‘Smokescreens,’ said Dan.
‘So were you still dating this Jasmine woman when we met on that ski-slope in the Italian Alps?’ she asked, with a look that suggested he’d better have been telling the truth about his creative skills.
‘Of course not,’ he said, rising to the challenge with the glimmer of a smile. ‘We broke up a good fortnight before I spied you in your skin-tight black ski-suit.’
‘My skin-tight black ski-suit?’ She frowned. ‘I thought you’d been as impressed by my mastery of the black runs as I’d been by your skill on the mogul field.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘It was definitely the sexy ski-suit.’
‘So it was the way I looked that made you ask me out to the nightclub that night?’ she asked, smoothly steering him back on track.
‘It was.’
Zoe tutted. ‘So shallow.’
‘Well, what can I say? You zoomed past me too fast for conversation. I just thought you were hot.’ He ran his gaze over her and felt the heat whip through him. ‘I still do.’
Her eyes darkened and she pressed a little closer and, his mouth suddenly dry, Dan lifted his pint to his lips and swallowed back a couple of large, much-needed gulps.
‘The feeling is, and was, mutual,’ she said a little huskily. ‘Obviously. Otherwise I’d never have gone to bed with you on our first date.’
Dan nearly choked on his beer.
‘Of course,’ she mused, ‘that particular moment of recklessness might have been simply down to all that grappa.’
‘Please don’t mention the grappa,’ he muttered, rubbing his chest and wincing. ‘I can hardly bear thinking about it.’
She smiled at him with fond nostalgia. ‘I’m not surprised, but then you were knocking it back like water.’
‘Something had to make up for the dreadfully cheesy song you requested and then insisted on dancing to.’
She mentioned a famously cringe-worthy hit of the eighties and her eyebrows lifted. ‘You told me it was your favourite.’
He shrugged. ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’
‘Were you really so keen to get me into bed?’ she said, adding a touch of wistfulness that didn’t sound entirely feigned.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think we were lucky the grappa didn’t impede your performance.’ She sent him a smile that shot straight through the length of him and curled his toes.
‘Nor yours,?
? he murmured, finding it all too easy to visualise Zoe on his bed and in his arms.
‘All in all it was quite a night, wasn’t it?’ she said softly.
‘It was.’
‘Oh, this is so romantic,’ sighed Harriet. ‘Zoe told us you were the yin to her yang, the east to her west and the north to her south, and I can totally believe it. You two are totally made for each other.’
‘We are, aren’t we?’ said Zoe, so warmly, so dreamily that for one horrible moment he thought she might actually mean it.
And if that wasn’t enough to set off alarm bells, amid the collective female sighs, through the sudden haze in his head and above the rushing of the blood in his ears he heard Samantha coolly say, ‘Zoe mentioned you were on the point of proposing, Dan, so tell us, when are you going to make an honest woman out of her?’
Oh, God, he thought, feeling a cold sweat breaking out all over his skin. How the hell could he have forgotten about that? When Zoe had brought it up, it hadn’t seemed relevant because he hadn’t planned on things going this far. But they had, and now he was going to have to propose because he couldn’t walk out and leave her hanging now. Having come so far it really wouldn’t be fair. Besides, he’d promised himself he’d see this thing through right to the end, and that was what he’d do.
Whether he’d be able to make it convincing, however, was an entirely different matter. An engagement of any sort wasn’t something he’d ever really contemplated, at least not recently. So he’d just have to do it plainly and quickly, as if he couldn’t wait to whisk Zoe off to celebrate properly and in private.