‘Their obvious distress gives you pleasure?’
Grace thought about sticking her tongue out, but that could be misconstrued. ‘No! It’s just my best friend Lily’s getting married and I thought it would be funny to take a picture on my phone and send it to her so she could see what she was getting herself into.’
Vaughn was smiling now. Not one of his chilly smiles but something warmer that opened the shutters a little. ‘She’s having cold feet?’
‘As if!’ Grace snorted inelegantly. ‘She’s been banging on about centrepieces and trying to bully me into a buttercup-yellow bridesmaid’s dress. I swear, she’s going to put me on a diet so I don’t ruin the wedding pictures.’
Vaughn gave her a lazy appraisal. ‘You know you don’t need to lose weight,’ he said mildly. Which was sweet of him, but the empire line of Grace’s Ossie Clark dress was very forgiving and he was making major inroads into Grace’s chips for someone who claimed she didn’t need to cut the carbs. ‘So the future doesn’t look good for our fellow guests?’ he added, inclining his head in the direction of the other tables.
‘I give them a year,’ Grace stated firmly. ‘Two years if she gets knocked up on the honeymoon.’
And making Vaughn laugh like that, really laugh so he shook silently and pinked up, was going to be added to the list of Grace’s ongoing projects, which currently included finding the perfect LBD and learning to make lace. It took at least ten years off him.
‘Why the gloomy forecast?’ he asked, after the laughter had ebbed away so the only reminder left was a softening of his voice.
Grace swept her eyes along the table. ‘The bride has the potential to grow into a real harpie - just look at her mum.’ She grinned. ‘And I think the groom’s gay for his best man. Jesus! Don’t stare! They’ll know we’re talking about them.’
‘You’re quite right,’ Vaughn agreed, standing up so he could pick up his chair and sit down next to Grace. ‘And I couldn’t really see properly anyway. Which one’s the groom again?’
Halfway through Grace’s character assassination of a woman they’d decided had slept with the groom’s father after a Masonic dinner dance in 1987, Vaughn draped his arm around Grace’s shoulder, fingers ghosting across her clavicle, and the rush of sensation was as unexpected as Vaughn’s laughter. When he tugged on a stray tendril of hair escaping from her topknot, Grace almost turned her head to kiss him. Instead she picked up her glass with a not-quite steady hand and said, ‘I’m pretty sure the woman in the nasty red dress is a Russian mail-order bride.’
Vaughn shook his head. ‘Actually I think she’s from the Ukraine.’ He gestured for a waiter. ‘You should order pudding.’
‘Not for me, I’m stuffed,’ Grace protested.
‘You must, Grace. They do a wonderful sticky toffee pudding,’ Vaughn urged her. ‘You really didn’t eat much dinner.’
Grace looked at him incredulously. Sticky toffee pudding in this heat? Maybe Vaughn was a feeder and his endgame was locking her in a basement, tying her up and pouring liquid lard down her throat. She’d seen a documentary about it on Channel 4. ‘Two spoons, please,’ she yelped at the waiter once Vaughn had ordered the pudding and two glasses of brandy.
The waiter left and Grace wondered if she should carry on describing the wedding-party from hell before they lapsed into another uncomfortable silence, but the other diners were starting to head indoors. The groom’s Uncle Bertie (a secret cross-dresser, they’d decided) ambled past their table and Vaughn suddenly raised his glass.
‘Are you here for a wedding?’ he enquired.
‘My god-daughter,’ the man replied, slurring his words because Grace had already identified him as a heavy drinker from his bulbous red nose and crumpled white suit. ‘Can’t say I like the fella she’s marrying though.’
‘Well, I hope they’ll be very happy together,’ Vaughn murmured. ‘We were just remarking on what a beautiful couple they are.’
Grace smiled weakly, which was hard when she was biting her lip at the same time. The moment that the man unsteadily tottered off, she picked up her napkin and swiped Vaughn with it. ‘Give me a warning next time,’ she spluttered through her giggles.
‘He wasn’t anyone’s uncle. You were wrong. You’ll have to pay a forfeit later,’ Vaughn said, his fingers rubbing circles on the back of her neck, and Grace swayed a little closer as the waiter presented her pudding with what she thought was a very unnecessary flourish.
She looked at the bowl without much enthusiasm. Then she quickly swallowed a mouthful of ice cream to cool her down. It didn’t work. ‘No, it’s too much.’
Vaughn was already pulling the bowl closer. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked perfunctorily, and Grace didn’t even have time to nod before he brought the spoon to his mouth.
Every time he swallowed, Vaughn would close his eyes and purse his lips, like he was having these tiny moments of rapture. It was the cutest thing Grace thought she’d ever seen, though Vaughn wasn’t at all cute. He was, like, the Anti-Cute.
Still, when he’d scraped up the last sticky pools of melted ice cream, she vowed that, when he was being his most intimidating and infuriating, she’d remember him like this - with a smear of ice cream clinging to his bottom lip.
