‘This Jerry—do you intend to put the poor man out of his misery and go out with him, or is there someone else on the horizon?’ he asked conversationally, so conversationally she felt she couldn’t really ask him to mind his own business, as she would have liked to do and as she felt he deserved.
‘No to both,’ she answered shortly, hoping he would take the hint.
He didn’t. ‘So you’re fancy-free and single?’ he drawled easily. ‘Enjoying the odd date but without any ties or commitments?’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke, his eyes on the windscreen.
‘There hasn’t been an “odd date” for quite some time.’ She aimed to make her voice faintly amused, as though she wasn’t as taut as piano wire inside. ‘But, yes, I suppose you could put it like that.’ Not that my private life is anything to do with you.
He nodded slowly. ‘Are you a career girl?’ he asked evenly.
Bearing in mind who he was, she could really only answer in one way, but it had the added advantage of being the truth when she said, ‘Yes, I am, if being a career girl means I want to do well in my job and get somewhere.’
‘And you enjoy being independent and autonomous.’ This time it was a statement, and Sephy stiffened slightly. He saw too much, this man, and she didn’t like where the conversation was going.
She forced herself to take a deep calming breath before she shrugged and said airily, ‘Doesn’t everyone at some stage?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he challenged smoothly.
‘Well, most of my friends think that way.’ Her voice was too defensive, and she recognised it even before he spoke.
‘I’m sorry, I seem to have touched a nerve,’ he said, in a voice which suggested he wasn’t sorry at all.
Arrogant swine! She gritted her teeth and stared straight ahead.
The rest of the journey was conducted in a silence in which Conrad seemed to feel extremely comfortable but which Sephy found unpleasant and disturbing to say the least. It didn’t help that he was completely oblivious to her and she was aware of every tiny movement he made—his strong capable hands on the wheel, his big powerful body, the way his trousers pulled tight over lean thighs…
Sexual attraction. The words were stark but Sephy faced them bravely, aware she had been putting off the moment all day. Okay, so she was sexually attracted to him and she hadn’t felt this way in years, not since… Her thought process hesitated, and then she followed through. Not since Da
vid.
David Bainbridge. The cliché of tall, dark and handsome. He had been the ultimate prize in the small village community near Banbury where she had been born, and the summer after she had finished her A levels and he had been home on holiday from university had been a thrilling one.
His father was something big in the City, and from the age of seventeen David had driven his own red sports car with a different girl in tow for every day of the week. Sephy had always been in awe of him, and consequently excruciatingly shy in his presence whenever the young people of the villages thereabouts got together. Her shyness had expressed itself in a cool aloofness that had earned her the nickname ‘Ice Maiden’ amongst the lads, although she hadn’t known about that at the time.
She had been a short fat toddler and a short fat child, and even at eighteen a vestige of puppy fat had remained. That, combined with her abundance of freckles and the ugly brace she had had to wear on her teeth, had made her self-esteem zero, but she had hidden her lack of confidence under a reserved, touch-me-not exterior that protected the vulnerable girl underneath.
And then that summer David had appeared interested in her. He had returned from university with a beautiful blonde who had stayed two weeks and then disappeared to visit her family in Sweden, and from almost the day Annika had left David had begun seeking her out at the local dances, picnics, visits to the pub and so on. He had been quite open about it.
She hadn’t been able to believe it at first, and then she had floated in a bubble of wonder and excitement as she had waited for him to ask her for a date, a real date, without any of the rest of the crowd along. She had dreamt about the moment for nights on end.
And then he had asked, one evening when a gang of them had been sipping ice-cold beer in the garden of the village pub. David had taken her aside and told her he was crazy about her, that he couldn’t understand how he’d never noticed her before, that he really wanted them to get to know each other better.
‘Come for a quiet meal at my place?’ he suggested softly, his arms round her waist and his ebony eyes looking into her dazed brown ones. ‘The parents are away so we’ll have the house to ourselves. We can get a video and just chill out with a pizza and a bottle of wine. Please, Sephy?’
And he kissed her, drawing her into him as his hands moved seductively over her body before wandering under the loose thin cotton top she had on and cradling her breasts, his thumbs rubbing and tweaking their hard points until she thought she’d melt right at his feet.
It was her first kiss, her first tentative sexual encounter, and it blew her mind. She had worshipped him from afar all her life and suddenly the impossible, the inconceivable was happening. He’d fallen for her. Her…
She was the girl he drove home in his flash red sports car that night, and as they waved goodbye to the others she felt as though she was in a wonderful, blissful dream.
And then the dream turned into a nightmare.
It was her friend Glenis who told her. Glenis came round the next morning, sympathetic and commiserating but with an edge to her pity that told Sephy the other girl was perhaps secretly relishing the drama too, to say that Robbie— Glenis’s boyfriend—had told her on the quiet that David was taking Sephy out for a bet.
‘A bet?’ Sephy looked into Glenis’s round eyes, owl-like behind their thick glasses. ‘I don’t understand.’
Glenis wriggled a bit, but she still took a delight in telling her. ‘One of the lads, I don’t know who, bet David that he couldn’t get the “Ice-Maiden”—that’s you—into bed on a first date,’ Glenis said conspiratorially. ‘And David said he could. His parents are away in America for a few weeks so he told the lads he’d do it at his house, and they could hide in a spare bedroom and then he’d call them in to prove it when he’d finished. I’m sorry, Sephy, but I couldn’t let you walk into that, could I? I had to tell you. I couldn’t believe it at first, but it is true, honest.’
She thanked Glenis somehow, and once the other girl had gone picked up the telephone with numb fingers and called David’s home. She didn’t think about what to say, she just asked him. And he didn’t even try to pretend once he knew he had been rumbled. That hurt as much as anything else. He was offhand and contemptuous and amused, and it was he who put the phone down on her.