Buch lesen: «His House of Submission»

For one tense moment, as I perched with my legs wrapped around Will’s hips and his hands clasped beneath my bottom, holding me up, I thought he was going to stagger and fall with me on to the chaise longue.

‘Jesus, be careful,’ I hissed, still clinging to the open bottle by its expensive neck. ‘That’s Louis Quinze.’

But thank God for sinewy, strong, horny-handed sons of the soil, because Will recovered his balance and continued in the direction of the drawing-room door, grimly intent on getting me to the bedroom.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said, nudging the door open with his toe and carrying me into the vast hall. ‘You’re the expert.’

He found the back stairs to the old servants’ quarters and plodded heroically across the parquet.

‘I hope you’re an expert too,’ I said, breathing hotly into his ear. ‘And not just when it comes to grounds maintenance.’

‘I’ve never had any complaints.’ He smirked and stopped to add another kiss to our already substantial tally. ‘All that digging comes in handy when you need to carry women upstairs and throw them on to beds.’

‘You’ve obviously dug a lot.’

‘Yeah.’

But once we reached the third flight of steps he had to stop talking and concentrate on the job in hand. On our arrival in his room, with its sloping ceiling and low beams, he was starting to feel the strain, beads of sweat shiny on his forehead.

It was clearly a relief to him when he was able to lower me on to his bed and stand straight, stretching his limbs and grimacing. I could have lived without the grimaces, but this at least gave me the opportunity to run my eyes with avid greed over his body.

Will spent all day, every day, in the open air and it showed, in his healthy tan and his solid build, his broad shoulders and densely packed thighs. He wasn’t my usual type at all – sturdy and studly where I usually went for wispy and fey – but two weeks cooped up in this place with no other company had worked its erotic magic on me and now I thirsted for him.

He fell to his knees on the mattress, towering over me, giving me the full roguish glint.

‘So now I’ve got you in my lair, Sarah …’ he whispered.

‘Your lair, eh? Your eyrie, high above the park.’

I propped myself on an elbow and put the wine bottle down on the bedside table.

‘Something like that.’ He put a hand on my collarbone and pushed me roughly back down.

‘You sound as if you’re the hunter and I’m your prey,’ I said, reaching out and grabbing his wrist. ‘But I’m not sure you’ve got it the right way around.’

He swung one leg around so that he straddled me and pinned me down with my wrists above my head.

‘I’m pretty sure I have,’ he said, leaning down low to rasp the words into my ear. ‘Aren’t you?’

Enjoying the feeling of restraint I twisted and turned and tried to buck him off me, knowing I wouldn’t succeed, not wanting to succeed, but wanting the resistance, the friction, the arousing sense of powerlessness it all led to.

He chuckled, understanding the game and its unspoken rules, and held me all the firmer.

‘No way, Sarah,’ he taunted, releasing one wrist and catching both in one hand, just to show me that he could. ‘Now I’ve got you where I want you, I’m not letting you go.’

‘You planned this, then?’

He shut me up with a kiss, a fierce stamp of his lips on mine. His free hand closed around the neckline of my shirt then undid the top three buttons.

‘Of course I did. I’ve been watching you. Ever since you came here.’

More buttons slid open, then Will’s rough palm was on my bare skin, beneath my bra cups, gliding over my ribs and stomach.

‘Nobody else to look at, is there?’ I whispered, but I was starting to lose the capacity for repartee, especially when his mouth descended on my neck, then the hollow of my throat, then my cleavage.

The heaving of my chest and my little moan of pleasure must have given him the clue that it would be safe to release my wrists. I colluded with him now instead of fighting him. We were working together in the pursuit of pleasure. And this was where things always became a little awkward for me.

I was so anxious to be ‘good in bed’ – to be active and passionate and skilled – that I lost all grip on what I was feeling myself.

Objectively I knew that he was sucking on my nipple and it should feel good – it did feel good – but the feeling good was layered beneath my own worries about what I was doing to make him feel good. A former lover had enjoyed it when I massaged the back of his neck at times like these. Would that be a good move? I tried it. He seemed to appreciate it. Or was I irritating him and he was just too polite to say so? Not that he could say much, with a mouthful of nipple. Oh, God. It was too difficult. I couldn’t disconnect, could never go with the flow. If only the flow would just come and take me, throw me up on its racing tide and carry me, swirling in white water, into the depths where real, unforced pleasure lay. I knew it existed. History showed that it was real. Why couldn’t it ever be real for me?

