All Bets are On

NINE


Rule #9 A player will involve you in his home life as little as possible. Don’t be surprised if he finds excuses not to invite you back to his place.





Right up until Alice got out of the taxi at the end of Harry’s road, she intended to knock on the door like a grown-up and give him the chance to discuss the evening rationally. Unfortunately, somewhere during the short walk, sensibility was crushed underfoot by paranoia. Since she’d left him at the bar there had been a wall of silence. No follow-up calls to protest his innocence. No chasing after her in a taxi. And suddenly she couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have given up on talking her round because he’d taken the lean blonde woman home with him.

How could she trust her own judgement? When had she been such an expert on character-guessing? When she’d dreamed of marriage to a man who turned out to be exploiting her for fun? Add in Harry’s reputation and it would never be enough for her to just give him the benefit of the doubt. That was Simon’s legacy. Listening to whatever explanation he wanted to give just wouldn’t cut the mustard. If she was to be sure, she had no choice but to check up on him. That was the price of peace.

And so instead of walking up the path to his front door like any normal human being and pressing the doorbell, she was now teetering on the top of a wobbling pile of crates in his back garden, craning to see through a chink in his curtains.

The worst thing of all was that she could no longer deny it. Pressing the doorbell would have meant she was still in control of her emotions. Teetering like a lunatic in his back garden meant she was in too deep. She cared far too much now what his game was. Because if this visit was really only about her list of player behaviour, a knock on the front door would have done. The fact her insecurities had taken over meant the worst was true. She was falling for him.

She leaned forward and gripped the windowsill to give herself a few inches more leaning ability. Falling for him she might be, but she could still save herself. It wasn’t too late to curb that now if her worst fears happened to be realised. The lights were on. He was obviously home. The question now was whether he was home alone or whether he’d brought the blonde along for company. Or maybe even picked up someone else entirely. It had been more than two hours since she’d left him in the bar, plenty of time for a player like him to pick up an entire harem.

It rankled that he had never invited her back to his place. She thought of Arabella, who’d left her earrings here. Obviously he hadn’t been above taking her home with him. Maybe he reserved his shag-pad for one-night stands only—that way he could pursue two women at a time, right? The easy ones could come straight back here, and the ones who didn’t immediately fall at his feet could be wined and dined. She could see plates, mugs, some pots and pans through the gap in the curtains. A pigsty admittedly, but undeniably a kitchen.

She could hear faint sounds inside, too indistinguishable to work out if he was in there with someone or if the TV was on. Another surge of paranoia made her shift her weight.

And suddenly there he was, in the room, gorgeous as ever in jeans and dark blue shirt. She watched as he opened a cupboard and took out a glass. She framed her eyes against the window with her hands to try and get a better view, see if he took down a second glass, then maybe a bottle of champagne would appear and then...

Without warning, although the wobbly danger signs had been there all along, there was a shift beneath her knees and the crates below her crashed in a crumbling mess of sharp corners and hip-scraping sides into a haphazard pile. She went down with them, unable to stop an anguished squawk as she lost her footing, and ended up lying on her back staring up at the starry sky. There were bruises all over her and, worse, the burn of embarrassment rushed through her like fire as the back door opened with a bang and suddenly he was there, looking down at her with an incredulous expression on his face.

‘You only had to knock.’

* * *

Unfortunately there was no ladylike way of clawing your way out of a pile of crates. Alice ended up heaving her way out onto the damp grass like a hippo. She looked up at him, towering above her in the slanting glow of light from the open back door, his hair lightly tousled, an amused expression on the chiselled face, and wondered if there was a nearby stone big enough for her to crawl under. It didn’t matter now if he turned out to be a keeper in player’s clothing, because she’d blown it.


‘I can explain,’ she said, reaching out to take his proffered hand. He pulled her to her feet in one easy tug and then she was next to him, his gaze holding hers, the clouds of their breath mingling. Her heart raced.

‘I look forward to that,’ he said, his voice dangerously neutral, giving no reaction away. ‘Just let me grab a jacket. I’ll take you for a drink, there’s a good pub at the end of the road, and you can go for your life. I’m sure it will be a gripping story.’

He turned back towards the door, and as she digested what he’d said and realised what he was doing humiliation was pushed out in its entirety by one thought of absolute clarity.