And, quickly, before she could wimp out, Grace leaned in and kissed him clean, snaking out her tongue to lick away a stray crumb. She felt Vaughn tense - and just when he gave in and opened his mouth . . . she pulled away and smiled at him. She could so do this.
‘Shall we have the brandy in our room?’ she suggested.
Vaughn didn’t touch Grace during the climb upstairs. With one hand cradling her glass of brandy and the other holding up the hem of her dress so she didn’t trip, it made coordination tricky. Especially as Grace could feel Vaughn’s eyes etching a pattern right between her shoulderblades.
She stumbled through the door and took a second to catch her breath, before she turned to face him.
Vaughn shut the door with a decisive thud and leaned back against it. ‘This will do,’ he said, so blandly that Grace wasn’t sure if he was talking about the room or her. ‘Have you been smoking in here?’
Grace sniffed the air. She’d had the window open the entire time and she couldn’t smell any lingering traces of Marlboro Lights. ‘I had one,’ she said defensively, hoping he wasn’t going to give her a lecture on the perils of smoking because that would damp down the little spark that was still smouldering.
But Vaughn just smiled. ‘You shouldn’t. You’ll get wrinkles on that pretty face,’ he purred, taking her hand so he could pull her towards the bed.
It was going to be like that. No stilted conversation and tentative kisses - and anyway, Grace had had enough of those to last several lifetimes. Vaughn sat on the edge of the bed and tugged her between his legs so she could feel the heat coming off him and felt sure it was mirrored in her own rosy cheeks.
She took a gulp of the brandy and felt the burn sizzle its way down to her belly. Before she could gulp the rest of it down, Vaughn was taking the glass from her and leaning over to place it on the nightstand.
‘I’d very much like to see you undress,’ he remarked conversationally, the picture of poise apart from that familiar tic pulsing away.
‘OK,’ Grace whispered, and she flexed the hand he was still holding and waited for him to let her go. Without Vaughn’s touch, Grace felt slightly disorientated as she took a step back. Then another. She could keep taking steps as far as the door, she thought, then down the stairs and out into the night.
She could . . . but instead with clumsy fingers, she reached for the concealed zip and inched it down. Staring at a point approximately six inches above Vaughn’s head, Grace started to wriggle out of the diaphanous chiffon folds.
‘Slowly,’ Vaughn said quietly, though Grace didn’t remember asking for any audience participation. But she decided it didn’t matter when he breathed in sharply as her breasts emerged.
They shimmied in the dim light as the
dress got stuck on her hips. Objectively Grace knew that her breasts were damn fine. They still aced the pencil test every time and had a few good years left before they started a gradual descent and she’d have to start sleeping in a bra like Marilyn Monroe. So she concentrated on stepping out of the puddle of material rather than clamping her elbows to her boobs, and kicked free of her flip-flops so she was standing there in nothing but her M&S cami-knickers. Then, before she could stop herself, Grace bent down to pick up her dress and placed it neatly over a chair.
It wasn’t seductive but Grace had blown an entire term’s student loan on the Ossie Clark dress when she’d found it languishing in the back of a vintage shop in Manchester and she couldn’t just leave it on the floor. Nope. That wasn’t the way she rolled.
Maybe that’s why Vaughn was staring at her like she’d just back-flipped across the room but Grace simply shrugged, which sent his eyes right back to her chest, and hooked her fingers in the waistband of her tap pants.
‘No,’ Vaughn said suddenly. ‘Come here.’ And he tapped one finger against his thigh.
Grace approached with some apprehension but Vaughn wouldn’t have been looking at her like that, with something approaching awe, if he wasn’t pleased with her performance so far.
‘Hey,’ Grace said, as she straddled his thighs and wound her arms round his neck, their faces so close that if she leaned forward a couple of millimetres they’d bump noses.
‘Hey,’ Vaughn said, hands coming to rest on her hips, eyes almost closed so Grace couldn’t tell what he was thinking. ‘There’s no need to look so anxious.’
Grace frowned. ‘I’m not,’ she denied hotly. ‘Do I look anxious?’
But Vaughn didn’t answer because he was kissing her.
His kisses were as contradictory as he was. Forceful, demanding but also concise, even sweet as he bussed the tip of Grace’s nose with his lips as he settled her more securely on his lap. They were the kind of kisses that made Grace come slightly untethered because good kissing, really good kissing, wasn’t about being in love with the person you were with. It was all about the technique of the person you were with.
And Vaughn was right up there in her Top Five Best Ever Kissers. In with a bullet, when he did something with his teeth and her tongue that made Grace sigh into his mouth and almost swoon if she hadn’t been grinding herself against his cock.
Vaughn’s lips left hers to nuzzle a path along her neck, lifting her up again like she was much lighter than 123 pounds so he could mouth her breasts, sucking at one tightly budded nipple while Grace ran her fingers through his hair.
She tensed momentarily when Vaughn’s hand crept between her legs but he made an approving noise when he discovered how wet she was and she thought that maybe she’d never been quite this turned on before. It was a potent combination of being with a man who actually knew what he was doing and knowing this was just an arrangement, which had seemed sordid but was now edging firmly towards the door marked illicit thrill.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Grace muttered as she tried to undo his shirt buttons with clumsy hands. ‘Jesus.’
