Did Someone Order Room Service?:

‘Makes sense. You need a relative to invoke a tantrum that size.’

‘It was NOT some tantrum. I’m twenty four, not four. It was anger. Pure, white hot, tear-her-head-from-her-shoulders anger.’

He pulled a face.

‘Wow. Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you.’

She managed a smile and groped for a potted explanation before he could pigeon-hole her as scary freak.

‘She’s cleaned out my savings account and disappeared across the world on some ridiculous mid-life crisis trip.’ She pointed her pen at him. ‘The States. Your neck of the woods. I was trying to talk her down but she was already at the airport, tickets in hand, and nothing was going to stop her.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m normally a pretty level-headed person, I just lost it, that’s all. I’d been saving for years.’

Exasperation twisted her stomach again, this time with a sense of defeat that made her want to crash her head down on the coffee table next to the sofa. Her mother would be airborne now, winging her way across the Atlantic, and Layla might just as well have withdrawn her savings from the bank and chucked them in the bin for all the likelihood she had of ever seeing them again.

‘For what?’

She shrugged.

‘A place of my own.’

The chances of achieving that dream now were non-existent, certainly for the next few years. For some reason saying it out loud invoked a surge of despair that made her throat feel suddenly tight and achy. She swallowed like mad and bit her lower lip, hard to distract herself. She was absolutely not going to lose it in front of a stranger. Especially a stranger who had everything. He probably had half a dozen places of his own on various different continents.

‘Just you and your mom then?’ he said. ‘Any other relatives? Married, single, other?’

The only good thing about that question was that it distracted her from her misery. Was he actually sizing her up as a prospect? Good grief, was this how he operated – checking out his prey in a few quick sentences to see if they had strings attached or not? He was looking at her in a boldly appraising way that made her stomach feel like melty marshmallow, as if he could see right inside her. She took a calming sip of her orange juice.

‘Single,’ she said.

He continued to look at her expectantly. She would have loved to be the kind of confident person who felt no need to fill deliberate pauses in conversations, but the age-old need to be liked and respected had total control when it came to holding her tongue.

‘I don’t have time for relationships,’ she heard herself elaborating. He was nodding encouragement. ‘I’ve been trying to get on at work, save some money up for a flat.’ A rueful laugh bubbled out of her. ‘Not that I’ve actually got any savings anymore. And this job isn’t exactly nine-to-five. Socialising takes a bit of a back seat.’

‘Ah the job again,’ he said, sitting back a little on the sofa. ‘So there’s really no limit to any request I might make?’

A calming wave of relief that the conversation was back on a professional footing made her breathe easier.

‘Nope,’ she said, giving him an enthusiastic smile. ‘No limit. We had an actress not long ago who took a whole floor for her entourage and had every room repainted candy pink. Or on a lesser scale, scented candles in the room are a biggie. Or banks of flowers on every surface. No request too great, too off-the-wall, too diva … ’

She trailed away with the PR spiel as he continued to watch her, his gaze holding hers absolutely steady, the expression on his face like the cat who was about to steal the cream.

‘And what about more…personal requests.’

His eyes creased at the corners, the lopsided smile that had melted the hearts of the nation’s women played at his lips.

Her heart began thundering as if she’d just taken the four-storey hotel stairwell two at a time. He was coming onto her. Wasn’t he? Why on earth would someone like him look twice at someone like her? If it had been anyone else self-doubt might have won the day and she would have dismissed the idea out of hand, but then this was Matt Stanton. The track record of his personal life spoke for itself, he’d bedded more women than she’d had hot coffees.

She’d been a fan of his for years. It wasn’t just his skill and grace on the tennis court, it was the same thing that afflicted the rest of the female species. Women fell at his feet, at which point he picked them up, had the time of his life and then dropped them again just as abruptly. Most infuriating of all, that bachelor-playboy persona seemed to make him all the more desirable.

None of them seemed to mind. Even the kiss n’ tell stories were, when you got right down to it, ultimately complimentary, this morning’s offering a perfect case in point. She thought back to the morning tabloids – My hot aeroplane encounter with Mile-High Matt splashed across the front pages with accompanying grainy mobile phone pic of his naked and very muscular butt.

