Once in a Lifetime (47 page)

Even his voice was sexy.

‘I’m beginning to think it may take longer than I initially thought,’ he added.

Marcella realised he was flirting with her, in such a subtle way that nobody else noticed. She felt a rush of total lust that made her whole body burn. Suddenly, she was far too hot and her skin was misted in sweat and she felt sure everyone could see it. But the training kicked in. Her own training.

People aren’t looking at you all the time watching for imperfections.

You’d be surprised what they don’t notice. If you hiccup, sneeze or flush puce, they often don’t notice, and if you carry on as if you haven’t noticed, then they will carry on too …

Her own words mocked her as the heat increased. Satellites in space could probably detect it.

‘I’ll leave you boys to it,’ she said, and backed off into her

own office. Leave you boys to it? What did that sound like?

Not the independent career woman, that was for sure.

At her desk, she picked up her desk calendar and fanned herself with it. Had that really happened? Had she just felt herself fall head over heels in sheer lust with Paul’s plumber cousin? She was really losing it now. It was time to give up work, move to a remote island, let her hair grow long and pin it up in a bun with knitting needles.

She kept the door shut all morning and only ventured out at lunchtime when there was no noise in the rest of the office. She didn’t know if Lorcan was starting work that day or when, but the less she saw of him the better. She’d die of embarrassment if she reacted like that again. Imagine if Connor had noticed.

Paul wouldn’t, Paul was clueless, but no matter how clever she was at hiding things, Connor would eventually cop on.

Hopefully, it would be a quick job and Lorcan would have his team of people doing it, rather than him being around the office looking broodingly handsome and flirty.

She made herself coffee, took a banana from the kitchen fruit bowl and was on her way back to her office when Lorcan appeared.

‘I was looking for you,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Hanging on to her banana for dear life, Marcella kept walking until she reached the safety of her office. He followed her.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked. ‘Connor seems to be out, but if you want to wait until he’s back -‘ She was hot again. She couldn’t fan herself, it would look like she was having a hot flush, which was the kiss of death to a woman in her forties. ‘I don’t want to see Connor. I came up to ask you out,’ he said, staring at her with ferocious calm.

‘To ask me ‘

‘- out, yes,’ he said. ‘You’re unattached. I asked. I’m unattached and I find you incredibly gorgeous, so I’m asking you out. Is there a problem with that?’ He put his lovely dark

head to one side and Marcella had a vision of that head nuzzling her throat, with her hands grasping his skull, his mouth moving down further to suck her nipples.

The heat soaked through her white vest this time and she hoped it wasn’t making the fabric cling to her because this bra was so see-through, entirely the sort of thing a woman might wear to bed with the intention of having a man rip it off her later, with his teeth, perhaps …

‘What is it with you?’ she demanded. ‘You, you ‘

One eyebrow arched.

‘Out where?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Dinner.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’m busy,’ she snapped.

‘Tomorrow night?’

‘Fine. Where?’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said.

Marcella shook her head. ‘No, I’ll meet you there.’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said again. ‘When I take you to dinner, I take you. Eight o’clock? You tell me where.’

‘Are you always this pushy?’ she asked, as she wrote her address on a piece of paper.

‘Only when I really want something,’ he murmured.

When he left, Marcella went to the window and wrenched it open, standing with the breeze flowing over her skin until she cooled down. She would get him out of her system. He was probably as thick as four short planks. Nothing turned her off a man like stupidity.

He wasn’t thick. Quite the contrary. They ate at a small Italian restaurant in the city, and Marcella found that she could listen to him talking all night. Not that he did talk all night: he let her talk, and he listened. But when he did talk, it was clear that a serious brain was behind those sexy blue eyes.

He’d completed a degree in finance before turning to plumbing when the investment bank he’d worked for went through a rocky patch in the late nineties.

‘But why plumbing?’ Marcella asked.

‘Why not plumbing?’

