Mr and Mischief. Кейт Хьюит
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utterly nonplussed by her rather brutal assessment of him. Boring? And he’d been thinking she still had a little crush on him. Well, that was him sorted. ‘Boring,’ he repeated musingly as he started the car. ‘And dull. I wonder if I should be offended.’
‘You can hardly be offended by that, Jason!’
Now he really was offended. Most women didn’t think he was boring at all. Most women were eager to spend an evening with him. Yet here Emily sat sprawled in the seat across from him, her skirt riding up on her slim thighs, looking at him as if he were her doddering old uncle whom she had to humour.
Yet she hadn’t looked at him like that last night. He still remembered the brief, enticing touch of her hand on his chest. She’d been startled by the electric current that had suddenly snapped between them; he knew she’d felt it. He certainly had. Now he slid her a sideways glance as he revved the engine, causing Emily to laugh a little as she instinctively grabbed the door handle. ‘Can’t I?’ he murmured.
‘Well, honestly,’ she said once he’d pulled out of the office’s underground car park and begun to drive down Euston Road at quite a sedate speed. ‘You’ve always been—’
‘Boring?’ He heard the slight edge to his voice and strove to temper it. This was not how he’d pictured this evening starting.
‘Well, not boring precisely,’ Emily allowed. ‘But. predictable. Cautious. Steady.’ Jason kept his face expressionless although he felt his brows start to draw together in an instinctive glower. She was actually patronising him. ‘You never took part in the games and scrapes we got into—’
‘By “we” I assume you mean you, Isobel and Jack,’ Jason returned dryly. At Emily’s nod, he continued, ‘You might do well to remember, Em, that you’re twelve years younger than I am. While you were getting into these so-called scrapes, I was in university.’ His hands tightened on the wheel as the difference in their ages struck its necessary blow. Emily might be twenty-five, but she was still young. And in many ways, naive. Innocent, if not utterly, not to mention scatty, silly and far too frivolous. She was entirely wrong for him. Wrong for what he wanted.
Wrong for a wife.
‘Well, of course I know that,’ she said. ‘But, even so … you’ve always been a bit disapproving, Jason. Even of Jack—’
‘You didn’t have to live with him,’ Jason returned, keeping his voice mild. Of course everyone loved Jack. Jack was fun, except when it was Jason fetching him from boarding school after he’d been expelled, or from a party where he’d passed out. Fortunately, Jack had settled down since he’d been married, but Jason still remembered his younger brother’s turbulent teen years. He’d helped him out because their father never would, and Jack had no memories of their mother. He had precious few himself … and the ones he did, he’d sometimes rather forget.
‘Still,’ Emily persisted in that same teasing tone, ‘I remember the lectures you gave me. When I picked a few flowers from your garden, you positively glowered. You terrified me—’
‘By a few flowers you mean all the daffodils.’ They had been his mother’s favourite, and he’d been furious with her for beheading them all, as he remembered.
‘Was it all of them?’ Her eyebrows arched in surprise. ‘Oh, dear. I was a bit of a brat, wasn’t I?’
‘I didn’t want to be the one to say it,’ Jason murmured, and was rewarded with a gurgle of throaty laughter that made him feel as if he’d just stuck his finger in an electric socket. His whole body felt wired, alive and pulsating with pure lust. This evening really had been a mistake. He was playing with fire, and while he could handle a few burns, Emily surely couldn’t. That was why he’d always stayed away, and why he should keep at it. Right now he could have been sitting down to dinner with Patience Felton-Smythe, a boring woman with a horsey face who liked to garden and knit and was on the board of three charities. In short, the kind of woman he intended to marry.
Emily gazed out of the window at the blur of traffic, the streets of London slick with rain. Although it was only the beginning of November, the Christmas lights had already been strung along Regent Street and their lights were streakily reflected on the pavement below.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Jason turned onto Brook Street.
‘Claridge’s,’ he said and Emily let out a little laugh.
‘I should have known. Somewhere upscale and respectable and just a little bit stodgy.’
‘Like me?’ Jason filled in as they pulled up to the landmark hotel.
Emily smiled sweetly. She had offended Jason with her offhand remark. ‘You said it, not me.’
‘You didn’t need to. But, in any case, Claridge’s has had a bit of a remake over the years. You might find it’s the same with me.’ He tossed the keys to the valet and came around to help Emily out of the car, his hand strong and firm as he guided her from the low-slung Porsche—not easy to manage in her stiletto heels and short skirt—and continued to hold her hand as he led her into the restaurant. Emily didn’t protest, although she surely should have. There was something comforting and really rather nice about the way his fingers threaded through hers, his grip sure and strong.
It reminded her of when she’d been younger, and no matter what she’d done or where she’d gone, she’d trusted implicitly that Jason would be there to save her. Scold her too, undoubtedly, but she’d always known with him she was safe.
Yet as Jason glanced back at her, his eyes glinting, turning them the colour of dark honey, she had to acknowledge that something about holding Jason’s hand didn’t feel like when she was younger at all. In fact it felt quite different—different enough for a strange new uneasiness to ripple through her, and she smiled and slipped her hand from his as the maître d’ led them to a secluded table in a corner of the iconic restaurant.
‘So what’s the occasion, exactly?’ Emily asked as she opened the menu and began to peruse its offerings.
‘Occasion?’
‘I can’t think the last time you took me out to dinner, if ever.’
Jason’s lips twitched. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’
‘I suppose, but.’ Emily paused, cocking her head as she gazed at Jason; his hair was a little damp and rumpled from the rain and he had an endearingly studious expression on his face as he perused the wine list. She could see the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, and it made him look surprisingly attractive. Sexy, even, which was ridiculous because she’d never thought of Jason that way—
Except for that once, and that was not going to be repeated.
‘Are you checking up on me?’ she asked, and Jason glanced up from the wine list.
‘Checking up on you? You sound like you have a guilty conscience, Em. Too many parties?’
‘No, it’s just …’ She paused, uncertain how to articulate how odd it was to be here with Jason, almost as if they were on a date. Which was ridiculous, because she knew Jason didn’t think of her that way—hadn’t he proved it on the dance floor seven years ago? Emily was quite sure nothing had changed there.
Except she had changed, of course. She’d grown up and moved long past that silly moment of infatuation with staid, stuffy Jason. And while she was perfectly happy to have dinner with an old family friend, she wasn’t sure she wanted some kind of lecture. Had her father asked Jason to keep an eye on her, now he was back in London for a fair bit? It was quite possible.
‘Just no lectures,’ she said, wagging a finger at him, and Jason shook his head.
‘I think you’re a little too old for lectures, Em. Unless you misbehave, of course.’ There was something almost wicked about Jason’s smile, his eyes glinting in the candlelit dimness of the room, and Emily felt her stomach dip again.