“I was thirteen. I decided to raid my piggy bank and go to the hairdressers and had it cut into a bob. Because it’s so thick it bushed out and made me the butt of a lot of my classmates’ jokes. After that, I let it grow.” I leaned back a little into his hands as he rummaged for more pins.
“Don’t ever cut it again.” His voice was low and melodic. “It’s like spun gold.”
I felt shivers cross my skin and the heat of his body next to me. It had been too long since I’d slept with someone, my last friends with benefits buddy ending up in a semi-sort of relationship. It had been too long since I’d had the touch of someone too.
My hand dropped to Eli’s thigh, as if I was steadying myself, but I wanted to test his reaction. He’d pulled his hand away earlier; if he moved now he wasn’t interested.
His leg stiffened, but my hand remained. I pressed my thumb in gently, feeling his muscles through the material of his dress pants. “If I keep it long, I’ll demand your services every time I have it put up to get rid of the pins. My brothers are too rough.”
“You must have men other than your brothers wanting to do this,” he said, another curl released. “Whenever you’re out after work you have a flock of men trying to buy you drinks.”
“I’m a single female. We attract men like flies around sugar. It isn’t that hard.”
He threaded both of his hands through my hair and pulled it gently, before his fingers applied pressure to my scalp. I heard a soft moan from my own lips and felt myself rest back into Eli.
“Are you comparing me to a fly?” he said. I heard the smile in his tone.
“You’ve never been one of the flies.” He hadn’t. There had been his girlfriend and I knew Eli was the type of man who didn’t cheat. And I didn’t know when they’d split.
“I was with Andrea,” he said. “And for the past three weeks, when I’ve seen you, you’ve had four bodyguards around you. Not that my head’s been in the right place to be one of your flies.” His hands dropped to my shoulders, sliding under the thin straps.
“Where’s your head now?” I said, my toes tilting off the end of a cliff. It would be fun to jump with this man. Inside him was a coiled spring full of need and desire and experience and I wanted to feel it unravel.
“In this room with you. It’s been with you all night since I saw you fighting off Bradley. And before.”
I turned my head to his, our faces just centimetres apart. Hazel eyes watched me intently and I wondered how they would look when he was inside me. Because I was going to find out, brothers’ colleague and a decade older be damned. “You didn’t need to book a hotel room, did you?”
He smiled. And then I kissed the smile right off.
Chapter Two
Elijah
April
“If you wantto send it special delivery it’ll be an extra eight pounds.” The woman behind the counter in the post office sounded pissed off, firmly sticking down the barcode to the box. “I’d recommend it if there’s anything valuable in there.”
I shook my head, just wanting the box to be out of sight as soon as possible. “No. Signed for is fine. It’s nothing irreplaceable.” Andrea had suggested that I donate the few clothes she’d had in my house to a charity shop and throw away the toiletries that had been barely used, but that would’ve been too fucking easy. So instead I’d decided to send them back to her and then she could do what she wanted.
“That’s your receipt and at the bottom is the tracking details. You can log on to the website and find out when it’s been delivered. Have a good day.”
I walked away from the counter, dismissed by a little old blue-haired lady in much the same way I’d been dismissed by Andrea. Quickly and without performance. Something that summed her up. She had been drama free and sensible, two years older than me with an already successful career as an accountant. She’d moved to Leeds when a promotion came up at one of her firm’s other branches, nine months ago. Before that we’d had the whole moving in conversation. Before she’d moved I’d thought that she was it, maybe. She was going to do a year in Leeds, then look to relocate back to London.
Best laid plans, and all that shit, because it hadn’t worked like that.
I headed across the road into Silvia’s, a small bar where the manager made Greek food and served a vast range of bottled beers, with a few craft ales on draught. It was Friday and I had no appointments this afternoon, just a few files to sort, and a couple of beers would be the right send off for the funeral pyre that was now in the mail.
The bar was busy given that it was Friday lunch time and plenty of London finished their working weeks about now. It was kitted out in greys and lighter shades of blue, the furnishings I could imagine Ava commenting on. If it had been quieter, I’d have banged my head on the table to knock images of her out of my head. Every time I was in a building I would now notice the décor and wallpaper and girly shit like furnishings and think about what she’d say about it. The Sunday morning after Jackson’s wedding, we’d lain in bed with her head on my chest and legs still wrapped around mine and she’d gone through the room’s furniture and pictures, telling me where everything was from and what the designer had been trying to achieve and what she would’ve done better. Then she’d led me into the bathroom and done the same thing, illustrating exactly why a big shower was necessary when I pressed her against the tiled wall and fucked her again with her legs wrapped around my waist and her hands in my hair. The scratch marks down my back had only just healed.
And I hadn’t really stopped thinking about her.
One night. We’d said it would be one night. I was too old for her, nearly ten years older and the same age as her eldest brother who I worked for. I wasn’t sure how he would react if he knew that his littlest sister had been my fuck buddy for a night, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t get me a pay rise. I’d needed to get over Andrea and draw a line under something that had been doomed for the past few months and Ava had needed to scratch an itch. A one-time thing, because fuck knew it couldn’t go anywhere.
“Your usual?” Silvia asked.
I nodded, taking a table near to the bar and grabbing a newspaper from the side. “And a Dizzy Blonde.”
“That’s no way to talk about me, is it?”
