It no longer felt like a kiss just to be near him. It was a kiss. Ellie couldn’t tell if David got to her lips first, or if she was already straining towards his mouth. All she knew was that her arms were round his neck, fingers raking through his hair and their mouths were locked together in a fierce clumsy kiss. There was a clash of teeth, then he turned his head ever so slightly and she shifted ten degrees in the other direction and then everything aligned; planets, time, space and their mouths on each other, and Ellie started to cry all over again from the sheer relief that she was kissing and being kissed by David Gold.
They were kissing and she was crying, and her nose was running and her mascara must have streaked down her cheeks, but it was still perfect. A moment that she’d thought about so many times but her dreams didn’t compare to the feeling of David’s hands framing her face like she was utterly precious, even as she could feel his tongue in her mouth, his hard cock nudging between them.
She didn’t know how much longer she could have carried on without his kisses.
Then the cool bag, which had managed to stay on David’s shoulder throughout all the excitement, slipped and banged against Ellie’s hip on its descent and the spell was broken.
They weren’t kissing any more, but standing a respectable metre apart.
It was dark and hard to see his face so Ellie wasn’t sure what he was thinking. She was tempted to get in there first, to say that it was a terrible mistake and she hadn’t been in her right state of mind all week, and that it could never happen again, when he cleared his throat. Ellie waited for David to spit out some legal disclaimer and refute any pleas of culpability that she might make.
‘I’ve thought about nothing else but kissing you ever since Glastonbury. Even after I found out who you really were.’ Ellie felt that same, blessed sweet relief again. He’d felt the same way, could sense that fierce pull tugging them closer and closer to each other. Then relief gave way to cold, grim reality, because of who she was, Billy Kay’s daughter, and who he was, Billy Kay’s right-hand man. ‘It’s why I’ve tried so hard to keep my distance. This complicates everything.’
Ellie was already fishing in her handbag for a tissue to wipe the snot and smeared make-up from her face. ‘I know,’ she agreed, because David was right. A kiss was all it could ever be and it should never have gone as far as that. ‘This is stupid. Things are already too complicated.’
‘It just so happens that I’m good at dealing with complicated,’ he said. Ellie wasn’t sure what he meant, although they were in an obscure corner of the Heath and a lot of his immediate problems could be solved by burying her in a shallow grave to be discovered by a dog walker weeks from now. ‘Complicated is actually more straightforward than crisis management.’
‘Oh, so now I’m something to be dealt with, rather than managed, am I?’ Ellie said in a hurt voice, as she finished scrubbing at her face. Her skin felt tight and sore, and her lips were stinging from his kisses.
‘I’m not arguing about this. Not when we’re in the middle of the Heath in darkness, not far away from an area popular with the local dogging community,’ he said in an amused voice, though Ellie couldn’t imagine what was funny about that. She also didn’t know why he was taking her hand and she was letting him, curling her fingers around his, squeezing so he squeezed back. She was also trying really hard not to peer and squint into the undergrowth, which was still rustling, in case some local pervert was hiding and had been getting his rocks off watching them kiss. That was not how she wanted to remember their kiss.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, with a shudder. ‘I’m sure there’s something in the bushes.’
Ellie thought that as soon as David had led them out of the woods and they could see Kenwood House in the distance like a lodestar to guide them back to the right path, he’d drop her hand.
He never did. He held her hand, even once they were walking along Hampstead Lane. Was still holding her hand, his thumb absent-mindedly stroking her knuckles as they entered his building, waited for the lift, travelled up to the fifteenth floor.
They stopped holding hands only when they were through his front door. Like the first kiss, there was an unspoken agreement about what was going to happen next.
Chapter Twenty-four
For one all-too-brief-moment Ellie was pressed against the door, David’s body holding her there as he teased her with the promise of a kiss, until the teasing and the waiting became unbearable. Then they were half-falling down the three steps into the living room, staggering across the floor, mouths still locked together.
