Excerpt from The House on Willow Street
Hannah stretched one slim, tanned leg in the direction of the taps, clasped the hot tap expertly with her dripping foot and felt hot water flood deliciously into the bath.
‘You’ve done that before,’ said Jeff in amusement as she sank back against him in the water, her back slick against his bare chest, nothing but lemon verbena-scented bubbles between them.
‘I love reading in the bath and, in the winter, it’s horrible sitting up out of the water to turn on the taps, so I’ve learned how to do it with my feet,’ Hannah murmured as the water level rose slowly in the cracked old roll-top bath and the heat flooded all over her limbs. She felt gloriously tired yet happy, every inch of her body satiated even though she’d had practically no sleep last night. Sharing a bath after such a wonderful, marathon lovemaking session had been a brilliant idea. The bath water eased the aches caused by Jeff’s very energetic lovemaking. There had been one mad moment when they’d almost fallen off Hannah’s bed and she’d just managed not to shriek out loud in agony as a shooting pain had rocketed up her back into her neck. That was obviously the drawback of flings with younger men, she decided gleefully: they had no concept of back problems and were keen to do gymnastic things with mirrors, armchairs and the ties of your dressing gown. The only thing poor Harry had ever done with the ties of his dressing gown was to let them trail behind him all over the kitchen floor picking up bits of fluff, spare cornflakes and dust.
What was she calling him ‘poor Harry’ for anyway? ‘Poor’ my eye. Parasitical, Lying Bastard Harry suited him better. Thinking of parasites, she grimly hoped that his year-long trek around South America meant he’d finally met that infamous parasite that lived in tropical rivers and swam up the urine stream of any man stupid enough to pee in a river. Once it swam into your system, you were in big trouble. Hannah hoped eradicating it would involve some agonizing operation where Harry couldn’t sit down without wincing for a week. Something like the duck-billed speculum thingy which women had to endure being inserted for cervical smear tests, but much, much worse.
‘Is there anything else you can do with your feet?’ Jeff asked wickedly, whisking her away from the Amazon and agonizing medical experiments by nibbling her ear provocatively.
‘No,’ Hannah said firmly, concentrating on letting the water soothe the nagging ache in her right hip. She closed her eyes and began planning the next hour: her small suitcase was neatly stowed on top of the wardrobe in the boxroom and the clothes she wanted to take to Egypt were carefully arranged on the boxroom bed. It would take half an hour to pack, ticking off every item of clothing and every toiletry on her pared-down list. Then she had to empty the fridge. No point coming back to a disgustingly smelly kitchen through carelessness. When the kitchen was linked to the sitting room by badly fitting double doors, limiting bad smells was particularly important. Logistically, Hannah thought as her mind ran through her preparations with the precision of a Swiss watch, she only had a couple of minutes more to soak in the bath.
Jeff had other ideas. His mouth began trailing down her neck on to her shoulders while his hands rippled under the water, stroking Hannah’s thighs suggestively. She could feel the muscular chest with its six-pack stomach contracting with desire as he touched her.
She sat up abruptly and turned off the hot tap, her dark hair slicking against her skin like a tangle of seaweed.
‘We don’t have time, Jeff,’ she said sternly. ‘It’s half nine already. I’ve got to be at the airport in a couple of hours and I’ve got some phone calls to make, not to mention the fact that I haven’t packed yet.’
Jeff pulled her effortlessly back into the bath with arms used to bench-pressing double her body weight. ‘If I was going with you, you wouldn’t need to pack very much,’ he said, nuzzling her ear. ‘Just a couple of G-string bikinis and a sexy dress like that one you were wearing last night.’
Hannah had to smile. The amethyst dress was incredibly daring and unlike anything else in her limited and quite conservative wardrobe: two flimsy spaghetti-strap little slip things worn together, she’d bought it in a designer shop in a sale and it had hung in her wardrobe for a year before she’d felt brave enough to put it on. But last night, for the launch of the hotel’s new nightclub, Jupiter, she’d decided to drag it out and wear it.
‘There are going to be loads of famous people there. The guest list is like flicking through Hello!’ one of Hannah’s hotel receptionist colleagues had wittered excitedly about the launch weeks beforehand. ‘We’ve got to pull out all the stops, girls. We can’t let the hotel down.’
So Hannah had pulled out all the stops, had set her long dark hair in curlers so it rippled down her back like a sheet of raw silk and had shoe-horned herself into the ruinously expensive dress she’d nearly taken back to the shop so many times on the grounds that it was a waste of money. All the other Triumph Hotel receptionists had gasped in shock at the sight of the normally staid Ms Campbell in something other than her off-duty uniform of crisp white shirt, ironed blue jeans, blazer and loafers. She looked phenomenally sexy, they said, stunned. Who’d have thought she could transform herself from a frostily polite receptionist into a siren with just a dress?
Jeff Williams, who ran the hotel’s new gym and was as yet unfamiliar with Hannah’s reputation as a bit of an ice maiden, had gasped with pleasure at the sight of her gym-toned, curvaceous body clad in a wisp of filmy chiffon that clung in all the right places.
Unlike the starstruck members of staff who spent the night gazing cow-eyed at the various stars knocking back Moët in the roped-off area of the nightclub, Jeff and Hannah spent the evening discovering that they both loved to dance. They drank far more mineral water than alcohol as they moved sinuously on the dance floor, jiving, boogieing, salsaing and even waltzing when the DJ played some slow, jazzy numbers. High on having fun, it only took two glasses of white wine to give Hannah a heady buzz where the idea of letting Jeff kiss her seemed natural really, rather than a complete mistake.
‘I’m ten years older than you,’ she reproved as they squashed up together on one seat, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his fair head bent over hers. She felt ridiculously like a teenager on a date, but it was fun.
‘Thirty-six is hardly old,’ Jeff had murmured, kissing the tendrils of dark hair that clung to her cheekbones.
As his bachelor pad was miles across town and sounded like a laddish bombsite shared with three other young men, it seemed more sensible to have that cup of coffee in Hannah’s immaculate apartment, a mere stone’s throw from the Triumph Hotel.
Sitting on the small, hard sofa-bed, Jeff had admired the unusual brocade cushions that Hannah had