Lots of Love (19 page)

Biting the tip of her tongue hard to make the thought go away, she fanned her shirt, determined to get back on track and complete her hot cross-examination. ‘Have you advertised Goose Cottage this month?’

Lloyd was glistening all over like an oiled Adonis, licking salty sweat from his perfect lips. He rested his chin in his cupped hands and blinked becomingly. ‘Not recently – you have to be aware of the danger of over-advertising.’

Was it her imagination, Ellen wondered, or was his ankle rubbing against hers?

‘And the cost, no doubt?’ she said lightly, pulling her feet under her and feeling the sweat squelch behind her knees.

‘True – but people see the same house advertised again and again, and start to think there’s something wrong with it.’ He was watching her face closely, and added, ‘Doesn’t that pool make you want to dive in?’

She felt her toes brace in preparation for a table-upturning sprint to the diving board. But she held herself down. Nice try, she thought testily. I’m ready for you. ‘Not right now, it doesn’t.’ She unglued her shirt from her chest and fanned it again. ‘And getting back to the point, it doesn’t help when the agent tells people, within seconds of their call, that there
is
something wrong with the cottage, then announces there aren’t any colour brochures left but he’ll send off a dodgy photocopy.’

‘Ah – yes.’ He wiped his wet temples with his palms. ‘Sorry about that, but I
was
in a hurry.’

‘And why isn’t there a for-sale sign outside?’

‘We never put boards up for rural properties over half a million unless they’re hard to find. It gives an air of exclusivity.’

‘And it means nobody knows they’re for sale!’ She wiped sweat beads off her own forehead. ‘Oddlode’s full of rich tourists who might want to buy a house on the spur of the moment.’

‘And it’s also full of tourists who love to look round properties for something to do on a rainy day instead of a cream tea.’ He was getting prickly too, the super-smooth banter staccato and edgy. ‘We call them Misguided Tours. They never buy houses and they waste everybody’s time.’

‘And estate agents who don’t sell houses are a waste of time, too.’

His handsome face twitched with the effort of maintaining the big white smile. ‘Then tell your parents to drop the price.’

‘First, I want a for-sale sign,’ Ellen demanded.
‘And
I want you to run adverts for Goose Cottage in the local papers next week, as well as in
Country Life
and the Saturday
Telegraph
– that probably means actioning all this on Monday to make the deadlines. I shall expect to see proof. Did you send press releases to the property-news pages about Goose Cottage and its history?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Then do that too.’ She twisted her sweaty hair back from her face. ‘I also want you to arrange for more brochures to be printed next week – again, I’ll need proof that this has been done.’

‘We do charge for these services, you know.’

‘If you sell the house within a month, you can charge,’ she said simply. ‘If not, we take it to another agent and you bear the costs. And if that agent values it at less, we’ll sell it at less.
You
valued it at the asking price and you sell at no less than five per cent under that price or you walk.’

‘That’s unheard of!’

‘So, break the rules. It’s either that or I appoint another agency on Monday.’ She leaned back in her seat, fanning herself with her shirt.

He cocked his square, pretty jaw, twisted his kissable pin-up lips and stared at her as his caramel eyes bubbled with indignation. ‘Is it breaking the rules to call your clients’ daughter a total bitch?’

‘I’ll take it as a compliment.’ She raised her chin and smiled.

Sweat was glistening on Lloyd’s golden skin, lifting the blond hairs and ruffling his feather-cut fringe. Disgruntled and left-footed, he was far more attractive than when he was trying to charm.

Ping! At last, the attraction she’d felt when she first met him kicked Ellen in the solar plexus. Her libido bounded out to enjoy the sunshine, a little tetchy from so long in the cold and a little uncertain that it was capable of more than a quick outing, but definitely
in situ.

She felt the big smile pulling at her lips. And it had the strangest after-effect. As she smiled, she felt it tugging her knickers tightly into her crotch. The higher the smile, the tighter her knickers. She found laughter rippling through it too – an irrepressible, joyful release of tension. She was fizzing all over.

And she was impressed and more than a bit surprised when Lloyd suddenly smiled too. ‘You really are in a firing mood this evening, aren’t you?’