‘If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I’m not a groupie,’ she heard herself say, thinking of her mother’s insane mission to follow a has-been rock group to another continent. No way was she being categorised alongside that.

Rock stars, tennis stars, it was all interchangeable. What it amounted to was basking in the fringes of someone else’s celebrity, as if the excitement in their lives would somehow rub off on your own supermarket-shopping nine-to-five-daily-grind existence.

‘I don’t care if you are or not,’ he said. ‘The popular press might have it down differently but whether you believe it or not that’s not the single characteristic I look for in a woman.’

‘But you’ve known me for five minutes,’ she protested.

He shrugged.

‘Why does that have to be a negative? If you think about it for a moment you’ll see it opens up a world of possibility. There’s no background hangups to get past, no baggage to talk over and get in the way, no irritating friends and family members to get along with. No hoops to jump through. Just you and me. This room. And whatever we want it to be.’

He leaned forward, reached a tentative hand out and stroked a finger gently across her cheek, the lightest of touches which sent sparks of heat flying through her.

OMG Matt Stanton just touched my cheek!

This was exactly the kind of situation her mother had chased since before Layla was born, and now it had simply presented itself to her as if by magic. An unexpected surge of righteous in-your-face defiance caught her by surprise. Dull and boring, was she? Life passing her by? The hottest man in world tennis had just propositioned her without needing so much as a hint of encouragement. She wasn’t even dressed up for Pete’s sake, she was wearing the usual hideous charcoal grey hotel uniform, name badge pinned to her lapel, happy-to-help smile pasted on her face. Not a leather bustier in sight.

Hot on the heels of the defiance came an idea that was so wildly outside her remit that it made her feel dizzy and she held her glass of orange juice tightly in both hands and took a calming sip of it to steady herself.

Her life as it stood at this moment in time wasn’t exactly scaling the dizzy heights of success, was it? Her mother’s parting words gnawed at her pride and self-belief deep down on a base level. Maybe she could have brushed them off if she was holding down some high-flying job and living an upwardly mobile life in a flat of her own, but the fact was, she wasn’t even close. However hard she might try to crush it, there was a tiny bit of her that wondered whether her mother might actually have a point when it came to life. What exactly had twenty four years of striving for respectability got her?

It had been no picnic staking a claim for common sense and normality in the middle of the chaotic one-crazy-minute-at-a-time lifestyle of her mother. Since reaching adulthood the desire for a place of her own had reached dizzying heights, the need for proper roots and security driving her on to work ever longer hours.

And just where exactly had it got her?

For the first time she could remember, looking into the melting brown eyes full of suggestion, with the day becoming crazier by the minute, she questioned her own judgement and beliefs.

Thanks to her mother she was as far away from saving a deposit up as ever. She had a tiny rented studio with sparse shared facilities and a job that left hardly any surplus at the end of the month for savings. The endless grind of that wore her down. Her friend Lucy, one of the many waitressing staff, had a buzzing social life which she lived to the full, never knowing or caring what the next moment might bring. Layla rarely had time or funds for any of that.

Why not do something outside her comfort zone for once? Her comfort zone hadn’t exactly delivered much in the way of comfort so far. The thought of doing something reckless and impulsive felt suddenly very exciting, as if she would be stepping outside her own nightmare of a life into a glamorous unpredictable world where anything could happen. For a moment there she actually weakened.

And then reality bit her squarely on the arse.

What was she doing? Was this the kind of thought that travelled around her mother’s brain on a loop? She was under no illusions about how exciting and interesting she was when put up against the draw of fame and fortune, her mother had spent her whole life illustrating that very point. She had no truck with fame or celebrities and was she really about to be seduced by the very thing she’d spent her whole life abhorring?

She grimly ignored the delicious flip flops going on in her stomach as he smiled at her and forced herself to put her glass down on the table. She stood up, put a few paces between them and swallowed hard to channel calm and squash the surge of you’re-not-turning-him-down-are-you disappointment that had begun to rise in her stomach to replace the butterflies. He didn’t get up, simply lounged back on the sofa looking up at her in amusement, a smile still playing about his lips. He was utterly, breathtakingly gorgeous. But the fact that she owned a calendar depicting him in a different bare-torsoed pose for each month of the year had no place whatsoever in this debate.

