‘Anything else other than sex?’
She shrugged. ‘Not especially. I don’t mind either way.’
Barely able to believe he was having this conversation, Dan fought for composure. ‘You don’t seem the no-strings type.’
‘I’m not. Or at least I haven’t been. And that’s rather the point.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve got stuck in a bit of a rut, and a pretty boring one at that. I’ve been working too hard. I need to get out of it before I fossilise. I’m thirty-two, Dan, and I’ve never really had truly amazing sex, and I want some.’
‘What makes you think it would be truly amazing between us?’
God, what was he, stupid? Zoe merely arched an eyebrow as if in perfect agreement with his silent self-assessment.
‘OK, forget that,’ he muttered. ‘Dumb question. How have you got to thirty-two without ever having had great sex?’
She shrugged and tellingly flickered her eyes away from his for a second. ‘Oh, just unlucky, I guess.’
Some kind of sixth sense told him that there was more to it than that, but Dan was in no fit state to work out what, let alone begin an in-depth intelligent conversation about it, which was good because as he no longer did the sharing of personal information he wasn’t particularly interested.
All he could think about was how incredibly gorgeous she looked, how great she’d felt last night, how bemused—and disappointed—he’d been by her dramatic flight from the pub, and how much he wanted her.
‘So what do you think?’ she prompted.
Dan’s mouth went dry and his blood roared in his ears and his brain struggled to formulate any thought that didn’t involve Zoe naked. If they slipped out the back and caught a taxi there, who would ever know? And God knew how long it had been since he’d had sex. ‘You really want this?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, if you do.’
‘Oh, I do.’
She gave him a slow seductive smile. ‘I was hoping you might say that.’
With his heart beating furiously and desire pounding through him Dan leapt to his feet, held out his hand and said, ‘Then you’d better come with me.’
SEVEN
When Dan made a decision he certainly didn’t hang about, thought Zoe, sitting in the back of a taxi a quarter of an hour later. He hadn’t even gone back inside to say goodbye to the people he’d been with. He’d just whisked her off to the cloakroom to retrieve their coats, then he’d bundled her into a taxi, given the driver his address and they were off.
And thank God for it because she’d been on the verge of spontaneously combusting for a while now and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could contain herself. That electrifying conversation they’d had in the hotel lobby had been so hot she was surprised the wicker chair she’d been sitting in hadn’t gone up in flames. At one point she’d even vaguely looked around for the location of the nearest fire extinguisher.
At the time she’d thought Dan had been equally affected—he’d certainly seemed as rapt by her as she’d been by him—and she’d half expected him to grab her the minute they’d got into the taxi.
But he hadn’t. He’d immediately turned to stare out of the window and hadn’t said a word since they’d pulled away so what was going through his mind now she had no idea.
Under normal circumstances Zoe didn’t have a problem with silence. On the contrary, generally she was a huge fan of the stuff. But this silence was deafening and vibrating with a weird kind of tension and she felt as if she were sitting on knives. The edge to him she’d noticed earlier was still there, filling the foot or so between them in the taxi and making her stomach quiver with anticipation and her skin prickle.
It was all so excruciating, and growing even more so with every mile the taxi ate up that eventually Zoe couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Clearing her throat, she turned slightly to face his profile.
‘Did you know that the first white line in the road appeared in this country in nineteen twenty-one?’ she said, her voice sounding weirdly loud in the inky darkness of the back of the taxi.
‘What?’ Dan muttered, not taking his eyes off whatever held his fascination, which really wasn’t that much of a surprise since it was undoubtedly more interesting than her stab at conversation.
Not that she cared about that particularly. Given that exhibitionism had never been part of her plan, as far as she was concerned anything was better than the alternative of jumping into his lap and wrapping herself around him, and, as numbingly boring and unsexy as traffic planning might be, the more she concentrated on the lines in the road, the less she thought about the lines of his thighs and the less her fingers itched with the urge to get acquainted with them.
‘The first white line in the road appeared in this country in nineteen twenty-one,’ she said again and silently dared him to look at her.
‘Did it?’