Convenient Engagements

All in all, it was a relief when Gib went off to have a shower. Phoebe took the opportunity to scramble off the bed and change into the dress she had brought specially for that evening. It was very simple, a slim sheath the colour of a tropical lagoon that brought out the green in her eyes and left her shoulders bare. Phoebe had worried that it might be a little too dramatic for her to carry off, but Kate and Bella had been unanimous in their approval.

‘It’s perfect! No one would ever think you were brokenhearted in a dress like that!’

‘That,’ Kate had agreed, ‘is a dress worn by a woman in control of her life.’

There was irony for you, thought Phoebe, wondering what to do with her hair. She never felt in control when Gib was around.

The bathroom door opened and Gib came out, a towel wrapped around his hips. He whistled when he saw her, and she span round, the breath drying in her throat. His blonde hair was dark and damp from the shower, and she couldn’t help noticing how lean and brown and compactly muscled his body was. Quickly, she turned back to the mirror where she was fixing slides into her hair.

‘I hope you’re not planning to go like that,’ she said, horrified by the shake in her voice.

‘I wish I could.’ Gib contemplated his suit without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose I’ll have to put that on again. I’ve got nothing else to wear, and before you say it, yes, I know it’s my fault! I hate wearing suits,’ he grumbled as he retrieved his shirt from the hanger. ‘I can’t stand the feel of a tie around my neck.’

‘I’m surprised you’re not used to it, running that bank of yours,’ said Phoebe, taking refuge in sarcasm to distract herself from view of his smooth brown back in the mirror.

He glanced at her over his shoulder with a glimmering smile. ‘Maybe mine’s a different kind of bank where you don’t have to dress like a dummy all day!’

‘That sounds about as likely as you being president,’ she said, mumbling through the clips she was holding in her mouth while she secured her hair in place. ‘Don’t you want your staff to look professional?’

‘In my bank we’re more concerned with what people do than how they look,’ Gib informed her loftily.

Phoebe smoothed the last hair into place. ‘Right,’ she said, her voice laced with irony. ‘I’m sure it’s a great success! Now look, can you please keep off the subject of banks this evening? We don’t want to be rumbled now we’ve got this far. I’d appreciate it if you’d remember what you’re here to do!’

‘To show everyone how in love with you I am?’

‘Yes,’ she said, not quite able to meet his eyes directly. She busied herself looking for the necklace Bella had insisted on lending her instead.

‘That shouldn’t be a problem with the way you look tonight,’ said Gib. ‘You look sensational!’

Startled, Phoebe’s eyes flew involuntarily to meet his in the mirror. He was smiling, obviously joking, but there had been something in his voice that made her suddenly, acutely, aware of him, of the breadth of his shoulders and the long, muscled legs and the easy way he moved.

‘There’s no need to start pretending yet,’ she said, tearing her gaze away with an uncertain laugh. ‘There’s nobody else here.’

‘I know,’ said Gib.

The air leaked out of Phoebe’s lungs, and in the taut silence that followed, she fumbled around on the chest of drawers for her jewellery. She was intensely relieved when Gib went back into the bathroom. He reappeared wearing trousers, which was something, she thought. Shrugging on his shirt, he looped the tie round his neck and knotted it loosely.

The casual intimacy of dressing threw Phoebe completely. She was trying to fasten Bella’s spectacular necklace, and Gib’s presence only made her fingers even clumsier at the fiddly catch, until she muttered under her breath in frustration.

‘Here, let me have a go,’ he offered, having watched her struggling for a few moments.

It would be childish to refuse, Phoebe decided. She bent her head, tensing as Gib moved towards her and brushed her hair gently out of the way. The graze of his fingers against her neck made her shiver involuntarily, and she stood mouse-still as he fastened the necklace and smoothed it into place.