David fell backwards onto the sofa, Ellie on top of him, kissing him fiercely as his hands fisted in her hair. He even let her pin his arms above his head, watching her with heavy-lidded eyes as she tightened her hands around his wrists to see if he’d try to break free. He didn’t, but he sighed. Not a sad sigh, but a sigh that was full of longing and wonder, or so it seemed to Ellie as she licked a path along his ridiculously sharp cheekbones.
‘I’ve been wanting to do that since the first time I saw you,’ she said. She hardly recognized her voice, it was so breathy. ‘There have been so many times over the last few weeks when I didn’t think you were the same man I’d met at Glastonbury. I was beginning to think that it had never happened. That I just imagined it.’
That should have cast a shadow over the two of them, because all the bad times that had happened since were a direct consequence of the five minutes after that first meeting, and when David strained against the bonds she’d made from her fingers, Ellie let him go.
His hands settled on her hips. ‘I can assure you that us meeting at Glastonbury wasn’t just a dream you had. Unless I dreamed it too,’ he said. Ellie waited for him to elaborate, dreading that he might mention Richey, but he just smiled, eyes darkening. ‘So, was there anything else you wanted to do to me?’
Ellie showed him. For a man who was still so much of a mystery, there were things about him that were unambiguous. He wanted her. That was obvious from the desperate rise and fall of his chest when she slowly unbuttoned his shirt, the insistent promise of his cock against her belly, even through his jeans, and the way he beckoned her closer with one finger so he could whisper in her ear: ‘Shall I show you what I wanted to do to you?’
Ellie let him roll them over. She gazed up at him as he straddled her and slowly unpicked the knot that kept her wrap dress wrapped. She’d never thought that untying a bow could feel like torture, but it did when his eyes never left her face and his plump bottom lip was caught between his teeth as he parted the edges of her dress like he was opening a present that he’d waited months to arrive.
David wasn’t looking at her face any more but at her breasts; it was too hot to wear a bra, not that Ellie had much to lift and separate. She wished her breasts were lush and voluptuous but David made a throaty, approving sound, then swooped down to take one tightly budded nipple in his mouth, to soothe the ache with his tongue while his thumb rubbed and teased the other breast and Ellie lifted towards his hungry, voracious mouth, hands firm on the back of his neck so he knew not to stop.
No one had ever made Ellie sob in sheer frustration before. She tugged David’s shirt off, then wriggled her hands between them to unbutton his jeans and pushed them down with her legs and even her feet, gasping when he twisted on top of her as he kicked them off, cock right there for one glorious second. Then they were skin to skin. Almost skin to skin.
David’s hand trailed between her breasts, traced each rib, followed the curve of her belly and the jut of her hipbones until he reached the white lace of her briefs. When Ellie looked up at him from under her lashes, she knew what he was asking, just from the arch of one eyebrow and the hesitant quirk of his mouth.
‘I’m keeping them on,’ she said, because she didn’t have another option.
‘I could make you come without taking them off,’ he told her without any bravado. ‘If you wanted.’
She did want. That was the problem. Or it was one
of the problems. ‘I’m not going to be another one of your women,’ she reminded him, just in case he’d forgotten Jessica, or Melanie from Goldman Sachs, or the girl from Glastonbury and goodness knows how many others.
‘Ah, and it becomes complicated again,’ David said, and Ellie was so sick and tired of complicated. ‘That’s an issue you don’t need to worry about.’
He was retreating, still on top of her, but his mind was somewhere far away. To that place where he had other women he could have sex with who didn’t come with so much baggage.
Ellie folded her arms to cover her breasts. David was levering himself off her in an instant. She grabbed the two sides of her dress and yanked them together, then gave all her attention to trying to find the tiny hole in the side seam so she could poke the right tie through it.