He doesn’t want me inside his house.

She stumbled after him, grimacing at the ache in her bones from her ungainly fall, and grabbed his arm.

‘No need to go to the pub,’ she said. ‘I’m here now. A cup of coffee will do. Let’s just get inside out of the cold.’

Although frankly she wasn’t feeling the bite of the autumn evening one bit. Her whole body seemed to be boiling up with anger. Who did he have in there that he didn’t want her to see? Had he left the blonde in his bed?

‘Pub’s much nicer,’ he said, his face inscrutable. ‘I forgot to get any milk in and the place is a tip.’

‘Black coffee is fine and I don’t give a toss about a bit of mess,’ she said, not letting go of his arm. She thought that might be enough, but still he didn’t invite her in and stood blocking the way.

Enough was enough.

She dropped his arm, sidestepped him neatly and walked across damp grass onto the gravel path, heading towards the door.

‘Alice,’ he called after her. ‘Alice, please don’t go in there.’

‘Who is she?’ she snapped over her shoulder at him, almost at the door now. ‘Your ex from tonight, the Innova temp? Or just someone you picked up after I...oh, my flippin life!’

The smell hit her as she made it through the door. Inside was a galley kitchen with a table at one end, a sink full of washing-up, yet she didn’t register any of it because it felt as if only one of her five senses was working. The gagging stench of rotting dead fish assaulted her and extinguished all coherent thought. It was so dense the air felt almost soupy with it. She clapped a revolted hand over her mouth and turned back to him as he caught up with her. She vaguely registered that his face was apologetic.

‘What in the name of hell is that smell?’ She gasped, shoving him blindly aside so she could stick her head out of the back door and take a few gulps of fresh air.

‘I wish to hell I knew,’ he said.

She moved outside to stand on the doorstep. She could still pick up the stench from here but it was diluted enough by the fresh air outside that she could at least think coherently.

‘Why don’t we just go to the pub?’ he said again.

She remembered why she was here. Surely the smell didn’t permeate the whole house.

‘Is there someone else in here? Is that why you’re so reluctant to invite me in?’

‘That’s why you were lurking in my garden in the dark instead of ringing the doorbell? You think I’ve got some other woman holed up in here somewhere?’

Embarrassment at the fact he’d caught her gurning through his window made a comeback.

‘Alice,’ he said slowly, as if talking to a toddler. ‘There is no one in here apart from me. If I haven’t invited you over it’s because I didn’t think you’d particularly enjoy spending time in my house when it smells like something’s died in here.’

‘Oh,’ she said in a small voice.

‘What do you think—that I’ve got some woman hidden in my wardrobe? Go on and look,’ he said, moving aside so she had easy access past him. ‘Go on, check it out. You’ll find a bit of a mess but you won’t find any other woman.’ His blue eyes were fixed on hers. ‘I’m not interested in any other woman.’

Her stomach gave a slow and melting flip. Part of her, the part that kept glancing back instead of looking forwards, wanted to push past him and ransack the place. Yet she knew if she succumbed to that desire it would be a regression. And for Pete’s sake, it wasn’t as if his excuse weren’t plausible. She had the godawful stench filling her nostrils to prove it.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to think rationally.

‘I don’t need to go through your cupboards,’ she said. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

He sighed in a finally-she-sees-sense way.

‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘Bring on the explanation. In fact, you don’t need to. It’s pretty obvious why you were lurking in my garden. You were suspicious because of what happened tonight and you decided to check it out—is that it?’

She pulled her coat more tightly around her and folded her arms against the cold. She avoided his eyes. No point denying it.

‘That’s pretty much it,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘You could have just asked me straight out,’ he said.

She wondered for a crazy moment if she would ever be the kind of person for whom asking straight out would be good enough. Or if she was doomed to mistrust everyone and everything until the end of time.

‘The problem with that is your track record,’ she said, on the defensive because she’d made such a fool of herself. ‘Based on your past and the way you and that blonde disappeared for some private time...’ she made sarcastic speech marks in the air with her fingers ‘...do you really blame me for thinking if I asked you outright you might not have given me a straight answer?’

Silence while he looked down at his feet and ran both hands through his hair. Then he sighed and looked up at her.

‘Ellie is an ex-girlfriend,’ he said. ‘I told you that. There’s absolutely nothing between us now.’

