Charlie Glass's Slippers (30 page)

“You look amazing tonight, Charlie.”

“You don’t,” I whisper back, “look so bad yourself.”

“I can’t wait for dinner to be over,” he murmurs.

By which I’m assuming he means that he can’t wait for
dinner to end so that he can take me up to the bedroom and do all kinds of wonderful things to me. Though there’s just as good a chance, I admit, that he can’t wait for dinner to end so that he can escape from Pal. Pal is sitting on my right-hand side and—I can only assume—attempting to impress Jay by name-dropping pretty much every human being he’s ever been friends with, or accountant to, or—as far as I can tell—bumped into by accident on the escalators going down to the tube, in the hope that one of them might provide him with common ground with an influential billionaire.

“And I don’t know if you know Jack Samuelson?” he’s asking Jay now, tucking heartily into his plate of lamb navarin with pommes Lyonnaise, as though he’s completely forgotten that only three months ago he sat in my flat fretting about his cholesterol level and spurning pretty much exactly the same dish.

Tonight, by the way, I’m the one doing the spurning. I don’t care how delicious the lamb smells, or how heavenly Hannah’s perfect circle of pommes Lyonnaise looks, oozing its little pool of butter on my plate. I’m fast approaching the culmination of Mission: Get Naked in Front of Jay Broderick, a mission that has taken weeks and cost a small fortune, and I’m not about to let unnecessary things like carbs and fat put me off my stride.

A pea or two is probably okay, though, isn’t it? Just a dainty forkful of these exquisite, garden-fresh peas, which admittedly are pretty much drenched in sweet melted butter but are probably packed with all kinds of fantastic nutrients that will give me the energy I need to keep up with Jay in the bedroom. In fact, with that in mind, a
little
taste of the Lyonnaise potatoes might actually be a good idea, rather than a bad one. After all, shagging someone senseless requires a fair old amount of effort, if memory serves. Jay’s not exactly going to be too impressed if I just lie there, exhausted from lack of nutrients. So,
a taste of the potatoes it is. For the nutrients. Very important. Vital, you might say.

“Jack Samuelson of
the
Samuelsons?” Pal is continuing, leaning around me to better address Jay. “I wondered whether your family might be friends of his family? Lovely guy,” he goes on, without actually bothering to wait for Jay’s reply. “He’s been a client of ours for years. As a matter of fact, I’m due to go to Ascot with him next weekend. The Royal Enclosure, obviously. Will you be there at all?”

“Nope. Not really into horse racing.” Jay, with the patience of a saint, shoots Pal a polite smile. Then he shoots me a much less polite smile (frankly, it’s bordering on filthy) and leans over to murmur in my ear again. “Have I told you already how much I love watching you eat, Charlie? The way you just go for it . . . it’s so sexy.”

Which is when I realize that my little forkful of potato has somehow become an entire serving. And that I’ve polished off my peas and made pretty solid inroads into my lamb.

Oh, sod it. It’s all nutrients, remember? And when my gluttonous appetite is making Jay smile at me the way he’s smiling at me now . . . Well, I can face the consequences tomorrow morning, can’t I? I’ve brought my hateful trainers and hateful running kit in my weekend bag. So what if I have to be up with the lark, squatting and lunging my way around the knot garden that former girlfriends have used for nothing more strenuous than topless basking? It’ll be worth every bite. I
want
Jay to think I’m this lusty, sexy, sins-of-the-flesh kind of girl, rather than the kind who’s just had a bit of a meltdown in her friend’s bathroom because she’s terrified of getting naked. So I smile at Jay in (what I hope is) a flirtatious manner, and lustily reach for a refill from the pommes Lyonnaise dish. I’m rewarded by one of those filthy smiles back, and the sudden touch of his hand, as he rests it on my thigh.

“Well, maybe I could ask Jack if he has any spare tickets for
the Royal Enclosure.” Pal is persistent—you have to give him that. “I’m sure you’d have a splendid time, Jay.”

“Oooh, don’t go to Ascot.” Honey shudders, her blue eyes widening. “It’s really cruel! All those poor horses, breaking their legs and dying.”

“That’s the Grand National, sweetheart,” Jay tells her, kindly.

“Ascot is the posh one, Honey. With the queen and everyone in big hats,” I add.

“All
right
, Charlie!” Honey’s voice is querulous, and she looks as if she might actually be about to weep girlish tears all over her own pommes Lyonnaise, rather than eat it. “There’s no need to make me look stupid!”

