, and the spaghetti.
Gideon stopped so suddenly that I collided with him and promptly forgot to breathe.
He turned to face me. “Listen,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to say this yesterday, because I thought you were too drunk, but now that you’re sober again and as prickly as ever…” His fingers carefully stroked my forehead, and I was about to hyperventilate. Instead of going on, he kissed me. I had closed my eyes before his lips touched mine. The kiss was more intoxicating than yesterday evening’s punch. It left me weak at the knees, and with a thousand butterflies in my stomach.
When Gideon let go of me again, he seemed to have forgotten what he wanted to say. He propped one arm on the wall beside my head and looked at me seriously. “We can’t go on like this.”
I tried to get my breath under control.
“Gwen…”
There were footsteps in the corridor behind us. Gideon quickly withdrew his arm and turned around. A moment later Mr. George was standing in front of us. “So there you are. We’ve been waiting for you. Why isn’t Gwyneth blindfolded?”
