The Plus-One Agreement (7 page)

That very jumpiness seemed to heighten his awareness of her on some level, and it felt perfectly natural for him to lean in close to her on the way down the passage towards the stairs. He rested his hand lightly around her waist, conscious of her slenderness beneath the light flowing drape of her dress.

* * *

Emma was hotly aware of him next to her as he escorted her along the landing. As his arm curled around her waist she picked up the spicy scent of his aftershave on warm skin and her stomach gave a slow and far too delicious flip. Everything about him seemed to be overstepping the lines of her personal space in a way it never had before. The way he stood just a fraction closer to her than strictly necessary... The way he’d held her gaze a beat too long when he’d teased her about wanting ground rules.

‘Er...there’s no one actually here to see us,’ she pointed out, glancing down at his hand, now resting softly on her hip. She looked up at him questioningly.

‘Just getting into character,’ he said easily, not moving his hand.

‘I’m determined to inject a bit of tradition if it kills me, Donald,’ she heard suddenly.

Her mother’s distinctive tones drifted down the corridor from behind them and she froze next to Dan. And then they were getting louder.

‘I think I’ll have a word with Ernie’s parents about top tables and speeches. It’s a family occasion. They’ll be expecting us to have some input.’

Emma’s heart began to sink at the thought of her mother instigating a cosy chat about traditional wedding roles with Ernie’s clearly far more liberal parents and she stopped at the top of the stairs, intending to intercept her and suggest a new approach of just enjoying the celebrations without actually
criticising
any of them.

The coherence of that thought dissolved into nothing as Dan suddenly curled his hand tighter around her waist and propelled her back against the nearest wall. Before she could so much as let out a squeak, he kissed her.

SIX

Nigh on
eight months of conditioning herself that her attraction to him was just a stupid crush, and all it took to get every nerve-ending of attraction right back in action was one kiss. One kiss that made her toes curl and her stomach feel as if it might have turned into warm marshmallow.

He caught her lower lip perfectly between his own lips and sucked gently on it, his hand sliding lower to cup the curve of her bottom. The smooth wood panelling of the wall pressed against her back. She could feel every hard, muscular contour of his body against hers, and sparks danced down her spine and pooled deliciously between her legs.

Her eyes fluttered dreamily shut—and when she opened them she was staring right into the disapproving gaze of her mother, a vision in purple sequins, a few feet away over Dan’s shoulder.

Reality clattered over her like a bucket of ice cubes and she wriggled away from him, the flat of her hand against the hardness of his chest, her heart racing. He made no effort to disengage whatsoever, so she added an extra pace’s worth of space between them herself.

He was watching her steadily, the petrol-blue shirt he was wearing making his eyes seem darker than usual, a grin playing about his lips. Her heart raced as if she’d just sprinted up and down the creaky stairs a few dozen times.

She tore her gaze away from his.

‘Mum!’ she gabbled.

‘Hello, darling.’ Her father leaned in to give her a kiss and shook Dan’s hand.

Her mother glanced at him disapprovingly.

‘Really, Emma,’ she remarked. ‘A little class would be good.
Anyone
could walk along this corridor and how do you think it would look to find you two in a clinch?’ She radiated criticism, despite the fact that she was intending to steam in and openly re-evaluate the wedding plans. When it came to social etiquette she could be remarkably selective. ‘You’re not sixteen, you know. A little decorum would be good. Thank goodness Adam can rely on your father and me to make a good impression.’

She swept past them down the stairs.

Emma stared after her incredulously and then rounded on Dan.

‘What the hell was that about?’ she snapped. ‘What did you think you were
doing?
’

‘We’ve got an image to keep up,’ he said, shrugging as if he’d done nothing wrong.

So he’d just been playing a part, while her knees had turned to jelly. There had been a moment back there when she’d thought she might simply fold into a hot puddle on the floor.

But he didn’t need to know that, did he?

‘I don’t think we need to take things quite
that
far,’ she said, trying to breathe normally.

‘Are you complaining that my kisses are somehow substandard?’ he said, his gaze penetrating, a grin touching the edge of his mouth and crinkling his eyes.

Her blush felt as if it spread all the way from the roots of her hair to her toes, because as kisses went it had been utterly off-the-scale sublime.

‘Of course I’m not saying that,’ she snapped. ‘It’s just that when I said we were aiming for perfect couple I obviously should have specified that I didn’t mean perfect couple at honeymoon stage.’

‘What
were
you aiming for, then?’ he said, blue eyes amused. He rubbed his lips thoughtfully with his fingers, as if he was savouring the taste of her.

She ran a hand self-consciously over her hair. Perhaps if she could smooth the muss out of it she could smooth the fluster out of the rest of her.