His head rose, his eyes peering at me from above my breasts.

‘Bloody bras,’ he muttered. ‘Whoever invented them wants shooting.’

He plucked at the underwires until I obligingly sat up and unhooked it myself. I looked down at my breasts, amazed at how much larger my nipples could grow, then turned my face back to Will when he cupped them and rubbed his thumbs around the sensitive nubs.

‘I hope it didn’t kill the moment too much,’ I said apologetically.

‘Sh, don’t be daft. The removal of the bra is a rite of passage. I’m used to it.’

‘I bet you are.’ I reached out for his T-shirt, pulling it out of his jeans waistband. He followed my cue and removed it himself, his arms stretching up away from an expanse of mouthwateringly taut chest above a flat abdomen, everything where it should be. His skin was golden and he had a tattoo on his right bicep, one of those Celtic knots encompassing the muscle.

‘I like your tattoo. Celtic blood?’

‘Nah. Everyone was having these done back then.’

He flexed his arm then pounced back down, his nose hovering millimetres above mine.

‘You don’t have any little surprises for me, then? Tattoos? Piercings?’ His fingers drifted over my nipples, my navel, towards my trousers, under the waist …

‘No, no,’ I gasped, before he came to land, palm-first, in my pubic bristles. Damn. Why had I not realised I was going to let him seduce me tonight? I squirmed, pulling my lower body away from his explorations. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘Hey, hey.’ He held up his hand, his lower lip jutting a little. ‘It’s OK if you don’t want to –’

‘I do want to. It’s just … I didn’t wax.’

‘Oh God, do you think I care about that?’ He shook his head and set to unfastening my buttons. ‘You can perm it and dye it pink for all I care.’

The trousers were yanked off, followed by my knickers.

He put his hand, sideways on, between my lips, as he gazed down at my unclothed pussy.

‘As long as it’s wet and ready for me …’ he murmured.

I hoped I was. Was I? I couldn’t really tell, too much performance anxiety muffling the sensation, warping my sensual urges.

He bent lower, pattering, remarkably delicately, on my clit with his thick, callused fingers.

‘Nice and warm,’ he breathed.

I sat up and reached for his belt, but he batted me away.

‘Hey,’ he said, slightly reproachful, and I blushed in agony at making a wrong move. ‘I want to pay attention to you first. It’s not a game of tit-for-tat. Relax.’

Relax. Yeah. Nothing like asking the impossible.

‘Relaxation doesn’t come easily to me,’ I muttered, still mortified.

‘No kidding.’ He kissed my forehead, then my lips, then he patted my cheek sympathetically. ‘Just try, eh? For me.’

I tried. I lay back and shut my eyes and channelled all my awareness towards his fingers and my clit. His touch was rough but sure, but he didn’t say anything, leaving too much silence so that the ticking of his clock and the strange gurgles of the hot-water pipes intruded. How did it feel? How would I describe it?

‘You are enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he said, sounding puzzled.

‘Yes, but … can you just fuck me?’

His fingers stopped what they were doing and he drew them out.

‘Sure,’ he said.

My eyes were still screwed shut. I heard the sound of his belt coming off, then his jeans.

‘Most girls like a bit of foreplay,’ he said.

‘I’m just … it’s been a long time. I want to remember what it feels like.’

I heard the opening and shutting of drawers then the snap of rubber.

‘OK. This is what it feels like. You could open your eyes, you know.’

‘I like to keep them shut.’

‘Didn’t realise I was that hard to look at.’

‘It’s not you. Please …’

My plea was answered by the blunt arrival of a rounded cock head between my legs. His heat and scent moved down close to me, wrapping me in them, taking me out of my isolation, making me want him now. I put my hands on his shoulders, shivering pleasurably at the way they flexed and moved underneath his skin. He was so strong. I wanted him to make this hard, make it fast, pile-drive into me, obliterate my senses.

‘Please,’ I whispered.

He thrust forward, just the forceful way I wanted it.

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘That what you want? That good enough for you?’

‘Oh, yes. More. Please. More.’