‘With your education, you could do anything.’

‘Do you think that what I did in college means I should want something better than to be a plumber?’ Lorcan said, smearing brie on a cracker for her.

Marcella, realising that he was going to feed it to her and shocked at the fact that she liked the idea, blushed.

‘If you don’t hold it against me that I’m a plumber, I won’t hold it against you that you work in PR,’ he said.

‘I love my job,’ Marcella said.

‘I love mine and I’m proud of it.’ He held the cracker delicately to her lips, teasing her with it, allowing her little bites.

‘I have a growing company, forty employees, and I won’t tell you my turnover because I don’t know you well enough yet, but I’m earning more money than I earned in finance. You’re not an intellectual snob, are you?’

Marcella blushed again.

‘Intellectual snobbery is a real eighties thing,’ he said. ‘I’m more of a nineties guy and I don’t look down on anyone because of their education or what they choose to do with it.

Ambition and success have nothing to do with that. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs of the nineties didn’t go to college at all.’

‘Don’t rub it in that I went to college a million years before you did. I’m old enough to be your mother,’ she said anxiously, taking a sip of wine.

‘That’s not possible, not unless my mother had me when she was eleven,’ he replied. They’d already had a conversation about age, where Marcella had told Lorcan the truth, half expecting him to run away at the news that she was forty-nine to his thirty-eight. He’d said it didn’t matter in the slightest.

‘And I don’t go out on romantic dates with my mother,’

he said now. ‘Except when we’re planning to appear on Jerry Springer.’

Marcella laughed loudly, spraying wine everywhere.

‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching over with her napkin. She dabbed his face and then his throat, and it felt as if they had both stopped breathing.

‘If you go any further down with the napkin, we’ll never be able to come to this restaurant again,’ he murmured.

‘I’ve had enough cheese,’ she said.

The too.’

They both made gestures to the waiter to bring the bill, but he won the battle to pay.

He drove slowly, not speaking, and Marcella felt the tingle of anticipation grow inside her. At her house, he parked the car and they sat in silence for a moment.

‘Do you want to come in for a coffee?’ she asked.

‘Do you want me to come in?’ The blue eyes bored into hers. ‘If I come in, I don’t know if I’ll be able to leave.’

Marcella wondered if she was stone mad, but she reached up and touched his cheek where the five o’ clock shadow was breaking through. Like a cat, he moved his face so the line of his jaw was cupped in her hand.

‘You don’t have to leave,’ she said.

Marcella had never kept a secret from Ingrid in all the years they had been friends. No matter what happened, they talked about it. But Marcella couldn’t tell Ingrid about this, this was like breaking all the commandants of being a good friend: enjoying yourself when your friend was devastated and betrayed.

Enjoying yourself with a younger man made it worse.

When she thought about the age gap in isolation, she felt like Hugh Heffner with one of the Playboy girls. She thought of how she and Ingrid had spoken of such men, the sort of men who grew older and older, got covered in liver spots,

had frail bodies, wrinkly skin and eyes that still gleamed when they saw nubile flesh.

‘They’re disgusting,’ Marcella used to say. ‘Why don’t they date women their own age or thereabouts? Why twenty-year olds?’

‘It’s about power,’ Ingrid used to say sagely. ‘Having a young girlfriend signals to the world that they have the money and the power to attract such a woman. If they didn’t have that, they would just be an ordinary, much older guy.’

So doing it in reverse, dating a younger man, made Marcella feel hypocritical and secretive.

But, oh, he was wonderful.

Lorcan. Marcella rolled his name around in her mouth.

Her younger lover. In the media world she belonged to, that made her a cougar - a woman in her prime with a younger lover.

When she was with Lorcan, laughing with him, making love with him, they were just people.

Thinking of herself as a cougar changed that, it smacked of some sort of desperation, for all that articles in magazines always made being a cougar sound fabulous: have a younger man as your lover, let him appreciate your inner beauty as well as your experience.

