“Did someone make this Izzy Day?” I ask, raising my eyebrows at her.
“Sit, please?” she tries, and this time I do as I’m told.
She dips a small, pointed brush into a rectangle of blue paint, moistens it with water, and dips again. I watch the way she frowns when she concentrates, how she brushes her hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand. Everything about her is suddenly acutely fascinating.
I wonder when it happened. If there was one single tipping-point moment when I began to fall for her. Did I ever truly hate her? It seems unthinkable now.
Izzy touches the brush to my temple, stepping close enough to skim her thighs against my knees. The paint is cool—I flinch slightly, and she tuts, brush still moving, tickling against my skin. Dab, paint. Dab, paint. Each time she leans in towards me, I have to fight the temptation to look down her shirt.
“So,” I say as she works her way down the side of my jaw. “You have me at your mercy. What are you going to do with me?”
“I’m thinking a sort of Jack Frost vibe,” she says, but the quirk in the corner of her mouth tells me she knows what I mean.
The next time she returns to me with the paint, she stands even closer. Heat unfurls along my spine, and on impulse I shift my knees to trap her leg between mine. She breathes in sharply, brush stilling on my cheek. I give in and let my gaze flick to that triangle of pale skin where her shirt falls open at the neck. I can see the edge of a white lace bra, and the soft curve of her breast.
I shouldn’t have looked. That has not made this easier.
“Have you changed your mind, then?” she asks, twisting away to reach the paint but keeping her thigh between my knees. “About tonight?”
The brush whispers against my cheekbone. Izzy licks her bottom lip. I could have her in my lap in half a second. I want to. She knows I want to.
“No. I’ve not changed my mind. Have you?”
“I told you my decision was made.”
I incline my head in acknowledgement as she moves away to top up her brush. This time, as she turns back to me, she presses a thumb under my chin and forces my head up, then to the side, baring my throat. She takes the brush to the sensitive skin beneath my ear and I inhale, closing my eyes. She’s not even touching me and this is turning my blood to fire.
“You could have had me in your bed last night,” she says. “One message.”
I knew that. I felt it for every slow minute of the evening.
“You really do have ironclad self-control, don’t you?”
She has no idea.
“I want to know what happens when you let go,” she whispers, leaning in. “I want to make you lose your fucking mind.”
Pelo amor de Deus. My heart is pounding.
“All done,” she says brightly, pulling back, her thigh slipping from between my knees. “Want to see?”
I open my eyes. She’s looking down on me with an infuriatingly familiar expression: the self-satisfied smile she wears when she’s beaten me at something.
She holds a small make-up mirror out for me to see myself. I have no idea what I’m going to find—it could be reindeer, or snowmen, or possibly Lucas is a dick written on my jawline. But it’s amazing. A tumble of white and blue snowflakes running from my right temple to the left side of my neck.
“It’s good,” I say. “Now can I do it for you?”
“You? Paint my face?”
“Mm-hmm.”
The reception bell dings. As one, we look towards the door.
“Saved by the bell,” she says, already bouncing away towards the lobby. “You might want to . . . wait a minute.”
“Yes,” I say, shifting in my seat. “Perhaps you had better get that one.”
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
We both end up having to wait tables over lunch. Izzy changes into her waitressing uniform in the lost-property room, leaving the door ajar, taunting me, tempting me to follow her inside. When she steps out to see me frozen in my seat, determinedly not looking, she gives me a smug look, as if to say, Couldn’t take the heat, then?
I imagine I’ll be safe waiting tables, but we pass so often, always close enough to brush arms, always locking eyes. I never lose her in that room—I know exactly where she is. At one point, as she moves past me into the kitchen, she whispers, “Slow day, Lucas? I’ve never seen you check the time so often.”
I am openly staring at her across the dining area when Mr. Townsend walks in. By the time I manage to redivert my attention to the specials board, he is regarding me with amused interest. I swallow.
“Can I help you, Mr. Townsend?” I ask. “Has there been a phone call?”
We’ve come to rely on Mr. Townsend this winter: he is the only person ever guaranteed to be in the lobby.
“It’s Budgens time,” he says.
Merda. I glance at the Bartholomew clock through the dining-room door, which is propped open so that Izzy and I can see the front desk. After some quick maths, I realise Mr. Townsend is right.
“Lunch service ends in half an hour,” I say. “I am all yours after that.”
“Lovely.” Mr. Townsend pauses. “Why don’t you bring Izzy?”
“We can’t spare her, I’m afraid.”
“I’d like her to come.”
I eye him with suspicion. He looks back at me with an expression of innocence that brings Izzy herself to mind.
“I might insist upon it, actually,” Mr. Townsend says. “I think stepping out of the hotel together would do us all some good.”
“Excuse me,” says a woman whose toddler is currently drawing shapes on the tablecloth with pea soup. “Please can I get the bill? Like, as soon as you can? Ideally right now?”
“Half an hour,” I say to Mr. Townsend. “In the lobby.”
“With Izzy.”
The man has more backbone than I’d expected.
“It’s up to her,” I say. “And Mrs. SB. And,” I add, as an afterthought, “Barty.”
Mr. Townsend smiles. “I’ll speak to Uma,” he says, planting his stick and setting off into the lobby. “She can never say no to a guest, that one.”
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
“isn’t this nice?” Izzy says from the back seat of my car. “A team trip to Budgens!”
Things have escalated. I’m not sure Mr. Townsend is very pleased about this—his aim, I suspect, was to get Izzy and me together outside the hotel, having observed the way I looked at her in the dining room and decided to play matchmaker. But Ollie overheard us talking about the trip during lunch service, and was so determined not to be left manning the front desk again that he made up an obscure ingredient he had to get—himself—for Arjun. And then Barty overheard him and said he was coming to get some doughnuts. I believe Mrs. SB is managing the front desk, which she hasn’t done for approximately forty years. I wonder if she knows how to work the computer.
“Are you all right, Lucas?” Mr. Townsend asks me kindly from the passenger seat.
“Absolutely,” I say, though there is sweat prickling between my shoulders.
Right now, in this car with me, I have Izzy, plus one elderly guest, one kitchen porter, and my boss. And yet every time I glance back in the mirror, all I see is her. The wicked heat in those palmeira-green eyes. The way she seems to know every time I’m looking at her. How her gaze meets mine fast, hard, like we’re crossing swords.
She said she’d torture me today, but she’s hardly had to—it’s the day itself that’s torturous. Every slow minute that stands between me and a night with Izzy.
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
Upon our arrival at Budgens, things go smoothly for an impressive ten minutes. I feel calmer here, away from the hotel. It is easier to think about something other than Izzy Jenkins—even if she is in the same aisle.
We select a box of doughnuts after a long discussion about which of the available flavours is best (all are overrated; doughnuts are just bolinhos de chuva with too much sugar and no personality). Mr. Townsend chooses the first of his snacks (shortbread biscuits of a very specific shape). Barty shouts “Mrs. SB likes it rough!” across the chilled aisle (he was referring to puff pastry). And then Izzy opens her rucksack and pulls out the Tupperware of rings, right there by the fridges.