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‘Why do you have to go? We’ve just got here!’
‘I know. I’ll get my driver to take you back to your place.’
‘But look at me! I’m all dressed for a night out!’
‘And you look spectacular.’
‘I don’t mind waiting for you! I’ll... I’ll...just sit at the bar until you’ve done whatever you have to do!’
‘It’s better for you to return to your apartment.’
‘Will you at least meet me there later?’
‘If I were to be polite, I would sayperhaps.If I were to be honest, I would have to sayno. I’m an honest man.’
‘But...’
‘I have to go, Clarissa.’ This as he was urgently texting his driver, who was on standby, to head right back to the bar so that he could collect her. He tucked his mobile into his pocket. ‘Sid will be here in ten. He’ll wait for you outside.’
‘Thanks for nothing, Nico!’
No point going for another apology. Truth was... Clarissa wasn’t going to lose sleep over a broken date, even one she had been angling for for a while. She would flounce off and, within an hour, would be on the phone to one of her model friends probably slagging him off.
Besides, gut instinct about Grace and whoever she was with was already consuming his attention and he barely glanced at Clarissa’s departing back before striding off into the dark room and amongst the crowds and straight to that table at the back.
Grace had no idea that her boss was in the crowd, far less that he had spotted her from the across the room.
She was too busy trying to work out how best to extricate herself from her evening.
How on earth could this have gone so wrong?
The profile had lookedsopromising!
Victor Blake: aged thirty-four.
Occupation: lawyer.
Hobbies: theatre, foreign movies and reading.
Six foot three with a full head of hair and a smile that crinkled his eyes, at least in the photo that he had posted of himself standing in front of a sailboat, which had implied a love of the ocean, presumably.
Grace couldn’t have been more cautious. Three weeks of emails and several conversations before dinner had been suggested by him at this very venue. Grace had been impressed. She’d never been here but she’d booked it often enough for her boss. Chez Giscard...an uber-expensive jazz club in the heart of Mayfair. She had been thrilled.
First date in for ever with someone she had so much in common with. How awful could it be?
She loved the theatre even though she couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d been. She enjoyed foreign films. She read voraciously, largely when she was guiltily aware that she should be going out...and sailing? Well, the very thought of it was enticing. Who would ever object to the wind blowing through their hair and the salty air against their face?
So how was it that she was now sitting here, toying with the stem of her wine glass, her anxiety levels rising in small, incremental degrees as her date poured drink after drink for himself and tried to edge closer and closer?
This was Grace’s first foray into the thorny business of trying to find a guy via a checklist of likes and dislikes, dispassionately listed under various Soulmate Perfect headings. It was a world she had never seriously considered exploring until six months ago when she had looked in the mirror and staring back at her had been a woman now in her thirties with next to no experience of the opposite sex. A woman who had spent her life juggling various responsibilities that had landed on her shoulders, almost without her realising their consequences at the time.
A woman who could proudly look back on her youth as a time spent anxiously looking out for her mum and then, later, her brother.
Whatever the opposite of a misspent youth was, she had lived it.
And to top it all off, all those years...four and a half of them...spent with a crazy crush on her boss.
She’d been hiding. Life had been happening out there but she had turned her back on it and, instead, taken the easier option of a forbidden attraction that was safe because it would never come to anything.