‘Firing on all cylinders.’ She couldn’t stop the sudden crotch-tightening, belly-lurching, hollow-chested feeling. The sexual appeal was back big-time. When you knocked his smooth edges off, Lloyd Fenniweather was pretty desirable. ‘So does that mean you’d rather I appointed another agent?’

Lloyd looked at her for a long, long time, the big smile blasting even more heat into the kiln-like courtyard. ‘You really are amazing, you know that? You’re one of the sexiest women I’ve ever met.’

Ellen licked her lips, returning his gaze. She still couldn’t find him quite as sexy as she had for those few giddy moments on the Goose Cottage drive a week earlier, but she was enjoying herself again. He could forget about water sports in the Pear Tree Farm master bedroom, but there was something else wet and seductive she was desperate to try.

‘Are we going to be really late for the restaurant?’

He didn’t even look at his watch. ‘They like me. They’ll hold the table.’

‘Good.’ She stood up. ‘Excuse me – there’s something I just have to do . . .’

Kicking off her sandals as she ran and untying the drawstring on her skirt, Ellen left her clothes where they fell on the paving stones and bounded down the diving board.

It wasn’t one of her most calculated gestures. As a child of the sea and far too accustomed to clambering in and out of wetsuits to be body-conscious, it didn’t occur to her that here, in the landlocked Cotswolds, going for a swim in undies was tantamount to offering yourself on a plate with garnished nipples and sauce on the side.

Lloyd sat transfixed at the table as she pranced along in a white bra and pants then divebombed into the Cambridge blue surface. ‘You beauty!’

But Ellen heard nothing but the rush of water and the echoing swoosh of her opening arms as she slowed down and sat on the bottom of the pool. As the air bubbles were forced out from beneath the fine hairs on her body, from her nostrils, ears and clammy skin, Ellen stayed suspended underwater and felt as though she had dived into heaven. It had been a week since she’d swum, and no amount of long warm baths to soothe away the aches of non-stop cleaning had compensated for this sensation. She swam a length of the pool underwater, looking through the clear water at the mosaic tiles and steps at one end, dancing with reflections from the evening sun, in a world of her own.

When she resurfaced, Lloyd was standing, open-mouthed, at the poolside.

‘I’ll buy it!’ she called up to him, wiping water from her eyes and nose. ‘Do you think they’ll take an offer on the pool? I don’t want the house.’

He laughed, and watched her backstroke away, staring hopefully at her undies in case they had gone see-through. But Ellen had swum often enough in her faithful Sloggis to know that they preserved your dignity as well as – if not better than – a bikini.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she asked.

Lloyd gave her a wolfish wink. ‘No underpants. Besides, I prefer to watch.’

Ellen had a feeling it had a lot more to do with not wanting to ruin his hairdo before their meal, but she let it pass. Teasing him was too easy. ‘I’ll just do a couple of lengths and then I’ll be out.’ She crawled her way to the shallow end in smooth, easy movements, unspeakably relieved to have found a way of rinsing away the storm-gathering, nicotine-craving tension. A few more minutes in the courtyard cauldron and she would probably have either clouted smooth, calculated, sexy Lloyd or kissed him, and she wanted to do neither. She wanted him to sell her parents’ house ASAP so that she could fly away and find blue seas and pools all over the world to swim in.

So when she mounted the steps, tipping her head from side to side to rid her ears of water, she paused beside him. He was leaning against the west wall of the courtyard in one of his pretty poses, cooling off in the shadows. ‘You haven’t agreed to my terms yet,’ she reminded him, a thousand times more relaxed than she had been when she jumped in. Cooled by the water, her libido had snuggled back into its hidey-hole and refused to resurface.

‘I agree.’ The white smile beamed out of the shadows. ‘Do you really expect me to say anything else when you’re standing in front of me looking like that?’

‘Have you got a problem with it?’ she asked.

‘Only that I want to kiss you more than anything in the world right now.’ His eyes gleamed, but he didn’t move.

Ellen could hardly be surprised. He’d made his attraction to her very clear, and she was tramping about in wet underwear, although she no longer felt particularly sexy – just relaxed and cool-skinned for the first time all day.

