‘Me too.’
Susie didn’t know what had just happened there. What she did know was that she wasn’t going to go down Confidence Lane and start telling him all about her family and her learning curves.
She was already reaching the conclusion that the only reason he had even glanced in her direction was because of her novelty value. If he only dated clever career women, someone plonking herself at his table with a long-winded tale of online dating mishaps would have been a shock to the system.
So who was this woman who had shaped his responses to the opposite sex and determined the sort of women he chose to date? She assumed some past love affair. Maybe he had fallen in love with the wrong girl? The fact that he had taken it so badly—badly enough to change the way he looked at his relationships—was telling. He had fallen in love and got burned.
Her thoughts rambled on until she surfaced to hear him asking her about the wedding she had mentioned.
‘Wedding?’ She gave an airy laugh and flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘What wedding?’
‘The one you have coming up... You were about to launch into a tale of young love and confetti...’
‘Wow. You live here? Isn’t this the most expensive place to live on the planet?’ She craned forward, squinting into the darkness and staring up and up and up at the spire of glass rising into the clouds.
As a diversion from a conversation she no longer wanted to have, it worked.
The apartment her parents owned was nice. No, it was better than nice. It was in a great location, and had been refurbished to a high standard, but this was the stuff of dreams—a place ordinary mortals never got to see.
She had genuinely forgotten the ‘wedding on the horizon’ conversation.
‘Impressed?’ Sergio was exiting the car and swinging round to open the passenger door for her, but she had already hopped out and was staring.
‘Very impressed,’ she confessed.
That came as no big surprise to Sergio. He imagined her place as somewhere small and damp and in poor condition, languishing in a fairly unsavoury location. Possibly directly under a flight path.
It had begun to rain—a fine, dreary drizzle. It was after ten on a dark, wintry night but there was the alluring promise of excitement within the walls of his massive apartment and he felt like a randy teenager at the conclusion of a first date with the hottest girl in school.
They were whooshed up to his apartment in a glass elevator and finally, as he pushed open the door to his apartment, she managed to find her voice, which had got lost somewhere between the vast foyer and the fifteenth floor.
‘This is...incredible—but I guess you know that already...’ She laughed nervously and stared around her at a marvel of modernism. Cool abstract paintings, most of which she recognised, were hung strategically on the walls and there was an awful lot of pale marble everywhere.
She was in his apartment...
There was nothing to be nervous about. She repeated that mantra to herself as he dutifully made noises about the layout of the apartment.
So many rooms... And whilst he was obviously accustomed to the artwork, to the vast scale of everything, the avant-garde kitchen where the marble gave way to wood, the sitting area which was dominated by creams and whites... Well, she was more and more impressed with every passing step.
She peppered him with questions. Asked him how long he had lived there, if he knew his neighbours—which for some reason he found very funny—wondered aloud what would happen if he spilled red wine over the white leather sofa...
She chattered ceaselessly—because whether or not she should be nervous, she was.
With all her online dates—three of them, because number four had bitten the dust before they could actually meet—she had ultimately been in control. Public places, superficial conversation, awkward goodbyes...
She had not, even in passing, been tempted to go anywhere with them except to the door, where they’d parted company in different directions.
And both her relationships had started life in the friendship arena and then progressed from friendship through to curiosity and into a relationship before morphing back into friendship.
This...was different.
‘Perhaps some coffee...?’ she said.
So she was looking for a relationship? Why hide from that? He wasn’t. And definitely not with someone like her. She wasn’t a career woman who could talk about business stuff. That were the sort of women he dated, went out with, would consider a candidate for a relationship. He had said so himself. She was a one-off.
And he was a one-off for her as well. He was...this was...lust. No more, no less. Heck, she was aware of him with every fibre of her being—could feel his presence like a forbidden thrill.
So they were even. Weren’t they?
Still...a cup of coffee might settle her nerves. She pictured them heading up to that split galleried landing straight to his bedroom...where he would turn to her, expecting her to launch herself into abandoned sex when in fact she might have had two boyfriends but she was woefully short on the sort of experience she figured he would be used to.
‘You want...coffee...? At this hour?’ Sergio leaned against the kitchen counter and looked at her evenly.
‘Maybe a nightcap...’ A strong dose of hard liquor would definitely steady her nerves. Or else knock her out completely. Both options were preferable to the frantic flutter in her stomach.
‘Sit down,’ Sergio told her gently.
He propelled her towards one of the black leather chairs at the kitchen table and then perched on the side of the table, which was a beaten metal affair the likes of which she had never seen in her life before. She stared at it fixedly and tried not to let her eyes wander to the strain of his trousers pulling taut across a muscular thigh.
‘So you want either a cup of coffee or a nightcap?’ he mused, tilting her face upwards so that she could look at him.
What was he to think? He didn’t know. They were in his apartment and she should be coming on to him. That was how the game was played. Was this some cunning ploy to hold his interest? He didn’t want to let go of his natural instinct to suspect the unexpected, but some other natural instinct inside him—one that had never surfaced before—was pushing him in a different direction.
‘Either or...’ Susie blinked and licked her lips.
‘Do you usually have nightcaps?’
‘Not usually, no...’
‘Only when you go on dates?’
‘I...I don’t really do a lot of dating, as it happens.’
‘Just random ones with strange men you meet on the internet?’
‘I would never have dreamt of having any sort of nightcap with any of those guys I arranged to meet,’ she told him truthfully. ‘They were pretty awful. Well, not awful. Just...boring and average...’
‘Is there a hidden compliment in there somewhere for me?’
‘You really are arrogant!’ But a little smile hovered on her lips and she relaxed fractionally.
‘And you’re very sexy,’ Sergio told her bluntly. ‘So why the hell do you think that the only way to meet a man is on the internet?’
‘You