‘I was thinking more comfortable in each other’s company. You know the kind of thing. More the on-the-brink-of-settling-down stage.’ She shrugged, her pulse returning to normal now. ‘Then again, you’re clearly drawing on your own experiences. When did you last have a relationship that made it past loved-up? You go from meet straight to dump. You miss out everything in between.’

He laughed, clearly amused by the whole affair.

‘You gave it one hundred and ten per cent when you were staging our “break-up”,’ he pointed out, making sarcastic speech marks in the air with his fingers. ‘Right the way down to the spectacular drink-throwing. What’s the matter with that approach now?’

She could hardly say it made her knees unreliable, could she?

‘Because the whole point of this is to stop my parents showing Adam up,’ she said. ‘And they’ve actually as good as just told
us
to get a room. I think we might have taken it a
teensy
bit too far.’

She led the way down the stairs

‘Spoilsport,’ he called after her, kick-starting her blush all over again.

* * *

As they walked out through wide-open double doors onto a stone-flagged terrace she was more aware than ever of his hand pressed softly in the hollow of her back. It seemed to generate sparks of heat that climbed tantalisingly up her spine. Her mind insisted on replaying his kiss on a loop, making her feel completely flustered.

Fortunately she had the reality check of Adam’s flamboyant styling to smack her between the eyes. The terrace was softly lit by hurricane lamps on tables and pin-lights strung along the stone balustrade. A band were set up to one side, playing jaunty music to which none of the guests were dancing because they were all crowded around the centrepiece in the middle of the terrace.

For a moment she had to lean back and narrow her eyes while her brain processed exactly what it was.

Adam and Ernie had apparently commissioned a life-size ice sculpture of themselves. It gleamed in the floor-level spotlighting. It depicted Adam with one finger pressed against his temple in a thoughtful pose while Ernie looked on.

Her parents were standing to one side, and her mother’s face was a stunned picture. On the bright side, at least it appeared to have rendered her speechless. As soon as she saw Emma and Dan she crossed to them, the beads on her purple evening dress shimmering as she walked. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in a ballroom dance show.

The real Adam and Ernie joined them, wearing complementary head-to-toe designer suits, with a group of Ernie’s relatives flanking them.

‘Aren’t they
fabulous?
’ Adam was gushing, clasping his hands together in delight. ‘And the best thing about having yourself carved is that you can tweak the way you look. So I made myself taller and we had a bit shaved off Ernie’s nose.’

‘Well, I’ve got to be honest, I’m not that impressed,’ her mother sniffed, deploying her usual tactic: if it was outside her comfort zone then she was suspicious of it. She leaned backwards appraisingly. ‘They’ve made your ears stick out,’ she remarked to Adam. ‘How much did you pay for them?’

‘Mum, you can’t ask things like that,’ Emma said, smiling nervously at the group.

Her mother drew herself up to her full height and pursed her lips. ‘Of course I can. Adam’s my son. We’re parents of the groom. I’m entitled to my opinion.’

‘They were a gift,’ Adam said, pink-cheeked. ‘From Ernie’s aunt. She’s a sculptress. She spent
hours
working on them. In a freezer.’

There was an ensuing pin-drop silence, during which Emma’s father took a canapé from a passing waiter and attempted to lever it into his mouth.

‘No more of those tartlets, Donald,’ her mother said, leaning in as if with a sixth sense. She expertly took the canapé out of his hand and his teeth closed over thin air. ‘Cholesterol!’ she snapped.

Ernie dragged a blushing Adam away to circulate, and Emma did her best to stand in as sounding board for her mother’s stream-of-consciousness opinions on every minuscule aspect of the proceedings. She was vaguely and gratefully aware of Dan’s calming presence at her side.

How would she manage at things like this in future, without him watching her back? The thought of losing that comfort gave her a needling sense of dread.

A couple of hours later she was worn out with smiling and small talk and her mother seemed to have reconnected with a kindred spirit in the shape of Emma’s spinster aunt Mabel, last seen at a childhood Christmas before moving up north. Emma watched them across the terrace, their arms folded in matching poses, matching critical expressions on their faces. Although her voice was drowned out by the music, she saw her mother’s lips form the word
grandchildren
as the pair of them looked her way.

She turned to see her father surreptitiously sliding food from the buffet table onto an already heaped plate while her mother was preoccupied.

‘Your mother’s got me on a diet,’ he said when he saw her disbelieving stare.

‘Doesn’t sound like much fun,’ Dan said.

He shrugged.

‘It’s not so bad. I have a second lunch down at the golf club most days. They do a fantastic pie and crinkle-cut chips. What she doesn’t know, and all that.’

Oh, for Pete’s sake, she’d had just about enough of this.