I opened my eyes and looked at his forearms, braced either side of my shoulders. How tense and powerful they were, holding him steady while he worked me. His chest heaved up and down, brushing my nipples with each jerking motion. He was handsome and he was fucking me. I was being fucked. What did it feel like?

It felt like a series of shocks, stretching my hidden channel, a jolt jolt jolt. I looked for the sense of being overpowered, but as always, I looked too hard and couldn’t quite place it.

I tried to reach out for it.

‘I need this,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed, panting with exertion. ‘You need this. You’ve been needing it ever since you got here. Keep those legs wide, baby, cos you’ll be getting more and more of it.’

Yes. This was working now. This was moving me towards my goal. He had been watching me, seeing the desperate slut inside the Peter Pan collars, he had known all along that what I needed was to be pinned down and given a good seeing-to. He understood what would keep me sweet and it amounted to being kept on my back with my thighs spread, taking plenty of hot, hard, grimy, sweaty fucking. He would give it to me and then he would tell his friends and they would give it to me and then …

I was almost there. I slipped my fingers between our grinding pelvises and touched the spot, my hand immediately hot and damp.

His cock was a nice one, firm and substantial, if not quite in proportion with his godlike body. My knuckles grazed against the root of it, feeling it rub back and forth, the rubber soaked and slippery now.

He plunged and plunged and I felt my buttocks tense and my spine arch and oh, yes.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said it out loud, again and again and, just as I crested the high point and tipped back down the other side of the wave, I said, ‘Thank you, Sir.’

And then I turned my head away and considered smacking myself in the face. Why on earth had I said that out loud?

But Will didn’t question it, simply banged away all the more until his own orgasm ripped through his body – really, I could feel the ripping – and then collapsed on top of me.

I always liked this moment, the hammering of twin hearts and the gathering of breath. Somehow this was a better payoff than the preceding orgasms.

‘You came, didn’t you?’ panted Will, rolling off eventually.

‘You heard me, didn’t you? Of course I did. Of course.’ I stroked his close-cropped hair. Beneath it, his scalp felt hot.

‘Just … you’re a bit of a strange fruit, aren’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What you said. When you came.’

I turned my face away.

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘I’m not. Sarah, honestly, I’m not. Look at me. Talk to me.’

I dared a glance from beneath low-slung eyelids. He didn’t look jokey or mocking. I opened them wider.

‘You and him,’ Will said. ‘You’d probably get on.’

‘Him? Jasper Jay?’

I couldn’t refer to my employer by anything but his full name. We weren’t on first-name terms yet. Indeed, we weren’t on any terms. We had never met.

‘Yeah. Jasper Almighty Jay.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘He’s all right. He pays me.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Didn’t he interview you?’

‘No. It was a woman, his secretary or PA or something. He was in France, filming. Well, he still is. Anyway, why did you say that we’d get on?’

‘That thing you said. It was a bit kinky.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shut up apologising, you daft ha’p’orth. Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of kink. It was quite a turn-on, as it goes.’

I exhaled gratefully. I hadn’t made such a prize exhibition of myself after all. Though I could still see, in the corner of my mind, a little mental film reel of Will down at the local pub regaling his mates with the story.

‘Thanks. So?’

‘So. Jasper Jay and you might have a little something in common.’

‘What do you mean? He’s into …?’

‘Get your kit back on,’ whispered Will, ‘or not, as you choose, and I’ll show you.’

I couldn’t really be bothered with all the jeans and bra palaver, so I borrowed a threadbare towelling robe of Will’s and followed my half-dressed lover out of the bedroom.

‘He hired you to catalogue his collections,’ said Will, creeping barefoot down the back stairs. ‘But I wonder if he meant you to see this one.’

‘A collection?’ I whispered. Why was I whispering? Why were we creeping? It all felt deeply illicit.

We tiptoed past the library, with its vast collection of first editions, some of which I’d managed to list. Past the drawing room and the morning room and all the other rooms, chock-full of antiques and artefacts. Up the main stairs to the first floor bedrooms, past my little bolthole and into …

‘Oh, I don’t think we should go into his room.’

‘Why not? He isn’t here. He’ll never know. Here, have a swig.’

He passed me the bottle of expensive red wine, but I was too wary of spilling it, and besides, my mind was occupied with taking in the huge four-poster bed and the dark oak furnishings and the gigantic chest that took up at least a fifth of the large room’s space.