She pulled a face.

‘You were in a clinch. I know what I saw.’

‘You saw Ellie kiss me. But you didn’t see what went on before that and you were too determined to think the worst of me to give me five minutes to explain.’

A warm flush crept into her cheeks because he had a point and she knew it.

‘This is just a few dates to you, right?’ he carried on. ‘If that’s really all it is, if you don’t really care one way or the other, then why go through all this cloak-and-dagger stuff? If you don’t feel you can trust me, don’t come here trying to catch me out, just bail.’

A sharp prickling at the very back of her throat made her swallow hard. Because it no longer was just a few dates to her and, although admitting it to herself felt like pulling fingernails, she didn’t want to bail.

‘Trust is...’ she took a deep breath ‘...well, it’s a big ask, that’s all.’

He took her hand in his then, and the prickly throat almost made a comeback.

‘There is no other woman,’ he said. ‘There won’t be. Not while I’m seeing you. I don’t cheat. If I’m not happy I end it before I move on.’ He looked over her shoulder, through the door into the foul-smelling kitchen.

‘Trouble is, with Ellie I left ending it a bit too long.’

* * *

He grabbed a couple of the crates and turned them upside down, then sat down and tugged her down next to him. It was a perfect clear autumn night and moonlight washed the small garden in silver. Behind him golden light from his kitchen pooled outside the back door. Her senses were so focused on him that she barely registered the chill air.

He looked her in the eye.

‘You want to know what’s going on between Ellie and me?’

Her heart began to pick up the pace as she nodded her head.

‘I haven’t told anyone about this.’

Hideous scenarios paraded through her head, making it spin. Was she pregnant? Were they secretly married? Her heart felt suddenly like lead. She bit her bottom lip and waited for the bombshell.

‘I’m the victim of a woman scorned,’ he said.

For a moment she couldn’t quite comprehend what he’d just said.

‘You’re what?’

‘Ellie is a vengeful ex-girlfriend. A bunny-boiler.’ He paused. ‘And she really got me good. No one knows about it. Except for you now.’

She stared at him. His blue eyes were totally clear and because the look in them was one of weary resignation she bit back the compulsion to laugh. How ironic that Mr Love-Them-And-Leave-Them was fed up with being messed about by an ex.

‘Of all the things I expected you to say, that didn’t even make the list,’ she said.

As a past member of the woman-scorned club herself, curiosity was eating her up as to what this Ellie had actually done.

‘What happened?’ she prompted.

He shrugged.

‘I dated her for a few months. We went out, had a good time—at least I thought we had a good time—and then—’

‘What?’

‘She started to talk about next steps, moving in together, meeting her parents, that kind of thing.’

This time she couldn’t suppress a laugh.

‘Let me guess—you ran for the hills.’

His lips twitched into a small smile at that.

‘I didn’t exactly run for the hills but I told her I didn’t want anything serious, I thought it had run its course between us...’


‘You’d like to be just friends, blah blah, the usual.’

‘Exactly.’

‘How did she take it?’

‘Like a total lunatic,’ he said. ‘She came round to my place to pick up a few of her things that she’d left there. I was in the kitchen, keeping out of the way. I didn’t realise until after she’d gone that she’d shredded my entire wardrobe and tipped coffee dregs over my laptop.’

‘Oh, wow.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It gets worse. A couple of days later and my car was keyed. Really badly. It cost me a fortune to get a respray.’

‘That was her too?’

‘I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘But, yeah, I think so.’

She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. Try as she might to feel sympathy for him, there was no getting away from the fact she could relate to this girl, this Ellie. Another girl just like her, who’d had the confidence and self-respect crushed out of her by some man just because he was out to have fun. There was a brief dark moment as she remembered the place she’d been in when she’d found out that the pictures intended for Simon’s eyes only had been shared out like sweets. No wonder that she could empathise with this Ellie after that. If he was expecting commiserations he’d come to the wrong girl.

‘Thing is, Harry, you kind of had it coming,’ she said. ‘There are at least half a dozen women in the office who’d probably give that girl a medal.’

She waited for his angry reaction.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘You do?’ Not what she’d expected and she couldn’t hide her surprise.