‘I need to check on a few things downstairs,’ she said, leaning in to grab her clipboard from the table and backing away at speed. ‘If you need anything, call the number for Guest Services. It’s attached to the phone.’

She heard his relaxed laugh as she headed for the door.

‘I’ll do that,’ he called after her.

****

‘I’ve just been hit on by Matt Stanton,’ Layla said, scratching her head. ‘At least I think I have.’

Now she was out of the gorgeous luxury of the Kerry Suite and back down here in the reality check that was the sparse staff quarters of the hotel, she began to question her own perception. Why the hell would Matt Stanton hit on her? He could have anyone he chose.

Her friend Lucy’s eyebrows met in a frown and she quit making coffee to give Layla her full attention.

‘You’ve what?’

Layla glanced quickly around her and lowered her voice to an uncertain whisper.

‘I think I’ve just been hit on by Matt Stanton,’ she repeated.

Lucy squealed mad laughter.

‘You kill me! Course you have! And I’m marrying George Clooney this weekend. He’s popping over to pick me up in his private jet.’

There was a brief stab of indignant offense because she was clearly so undesirable that the idea of Matt Stanton giving her a second glance was a joke.

‘He’s staying in the Kerry Suite on the top floor,’ Layla said. ‘It’s all been hushed up because he’s having trouble with the press and he needed a last-minute bolthole to get away from all the fuss.’

Layla waited patiently until the laughter petered out and an expression of incredulity replaced it.

‘The Matt Stanton? The tennis playboy with the abs to die for? He’s staying here? Omigod I’m such a fan.’ She stared into space, her mind obviously working overtime. ‘I wonder if I can get a transfer from waiting tables into room service for the week. You know, in case he orders some food in, or champagne. Some of those celebs are like that you know, don’t like slumming it in the public restaurant with the rest of us.’

Oh for Pete’s sake.

‘He said he doesn’t usually drink champagne,’ Layla said. ‘He had mineral water and I had orange juice.’

‘You had a drink with him?’

Did she have to sound so amazed by that fact?

‘Yes. And he was going on about personal requests.’

Lucy rolled her eyes enviously at the ceiling.

‘I am soooo jealous! So when are you going to follow it up? You know…’ she winked at Layla ‘…make your next move?’

She spoke as if it was perfectly natural to throw yourself at a celebrity if he happened to wander into your path.

‘I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s more than my job’s worth.’

Although actually her job wasn’t worth an awful lot right now, was it? She was busting a gut all hours and stuck in dismal rental accommodation for the foreseeable future. Disappointment suddenly seemed to be mixing with something else in her churning stomach. Something that felt an awful lot like regret.

‘It’s not more than mine’s worth,’ Lucy said, grinning.

‘So you wouldn’t have any scruples about having a fling with Matt Stanton then, even though he has the worst reputation ever for womanising. It would never lead to anything. He’s on the front of the tabloids with a different girl every week. Wouldn’t that bother you?’

Lucy shrugged and stirred a spoonful of sugar into her coffee mug.

‘Why would it? It would just be a quickie and it would actually be one to remember for once. Why make it such a big deal? Imagine having a fling with Matt Stanton.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘He’s absolutely gorgeous. And anyway everyone has ill-conceived flings in their past. One-night-stands that you wish you’d never done. Holiday romances that you shag on the beach and then never see again.’

‘I don’t,’ Layla said.

‘Yeah well, you’re not like the rest of us are you?’ She pointed at Layla with her teaspoon. ‘You’re…you know…sensible.’

She apparently tried to put a positive spin on that statement by adding a consoling smile, but it had no effect whatsoever.

When you got right down to it that was just another way of calling her boring. And she’d heard that once too often today.

‘Anyway,’ Lucy picked up her coffee mug and headed off towards the kitchens. ‘He was probably only messing about anyway. I mean, come on, he could have anyone he wanted, right?’

Tact was certainly not Lucy’s strong point. For some reason that parting comment grated hideously, the clear implication being that she had to be mistaken. Sensible, boring and now deluded that he could even have been interested in her at all. An inner defiance surfaced that might have been there all along, but more likely came from that final straw of a dismissive comment on the back of the crappy day from hell she’d had so far.