Will took a key from his jeans back pocket and fitted it into the chest’s lock.

‘This is his private stuff,’ I agonised. ‘I don’t think we should.’

Too late, though, because the lid was raised and I stared down into an abyss of deviance.

‘God,’ I whispered, lowering myself to my knees and peering inside. It was all so neatly compartmentalised, boxes within boxes, but some of the contents were in long fabric bags. For instance, the whips. And canes. And riding crops.

‘Is this what you’re into?’ asked Will, opening one of the boxes and showing me a selection of cuffs – leather, metal, fur-lined, velcro, you name it.

‘This is … I mean. Wow. It’s a collection. Does he just collect the stuff or does he use it?’

I opened another box, my curiosity overwhelming my caution now, and found a selection of first-edition titles, some of which – like The Story of O – were familiar to me, others not so well known.

‘The Harem of the Flagellants,’ I read, my finger hovering over a cheaply but sturdily bound Victorian tome. I shivered.

It was one thing to fantasise about these things, but quite another to see them in real life. I felt a strange kind of fear, as if I had skimmed a surface and been dragged underneath it. Now I was here in the underworld, could I get out again?

Will hadn’t answered my question, so I asked it again.

‘Does any of this stuff get used?’

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t had anyone here for a while. When he stays here, he just buries himself. Doesn’t go out. It’s like hibernation.’

‘I guess his work is quite intense. Ever since he won the Palme d’Or.’

Will shrugged.

‘Don’t ask me. I’ve worked here for four years but I wouldn’t say I knew him. This is the closest I’ve got to knowing anything about him. This here.’ He waved his hand at the boxes.

I had opened another. It contained things I had never seen in my life before, silicone things that were a little bit like dildoes but with an outward flare halfway along the length.

‘What the hell are these?’

Will snorted.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I’ve never done anything kinky,’ I defended myself.

‘Butt plugs, my love,’ he said, picking one up.

‘Oh, don’t touch it!’

‘Why not?’

I shook my head. I knew I was panicking, but I couldn’t seem to rein myself in.

‘Fingerprints,’ I mumbled.

He burst out laughing at that, waving the butt plug in the air.

‘You’re funny,’ he said, between fresh gusts of mirth.

‘You’ll have to share the joke.’ A third voice spoke from the doorway.

I fell backwards on to my arse, my hand clamping my mouth so hard and fast I almost knocked a couple of teeth out.

I watched through wide-stretched eyes as everything seeming to crash into slo-mo. Will dropped the butt plug and raised himself to his feet, shoulders back, squared for combat.

The man in the door was, presumably, Jasper Jay, though he wasn’t the way I remembered him from that medical soap he used to be in when I was a girl. Of course, a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then – fifteen years’ worth. He wasn’t a fresh-faced bright-eyed youth in a white coat now. He stood with one arm braced against the doorframe, in an expensive suit, its light biscuit colour accentuating his dark looks. He had that famous-person thing of looking somehow bigger and shinier and brighter than a real man. I hadn’t fancied him in the medical soap, or in the many news clips of him accepting the Palme d’Or, but now I could almost see the vortex of charisma inside which he existed.

But now wasn’t a good time to be ogling my boss.

Now was about the worst time ever for that kind of thing.

‘Shit, I thought you were in France,’ was Will’s pretty dreadful attempt at defending his actions.

I remained silent, cowering on a Turkish rug of early nineteenth-century vintage, concentrating on keeping Will’s bathrobe tightly wrapped around me.

‘Shit, you’re fired,’ replied Jay laconically.

‘You can’t just –’

‘Yes, I can. Pack your things. Load up your car. Get out of here.’

‘But my rights …’

‘In what universe isn’t this gross misconduct?’ He stepped into the room, unfolding his arm grandly to usher Will through the door. ‘Not ours, at least. Goodbye. I’ll forward any holiday entitlement you had outstanding on to you.’

‘Mr Jay, please … four years of good service.’

‘Ruined in the space of one night.’ Jay shook his head. ‘Like a film script, isn’t it?’ There was a pause. ‘I can’t help noticing that you’re still here.’

Will looked at me, as if expecting me to leap to his passionate defence. Seeing this wasn’t about to happen, he made as dignified an exit as he could muster.

