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When her eyelids fluttered open, Diana had no idea where she was.
She was naked, lying on her side in a bed that felt firmer than usual, although the sheets were just as crisp as those in the Somerfold master suite. And then she saw him: a firm, muscular back, broader than her husband’s. More tanned, the hair fringing the top of his neck longer than Julian ever wore his. Memories of last night came flooding back. She knew that what had happened on that rooftop, in this bedroom, was wrong on every level, but lying here in this strange bed, in a city she knew but was not h
er own, felt like an out-of-body experience she would remember for the rest of her life.
Adam was asleep, his breathing still heavy and deep. She reached out and touched him to check that he was real, stroking a mole on his back with her fingertip and drawing an imaginary line to another one between his shoulder blades. Light began to flood through the French door that led on to the roof terrace, a door that Diana was convinced they didn’t lock last night. She supposed that was quite a reckless thing to do in a wealthy street in New York, and yet there had been no break-in. Reckless things didn’t always have negative consequences, she reminded herself as she watched Adam stir, twitching at first, then moving on to his back, his eyes fluttering open.
Her heart thumped with anticipation. That he was still here was already a bonus, she told herself. Not that he had anywhere else to go – after all, this was his bedroom, his home.
He stared at the ceiling for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke.
‘Have you got jet lag?’ he asked, his voice husky with sleep.
‘I’ve got something,’ she smiled, acknowledging that her blood felt like jelly.
‘That will be the famous martini hangover,’ he said, sliding one hand behind his head. He still didn’t turn to look at her, but his arm rested against hers and he didn’t attempt to move it. She knew how easy it would be to hook her leg over his, how easy it would be to initiate sex again, but she daren’t, as much as she wanted to feel intimate and close to him once more.
For a moment everything felt suspended in time, and part of her wished they could stay like this for ever. Then he flung back the duvet and swung his legs out of bed, and her heart felt as if it might shatter into a million pieces. She watched him, beautiful from the back, tall, muscular and yet compact, like a Greek statue.
He grabbed his shirt and boxer shorts that had been discarded in last night’s encounter and put them on, which heightened her disappointment even more. She doubted that Adam was normally the sort to put on clothes from the night before. Nor was he the modest type, so she could only assume that he didn’t want her to see him naked.
‘I’ll make some breakfast. How do pancakes sound?’
She nodded, and waited until he had left the room before she got out of bed herself. Her chiffon knickers were still on the floor. She picked them up and noticed that they were ripped, which sent another surge of lust around her body. Part of her was embarrassed, ashamed for feeling like this. It had been a careless, drunken encounter, but unlike those she had had in her more wanton youth, she wanted it to happen all over again.
She could still taste him in her mouth, smell the lingering scent of their blended sweat. Last night had been a revelation. It was shocking and exciting that her body could feel all the things it had done, and it had been wonderful and terrible in equal measure. Oh yes, she knew it was forbidden to sleep with her husband’s brother – and so soon after his death, too. But the truth was, Diana felt liberated. Overnight she felt a woman again. Sexy and desired and beautiful.
Julian’s infidelity hadn’t just been a blow to her marriage; it was a snub to her personally. Couples’ therapy had brought their relationship back on track, months of individual and joint sessions where they talked about the problems and frustrations in their lives. But the sex had never recovered. Not that it had ever been as good as last night, even in the early days, when they used to meet in car parks after work and steal kisses in the lifts. On one occasion they’d had sex in the boardroom. It had been fantastic, wild, abandoned, but the heel of her shoe had scratched a ten-inch mark down the Biedermeier walnut table, almost giving Julian a heart attack and making him paranoid for weeks that they had been caught on CCTV. Then later on in their marriage, sex had been something with an end in sight. Having a baby. It was a reproductive process, not two people wanting to bring pleasure to one another.
She took a white towelling robe off a hook on the back of the door and put it on. When she went down into the kitchen, Adam was standing at a clean, unused-looking stove, flipping pancakes. She watched him for a moment, the unlikely chef at work. His shirt, which was only half buttoned up, stopped at the base of the boxer shorts, showing off his long legs, sprayed with fine light brown hair. He had good feet – always a potential turn-off – and his shirt sleeves were rolled back, showing off firm, muscular forearms.
For a second Diana imagined herself as one half of a young married couple in some glossy, glamorous sit-com. Part of her yearned for that nice, comfortable normality. So far her life had been full of extremes. She had been the struggling single mother, and then the pampered wife in her gilded cage. But New York had always been her city of dreams, and now here she was in the middle of one: a sexy man cooking breakfast for his girl in his stylish, bright Brooklyn brownstone.
She hadn’t imagined that Adam would be a good cook. Okay, pancakes with blueberries and maple syrup was not exactly beef Wellington, but they were hot, fluffy and delicious.
They made small talk about the weather, and she noticed that he was eating quickly and looking at his watch, which he seemed to do a lot when she was around.
‘I should go and jump in the shower.’
‘You have to go?’
He nodded as he finished his fresh orange juice.
‘You mean I should go.’ She was not naïve. She knew the etiquette of these situations.
‘No,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s just that I’ve got back-to-back meetings in the city.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but she didn’t know what to say. About last night . . . She almost winced at the trite, inadequate cliché on the tip of her tongue.
Instead, silence filled the room.
‘You are very beautiful,’ he said finally. He was looking at her, really looking at her, and it made her feel as desirable as she had done last night.
‘I can sense there’s a but,’ she said softly.
‘The problem with having a big brother like Julian was that he always got there first. First to ski a black run, first to learn to sail, first to work at the company and make my father proud. I was always swimming in his slipstream, always racing to catch up. Sometimes it didn’t matter. I became a better skier, a better sailor, but there were other things where he had got there ahead of me and it meant I could never go there. I couldn’t be head of the company, I couldn’t be with you.’
Tears prickled in her eyes.