By the time she’d succeeded, David was back in his jeans and shirt, and rooting through the fridge to emerge with a bottle of white wine. ‘I think we need to talk,’ he said to her. In Ellie’s experience those six words never led to anything good, but she nodded and struggled to sit up and swing her legs round so she was no longer sprawled in gay abandon across the sectional sofa.
He sat right next to her, close enough that his thigh was pressed against her, and when Ellie took a glass of wine from him he ran a finger across her knuckles. She should probably have jerked her hand away for appearance’s sake; instead she hung her head so she could see the spot on the little toe of her right foot that she’d missed with the nail polish earlier.
‘Ellie, let’s not lapse into an embarrassed silence. We were both consenting adults who kissed. It was very good, very enjoyable kissing. There’s no reason to look quite so devastated.’
‘I have every reason to,’ she said, ‘until I know whether you’re seeing anyone else. I don’t ever want to be the sort of girl who kisses other girls’ partners. It’s the worst thing a woman could do.’
‘Not the worst thing,’ David mused. ‘Surely murder or even theft would be—’
‘Well, it is theft, isn’t it?’ It was also rule one of the girl code. Chicks before dicks every time. You never body-shamed another woman and let her know she’d gained or lost a few pounds and you never – repeat, NEVER – let another woman leave the ladies with her skirt tucked into her knickers. But mostly, you never put the moves on another woman’s man, and if you did, then you deserved the long, lonely death that was coming to you. ‘Are you involved with someone else, because Jessica seemed to think you two belonged together. And what about Melanie?’
‘People don’t belong to people. They’re not possessions,’ David said heatedly.
‘Are you really going to argue about semantics? Really?’
‘I’ve known Jess for a long, long time. We were involved for a short while, now we’re not.’ Ellie could feel his eyes on her but she resolutely stared at that one imperfect spot of her pedicure. ‘I’m thirty-four. I’ve been sexually active for quite some time and I don’t have the inclination for a long-term relationship right now, so there are a couple of women I see casually. Non-exclusively.’
Ellie couldn’t help the tiny, inelegant sound she made as David spelled out in no uncertain terms why she’d be a fool to take this any further. Not just for all the reasons that she’d already gone through in her head again and again, but because she didn’t want to become just another woman he saw on a casual, non-exclusive basis. If she was having sex with someone, then she wanted it to mean something and she wanted to mean something to the person she was having sex with.
‘We shouldn’t have kissed,’ she said, and she folded her arms and tried to look prim and proper as David sat back and folded his arms, though his eyes were glinting as if he wasn’t really seeing Ellie sitting next to him but remembering what she looked like under her clothes. ‘I suppose, at least, we got it out of our systems but you have to admit, it was a really bad idea.’
‘It was probably one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had,’ he agreed, and Ellie didn’t know how he had the stones to say such crushing things in a calm voice without even a flicker of remorse. ‘Except I’ve been thinking about kissing you all week. Why do you think I kept away? I actually spent Wednesday evening camped out in Pizza Express with my laptop, for God’s sake.’
Her stupid, foolish heart, which should have known better, perked up. ‘But this still shouldn’t have happened and it’s not going to happen again,’ she said. It sounded like she really meant it. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
She’d never meant to stay another night in David’s flat but there she was, in his bathroom, cleaning her teeth and doing her final email check before bedtime.
Madeleine Jones had come through for her, as she invariably did. There was a seat booked for Ellie on the 15.45 Eurostar leaving from St Pancras tomorrow.
It was absolutely for the best, Ellie thought as she perched on the edge of the bathtub to wait for her serum to settle. Just because you had feelings for someone didn’t mean you had to act on them. Sometimes you had to exercise a little self-control.
With her face slathered in night cream and her mind made up, she opened the bathroom door to find David standing there.
‘It’s all yours,’ she wanted to say. Or, ‘I’ll be out of your hair by tomorrow afternoon,’ but she said nothing. David didn’t say anything either.
Then Ellie’s wash bag landed on the floor with a thud because all her arms wanted to do was to hold him and they were kissing again, without rhyme or reason, but simply because they couldn’t not.