Five minutes later and she was stalking back down the top floor passageway at top speed, heart thundering loud enough in her ears to drown out the tired old voice in her head that had kept her on the straight and narrow all these years.

He opened the door of the suite on her first knock and she burst into the room, riding the wave of defiant impulsiveness and crappy-day-from-hellness. The feeling it gave her turned out to be surprisingly liberating. Suddenly, unfettered by her endless drive for respect and normality, anything felt possible. She caught the briefest glimpse of his eyes widening in surprise as before she could change her mind, she stood on her tiptoes, curled one arm around his neck and planted a kiss squarely on his mouth.

CHAPTER THREE

Too stunned to do anything but stand there, he froze until she pulled away, breathing hard. The look in her wide eyes was a mixture of shock and exhilaration.

It wasn’t often that women surprised him. He’d been faintly amused by her determination to give him the brush-off. It all added to the fun, right? He certainly hadn’t expected Miss Straight-Down-The-Line to do a u-turn all by herself, and had in fact been idling away the half hour since she’d left the suite considering his own next move. Yet apparently his charm had a presence of its own, continuing to work even when he wasn’t present. And now that she had made that u-turn, it would be rude not to respond, right?

Initially caught off-guard, he quickly reclaimed control of the situation. He looked down into the china blue eyes and took in her short, quick breaths and the expression on her face of nervous excitement. Really, she was so cute. He took his time to savour the triumph as he slid his hands into her far-too-tidy hair and angled her jaw perfectly with a stroke of his thumbs. Slowly now, his pace not hers, he kissed her.

The touch of his lips and the slide of his hand around her waist sent delicious sparks of heat flying down her spine. Rationality almost made a last-minute comeback. One little move and she could still undo this madness, she could have the status of the girl who’d knocked back Matt Stanton, maybe that could have its own special kudos. She could go right on back to the daily grind, the work-hard-and-get-nowhere treadmill that she’d been on for years.

Maybe on a normal day rationality might have stood a chance. But today second thoughts didn’t seem to have an awful lot going for them. After the day she’d had the thought of behaving badly and tasting life seemed like the best idea she’d had in years. Why not find out exactly what it was she was supposed to be missing out on. At least then she could argue her point with her nutty mother from a position of knowledge. And let’s face it, behaving well for the last twenty four years hadn’t really yielded any results, had it?

She shoved away the voice of reason and let herself melt against him. There was no grabbing, no fast moves, he was making it clear that every step of this was something to relish, not a crazy rush. Just one single connection, his lips against hers, slowly intensified by his hand as he slipped it into her hair to cradle the nape of her neck. Tingling heat spiralled through her body to pool in an intense flutter between her legs.

And all the while the neon sign flashed in her mind.

Matt Stanton is KISSING YOU! You have his calendar hanging downstairs in your locker!

He took her lower lip between his own and sucked gently, caressing her lips apart with his tongue. Her hands crept around his neck, wanting more of that delicious connection, and excitement rose inside her like a crowd of butterflies, masking reality, buffering out the inhibiting real world of choices and consequences.

Losing herself.

She let her hands slide up his chest and knitted fingers behind his neck. His shoulders were gorgeous. The breadth of them. The solidity. And the strength in his arms and hands, the latent power beneath his lightness of touch. You could feel protected from anything wrapped in arms like those.

This was the ultimate in shallow encounters and that in itself felt suddenly exciting. Work was forgotten. Responsibility was forgotten. This was about proving a point – to her mother, damn right, but more importantly to herself. Payback time and damn the consequences. This moment was hers, she could take what pleasure she wanted from it. No complications. That thought was somehow freeing and intoxicating and she tugged at his polo shirt, pulled it free from his jeans, wanting to explore. He slid a hand around her waist and tugged her further into the room kissing her as he went, stopping briefly to pull the shirt over his head and throw it to the floor. Free now to touch him, she slid curious hands slowly up his tanned chest to his huge shoulders. Not a scrap of fat laced his body. Desire burned hotly through her at the feel of taut skin sheathing hard muscle.

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