There it was done. But instead of stepping back with the flip comment she half expected, Gib let his hands rest for a moment on the curve of her shoulders. Slowly, almost unwillingly, Phoebe lifted her head and met his eyes, blue and serious, in the mirror. They had held the same expression after he had kissed her in the car and her heart began to slam in her chest. She couldn’t move, could just stand there feeling the warmth of his hands on her skin, while an answering heat uncoiled inside her at an alarming rate.

With an enormous effort, she moistened her lips. ‘We’d better finish getting ready,’ she managed, appalled at the huskiness of her voice. Clearing her throat, she tried again. ‘We’ll be late.’

Gib dropped his hands and stepped back. ‘We don’t want that,’ he agreed dryly. ‘They might think that two people as much in love as we are have got better things to do alone here with a four-poster bed than get dressed up in uncomfortable clothes to spend an evening making more small talk!’

‘Making small talk was part of the deal,’ she reminded him, still not quite as steadily as she would have liked.

‘Ah, yes, the deal, we mustn’t forget that!’

They walked across the courtyard from their tower in silence. Phoebe was desperately aware of Gib, close beside her but not touching. There was a strange, jittery feeling just below her skin, and her stomach was looping and churning in a way that made her wish she could go back to simply worrying about whether anyone would spot that Gib wasn’t really a banker and wasn’t really her lover. That had seemed bad enough at the time, but this new consciousness of Gib was much, much worse, this was a whole new level of nervousness and Phoebe didn’t like it at all.

For dinner the remaining guests were divided up among five round tables. Phoebe and Gib were sitting with Lara, who spent most of her time moaning about her parents and their unreasonable behaviour in disapproving of her latest boyfriend.

‘He’s got his own band,’ Lara confided. ‘Some guy in the music business came to listen to one of their gigs, and he thinks they’ve got a great future. They’re going to London soon to make a recording, not that that cuts any ice with Mum and Dad! They’re so conventional,’ she grumbled. ‘They can’t bear the fact that Jed lives in a squat. They don’t understand that he’s an artist. He’d be stifled in an ordinary environment. That’s why he didn’t get an invitation to come to the wedding, even though we’ve been going out for weeks now! They want me to find someone like Gib, with a proper job.’

Involuntarily, Phoebe glanced at Gib. ‘Nice to know that someone appreciates how hard I work,’ he murmured provocatively.

‘Oh, they think you’re great,’ said Lara, missing the irony. ‘Mum can’t wait for you to spend the weekend so she can interrogate you properly! You’d better brace yourself, Phoebe. She’s bound to get out the baby photographs and tell Gib about the time you took your knickers off in the middle of their sherry party.’

‘I was only three,’ said Phoebe as Gib raised an enquiring eyebrow.

‘At least Jed is spared that,’ said Lara, cheering up at the realisation. ‘You should have been a rebel, Gib, then they wouldn’t be so keen on inviting you to stay.’

Oh, dear, Phoebe sighed inwardly. She should have foreseen that her mother would start planning intimate family get-togethers. Now she would have to think up endless excuses as to why they couldn’t go down for the weekend until their supposedly perfect relationship had had time to fall apart convincingly.

But how could she think when Gib was sitting next to her, and she was aware of every time he lifted his glass or gestured, every time he turned his head towards her and his smile burned at the edge of her vision. Her shoulders were still tingling where his hands had rested. The image of how he had looked when he came out of the bathroom with his powerful shoulders and his bare, brown chest and his straight, strong legs shimmered in front of Phoebe’s eyes no matter how hard she tried to blink it away so that she could see the medallions of lamb on her plate.

Not that she could eat, anyway. She pushed the food distractedly around her plate and tried to decide whether she longed for the evening to end, or dreaded, because it would mean being alone with Gib again.

And that bed.

Phoebe gulped at her wine. She must stop thinking about Gib like this! Stop thinking about his mouth and his hands and his lean, hard body. If Kate and Bella were here, she was sure they would tell her that she was simply projecting her feelings for Ben onto Gib because he was handy.

Yes, that was all it was. She was trying to turn him into some substitute for Ben. Ridiculous, really. So all she had to do was concentrate on Ben and maybe her pounding pulse would calm down and the twitchy feeling would fade and the tight knot in her stomach would relax.