“Sorry . . . I mean, I wasn’t . . .” But I break off, distracted by Jay’s hand drawing a slow, sexy figure eight an inch or two above my knee. Which is a fatal error, because the lull gives Pal the opportunity to swoop again.

“I was also wondering,” he asks Jay, “if you’d ever had any dealings with Adrian Halliday. You know, of Halliday Freeman Burke? Adrian’s brother-in-law is a colleague of mine—well, more of a friend, really—and he’s terribly keen for me to join him the next time he goes out to the Hallidays’ ski chalet in Colorado . . .”

Jay makes the catastrophic mistake of admitting that he does, indeed, know Adrian Halliday, which causes Pal to launch into a long explanation of precisely how he first came to know the blasted brother-in-law. I grab my wineglass and take a large gulp, wondering if I can find anything to say to Honey, until Jay is released by Pal, that isn’t going to make her accuse me of being mean to her. But I’m distracted by Jay’s hand, which is suddenly creeping farther up my leg. It’s made all the sexier by the fact that he’s pretending to be entirely engrossed in what Pal is saying, nodding away politely while his fingers play a frisky little piano concerto on my thigh.

Then he squeezes my leg all the more firmly. This time, actually, it’s less of a turn-on and more like he’s picking out the ripest avocado in the supermarket salad section.

A puzzling thing has just occurred to me.

Jay doesn’t have
three
hands, does he?

I only ask because I can see that he’s using his left hand for his fork, and that he’s just used his right hand to pick up the nearest red wine bottle and top up first Honey’s glass, then mine, and then his own.

I turn to stare at Pal, sitting the other side of me.

“Are you . . .” I realize I’m talking too loud. I lower my voice so it’s barely even a whisper. “Have you had your hand on my leg for the last five minutes?”

But before Pal can say anything—before he can even remove his hand, come to that—there’s a commotion from his other side. Lucy, who’s suddenly turned a very nasty shade of green, has plonked down her wineglass, knocking her water glass over in the process.

“Who’s making the room spin?” she asks, in a tone of voice that can only be described as slurry. When she follows this up with a loud hiccup, presses a napkin to her mouth, and utters the random phrase, “Lapsang . . . parrot . . . hobnob,” I know that A) she’s more drunk than I’ve seen her in years, and that B) if someone doesn’t get her to a bathroom soon, we’re really going to be in trouble.

Jay—as masterful in a crisis as I hope he’s going to be in the bedroom tonight—gets to his feet, heads around the table, picks Lucy up as if she weighs roughly half of the ten-stone-two that I happen to know she actually weighs, and proceeds to carry her up the stairs to her bedroom, me and (a furious) Pal trailing in his wake.

“I
told
her she was having too much to drink!” he’s spitting from out in the bedroom, as Jay carefully deposits Lucy in the bathroom and I hold back her hair as she throws up barely
digested lamb and peas into the toilet. “I’m so frightfully sorry about this,” he tells Jay, when he tactfully goes back out into the bedroom. “I’m simply mortified.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, buddy,” I hear Jay say. “These things happen.”

“Not to your girlfriend, they don’t. Lucy’s just an embarrassment.”

I don’t hear Jay’s reply (nor am I able to leap into the bedroom and obliterate Pal from the face of the earth with a single blow) because Lucy is retching noisily again, divesting her stomach of all of its contents and what looks like quite a lot of its lining.

“Doughnut,” she groans, incomprehensibly, from the depths of the toilet bowl. “Cleopatra.”

I try and utter some soothing words, even though the room is getting a bit spinny for me as well, and keep holding her hair back and patting her shoulders until finally she croaks that she’d like to go to bed now please. I call for Jay, but evidently he’s disgusted enough by Pal—or scared enough of Hannah—to have headed back down to the dining room by now, because it’s just Pal who puts his blond head around the bathroom door. He agrees, irritably, that he’ll help get her to bed, and then proceeds to haul her towards the bedroom while I fill up the tooth mug from the sink, and dampen a flannel so that I can try to take off some of Lucy’s makeup before she goes to sleep in it. I’m just going through her wash bag to find her eye makeup remover when I feel a (familiar, by now) hand on my arm.

I turn around, ready to give Pal a piece of my mind, if he’s lucky, and a punch in the nose, if he’s not. But I’m foiled in both these plans by the fact that he’s suddenly lunging at me, lips pursed like a comedy goldfish.