‘I need a walk,’ she said, heading for the steps down from the terrace and onto the lawns.

‘I’ll come with you.’

Dan followed her away from the party, grabbing a couple of champagne flutes from a passing waiter.

* * *

It was a beautiful clear summer night, the velvety cropped lawn silver in the moonlight. Strings of pearly pin-lights lent the trees a fairy-tale quality.

Emma walked on her toes at first, to stop her three-inch heels sinking into the grass, then gave up and took them off, walking barefoot, with the hem of her dress sweeping the grass. Dan was acutely aware of the change in their height difference. Now she seemed small and fragile as she walked next to him.

The faint sound of music and laughter drifted after them on the night air as the party carried on up on the terrace. The lawn swept gently downwards towards a small lake, molten metal in the moonlight. The fresh, sweet scent of dewy grass hung on the cool night air.

‘And you wonder why marriage doesn’t appeal to me,’ she said as he fell into step beside her. ‘If I ever found the right man why the hell would I marry him, if that’s what it does to you? They lead separate lives. Separate rooms, separate friends. He spends his life trying to exist below her radar and she’s got zero excitement in her own life so she makes up for it with gossip and by meddling in Adam’s life and in mine. And yet they think they’re presenting the image of joint marital solidarity.’

She warmed to her subject, flinging up an exasperated hand.

‘Is that how I’ll end up if I have kids? With them arguing over who
isn’t
going to have the annoying old cow over at Christmas?’

He couldn’t keep in a grin. She was so indignant.

‘It’s not all bad,’ he said. ‘At least they
are
interested in you.’

She sighed.

‘On an interfering kind of a level, maybe.’

He shook his head.

‘Maybe it comes across like that. OK, OK—it
does
come across like that,’ he said as she gave him an incredulous look. ‘But still you’re lucky to be part of a family. I couldn’t believe it when you said you were thinking about throwing it all away for some guy you’d known five minutes.’

Emma hid her fluster at his unexpected mention of Alistair by zeroing in on his other point.
Family
and
Dan
weren’t really two words she thought of in the same sentence.

‘That was part of the attraction,’ she said. ‘The idea of having some fun, for a change, with someone who put me first without criticising, without comparing me—who put me ahead of everything else. And with Alistair there was no prospect of settling into anything like my parents’ take on domesticity. It would have been loads of travel and excitement, minimal chance of ending up in separate bedrooms living my life through my kids.’

‘So the whole thing with Alistair was about you proving a point to your family? Why does it bother you so much what they think?’

Dan’s comment made her feel as if she was being sloshed with cold water—especially as it was so astute. She
had
been blinded to Alistair by the desire to impress her parents.

‘It had nothing to do with proving a point,’ she lied. ‘I’m a grown-up. What bothered me when I was a kid is just an exasperation now.’

She stopped to sit down on the bench he’d seen earlier from the bedroom window. He sat down next to her, the hard wrought-iron pressing cold through his shirt. He handed her one of the champagne flutes.

‘Then what is it?’ he said. ‘You handle yourself brilliantly back in London. You’re a real slick professional. You don’t need to let anyone’s criticism bother you.’

She stared across the silvery lawn. Faint laughter drifted across from the terrace.

‘Ah, but that’s exactly the point,’ she said. ‘When we see each other it’s usually for some work reason or other. When it comes to work I know I can hold my own. I know what I’m talking about. I make sure I won’t get caught out or make a slip-up.’ She paused. ‘It hasn’t always been like that for me.’

‘So what
was
it like, then?’

Emma looked at him, trying to gauge whether his interest was real or counterfeit. He’d never shown an interest in finding out more about her before—not unless it was related to work, of course. His blue eyes held hers steadily. She took a sip of her drink and smiled a little, remembering, letting the years fall away.

‘Growing up, I was the clumsiest kid you can imagine,’ she said. ‘If anyone was going to make a fool of herself it was me. And it was even more difficult because Adam’s always been such an overachiever. I started out at school trying to work hard, but it never seemed to matter how much effort I put in. I was never quite good enough to earn Adam’s level of interest or praise. He was picking up A grades, winning competitions, excelling at everything. After a while I learned not to put myself in a position where people could notice I was falling short.’

A memory returned to her in all its cringeworthy glory.

‘I had a part in the school musical once.’ She looked up at him. ‘When I was thirteen. Can you imagine me doing that?’

He shrugged, a small smile on his face. A polite response.

‘They used to do a musical every year. It was so popular. Everyone would come and watch—parents, locals. And that year they were doing
Grease.
Loads of singing and dancing. I was so excited by the whole idea. I just wanted to be part of it. It didn’t occur to me that there could be a negative side, that things could go wrong. I was so naïve.’