It was hard to think about Ben when she couldn’t see him, but once the pudding had been removed, the music struck up and bride and groom took to the little dance floor to much sentimental sighing from the other guests. This gave Phoebe the opportunity she needed, and she turned her chair like many of the other guests so that she could watch Ben holding Lisa close. He looked very contented, she thought. Not the most exciting man in the world, perhaps, but contented.

Where had that thought come from? Phoebe caught herself up with a frown. She had never found Ben at all dull before, so there was no reason to start thinking it now, just because he was so different from Gib, Gib with his gleaming blue eyes and his unsettling smile and his ability to make her furious and want to laugh at the same time.

Turning her back deliberately on him, she made herself focus on Ben, and after a while, as people were starting to move around, Gib got up and went over to talk to her parents. Phoebe was still staring determinedly at the dance floor, but she might as well have been looking straight at him, so acutely was she aware of every move he made. She was watching Ben, but all her senses were attuned to Gib as he sat down next to her parents. She didn’t need to see him to know that his alert, mobile face was lit with laughter, or that his hands were gesticulating as he talked.

‘Phoebe!’

She started as her mother came to take Gib’s empty chair. ‘Phoebe,’ she demanded in an urgent undertone, ‘what on earth do you think you are doing?’

From the other side of the room, Gib saw Phoebe stiffen and her chin came up at a combative angle. He didn’t know what her mother was saying to her, but it obviously wasn’t going down at all well. Phoebe’s face was flushed and there was a dangerous glitter to her eyes.

Murmuring an excuse, he got to his feet and went over. ‘Come on, Phoebe,’ he said as he held out his hand. ‘Let’s dance.’

Phoebe went without a word. She let him pull her into his arms and was glad of the excuse to hide her face in his throat. She felt ridiculously shaky all of a sudden. Gib held her tightly in a way that was at once comforting and disturbing. She was very aware of the hardness of his body, of the masculine scent of his skin, of the warmth of his hands through the silky material of her dress.

Gib could feel her trembling, and his expression was wry. Seeing Ben dancing with his new bride must have been the final straw for her today, and whatever her mother had been saying to her obviously hadn’t helped. Pulling her onto the dance floor had been an instinctive act to offer her an escape, but he hadn’t counted on how hard it would be for him. She was so warm and so slender, and her dress slipped distractingly over her skin beneath his hands. He could smell her perfume and feel her soft breath and the tickle of her eyelashes against his throat, the silky hair beneath his cheek.

A friend, he reminded himself. That was all he was supposed to be. A friend was what Phoebe needed right now, and he should be thinking about how much she was hurting rather than about how much he would like to take her back to that four-poster bed and make her forget all about Ben, and make her smile again.

In the meantime, she needed him to carry on the pretence, Gib told himself. If nothing else, it was a pretext to pull her closer, to kiss her ear and smooth his hand down her spine, feeling the dress shift tantalisingly over her bare skin.

It was just part of the act, after all. If he was really her lover, he wouldn’t want to let her go when the music stopped, would he? He wouldn’t want to take her back to the table and share her with everybody else. He would take her out into the summer night where he could kiss her properly in the darkness.

Almost without thinking, he found himself steering Phoebe out through the open French windows and onto the terrace. She didn’t resist, but when they came to a halt at last in the shadows, she pulled back to look at him, her eyes huge and dark in her pale face.

‘Thank you for that,’ she said with a crooked smile. ‘Mum and I were about to come to blows!’

Gib made himself let her go. ‘What was she saying to you?’

‘Oh, she came over to tick me off for ignoring you.’ The shadows hid the flush that crept up Phoebe’s cheeks as she remembered what her mother had said. She had been furious with Phoebe for sitting and mooning openly over Ben, as she thought.