She ducked her head away, squeezing water from her hair, and glanced at him again, thinking how different he was from Richard – the tongue-tied beach bum, who wouldn’t even notice whether a girl was wearing a microscopic bikini or a full-length drysuit if she made him laugh, who had no smooth banter or babe-magnet designer casual wear, whose only girlfriend until now had been Ellen, and who thought water sports were better than sex, not a form of it.

Apart from Gavin Grayson at the age of five (school playground, in exchange for a Frazzle), and Damian Atkins at the age of fourteen (by the ping-pong table in the youth club because her best friend was snogging his best friend), Ellen had only ever kissed Richard. She couldn’t imagine what another man’s mouth tasted like. She wondered whether their tongues and lips felt different.

She had no great desire to kiss Lloyd right now, but he was extremely attractive and looked as though he’d know what he was doing. She was also pretty certain that he didn’t want to fall in love, get married and have kids. He could make her knickers feel tight – sometimes – and was far sexier when he wasn’t talking. She could think of worse places to start. It might stop Richard creeping into her head so much.

‘Why don’t you, then?’ she suggested.

It was certainly nothing like kissing Richard. It was surprisingly gentle, for a start – his lips were soft and searching, moving slowly between hers. A cautious hand held her waist as though her skin was fine silk and another cupped her chin, the fingertips tracing the curve of her ear. As a practised seducer’s kiss, it was unexpectedly timid and passive.

Ellen watched his face as they kissed, the dark lashes closed against the tanned cheeks, the perfect skin still gleaming from the heat of the evening.

To her regret, her knickers didn’t tighten. Still sodden from the pool, they drooped like old-lady drawers and started to feel a bit chilly.

Lloyd pulled away, his eyes fluttering open as he smiled, then let out a low growl and tilted his head to the other side to swap nose positions. Now his mouth applied more pressure as he sought out her tongue with his, his chin so much softer than Richard’s goatee bristle. Ellen felt her lips yield automatically, allowed her body to be pulled closer to his and tilted up on her toes, but she felt hollow inside. His body was very different from Richard’s – taller and less solid, wider at the shoulder and narrower at the hips. When she reached up, she felt a thick, clean mop of hair, not the downy stubble of a balding buzz-cut. The beginnings of his erection – the same familiar, shifting prod – was higher up because he was so much taller, nudging her in the belly rather than the crook of her groin. As it stirred and grew it moved her navel ring from side to side as if it was a miniature door-knocker being rattled.

She tried kissing him back harder, hoping to kick-start something within her, but the only throttle she pressed was his as his tongue leaped enthusiastically in response, probing deeper, his body sliding against hers, the once-gentle hand slipping to her arse and encountering a damp buttock – the erection positively leaped to attention, rattling her belly ring like a hammer on a gong.

Ellen pulled away, wondering what in hell was wrong with her. It wasn’t unpleasant kissing him, but it felt no different from getting a shoulder rub while tasting a new wine. In return, he seemed far too eager to pummel her fibroids and down her in one.

‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’ She held him at arms’ length, her elbows locking as he tried to lunge forward again. ‘Shall we go and eat?’

‘Sure.’ He let her go reluctantly and flicked on the big white smile.

She turned away, wishing she had just told the truth, that she didn’t want to kiss him any more because her experiment had failed, and that while she was actually quite hungry, she was just as happy to go home and eat alone because they had nothing in common, and there was probably some good TV on. At least she’d save him the restaurant bill, so that his wallet wasn’t dented even if his pride was.

But Ellen was Jennifer Jamieson’s daughter, and while Jennifer would certainly
not
approve of showing your date your underwear then kissing him to see if you fancied him before the meal, she believed in good manners. She had spent years teaching her daughter to be ladylike, gracious and considerate, battling to soften the tomboy edges. It would, Ellen thought, be very bad manners simply to ask Lloyd for a lift home. She would have to spin out her table-talk and try her best to put him off gently by dessert.

She smiled coolly at him over her shoulder as she pulled on her skirt. ‘I warn you, I eat like a pig and have no table manners,’ she started as she intended to carry on, ‘and I’ll probably ogle all the waiters.’