Sal smiled to herself, feeling that lovely tingle she always felt when Niall’s face, body, everything came into her mind. It really hadn’t taken long for her and Niall to get it on; in fact, it couldn’t have been quicker. The moment he had appeared for his interview two months ago, looking all swarthy and handsome and brandishing a cute little tote bag of ingredients to cook, to show her what he could do, she was a goner.
He’d been wearing jeans, and a Foo Fighters’ t-shirt and he had little turn-ups on the sleeves of his t-shirt, which exposed his biceps, and his hair was all mussed up into a kind of sexy half-Mohican and he had one hand in his back pocket, and if she was the swooning type she would have swooned. Instead, she’d just said, ‘Hello’ and he’d said, ‘Hello’ back and his mouth had crinkled into a smile. He had the most amazing green eyes framed by magnificent eyebrows and . . . well, wow. Just wow.
He’d made her a beautiful dish of poached chicken and chargrilled vegetables, with a gorgeous fondant potato, and then they’d sat at one of the pub tables and talked. They’d talked about food and puddings and garnishes and jus and stuff then Sal had asked him if he wanted a drink; they had a new whisky they were selling and it would be good to get a second opinion on it . . .
It was a fine whisky. Very nice indeed. They had one glass and then another. Then Niall asked, jokingly, if folks were still allowed to play cards in this new trendy pub of hers, and she’d not only said ‘of course’, but had produced a pack of cards a punter had left from behind the bar and challenged him to a game of Gin Rummy. They’d played three rounds, and drunk the best part of a bottle of the Highlands’ finest.
Things had got very quickly drunken, and slurry, and blurry. Within an hour she couldn’t see straight. By 10 p.m., Niall was just about the best-looking man she had ever met. And at quarter past eleven, just after closing time, things had taken on a new, very sexy dimension when Niall had gone to make them both a sobering cup of coffee which neither of them had wanted, or indeed drank. He brought over to the table Sal’s Male Strip mug – one where you pour boiling water in to make the clothes fall off the man on the side, revealing a naked hunk – and, as the mug was full of hot coffee, the hunk’s clothes were off.
‘Interesting,’ Niall had said, his gloriously thick eyebrows raised.
‘Yeah,’ said Sal, ever so drunkenly, and in a purposeful (as purposeful as you can be when blind drunk) way that said ‘seduction’ in big neon letters above her head. At that moment all she could think of was Niall in an apron with nothing on underneath. She then winked at him. Actually winked. ‘I got it in Tenerife one year,’ she said, slurring like an on-heat Mae West – she was Sal, the seductress, her elbow slipping off the table, her morals slipping off the radar. ‘It’s big – the mug, I mean. It holds a lot of coffee.’
‘I see.’ The air was suddenly charged. Heady. Crackling. Sal felt quite faint. Drunk. Everything. He’d sat down, then he’d looked her right in the eye and asked if he could kiss her. Well, actually, what he’d said, which was far more sexy, was, ‘I want to kiss you,’ and she’d looked right back into his eyes, pissed and unsteady and full of lust and had said, ‘All right.’
It had been bloody marvellous. Sexy. Intense. A quarter-full tumbler of whisky had got knocked over and neither of them had cared. They’d kissed and kissed and kissed, like teenagers. He’d intertwined his fingers in her hair; she’d stroked one of his biceps. She’d been absolutely hammered by then, and she really, really fancied him. Then she’d uttered those magic and un-retractable words, ‘Do you want to come upstairs?’ and, with her heart pounding and her mind exploding with the possibility and sheer excitement of what was about to happen, she’d led him up those stairs by the hand . . .
‘And so we’ve just carried on,’ finished Sal, having summed it up for them in not quite so much wonderful detail. ‘Doing it whenever we can. Doing it wherever we can’ – this, for Tamsin’s benefit. Sal still wasn’t getting the required reaction. In fact, Tamsin was leaning forward, all ears, and didn’t look disgusted in the slightest.
‘So you really like him,’ said Rose, nodding slowly. ‘This is a first, since Guy.’
‘I didn’t say I really liked him,’ said Sal, ‘I just said I’ve been sleeping with him a lot. There’s a difference.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Wendy.
She really did enjoy sleeping with him. Right from that first time. And the morning after had been pretty perfect, too. She had been downstairs, wiping some tables, when there had been a creak on the stairs. She’d let Niall sleep in, in her bed.
‘Morning,’ he’d said.
A skimpy white towel – one of hers, from the airing cupboard – was tied round his waist. He had tanned skin and a cheeky smile. A mop of tousled, jet black hair, with lovely salt and peppery bits, at the temples. He was gorgeous the night before and the morning after. Sal had actually gulped.
‘Good morning, Niall. I’m guessing you slept OK?’ Her voice sounded weird; she didn’t like it. With an unprecedented breathiness to it, she sounded like a simpering wench who needed to be wearing a mob cap and a frilly apron. She was surprised she hadn’t added, ‘kind sir,’ to her entreaty
‘Wouldn’t anyone?’ he replied. ‘After last night.’ His voice had been so low and rumbling, she almost hadn’t caught what he said, but his words had rendered her speechless and Sal was never speechless. She had stood looking at him, in her imaginary wench’s outfit, her bosom heaving under her imaginary laced-up bodice. Her mouth wouldn’t open, her voice now didn’t work. ‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘I can sleep for England and you have a really comfy bed. Is it all right if I have a shower?’ God, his voice was deep. So manly. Flashes of some of the things he had said in bed to her last night careered around her brain like snippets of songs. She caught scattered refrains of a, ‘You’re gorgeous’, the hint of an, ‘Ooh, yeah, baby,’ and a soupçon of a ‘That’s it, down a bit.’
‘Go ahead,’ she said, finding her real voice, and in a way that she hoped made her sound alluring . . . hard to pull off when she was wearing her real outfit of an ancient pair of jeans with a hole in each knee, a grubby ‘Purple Rain’ t-shirt and a non-wench-like plastic pinny. ‘I see you’ve found a towel.’
He pinged the waistband. It had looked in glorious danger of falling off.
‘I did, thank you.’ He had turned to head back up the stairs. She’d admired the back of his calves. ‘Care to join me?’ His head whipped back round, his cheeky grin was full wattage and her heart nearly jumped out of her chest and straight into the pocket of her plastic apron, next to the notepad and pen and a couple of dog-eared beer mats.
‘Another time,’ she’d said hopefully, and he’d grinned and gone upstairs. Fifteen minutes later, he’d reappeared. Jeans, boots, Foo Fighters t-shirt; she remembered how she’d relieved him of the lot, last night. He approached her and gave her a kiss, and he smelled deliciously of her raspberry body wash.
‘See you next week,’ he’d said.
‘Next week?’
‘When I start work. I presume I got the job.’
‘You cheeky git,’ she’d said and she’d swiped him one with a damp Jeye cloth. Of course he’d got the job! His skills in the kitchen and elsewhere were clearly second to none.
‘And that’s it?’ said Rose, ‘Now you’re just bonking each other, at every opportunity?’ She gave a huge sigh. ‘Well, I don’t mind admitting I’m really jealous. Not much bonking goes on in my house at the moment. Well, none, actually. None whatsoever.’
Sal caught Tamsin giving Rose a sympathetic look.
‘Well, I’m horrified,’ said JoJo, mock seriously. ‘What a tramp!’
‘You should try it sometime,’ said Sal. ‘You might enjoy it.’
JoJo