But in reality, it felt different. A secret she needed to keep.

Nobody could know, not anyone at work, not even Ingrid.

If Lorcan had been less good looking, or even worked in a different field, it would have been different. But there was a Lady Chatterley’s Lover quality to falling for the plumber.

She couldn’t tell anyone that, truly, he was one of the smartest men she’d ever met. Well-read, funny, clever. In the world of media - a world where, ironically, people tended to have a very blinkered view of reading and pored over little else but media pages in the papers and articles written by people they knew - a professional woman dating a plumber was a little like a successful man dating a beauty queen.

Trading down.

None of them would believe Marcella was with him for his mind. They’d disregard the brain cells and look at the sculpted body, the handsome face and the powerful charisma that emanated from him, and they’d think: Bingo!! Yeah, you’re with him for his mind, Marcella. Sure.

On the third date, he’d taken her home to meet his mother and brothers.

That’s what you did with someone you were serious about, Lorcan said, and Marcella, who hadn’t been taken home to meet the mother of one of her boyfriends for at least twenty years, had thought it was very sweet - until she got there.

Lorcan’s family home was a sprawling semidetached house in a suburb where his mother, Antoinette, had raised her six sons alone after her husband died. Immaculately presented but comfortable, the house spoke of a warm family life. When they arrived for dinner, three of Lorcan’s brothers were there, all nearly as gorgeous and charming, making Marcella think they could fill half a calendar of hunks.

Then she’d met Antoinette, who’d come out of the kitchen in an apron, drying her hands on a tea towel.

‘Hello, Marcella,’ Antoinette had said and Marcella had felt her gut clench.

This was no little old lady with fluffy white hair. Lorcan’s mother didn’t seem that much older than she was, although miles apart in all obvious ways. Antoinette made Marcella think of what she’d have become if she’d stayed in her hometown and married one of the boys who’d been after her all those years ago. Antoinette had short hair - Marcella remembered how her own mother had cut hers as soon as she’d hit forty, saying that long hair was for younger women.

Antoinette wore a cream blouse’ tucked into a sensible plaid skirt and shoes that were undoubtedly comfortable but positively anti-fashion.

Marcella had gone for her version of casual, which meant a Ralph Lauren sweater with a white shirt underneath and denims that looked ordinary but were actually expensive ones cut by a former jeans model who understood the female body.

Her hair hung around her shoulders in glossy, dark waves.

Worse, one of Lorcan’s brothers, Tony, had brought his family with him, including his wife, Sarah, and their eighteen-month-old baby, an apple-cheeked little girl named Lulu.

Antoinette was polite to all, but Marcella felt a frost every time Lorcan’s mother looked in her direction.

Tony, Sarah and Lulu were a proper family unit, was the silent message. You, older woman taking my boy, are not.

Everyone wanted a go of Lulu, and when she landed on Marcella’s lap, Marcella felt the frisson of loss she always felt when she held a small child.

No matter that she’d done her grieving for that, it still hurt to have a perfect little creature staring up at her with pale blue eyes and an inquiring face. She would never have this now.

Marcella was good with children. She’d spent a lot of time with her nieces and nephews, and was adept at amusing them.

It took two minutes of smiling, talking and tickling Lulu’s chubby little hand in ‘Round and round the garden,’ before Lulu was hooked.

‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ Marcella crooned, as a delighted Lulu examined Marcella’s necklace and gave a few exploratory tugs on one of her earrings.

Lulu refused to be passed along and clung to Marcella.

‘She likes you,’ said Sarah happily, and began to relax enough to eat her dinner.

In other circumstances, Marcella would have liked Antoinette, but when Marcella was helping tidy up, Antoinette spoke to her alone and destroyed any chance of happy families.

‘I can’t say I’m delighted you’re going out with Lorcan,’

Antoinette said, ‘but he’s a man and he knows his own mind.