‘Yes. My first thought was to call the police, press charges, especially on the car damage. You have no idea how pissed I was about that. But then I thought about it and I realised I had to take some responsibility. I just hadn’t seen that she was setting so much store by our relationship. I should have been clearer with her from the start. To me it was only ever going to be a laugh and I messed up, let it run on too long, let her think it was more than it was. She was obviously reading a whole lot more into it than that.’

‘And tonight?’ she said, catching her breath.

He paused.

‘Tonight I realised how upset she must have been to do those things. It wasn’t my finest hour. I feel awful, like I’ve messed with her head. I tried to apologise, tell her that I never meant to hurt her—’

‘And?’

‘She thought I’d had some change of heart, that I’d suddenly seen the light and wanted to get back together. She kissed me before I knew what the hell was happening and then you showed up. I can see how it must have looked.’

For a moment she couldn’t say anything. It all sounded so plausible. Then he reached for her hand and the look of regret in his eyes made her heart melt.

She looked down at her hand, encircled in his, and in that moment she accepted the risk, took his explanation at face value.

She stood up and walked towards the house.

‘You’re going inside? Without a gas mask?’ he called after her.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.

* * *

‘How long has it been here?’ she asked him, grimacing and sniffing the air as she made her way through to his sitting room. Pleasant bay-fronted room, the floors stripped back to boards, a large leather sofa and flat-screen TV. Very single-guy.

‘First noticed it about a week ago,’ he said. ‘Just a whiff of it at first, not enough to make me think there was any kind of problem. But when I got back from Manchester this afternoon it was a million times worse. It’s especially bad downstairs in the sitting room and kitchen.’

‘Your kitchen isn’t exactly an example of perfect hygiene,’ she said.

‘I haven’t got round to washing up,’ he protested. ‘My fridge and cupboards are perfectly clean—you can check.’

She did, walking back to the kitchen and opening cupboard doors. So he was right. And the smell definitely seemed worse in the sitting room, and undoubtedly it was fishy.

‘And when did Ellie last come over here? Your woman scorned.’

‘She hasn’t been over here since she turned my wardrobe into rags.’

He followed her as she walked back down the hall and paced the sitting room, sniffing the air.

‘And it ended a few weeks ago, did you say?’

He nodded as she dragged a chair across to the window sill and climbed on it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Solving your problem,’ she said. ‘Finding the source.’

He watched her with a bemused expression as she reached up to the curtain pole and unscrewed the pelmet with one hand, the other covering her mouth and nose.

‘Aaargh!’

The smell instantly intensified to the point of unbearable, so strong it made her eyes water. Half laughing and half grimacing, he was suddenly across the room, sliding an arm around her waist and lifting her down to the floor. Her heart skipped a beat at his sudden closeness as he grabbed her hand and pulled her out to the hallway, opening the front door to let the crisp clean night air in. She leaned against the doorway laughing with him.

‘There’s your answer,’ she gasped, gesturing back inside. ‘Prawns in the curtain pole. Now all you need to do is clean the thing out or get rid of it and the smell will be gone.’

He looked down at her, incredulous expression on his face.

‘How the hell did you know?’

She looked down at her fingernails.

‘It came to me just now. When you were telling me about Ellie and the things she did. It just suddenly occurred to me that the smell might be a revenge thing too. At some point in the last couple of weeks—I’m guessing when she came to collect her stuff and shredded your wardrobe—she unscrewed that curtain pole and filled it with fresh prawns. Nothing happened for a couple of weeks until the prawns started to go off, then within days you’ve got the stench from hell. A few more days and you’d probably have had pest control out, had the floorboards up. But you still wouldn’t have found it.’

She glanced back up to see him looking at her curiously.

‘It hadn’t crossed my mind that it could be down to her.’

‘You haven’t heard from her for a few weeks so you assumed it was over with. That’s what you wanted to think. You wanted to dismiss her behaviour as just a brief overreaction to your break-up, whereas I can see where she’s coming from. Sort of,’ she added quickly, so he wouldn’t think she was some kind of stalker from hell too.

He was shaking his head in disbelief.

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘You’ve found it now. You just need to clean the pole out and problem solved.’

She made a move to go back into the house, thinking she might open some windows, but he reached out and touched her wrist, gently held it.

‘You can sort of see where she’s coming from?’ he said.

She turned back slowly, looking down at his hand on her arm, and saw with a flash what this actually said about her, what he was probably thinking. Not an hour ago she’d been secretly peering in at his back window and now she wasn’t exactly sympathetic about his relationship revenge.

