She put out a hand to stop him. “Not if you’re involved with someone else.” She glanced pointedly down at his phone.
“I’m not.” He sighed. “Though Prada is slow to get the message. We ended it a month ago and she still calls most days.”
“Prada? That can’t be her real name. Why don’t you just block her number, anyway?”
“How?”
Theresa took his phone and looked at it in some disbelief. “By getting an upgrade to the twenty-first century?”
He shrugged and slipped it back in his pocket. “It makes calls.”
“So, why did you end it with her?”
“Why do you assume I ended it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Because she’s the one still calling you a month later.”
He acknowledged the point by raising his hand. “She wanted to settle down.”
“Marriage?”
His lips twisted. “And free access to my bank account.” Prada could barely remember his birthday, but she never had any difficulty working out exactly what he earned each season, or how many Louboutin shoes and Louis Vuitton handbags that corresponded to.
“Ouch.”
He shrugged. “I’m glad to be rid of her. I’m enjoying playing the field.”
“So am I.” She gazed up at him, hazel eyes full of challenge and invitation. “I enjoyed playing it last night.”
“Last night was just a pre-season friendly.”
“Oh, really?”
“Uh huh. The real fun starts here, chérie.”
He leaned in to kiss the dimple at the corner of her collarbone. His damned phone started ringing again.
He sighed, but answered anyway. “Prada, I’m busy.”
Theresa folded her arms and perched on the edge of a stool. She wasn’t even pretending not to be listening.
“What do you think I’m doing at this time on a Sunday morning? I’m making love to a beautiful woman. I haven’t got time to chat.” He listened patiently to another bout of whining and eventually said, not unkindly, “I’m hanging up.”
Theresa was laughing at him. His shirt fluttered tantalizingly around her naked body. She took his phone and switched it off. “Poor Prada.”
“Why are you sorry for her? I’m the one being harassed.”
“Yes, but...” She ran her hand down the center of his chest. “She obviously hasn’t got anyone to make love to her on a Sunday morning.”
“This is true.” He slid his arms loosely around her waist and looked down at her. “But unless she stops chasing me, she will never find anyone else.”
“We should do something about that.” Theresa’s eyes suddenly gleamed with mischief. “I have an idea.”
“Does it involve you taking that shirt off?”
“No. Well, yes, but later.”
Emile sighed and let her go. “In that case, I will make coffee while you tell me your idea.”
The coffee machine was on the counter. He spooned the ground beans in and pressed the switch. Then he reached up for two mugs.
“We could get married.”
The mugs clattered onto the hard granite surface in the instant before he realized she had to be joking.
“Ha!” He shot her a grin. She met his gaze with a smile that said she was joking and a raised eyebrow that suggested she was half-serious, which was crazy. Unless she was one of those bunny-boilers that, until now, he’d assumed only lived in Hollywood movies.
“No,” he said firmly.
The smile became a laugh and she held up her hands in surrender. “Why not, though?”
She was insane. And sexy. And that glint in her eye was definitely a dare. But still. Emile closed his eyes and prayed for strength. “Just, no. We should not get married.”
“Think about it.” Theresa slid her arms around his waist and grinned up at him. “It would be the perfect way to get Prada off your back.”
Merde. This was why he needed to stop picking up random women in clubs. She hadn’t seemed like a lunatic last night, but that was because they’d barely exchanged more than a few words. Her eyes were twinkling and he had no idea whether that meant she was joking or not. He wasn’t going to take the chance.
“Still no. Do you always proposition guys like this after the first night?” It would explain why a woman as beautiful as her was still single, anyway.
“Only when my mother has finally pushed me to breaking point. You’d be perfect.”
He frowned. “She wants you to marry a footballer? Or a Frenchman?”
Her eyes lit up with laughter. “No, sorry. The opposite. She’d like me to settle down with a solidly respectable Englishman. You’d drive her crazy.”
Emile shook his head. “I feel sure you can do that yourself.”
“We could get divorced at the end of a year,” she said with a tilt of her head. “Trust me, I’m a lawyer.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Right. I think it’s my caffeine-deficiency kicking in.” She waved a hand in the direction of the espresso machine. “Give me coffee and I’ll probably go back to normal.”
He slid a mug in her direction and poured one for himself.
Theresa took a sip, taking her time to savor the deep, rich flavors. “That’s better. In fact, that’s the best coffee I’ve tasted in a long time.”
“It is the best coffee. It is French.”
“Bien s?r.” She nodded at him, mocking him gently.
“That is a truly terrible accent.”
“I know. My French teacher despaired of me.”
“She has my sympathies.”
Theresa grinned. “So, you don’t want to get married, then?”
“No.”
“Damn.” She said it without heat and now he could let himself believe she’d been joking all along.
“We hardly know each other.”
Theresa nodded. “And we don’t have anything in common. Well, we have one thing in common.” She tipped her head towards the bedroom door.
“Sex doesn’t count. People don’t get married just to have sex with each other. Not in the last hundred years or so, even in England.”
“Right. So we’ll just have to have sex and not get married.”
Finally the conversation had landed back on solid ground. “I haven’t got long. I need to be at the stadium in an hour.”
“They make you practice on a Sunday?”
He smiled and shook his head. “There’s a match this afternoon. Do you want to come?”
“No.”
Emile raised an eyebrow at her. There would be press photographers scoping out the players’ box. Prada, and all the women before her, had never missed a chance to get their faces in the tabloids and their names in the gossip columns. They might claim to be huge fans of the game, but he’d never kidded himself they were interested in anything beyond his celebrity. But Theresa wasn’t even pretending to care about the game.
He picked up her hand and kissed it, masking his hurt with the mock gallant gesture. “Ah, chérie, you wound me.”
“Shall I kiss it better?”
“What a good idea.”
He arrived late at the stadium, changed in record time, and went to warm up.
“Renaud.” The manager gave him a black look. Gatz had recently instituted a list of club fines in an attempt to keep the players in line, and Emile would be writing him a check later on to atone for his lack of punctuality. He grinned to himself. Theresa had been worth it.