‘You told us that you were over Ben,’ she had accused her. ‘You said that you were in love with Gib. It certainly doesn’t look that way from where we’re sitting,’ she had swept on when Phoebe had tried to protest. ‘It looks as if you’ve just been using Gib as a way to get back at Ben somehow. That’s not fair, Phoebe. It’s not fair to Ben and it’s not fair to Gib.’

There had been a lot more along the same lines. Trapped, Phoebe had been unable to explain that watching Ben had only been a way of not watching Gib.

‘Mum thought we’d had a row,’ she told him. ‘She’s afraid I’m going to lose you by being too uncompromising.’

‘Shall I tell her I like you that way?’ said Gib.

Her smile glimmered in the dusky light. ‘I’m not sure she would believe you. In Mum’s world, women are sweet and subservient and agree with everything their husbands say.’

‘Sounds like a parallel universe to me,’ he commented dryly.

‘Exactly. Anyway,’ Phoebe went on awkwardly after a minute, ‘I owe you an apology.’

‘Oh?’

‘After everything I had to say about you sticking to the script, I’m the one that’s made Mum suspicious,’ she said with difficulty. ‘She thinks I’m just using you and that I’m still in love with Ben.’

Sheila Lane was no fool, Gib thought, and she must know her daughter better than anyone. If she thought Phoebe was still in love with Ben, it was probably true.

‘We’d better convince her that’s not true, then, hadn’t we?’ he said, deliberately brisk. ‘What do you want to do? Another smoochy dance?’

Phoebe looked at him then away. This was her chance. ‘No,’ she said, and then had to stop and take a breath. ‘I want you to kiss me.’

It came out more abruptly than she had intended. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she added hastily.

Gib looked at her with rather a twisted smile. ‘Sure, if that’s what you want,’ he said.

He didn’t sound exactly thrilled at the prospect, Phoebe noted with a sinking heart. It had seemed reasonable enough when she had first thought of it, sensible even. What was the point of obsessing about that kiss this morning, when she could just get the whole thing out of her system by kissing him again? she had reasoned. It wouldn’t be the same this time, and it might at least keep her mother quiet. It wasn’t that she wanted him to kiss her particularly. It was just part of the act.

‘I don’t want to force you,’ she said defensively. ‘Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal. I’m getting paid, remember?’ he pointed out. ‘You might as well get your money’s worth.’

Well, there was one way of taking any romance out of the situation.

Phoebe wished she had never started this, but it was too late to back out now.

And, as Gib had so coolly reminded her, she was paying him good money for this. Why shouldn’t she ask him to kiss her? The fact that she had been thinking about it all evening was neither here nor there.

‘Shall we move back where your mother can see us more clearly?’ Gib was saying briskly.

Without waiting for an answer, he took her by the waist and manoeuvred her as if she were a rather unwieldy piece of furniture until they were on the edge of the light spilling out from the French windows, where they would be visible while looking as if they had meant to conceal themselves in the shadows.

In spite of his deliberately prosaic attitude, Phoebe’s senses jolted with anticipation as Gib’s hands tightened against her. Her heart was thudding in slow, painful strokes, and the excitement building inside her was so intense that she abruptly lost her nerve.

‘M-maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all,’ she croaked, but she didn’t move and her hands seemed to be creeping up his arms as if they had a will of their own.

‘Oh, I think it is,’ said Gib in an odd voice. He pulled her close, and when his mouth came down on hers Phoebe’s momentary hesitation evaporated in a rush of sensation.

His lips were warm and sure and persuasive as they explored hers. He might not have been too keen on the idea initially, but it certainly didn’t seem to be too much of a hardship for him now. That might be a sign of a man expert in dealing with women, but Phoebe was beyond caring one way or another. She gave herself up to the sheer pleasure of being held hard against him and, as his hands drifted enticingly down her back, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

God, it felt wonderful! It was all Phoebe could do to hang on to the last vestiges of her self-control but somewhere she found the will-power to unhook her arms from round his neck. Reluctantly, she broke the kiss, and took a ragged breath.

‘I think that should do the trick,’ she said.

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