She looked up at him in the cool darkness, the crisp air making her breath cloud. She could see his blue eyes in the golden light spilling out from the hallway and she could see concern there, not confrontation. Yet she still couldn’t face the humiliation of telling him the reason why she could empathise with this Ellie. She kept it vague.

‘Let’s just say I had a bad relationship. And maybe I can understand why Ellie might have wanted to get her own back. And yes, there’s a part of me that thinks good on her, good on her for standing up for herself. There were times when I wished I had the balls to rip up Simon’s wardrobe or send him pizzas that he hadn’t ordered...’

He was looking at her with his eyebrows raised and she realised she was doing herself no favours here if she wanted to dig herself out of the stalker mould.

‘But the point is, I never did anything like that. I never would. Not because I didn’t want to be mean or hurt him, or even because he might call the police and have me warned off.’ She felt a little click in her throat because she was getting upset. ‘I didn’t do any of it because I knew it wouldn’t make me feel better. It wouldn’t change what he’d done.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m not going to lie—I can see Ellie might have got a certain satisfaction from doing these things.’

A long pause.

She waited. Waited for him to wrap the evening up. Call her a taxi. One way or another, he’d be running a mile now.

‘Wait here a sec,’ he said.

He disappeared inside the house and she jumped as she heard windows bang shut, saw the lights go off inside. He returned within five minutes with his keys, jacket and wallet.

‘Come on,’ he said, unlocking the car.

‘I’ll get the Tube,’ she called after him, sudden pride kicking in. Why the hell should she care what his judgement of her was? As if he were some kind of icon for relationship etiquette! ‘I don’t need a lift.’

He stood next to the car, driver’s door open, the light from the car backlighting his face.


‘I’m not taking you home.’ A pause. ‘At least not yet.’ A shrug. ‘Unless you want to go home, in which case you’re insane if you think I’d let you take the Underground at this time of night on your own.’

His concern made her stomach feel soft. Even if it was going to be short-lived.

She walked down the path, joined him by the car.

‘Where are we going then?’

‘Somewhere we can talk that doesn’t smell like a fish market,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand that smell a second longer. I’ll book myself in somewhere tonight and sort the house out tomorrow. We can have a drink and then I’ll drop you home.’

* * *

Rule #10 Sleep with him at your peril. The moment he gets what he wants you become dispensable.





Not for Harry a Travelodge or bargain B&B joint. Half an hour later and he’d booked a room in a luxurious boutique hotel near Regent’s Park. She found herself sitting on a squashy velvet sofa next to the ornate fireplace, her stomach in knots because across the room there was a bed. She held her glass of wine in her hands to stop herself fidgeting. The subtle lighting in the room made him look more gorgeous than ever, light stubble defining his jaw, tiny smile lines etched at the corner of his eyes.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But I’m not some mad stalker. Peering through your back window was more about me than it was about you. I wanted to believe you at the bar when you told me there was nothing going on between you and Ellie, but trusting my own judgement is so hard. I’ve screwed up so badly in the past. I wasn’t stalking, I was...double-checking.’

He sat down opposite her, his own glass in his hand, and she saw with relief that he was smiling.

‘Is that because of your ex or because of me?’ he said.

He waited but she didn’t answer. His expression was gentle.

‘I don’t think for a moment that you’re some crazy stalker. I think you’re someone who—for whatever reason—finds it hard to trust, to let anyone in. What exactly did he do to make you that insecure?’

She looked at her wine in the glass, soft gold in the flickering light of the votives on the table, and tried to remember the last time she’d actually verbalised what had happened with Simon. She found she couldn’t. Tilly knew of course, she knew everything about Alice. But with the job at Innova she’d simply reinvented herself and built up a whole new bank of friends and colleagues. None of them knew about her past. Those that did had been left behind in Dorset along with her mother and her insane cycle of unsuitable relationships. She’d figured that London would be far enough. Did she really want to unearth all that pain again by entrusting what had happened to someone who inhabited that new life?

Yet Harry had proved her wrong. There was no other woman. She’d let her paranoia get in the way.

And maybe that was driving the problem. Maybe by not talking, not thinking about what Simon had done she’d buried her resentment deep inside her, where it festered like the prawns in Harry’s curtain pole. But letting it out all this time later, just like the stench that had permeated Harry’s house, would be so much worse.