I watched the knots between his shoulder blades, the buzz-cut V at his nape, retreat through the door.

I looked up, expecting my neck to be next on the block.

I ought to say something but I couldn’t think what so I waited, while tension and mortification played ping-pong in my emotional centre.

He didn’t say anything either, which was odd. He just looked at me, not angrily or severely, just sort of … pensively. His eyes were wintry and sombre, but not hard.

His abstraction was only broken when I cleared my throat and swallowed, looking desperately around me for any magical escape route that might present itself.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

I was already sitting down, but I gathered from the direction of his waving hand that I was to go and sit on the side of the bed.

There were armchairs in the room, but these wouldn’t do, it seemed.

‘Are you going to sack me too?’ I asked, the words coming out of my cotton-wool mouth in a thick wad.

He made no reply but walked over to the chest and reached inside.

I’d lost track of my heart. It had giddied up and up and now it was steeplechasing fit to collapse. What on earth did he have in mind?

He drew out one of the many long, thin boxes and came to stand over me, a looming presence, shadowing me. I felt very small and very vulnerable and yet a part of me was revelling in my disgrace, making sure it recalled all the details to be mulled over at leisure later.

He took the lid off the box and withdrew the contents – a wide strap of supple leather, with stiffer, darker, embossed leather at one end and a metal chain link intended for hanging it on a hook.

‘Do you know what this is?’ He presented it across his two palms where it lay, dormant but no less deadly, its antique tang gathering in my senses and whipping them up. ‘Take it. Hold it.’

Uncertainly, I plucked the thing from him and read the gilt lettering on the leather handle. ‘Holborn Barbering Supplies’. The leather was cold and smooth and cruelly sensual to the touch.

‘Well?’ Jay’s voice was soft but commanding.

‘It’s a razor strop. Antique.’

‘Can you date it?’

‘Not precisely. Mid-Victorian, perhaps.’

‘It’s not modern.’

‘No, it’s too heavy to be modern.’

‘That’s right. You know about these things, don’t you, Sarah?’

I looked up sharply at his use of my given name, which was spoken in a peculiarly intimate tone, with a whisper of caress behind it.

‘I … you hired me, after all.’

‘Yes, I did. I hired you.’

‘Do I still …?’ I couldn’t finish the sentence.

‘Have a job here?’ He stepped back and looked up at the ceiling, seeking advice in its elaborate cornicing and plaster rose. ‘Yes, I think you do.’

I waited a moment for my breathing to regulate then said, ‘Thank you.’

The silence between us was broken by the sound of bags being thrown heavily down the stairs.

‘Excuse me one moment,’ he said, leaving the room, presumably to direct the departure of Will. I wondered if Jasper Jay directed everything in his life like this, getting the details right, making art of the day-to-day. He had certainly orchestrated our first encounter to make it memorable. I stared down at the antique strop, picturing it employed for other purposes than the sharpening of blades. Had he used this on somebody? Had it fallen heavy on some bent-over bottom, marking it with a hot red rectangle?

I heard the front door slam, the revving of an engine outside. I wondered if I should feel sorrier for Will, but I couldn’t summon much in the way of sympathy when it came down to it. He’d been caught fair and square with his hand in the … well, I could hardly call it a cookie jar.

Jasper came back, but he didn’t enter the room, just stood with his hands on the top of the doorframe, leaning in, looking me up and down and over until I bristled with a weird exhilaration. At least the towelling robe was thick and he couldn’t see the way my nipples perked into stiffness under his gaze.

‘Come downstairs,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll light the fire. Have a drink with me.’

‘Oh … this robe … I should get dressed …’

‘No, you shouldn’t.’

I stood up and dithered with the razor strop, mutely asking him what to do with it.

‘Bring it with you.’

He walked off and I followed him, the leather clutched to my chest, trying to make my footsteps as barely-there as possible on the highly polished wood.

He had lit the fire by the time I reached the sitting room. I winced at the sight of the two abandoned wine glasses on the low coffee table. Jasper picked one up and sniffed into it.

‘Christ, the fucking nerve of him,’ he muttered. ‘My best vintage.’ But when he put it down, he smiled at me, a dazzling, film-star smile that knocked me off course.

‘Sarah,’ he said, all effusiveness and warmth. ‘Sit down.’

