The Bedroom Assignment

‘So talk!’ he commanded, taking the juice away from her.

She sank onto the chair, watching him pour first her juice then his coffee.

‘That poor man outside in the car—’

‘Believe me, he won’t be complaining. The longer I stay out, the more he earns. At triple time,’ Jay told her, amused. ‘Talk.’

She huffed a bit. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said candidly. ‘I don’t know how I came to tell you anything in the first place.

‘So you said. I guess it’s just timing. Look on me as your friendly neighbourhood busybody, if it helps. Pretend we’re leaning on the back fence.’

She looked at him. He was devastatingly attractive, with his smooth dark hair faintly tumbled and those spectacular cheekbones.

Zoe’s lips twitched. ‘Oh, yes, I can just see the hairnet.’

‘Hold that thought,’ he said, unoffended. He drank some coffee. ‘So run it past me again. You’re twenty-three. Yet you still live at home. You look like a dream. Your friends all think you’re a raver. You ought to be a raver. And yet you’re a virgin.’

She stiffened. But his tone was so utterly dispassionate that all her defensiveness fell away from her. She bit her lip.

‘Yes.’

‘And,’ said Jay shrewdly, ‘you’re not happy about it.’

Zoe winced.

His voice softened. ‘Want to tell me why?’

‘Well, like you said—everybody thinks I’m a raver.’

His brows twitched together. ‘Don’t understand.’

Zoe struggled to explain. ‘I have friends. Good friends. They think they know everything there is to know about me. And I’ve got this big secret—’ She spread her hands eloquently. ‘It’s like I’m cheating. All the time.’

He shook his head, still bewildered. ‘Cheating how?’

‘Living a lie,’ she said impatiently. ‘And I’ve been doing it for years.’

‘Ah. I think I begin to see.’

He swirled the coffee in his mug.

‘Let’s look at this another way. What was it that turned you off men? Something traumatic?’

Zoe sighed. ‘There you go. That’s why I’ve never told anyone. Nothing turned me off men,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’m not off men. Some of my best friends are men.’

‘Well, then—’

‘If I told Suze now, she’d think I’d suffered some big tragedy. Been beaten up or something. It’s not true. No man’s ever hurt me. No one’s ever let me down. I just— never got round to sex.’

‘Never got round to it?’ Jay found he was speechless.

Defensiveness crept back. ‘I was busy.’

‘But what about all those men you know? Quite apart from your own hormones, what about the other side of the equation? They can’t all have been busy, too?’

‘Ah.’ Zoe looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘Well, you see, they all thought I’d got someone else.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t get my head round this. How did they think you had someone else? How come you didn’t have someone else?’

She shrugged. ‘Our old friend timing, I suppose. My parents started to break up just as I was doing my first public exams. Then, when I was at university, I came home a lot because my brother and sister were still at school and—’ She bit her lip. ‘My mother went onto an alternative clock, making breakfast at midnight, that sort of thing. Someone had to keep the household fed and laundered.’

‘Reinforcements,’ he said, enlightened.

She flushed. ‘If you like. Anyway, the boys at university all thought I had a boyfriend at home. And the boys at home—when I saw them—thought I had a boyfriend at college. So did my sister. And I always had plenty of friends who were men, sort of in the general crowd. So nobody noticed the difference.’

His eyebrows hit his hairline. ‘But what about you?’

She looked surprised. ‘I told you. I was busy.’

‘Very few adolescent girls are so busy they fail to notice that they fancy the pants off the man of their dreams,’ he said dryly.

She flushed deeper. ‘Maybe I’m just cold hearted.’