His opinion of her right now couldn’t be clearer. After his encounter with prawn-girl Ellie he wasn’t likely to be interested in an insecure woman who needed endless reassurance. Needy and clingy with revenge potential. She couldn’t bear to be thought of as that. Worse, she couldn’t bear him to think of her like that. All that was left was for him to bail and she wasn’t about to tell him her darkest secret when he had to be on the brink of showing her the door.

At least she could get in first with that and salvage what self-respect she had left.

‘Maybe I should go,’ she said, putting her glass down on the low table next to her. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry for behaving like an idiot,’ she said. ‘I look at the way I’ve behaved with you, pouring coffee over your head, peering through your window, and you must think I’m some kind of lunatic.’ She gave a helpless laugh. ‘Even I think I’m being crazy but it all seems so damn rational at the time.’

He smiled at her and she forced herself to carry on.

‘You were right when you said we should disregard everything in the past and just think about us. Default should be trust, until it’s proven otherwise.’ She sighed. ‘But I can’t do that. My default setting is broken. And there’s nothing I can do about it.’

She began to stand up, but before she could get to her feet he was in front of her. He knelt on the floor, his gaze at eye level, blue eyes locked on to hers. His hand found hers, his fingers entwining softly with her own. She looked into his eyes and saw no distaste, no anger. Nothing but concern for her. And something else that made her catch her breath.

Desire.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ he said.

As he reached up and stroked her cheek softly she didn’t pull away. Her heart was pounding in her chest and her stomach was a soft squiggly mass of anticipation. Three years since she’d been in such an intimate situation and all thought of control melted away as her own desire took over, melding her firmly in the present. No reference to what had gone before and no room for thoughts about what she stood to lose if she’d made the wrong judgement here.

There was no crushing against her, no forcing things forward at some superhuman pace. His touch was languorous and slow. Always hesitant, letting her know by his tentative movements that stop could be invoked at any moment, waiting for her approval at every turn.

If she’d allowed herself to imagine this moment it would have featured him as the driving force, pushing ever onward to his conclusion. Now she found the opposite.

For a long instant he looked into her eyes, daring her to stop things. Then slowly, deliciously, his mouth was against hers, his fingers softly stroking their way into her hair, tilting her face to meet his. His other hand slid gently around her waist. The deep spicy scent of his aftershave filled her senses. He moved from his knees to sit on the floor and she felt the gentlest of tugging as he pulled her into his lap, the chiffon skirt of her dress crinkling upwards and pooling softly around them.

She’d expected him to take full control. At speed. Had actually steeled herself against it. And now the passion, the delicious slowness of it all, brought a rush of desire that was new to her. Had she ever felt this level of longing for anyone before? Had her body ever been sensation central like this before? Every nerve ending in her body felt zingily alive.

The novelty that she was in charge here, that she could say how fast or how slow, when to stop, filled her with delight. Slowly at first but gaining in confidence, she kissed him back, letting her hands slide underneath his shirt across warm skin and taut muscle. She circled her hips lightly against him, feeling his arousal and indulging it until at last he took gentle control, standing up and lifting her into his arms, his hands sliding around her as she locked her legs behind him. He carried her across the room to the bed.

* * *

Afterwards Alice lay nestled perfectly in the crook of his arm as if that spot were designed to be a perfect fit just for her. The only light in the room flickered from the candles grouped in the hearth and on the table. She rested her head against his chest, listening to the heartbeat beneath, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. She’d been swept up in the deliciousness of it, the infinite tenderness of him. When he’d held her gently and looked into her eyes, holding her gaze while they moved as one, there had been no room in her mind for cynical thoughts about his motivation—those thoughts had been floating somewhere in the stratosphere, banished by the depth of pleasure he invoked in her.

Her own heartbeat now wouldn’t quit. And not because she was still riding high on the last hour, but because now the deliciousness was over it was time to deal with the fallout.

Likely next move: Harry begins to distance himself. Awful.

Alternative next move: If he happened to have a spot on the bet pool she’d just handed him victory on a plate. Worse.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and scrabbled around desperately for a likely next move from him that wouldn’t put her life all the way back to square one.

There was none.

What the hell had she gone and done?