Chapter 11
11
SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER
C assie wasn’t particularly looking forward to Lucy and Russell’s wedding. Not when she’d lost her plus-one two weeks before the big day. Bod had suddenly announced he was emigrating to Australia where they were desperate for plumbers so he’d easily got the required points on his visa.
It took time and forward planning to emigrate to another country. Yet he’d given Cassie a week’s notice of his decision to resign from the position of boyfriend.
Now she was forced to fly solo at the fanciest wedding she’d ever been to. The fanciest anything she’d ever been to.
The wedding was taking place at the church in the village where Lucy had grown up; the reception at a country house hotel several miles away. It was more of a stately home and the room, which Cassie was meant to be sharing, and splitting the costs of, with Bogdan, was more than Cassie had ever spent on anything.
It had really eaten into her dress budget, though Cassie was determined to look as smoking hot as humanly possible. ‘There’ll be plenty of foxy single men who’ll be desperate to dance with you,’ Lucy had promised.
Russell was lovely but Cassie doubted that his friends would think she passed muster, and she didn’t really like posh boys, but still, she didn’t want people to think that she was some grubby charity case that Lucy had befriended as part of a community outreach programme. Also, there had to be one really fit bloke at the wedding. Hopefully, more than one.
Thankfully Grace, the fashion assistant on Skirt , had let Cassie borrow a Dolce so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income.’
All the wedding moments were ticked off. The cutting of the cake. The first dance to Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’. Everyone taking to the dancefloor for ‘Come on Eileen’. Many songs danced to. Many hours passed. Many glasses of champagne. Cassie’s shoes long abandoned.
The nuptials were winding down. Lara and Monique were each slow-dancing with a ruddy-cheeked man and Cassie was sitting alone at their table, everyone else gone. Her teeth had gone numb from all the champagne; unfortunately the same couldn’t be said of her feet, which throbbed in time to ‘Careless Whisper’.
Then she felt the light brush of someone’s arm against her shoulder and a voice said, ‘You look like you could do with some company.’
With a heavy heart and a fake smile, because she really could not listen to any more stories about Nathan’s ‘fucking crazy’ ex, Cassie glanced behind her – but it wasn’t Nathan.
It was the man she’d seen at the church. The well fit man who looked even fitter in the flickering glow of hundreds of tiny tea lights and the fairy lights strung across the support struts of the marquee. He looked a little more tousled than he had before and his smile was wider, very definitely appreciative, as he gestured at the empty chair next to Cassie.
‘May I?’ he asked in a drawly voice that carried the trace of an accent.
‘Yeah, I mean, of course,’ Cassie said.
He pushed the chair closer to Cassie so that when he sat down, they were almost touching. Then he rested one arm along the back of her chair so she could feel the heat coming off him, the faint scent of soft leather and spice cut through with something sharper.
‘I haven’t been able to take my eyes off you all evening,’ he said conversationally.
‘In a good way or a bad way?’ She might have drunk a lot of champagne but Cassie still knew that yawning during the best man’s speech and her enthusiastic twerking to ‘Bootylicious’ had not been her finest moments.
‘Oh, in a very good way,’ the man assured her.
This close, he was mesmerising. The intent way he looked at her, that half-smile, and the way there seemed to be something dangerous about it. About him.
And then he touched her.
One long finger hooked into the spaghetti strap of Cassie’s dress where it had slipped down her arm and adjusted it so it was on her shoulder again, the tip of his finger delving into the dip of her collarbone and causing chaos in her nerve endings.
‘God, it’s been doing that all night. So annoying,’ Cassie muttered, unable to turn away from his face because he was so pleasing, so beautiful, to look at.
‘Do you want to know a secret?’ he drawled, his finger still creating havoc as he now stroked it up her neck.
Eyes wide, Cassie nodded.
‘It’s one of the most erotic things I’ve ever seen. Every time it slipped down, it transformed you from proper to improper.’ Then, with his eyes never leaving Cassie’s flushed face, he slowly and deliberately pushed the thin loop of black satin off her shoulder again.
That brush of his finger across her skin was certainly the most erotic thing Cassie had ever experienced. Just his finger on her shoulder, the top of her arm, and already her nipples were hard, and a yearning ache had begun deep down in her belly. She hardly knew what to do with herself.
‘Are you staying here tonight?’ he asked, bending his head so his lips didn’t quite make contact with her shoulder but she could feel his breath ghost across her skin. She shivered though she wasn’t cold. Quite the opposite.
Again, Cassie nodded.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’
‘Yeah.’ A pause. ‘I do.’
His smile curved into something positively sinful. ‘Good, so do I.’