I sat on one side of the fire while he poured me some wine from an ornate cut-glass decanter, circa 1820s.

‘Aren’t you angry with me?’ I asked, taking a nerving sip while he seated himself in the opposite wing-backed chair with his own glass.

‘I’m assuming you were led astray,’ he said.

‘You’re assuming?’

‘Yes. Because that’s the interpretation that suits me. So I’m sticking to it.’

I hid my confusion in another sip.

‘You can leave if you really want, of course. But I’d prefer it if you stayed. I went to some considerable lengths to find you, Sarah. Now you’re here, I have no intention of letting you go.’

‘What?’

I put the glass on the card table and sat up straight. What could he possibly mean by that? The fire burned at the side of my face and I put my hand up to my cheek, protecting it.

‘The job you applied for wasn’t universally advertised, you know. I only had it placed in the university history department magazine I knew you wrote for.’

‘What?’ I said again.

I thought back to the advertisement, quite a showy one for my humble little student history-geek mag. I’d presumed it to be just one of many, fired off to every university history department in the country.

‘After I read that article of yours.’

‘You read an article of mine? In Past Pleasures?’

This made no sense at all. Why the actual hell would famous arthouse film director Jasper Jay read my obscure little postgraduate pamphlet?

‘Yes. Don’t look so shocked.’ He laughed. ‘It was forwarded to me by an associate who thought it … up my street. As it were. And it was. It was an amazing article. Superbly researched and lacking the usual prurient or hysterical tone one grows so weary of.’

‘You’re talking about … I can’t remember what I called it …’

‘“The Old Perversity Shop”. About that collection of Victorian fetish implements they found in Lincoln last year.’

I looked into the fire, wanting to laugh for some reason. This was like a dream, unravelling so quickly and so absurdly.

‘The thing about your article, Sarah,’ he said softly, ‘is that it was written with more than academic curiosity. It was written with enthusiasm. With love.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. Only somebody close to the subject could have written about it in the way you did. No “ugh, those old-school freaks”. No “isn’t this interesting, in a scholarly, abstract kind of way, of course”. You understood the allure of those whips and cuffs. Didn’t you?’

I was under the spotlight, on the spot. There was no feasible response to this other than a good deal of squirming and evasive body language.

But something told me that Jasper Jay wasn’t a man who would stand for squirming and evasive body language.

‘Didn’t you?’ he persisted. ‘There’s no point trying to deny it. I see it in you.’

‘Do you mean to say that you read my article, placed the advert in the hope that I’d respond and, and …?’

‘Had you hired on the spot? Yes. My agent knew she had to give the job to Sarah Wells. So when Sarah Wells walked into the office … bingo.’

He clicked his fingers and beamed with delight.

My toes were curled right under and I realised that every muscle in my body was held in a state of supreme tautness, as if in preparation for some kind of desperate death-match. Did it mean I was scared? I didn’t feel scared. Not exactly.

‘But why?’

‘You’ve seen my collection. I had hoped to leave it until later in the summer, when you’d finished the more … orthodox … portion of your task and my filming schedule was complete, but it can’t be helped, can it? Even my strict timetable can be subject to sudden changes.’

‘Why did you come back? I thought you were in France till August.’

‘So did I.’ He sighed, sipped his wine. ‘Our leading man disagreed. Ridiculous bastard went and got his leg broken in a jetski accident. Next movie I make, I’m having everyone, cast and crew, living in a barracks and having to apply to me for passes to get out.’

‘Control-freaky.’

He smiled at me again.

‘Yes.’

I appeared to have finished the wine. Christ, that was quick. I needed to sip from the glass, for my hands to have something to do besides shaking.

‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said. I watched his fingers, long and white, stroke the stem of his glass. ‘Unless you want to be.’

‘I can’t help it,’ I said, a tad mutinously. ‘This situation isn’t covered in Emily Post. I don’t know what to say or do, or …’

‘Just say what you feel. Do what you feel.’

‘In that case –’ I put the glass down with an overstated flourish ‘– I’m going to bed.’

He shrugged and smiled, watching me make as dignified an exit as I could.

‘Sweet dreams,’ he said when I reached the door.

I looked back at him. His face was shadowed, his brow low, the smile a Hollywood-white tease.

I fled.