They kept kissing as they moved along the corridor until David awkwardly nudged open his bedroom door with his foot. It was unknown territory, because she wasn’t a snooper, but as she was gently draped on top of a pristine white duvet, Ellie opened her eyes wide enough to take in a spartan room and another set of those glossy cupboard doors that looked like walls, behind which, no doubt, all of David’s suits and shirts, even his socks and ties, were arranged in serried ranks.
When she thought about that side of him, how he hid away anything that might reveal too much, Ellie wondered what she was doing here. Then David was lying next to her on the bed with her, not holding her or kissing her, but gazing at her in the lamplight like she was a work of art.
‘You are beautiful, though, Ellie,’ he said, like that was a huge problem, and anyway she wasn’t. On a good day she was pretty but right now she could sense that her Origins night cream was still sitting on the surface of her skin and her hair was scraped back and she was frowning. ‘If we simply kiss for a few more minutes, then what’s the harm in that?’
‘No harm at all,’ she concurred, reaching out for him.
But these weren’t just kisses. They were kisses that made her fall apart a little. They were kisses that were fierce but sincere. Kisses like they’d never get enough of each other, of the taste and the graze of teeth on bottom lip or a tongue dipping lazily in and out of a mouth.
These kisses were a line that should never have been crossed, so when David’s fingers found the tie on her wrap dress again, Ellie rested her hand on top of his.
‘No,’ she said unequivocally. ‘We are keeping our clothes on. All our clothes on.’
He smiled against her mouth, though Ellie didn’t think there was anything much to smile about. ‘Noted,’ he murmured, and his hand settled on the dip of her waist and he kissed her with his eyes open as if he couldn’t bear not to look at her.
His eyelids fluttered and his kisses got slower, then his limbs slackened because it was late and they’d both had a lot to drink and a lot to argue, and he was falling asleep on her.
Ellie shifted so she was lying on her back and David curled himself around her, arm across her belly, anchoring her to the here and now. By rights, she should have been sleepy too, except it was too hot, because it was always too hot now – even having a sheet over her felt like a fourteen-tog duvet – and she was still wearing her clothes, and though David hardly had an ounce of fat on him, he was heavy slumped against
her.
She lay there for a while. The room grew stuffier because if you left the windows open then you were feasted on by every mosquito in Western Europe, according to David, which was why he shut all the windows every night.
It was impossible to sleep when the air conditioning made a high-pitched whistling sound, and David kept nuzzling against her neck. Ellie hoped he didn’t want to snuggle and she really hoped he didn’t snore, and then she realised why she was too wound up to sleep.
‘I don’t manipulate people.’ Her voice sounded deafening in the still of the room. ‘And I’m not a people pleaser. I’m just … I try to be nice.’
There was no reaction. She should have brought this up much earlier, probably between coming home and snogging on the sofa, but at the time she’d been much more preoccupied with snogging on the sofa.
‘You want to do this now?’ David struggled to prop himself up on one elbow.
‘Generally, in my experience, if you’re nice and friendly to people, they’re nice and friendly back,’ Ellie said, because no, this could not wait until tomorrow. ‘How is that manipulation?’
‘Are you nice and friendly even to people you don’t like?’ David asked idly, but his questions were never idle, they were calculated, always.
‘There’s something likeable about everybody,’ Ellie insisted. People put up walls to hide their vulnerability, because they were afraid of rejection or because they didn’t want anyone to know they were shy, but they were just walls and walls could be knocked down with a genuine smile and enquiry about their general wellbeing. If that failed, Ellie would find something, anything, noteworthy about the person who was giving her a hard time, whether it was their charity work, latest art acquisition or new handbag.
It was always validating when people called the gallery and asked for the ‘friendly girl’ rather than the ‘posh girl with the attitude’ or ‘the posh girl who was too busy gazing into space to take any notice of me when I wanted to buy some art’.