Your Room or Mine?:. Charlotte Phillips
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break. Why was she even surprised? Everything about him oozed cash – the clothes he’d worn at check-in, the expensive leather overnight bag, the way he spoke.
‘You?’ he asked.
‘It’s a treat break,’ she said. ‘You know, one of those packages you can book. Dinner, bed and breakfast with use of the spa thrown in.’
He was looking at her politely and she supposed he’d never had to look for the deal price in his life.
‘So just the one night, ‘she added.
‘Better make it count, then,’ he said and the way he held her eyes a moment too long made it feel like he wasn’t just talking about the spa and the gourmet restaurant. Her stomach felt suddenly melty, not helped by the fact she was hitting the edge of her heat tolerance.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried out every facility in the spa, well, the free ones anyway, and I’ve still got dinner to go. Then tomorrow I hit the shops.’ She stood up. ‘I need to cool down. Excuse me.’
She stood eyes closed under the aromatherapy shower, letting it cool her skin, then walked around the pool to the lounger where she’d left her bag and towel. Oliver Forbes with his perfect body was still in the steam room. Instead of lying back on the towel she picked it up and automatically wrapped it around her. Confidence in the way she looked wasn’t her strong point right now. If Joe was washed up drowning on a beach she’d throw a bucket of water over him, but that didn’t diminish the little seeds of doubt he’d planted in her mind when he’d tried to shift some of the blame for his behaviour her way. OK so she knew she was carrying a few extra pounds, mainly around the hips, but she’d been so sure of Joe’s love she hadn’t given it a second thought before.
Oliver Forbes emerged from the steam room and stood under the shower. She watched as the water cascaded over his body, knowing she shouldn’t be staring but unable to tear her eyes away. Joe hadn’t been keen on exercise beyond playing a bit of football with his mates. What might it feel like to be with someone that fit? He grabbed a towel from a row of hooks, then skirted the pool and headed towards her.
‘You mind?’ he indicated the lounger next to her. There was a roomful of them to choose from and he wanted that one? Her heart gave a tiny skip.
She shrugged and he sat down, rubbing his hair with a corner of the towel.
‘Drink?’ he asked, reaching for the phone on the table between loungers.
She looked up at him. A drink? A flurry of excited butterflies zipped briefly through her stomach before common sense bashed them into submission. A drink did not mean he was hitting on her, and even if he was she couldn’t be less interested. Someone like him would never look twice at her, he was obviously just being polite.
Her own package deal danced through her mind. Outside its remit, you were practically charged for drawing breath in this place. Why not take him up on the drink, it meant nothing.
‘I’d love coffee,’ she said.
He gave the order over the phone and sat back.
‘I can’t remember the last time I went swimming,’ she said, pulling her own towel a little closer around her.
‘You don’t belong to a gym?’
That meant he did, presumably. Who was she kidding, of course he did. You didn’t get abs like that from sitting around watching TV. He clearly put in a lot of work.
She shook her head.
‘My working hours are long,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I’m so tired by the time I get home the last thing I’d want to do is more exercise.’
‘I thought your job was more about potting plants,’ he said, a grin touching his lips. ‘I didn’t realise it could be so physically demanding.’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s not standing with a basket picking flowers,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of heavy work involved. You have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.’
He reached across suddenly and paused, hand outstretched.
‘May I?’
She stared. What exactly was he playing at?
She watched in surprise as he took one of her hands in his, no impulse kicked in to pull it away despite the sudden hot feeling in her stomach. He uncurled her fingers to see the palm and turned her hand to see her fingernails.
‘This doesn’t look like the hand of a heavyweight gardener,’ he said.
She took her hand away and held both of them up.
‘Yeah well, it’s amazing what a bit of hand cream can do. Sometimes at the end of a working day they look like shovels.’
‘So gym, spa treatments and swimming is a welcome break then. Is this something you do often?’
Because she really looked like a gym bunny. Not.
‘Not often. I’m treating myself.’
‘And you prefer to do that alone?’
Her self-consciousness about staying here alone resurfaced and she squashed it back down.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be a solitary thing,’ she said.
‘No?’
For a moment she considered fobbing him off, but she was used to being the subject of gossip now. Why bother making up some story for someone she didn’t know and didn’t care about?
‘I booked the room for a romantic night away with my boyfriend.’ She looked him boldly in the eye. Nothing to be embarrassed about. ‘This hotel offers themed breaks – dinner, spa, breakfast, one price and it’s all included. Ex-boyfriend now,’ she added, pasting on an I-couldn’t-care-less smile, to prove she was absolutely fine with that.
‘You came alone on your own romantic night away?’ He sounded amused. ‘You didn’t cancel?’
She couldn’t blame him. It did sound a bit insane spoken out loud. She squared her shoulders.
‘It seemed a shame to waste it,’ she said. ‘It was a non-refundable payment. So I figured I’d turn it into a Reinvention Break instead.’
She mumbled the last part and he leaned in close enough for her to see the tiny droplets of water that still clung to his skin and hair. A light frown touched his eyebrows.
‘Reinvention? Of what?’
She looked straight at him. He was a total stranger, what the hell did she care what he thought?
‘Of me,’ she said.
Oliver leaned back in his lounger as their coffee arrived, watching her, all obstinate bravado protesting that she didn’t care.
‘Odd choice of word, ‘reinvention’’, he said, when the waiter had gone. ‘Implies that you need to change. Which in turn implies that you’re somehow responsible for whatever went wrong.’
‘I’m not!’ she snapped.
He looked at her over his coffee cup.
‘Call it something else then. Not reinvention. I haven’t seen anything about you yet that I’d change.’
As he heard her light intake of breath and saw a touch of blush rise high on her cheekbones, he wondered when she’d last received a compliment. Long-term complacent relationship? A breeding ground for lack of appreciation. All he had to do was take advantage of that.
There was something very appealing about her at close quarters. Put aside for a moment the fact that she was pretty, albeit in a dishevelled outdoorsy sort of way. There was an air of defiance about her that he liked. Whatever the ex-boyfriend had done, she wasn’t sitting at home crying into her pillow was she? She’d kicked him into touch and had turned her romantic