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Because ridiculously, she felt as though her skin belonged to them—to her and Jay—and she didn’t want to share it with anyone else. She supposed she would have to if she was going to date Simon. It was probably just that Jay was the only one who had touched her, and so it was hard to imagine another man. But she would get used to it, she guessed. She just needed to spend some time with Simon and get familiar again with his company. She hadn’t seen him in months after all.
Simon picked her up at seven in his hire car as arranged. It was a black Audi, very smart and sleek, a sensible, executive sort of car. As Sophia buckled her seatbelt, she tried to imagine Simon screeching away from her front door in it and pulling a doughnut skid. The thought made her smile, and when she looked up from her seatbelt buckle, Simon was watching her, smiling too.
For a second, she had forgotten he was there.
She looked at him properly now, at his lean, tanned face and blue eyes and sandy hair. He was wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and no tie and looked very much how she remembered him. Attractive, masculine, grown-up, capable.
“It’s good to see you, Sophia,” Simon said, his American accent sounding newly strange after her time back in the UK. “We miss you at the office. You look…really well.”
“Thank you. You too. How was your drive up from London?”
“Fine, once I got used to driving on the left. Traffic was good.”
“You’re not too tired for dinner then?”
“Never too tired to see an old friend.”
She smiled and looked away. Simon eased the car forward—it was an automatic—and they set off down the little lane from her house, heading back towards Harrogate where the restaurant was. It seemed silly that Simon had driven all the way out to her village to pick her up. She had offered to drive to him, but he had insisted. He was always very polite.
“Put the radio on if you like,” Simon said, and Sophia realised she had been sitting in silence for some time. It was nearly fully dark out, and the lit rectangles of passing windows were hypnotic. Sophia shook herself, remembered to smile, and switched the radio on. Some sort of bland, easy-listening ballad was playing.
“Oh, I love this song,” said Simon. “Don’t you?”
No, Sophia thought,I love eighties metal and hard rock. “It’s very…relaxing,” she said.
Simon talked about what she had missed since she left the office, filling her in on the gossip and news. It was an easy conversation for Sophia, as she knew the right sorts of phrases to say and questions to ask, although she didn’t actually find it very interesting. Other than Simon, she hadn’t given a single thought to the colleagues who had spent the last five years merely tolerating her.
They had a lovely little table in a quiet corner at the bistro, and the food was very good. Simon told her more about work, about the conference, about London. Sophia drank two glasses of white wine to try and loosen her tongue, but she felt as though she was drowning in the pressure of finding something correct to say and the need to meet Simon’s eyes regularly across the table so that he didn’t start frowning, like people always did, and ask her what was wrong. It was just so hard though, with him sitting right there, opposite her, looking right at her, all the time, as though she was pinned up and exposed, like a picture in a gallery window.
“Would you like to see the dessert menu?” their waiter asked, clearing the plates.
No!screamed Sophia inside her head.
“Yes, please,” said Simon. “That would be great.”
When it came, he ordered a slice of black cherry clafoutis.
“Delicious,” he said, offering her a bite on his fork. Sophia shook her head and wanted to hide under the table, unable to think of anything but Jay’s last message to her.
By the way, you taste like cherries everywhere…
Chapter sixteen
Jay
OnthedayofSophia’s party, Jay woke up after noon feeling like death.
He had vague memories of falling out of a taxi sometime earlier that morning—a taxi, because Sophia had told him not to drink and drive—a taxi he had only remembered he couldn’t afford when it pulled up outside Rakely House and the driver turned in his seat and asked for the money.
Oh God. He’d had to wake the housekeeper. Now he owed her seventy pounds. And she would already have told his parents, as though he was a child, and not twenty-six years old. Never mind. He would pay her tomorrow, on Sunday, when Sophia gave him his damned cheque and he presented it to his father and got his allowance restored. And in a few years’ time when he inherited Rakely he would fire the damned housekeeper and get another one.
A hot, young one.
That was what he really needed. To get laid. Because all the alcohol last night—and the night before—had done nothing to improve his mood. But there would be girls at this party. He would watch Sophia slow dance with Simon and then he would pull someone and bury his balls and try to forget for a moment… Try to forget… Try to…
Fuck.
Fuck.
