LITMIR.BIZ

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      It was empty. Jane kicked the marble base of the sink. She didn’t know what to do, so she washed her hands. She wished she could wash out her mouth, too. Or wash the last five minutes away.

      ‘He left me for a waitress,’ she said to her reflection, and then turned the water back on to wash her hands again.

      She heard a soft knock on the door. ‘Jane?’

      She went around the sink to the door. It was open a crack, and she could see a hand and half a face. Blue-eyed, jaw rough with brown stubble. Jay.

      ‘Jane? Are you all right?’

      She sighed and opened the door all the way. Fortunately the ladies’ room was in a corridor off the main dining room, so the entire restaurant couldn’t witness her conversation with a male model through the lavatory door.

      ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I said “crap”.’

      Jay shrugged. ‘I’ve said worse, and so has Thom. I can be quite an inventive swearer, actually. What’s the matter?’

      ‘Nothing. It’s—everything is fine.’ She smiled.

      The expression on his face let her know she wasn’t being convincing. ‘Okay. Listen, Thom’s sorting out the bill and getting us a table at the restaurant next door. Do you like Italian?’

      Her cheeks flushed hot. Some professional she was—she was meant to be the host. ‘That’s not necessary, I’ll be—’

      ‘It’s necessary,’ Jay interrupted her. ‘And don’t say the word “fine” any more. I know you’ve got a better vocabulary than that, even when you’re lying.’

      His words surprised a laugh out of her. ‘Okay.’

      Jay rested his shoulder against the wall beside him, the same sort of casual, comfortable stance he’d had when she’d first seen him. It brought him a little bit closer to her. She’d expect a model to wear some sort of cologne, especially as he was advertising it, but he smelled of warm cotton.

      ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong, Jane?’

      For a split second, she was tempted.

      It would be a relief to tell someone what was going on. She’d kept it in and kept it in and sometimes she felt as if she were going to explode. Jay was looking at her with concern in his blue eyes, a slight furrow between his eyebrows. And he looked so damn familiar, as if she’d known this stranger all her life.

      But she didn’t know him.

      ‘Did you see her shoes?’ she asked instead. ‘The waitress’s?’

      He nodded, seemingly not put off by the change in topic at all.

      ‘Were they cheap, or expensive?’ A model would know these things, she was sure.

      ‘Cheap,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Needed resoling. If she stands in those all day she’s headed for corns.’

      Her laughter this time wasn’t quite so unexpected, and it relaxed her a little bit.

      ‘Jane,’ he said, leaning closer to her, his voice lower and sincere, ‘I don’t know who that waitress is, but if it helps you to know this, you are about a million times prettier than she is. And you have a better job, and I’m certain you have a better personality.’ His gaze dropped downward, taking her in. ‘And you have much better shoes.’

      Jane’s skin heated, because, although he was discussing her shoes, he hadn’t just looked at her feet. He’d looked at her body on the way down. Just a look, but she was pretty much melting.

      Wouldn’t it show Gary if I went out with a model? she thought again, and then again brushed the thought aside. She’d already mixed up her personal and her professional life, and it was a very bad idea.

      ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I guess we’d better get back to—’

      Jay touched her arm, the bare skin of her wrist, and she stopped, arrested by the feeling of his flesh on hers again.

      ‘You’re doing wonderfully, by the way,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

      That was an odd thing to say, but she supposed it was meant as some sort of encouragement. ‘Thank you. I’m usually a very professional person.’

      ‘I know.’

      His fingers were still wrapped around her wrist. He could probably feel every beat of her heart. As if he were touching, somehow, her life force.

      Everything about him felt as if she’d known him for so, so long, maybe in a neglected corner of her mind where she paid attention to dreams and desires.

      ‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’ she blurted out.

      She could see the mild surprise in his eyes. ‘I would love to. Do you mean just the two of us, or—?’

      ‘Just the two of us,’ she replied, before she could think through what it was she had just done, or the probability that he would reject her. When she’d first started out in advertising, she’d learned to let her impulses loose, even the crazy ones, even the ones that would never work in a million years. Because sometimes they did work.

      But she hadn’t let her impulses loose for some time, now.

      ‘I mean, don’t worry if you don’t want to, I know you’re busy, and—’

      ‘I would love to.’

      That brought her up short. ‘Oh.’ She swallowed, put some more poise into her voice, and said, ‘Well, that’s wonderful. How about eight o’clock?’

      ‘Fantastic.’ His smile was both genuine and perfect. He nodded back towards the restaurant. ‘Shall we go and be professional now?’

      ‘Definitely.’ She stepped through the ladies’ room door and joined him, walking back across the restaurant, wondering with every step what the hell she had just got herself into.

      Four and a half hours later, she was still wondering. Except this time she was pacing the living room of her high-ceilinged, brick-walled loft, wringing her hands.

      Half of her was remembering Jay at lunch that afternoon. How he’d smiled when he’d said yes to her date, his hand curled intimately around her wrist. And then the rest of the meal, where they’d stuck safely to talk about modelling and the campaign and more general chat, and Jane had felt more like herself.

      Except for the moments when she’d watched him eat. Knife and fork, held in his long-fingered hands. It was silly to be aroused by watching somebody cut his food. But she was. His movements were economical, the tendons on the back of his hand flexing, his fingers agile.

      Whenever he took a bite of his risotto, she had to consider his mouth. How his bottom lip was fuller than the top. How both lips curved upwards at the corners, in a sexy near-smile. How white and even his teeth were.

      At one point he’d licked his bottom lip and she’d almost dropped her water glass because all she could think of was his mouth on her, his tongue in her mouth, how his hair would feel under her hands as she kissed him.

      And then he’d looked at her and smiled, with that somehow warm and intimate look, as if he and she shared a secret from the rest of the world.

      The man was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen in her entire life and she could not work out what he thought was going on between them. Unless he gave every woman this feeling, unless he had charm down to such an art that he appeared to be sincere in the most unusual way she’d ever encountered.

      And what on earth was she going to do with him tonight?

      Jane stopped pacing, sat down at her desk and opened her laptop, going straight to the Giovanni Franco cologne campaign files. She clicked on the notes her art director, Amy, had made for her when they were in the process of choosing Jay Richard

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