Loe raamatut: «Strangers in the Sauna»

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

Discover the Chatsfield

Copyright

Chapter One

Jenny Harding had it all planned out.

She wore Daniel’s favourite underthings, frothy and pink. They didn’t so much cover her naughty bits as make them that much naughtier, which was the point. Then, feeling bold and determined—because she wasn’t going to let over six months of a good relationship sink without a fight, and this surely qualified as a necessary sucker-punch—she belted herself into a trench coat, slipped on her highest and most decadent heels, and headed for London’s poshest hotel: the Chatsfield.

The legendary hotel couldn’t have been further away from the house Jenny shared with a collection of other graduate students far outside Central London, in both geographic and monetary terms. It had been a surprise when Daniel had announced he’d planned to spend a week in such luxurious surroundings, if she was honest, so far from the noisy house where they lived in rooms they’d been placed in by their university for the duration of their year-long masters degree courses, but Jenny had rallied.

‘I need to work on my thesis,’ Daniel had said two days ago in his delicious Scottish accent when he’d told her his plans, though their masters theses wouldn’t be due until the end of the summer and it was only May. ‘But why don’t you come for lunch next Tuesday?’

She’d smiled, though she hadn’t exactly felt supportive.

But as the taxi pulled up in front of the landmark hotel in a very upmarket part of already deeply monied Central London on this Thursday night, Jenny found she couldn’t do anything but admire Daniel’s choice of studying retreat. Who wouldn’t enjoy this place—if they could afford it? It felt like walking directly into one of the fairy tales she’d read so voraciously as a little girl in the decidedly unromantic prairie town in South Dakota where she’d been born and raised. She couldn’t help but sigh happily when she stepped inside the opulent lobby with its soaring ceilings and glamour she could all but taste.

This was the perfect place to reconnect with Daniel, who had felt further and further away lately. Which was quite a trick given he literally lived on the other side of her bedroom wall in the next room.

Jenny felt reckless and wild in all the right ways as she sauntered across the hushed magnificence of the busy lobby. How many times in her nearly twenty-five years had she longed to feel like this—as if her surroundings were soaking into her, making her as lush and spectacular as everything she saw? As if the night was already hers?

As if Daniel’s enthusiastic surrender to her plan was already completely assured!

Maybe it was the hotel itself, she thought as she stepped into the glorious elevator and keyed in his floor. It seemed to make everything feel that much more sparkly. Including Jenny.

The long walk down Daniel’s hallway felt good, she told herself—and not nerve-wracking at all. Powerful, she chanted internally, hearing her long, dark hair swish against the shoulders of the trench coat and deliberately lengthening her stride to feel the pull in her legs. I am a sexy and powerful woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to get it.

It felt true as she found Daniel’s door.

Tonight, she would sort things out in the time-honored manner of all men and women. Tonight, she would stop waiting for Daniel to take charge the way he never seemed to do. Tonight, she would reclaim what she wanted—and claim what was already hers.

Jenny knocked, loud and confidently, and then stepped to the side of the peephole so he couldn’t see her from inside, the better to surprise him. She imagined him sitting at the desk inside, his red hair standing up in spikes from running his hands though it while he read, frowning at the intrusion after hours of intense focus. She smiled with anticipation. She glanced up and down the hall and then—seeing that the hall remained empty, shivering slightly at her own uncharacteristic daring, and rolling with the surge of accompanying adrenaline—slipped off the trench coat and tossed it to the side.

Better to start as she meant to go on.

She heard the chain being pulled off, then the bolt being thrown, and she stepped closer, assuming her best rendition of a saucy, smoldering expression. The door swung open and Jenny expected to hear his favorite expletive, uttered in that scrumptiously gruff accent of his.

Except it wasn’t Daniel who stood there.

It was a woman. A very blonde and pretty woman, with what could only be described as bedroom hair and a very smug and dreamy expression to match.

Wearing nothing at all but a plush Chatsfield bathrobe she hadn’t bothered to belt.

Chapter Two

‘I don’t think we ordered that,’ the woman said with a merry laugh.

Jenny felt her entire body blaze into bright, humiliated red, which, she thought in what was obviously the edge of hysteria, must look ridiculous next to the pink underthings she was barely wearing.

‘I am so sorry!’ she breathed through a wave of mortification so intense that she was slightly worried it might take her out at the knees. ‘I must have the wrong room—’

But how could that be? She’d checked Daniel’s text no less than twenty-five times on the way over because she’d been terrified of exactly this, and there was no mistake. 507. She was frozen in shock and humiliation, but she managed to jerk her gaze away from the blonde and confirm that, yes, this was room 507.

Had Daniel switched rooms? He wasn’t expecting her for several days yet, so perhaps he had. He quite reasonably wouldn’t have thought to update her until Tuesday, she assured herself, when she was on her way—

‘Is that the food?’ came the voice from within.

A voice that Jenny knew very well. Scottish and sexy. A little bit rough around the edges, much like its owner.

She tried to deny it. She told herself she was imagining things. She and Daniel had fallen for each other when they’d met upon moving into their shared house back in September. They’d been together ever since. She’d told all her friends that yes, in fact, she’d moved to England and found her Mr. Darcy as she’d secretly hoped while pursuing her masters degree in English literature—he just happened to be a redheaded Scotsman from Aberdeen who was studying Economics.

It couldn’t possibly be Daniel, she told herself now. Of course it couldn’t.

But then he swung out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and Jenny simply… went blank.

She didn’t know how long she stood there. She watched Daniel’s jaw drop. She heard nothing but a deafening white noise inside her head. She felt her heart thud hard and sickeningly against her chest and wasn’t sure she didn’t faint, after all.

Except she was still standing when she could breathe again.

‘Daniel?’

Later, she supposed she’d hate herself for the fact that was a question. Like she wasn’t certain when she was standing right there in front of him. Or like she was waiting for some explanation that would make it okay that he was in a hotel room with a blonde woman and neither one of them was wearing regular clothes. Like there was any reasonable sequence of events that could make such a thing all right.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘I’d ask what you’re doing here but I think I can work that out on my own,’ Jenny retorted. She didn’t even know where that came from. The person using her mouth sounded cool and regal and not at all like a woman who’d just discovered her boyfriend in a hotel with a clearly post-coital blonde.

‘You’re not supposed to be here!’ he threw at her, like this was all Jenny’s fault.

Perhaps sensing that things could escalate at any moment, the blonde wisely retreated back into the room as Daniel moved towards the door. Jenny wanted to shout at her too, but caught herself. It wasn’t the blonde she was angry with. It wasn’t the blonde who had spent six months cuddling with her and spooning her at night and talking with such fervor about their shared future.

‘If you wanted to break up with me,’ Jenny hurled at him, her voice almost cracking from all the things that churned inside her then, that she was terribly afraid were written all over the acres of skin she was exposing, ‘why not say so?’

And Daniel sighed.

Very much as if he thought Jenny was being unreasonable in some way. Hysterical and overwrought. It was not a good sigh. Or a guilty one.

‘Who said I wanted to break up?’ He shook his head at her, as if she was some sort of child who needed slow, careful explanations to obvious things and he was reluctantly obliging. ‘I like sex, Jen. A lot of it. And with you it always has to be a bloody big production.’ When she stared at him in disbelief, he sighed again, and it was even more offensive the second time. ‘The talking, the cuddling. All of that malarkey. Sometimes I just want a shag. This has nothing to do with you.’