There’s a brief, horrifying moment filled with suction noises and a damp, wiggling tongue, and then I whack him around the
side of the head with my damp flannel and—mercifully—it’s all over.

“You hit me!” He steps away from me, holding his face.

“That’s the least you deserve! What the hell is wrong with you, Pal? You’re going out with my best friend!”

“So?”

“
So?
” I echo. Then I realize my voice has got a bit screechy, and that even though Lucy is passed out in the next room, she isn’t actually deaf. “
So?
” I repeat, in a furious hiss. “So it’s okay for you to grope me under the table, when she’s sitting right next to you? So it’s okay for you to kiss me, when she’s in the room next door?”

“Oh, well, if proximity to Lucy is your problem with this, I’m sure I could arrange to get her out of the way for a bit . . .”

“Pal, believe me, proximity to Lucy is
not
my problem with this.”

“But I really fancy you, Charlie,” he says, in a matter-of-fact way, as though this alone should be enough to make me jump on him, wild with desire. “And I’m not saying I want a relationship or anything. I just think we’re two extremely fit, very attractive people who could bring each other a lot of sexual pleasure.”

I just stare at him. Words have failed me.

“It wouldn’t even need to be a regular thing. Though I do have a fairly convenient gap in my schedule after work on Tuesdays. I don’t need to get to my spinning class until seven thirty, and I tend to be able to finish at the office by half past five . . .”

Feeling like I’m about to throw up myself—a state that I know is nothing whatsoever to do with my three martinis and five (or was it six?) glasses of wine, and everything to do with what Pal has just suggested—I shove the damp flannel and tooth mug at him and step around him towards the door.

“Put the water by her bed,” I mutter, “so she can have a drink if she wakes up feeling rubbish.”

“But Charlie . . .”

“If you pull this stunt again,” I add, “I’ll tell Lucy thirty seconds later, and Jay thirty seconds after that, and leave them to be the ones to deal with you.”

I can hear Lucy snoring, over on the bed, as I hurry out of the bedroom. Once outside in the corridor, I lean against the wall for a moment or two, trying to stop feeling A) sick and shaky, and B) the need to hose myself down with disinfectant, from top to toe but especially where Pal has touched me.

But even if I could lay my hands on a hose, or several gallons of Dettol, there isn’t going to be the opportunity to do anything of the sort, because Jay is heading up the stairs towards me.

“Hey! I was just coming to see if everything was all right. Is Lucy okay?”

“She’s okay. Well, she will be in the morning. Should we go back downstairs, to finish off dinner?”

“Oh, I think that ship has sailed. Everyone’s already gone to bed.” As he reaches the top of the stairs, he leans down to place the lightest line of kisses, all the way down from my ear to my collarbone. “Which I was kind of hoping you and me could do, too,” he murmurs. “Unless you had anything else in mind?”

“I have absolutely nothing else in mind,” I say. Which is true. Now that he’s here, and kissing me like this, the memory of Pal’s chilly fish lips is receding into the distance. It’s pretty hard to think about anything at all, in fact, apart from the sheer bliss of Jay’s touch.

He grins. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

“But . . . could you give me . . . just a minute or two?” I manage to say—or rather, to gasp, as he sets off kissing the other side of my neck, even more erotically than before. “I
mean, I just need to freshen up a bit . . . after Lucy and the vomit and all that . . .”

Remarkably, Jay doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that I’ve just introduced the concept of vomit into this incredibly sexy encounter. He simply says he’ll just pop down to the kitchen and apologize to Hannah for us all skipping dessert, and that he’ll be up in a couple of minutes.

A couple of minutes
. The moment Jay heads back down the stairs, I hurry along the corridor towards our bedroom. I need to temporarily put the awfulness of that Pal encounter out of my mind; ignore, for the time being, my concerns about the abysmal manner in which he treats Lucy. Because right now, I need to focus. I am about to go to bed with a six-foot-two, nicely muscled, smoldery-eyed, drop-dead-handsome hunk of a man, who drives way too fast, and kisses way too well, and . . .

I almost trip on something that’s been left outside our bedroom door. When I reach down to pick it up, I see that it’s a bag from a chemist’s in Ludlow.

Inside is a bottle of Piriton.

Ferdy
. He must have picked it up when he went to collect Honey from the train station earlier.