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Vaughn said against her skin. ‘Stand up for a minute.’
Grace slid off his lap, and even the floorboards beneath her bare feet felt like sensory overload as Vaughn slid down her panties and cupped her bottom to bring her close again.
Maybe the waxer she’d seen had been right because Vaughn pushed Grace down on the bed, arranged her as if she was one of his pieces of art, and started to explore her pussy like it was his new, absolutely favourite thing in the world.
‘Do you like it when I do that?’ he asked Grace, propping himself up on one elbow from between her thighs, and she felt dismay wash over her. She didn’t do dirty talk and she’d been percolating nicely when his fingers were delving, mouth too busy for questions.
All of a sudden it felt ridiculous to be sprawled out, legs scissored, sheet wrinkling underneath her. ‘You still have your clothes on,’ she pointed out, and rubbed the back of her knuckles against his cock. She felt it give a little leap of excitement; it distracted him beautifully.
Vaughn’s hand curled around hers and together they dragged down his zip.
When he came, Vaughn said her name like it was a prayer, then he was silent, burying his head against her breasts as Grace stroked the thick hair that he’d never grow long enough to become curls.
Grace had the scent of Vaughn on her, a little bit citrusy, a little bit sweaty, the taste of toffee in her mouth from their kisses and a slight ache between her legs because he’d been inside her. He’d fucked her. And she’d been fucked enough times for it not to mean very much. But when Vaughn finally disentangled himself with one last clinging kiss, Grace was glad to be free from his embrace because lying skin-to-skin, his arms around her so she could feel his pulse slowing down to a steady thud, had been much harder than she expected. It was intimate in a way that had nothing to do with sex or their names signed on a legally binding agreement. Why hadn’t she realised that? Because she was stupid, stupid, stupid.
Grace shifted away from him but Vaughn pulled her back into his arms so she could feel his softening cock against her arse as he dotted her shoulderblades with kisses and petted her belly with lazy fingers. ‘Don’t go,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Let’s stay like this for a while.’
Afterwards was always messy and sticky in Grace’s experience but she lay against Vaughn quietly, fingers curled around his upper arm.
‘What this?’ she eventually asked, when her fingers traced around the edge of a plaster.
Vaughn made an odd snuffly noise. ‘Nicotine patch.’
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘Well, I haven’t for three years hence the nicotine patch.’
‘You know that you’re not meant to wear them for that long, right?’
‘Yes, I’m well aware of that.’ There was no need for him to sound quite so snippy. This was traditionally the time when you really looked at each other, swapped stories about childhood scars and . . .
Grace inched her head closer because now she’d opened her eyes and adjusted, wincing, to the light he’d left on because he’d said that he wanted to look at her, she could see that the nicotine patch wasn’t the half of it. Vaughn had a tattoo. Not some tiny Chinese letters that probably spelled out I’m a gullible wanker, or an equally risible tribal band. This was a big, no-holds-barred inking, only half-lasered off. Grace could just make out the edge of a flush of cards, maybe a dice . . . and was that a skeleton or a rabbit?
But if he got that pissy about a nicotine patch, then Grace guessed that his bigass greaser tattoo was also another no-fly zone.
They stayed like that for a few more minutes, Vaughn’s hands slowing until they rested on her hips. Grace tried to ignore a tickle somewhere around her left ankle. She’d never been one for snuggling and eventually, when the tickle became an itch, she shifted out of Vaughn’s loose embrace and leaned over so she could scratch her ankle.
‘So, are you all right?’ Grace asked as she sat up and tried to casually wrap the sheet around her. Really, she wanted to ask if she’d been all right but that would have violated all kinds of unspoken first-time rules.
‘Never better,’ Vaughn assured her with a lazy grin. ‘Do you mind if I have the bathroom first?’
‘Go ahead.’ Grace ran a hand through her hair, which felt very birds’ nesty. ‘It’s all yours.’
‘If you open the window, I won’t say anything if you want to have a post-coital cigarette,’ Vaughn murmured and Christ, Grace thought, sex really brought out the best in him. She could see that wrangling Vaughn into a sunny mood would involve spending a lot of time horizontal, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Grace watched him lope towards the alcove with the bath in it. His body was a testament to the benefits of having your own basement gym, which he’d mentioned the other night. Or at least the back view was. He was long-limbed, she’d alre
ady guessed that, and his arse was just as pert as any of her much younger boyfriends. Actually more pert than about fifty per cent of them because they drank too much lager and didn’t have basement gyms. Grace would reserve final judgement until she’d seen the front, she decided as she groped frantically for the free bathrobe because she hadn’t grown up in a naked house.
Curled up on one of the armchairs, sucking down a medicinal cigarette, Grace wondered if she felt used. But mostly she felt disappointed because at one stage, when it had been all kissing and hands pressing her into the mattress with a firmness that was just the right side of forceful, she’d thought that she might come.
There was no way Vaughn could have known she hadn’t. By the time you were twenty-three, you were meant to have the sex thing sussed, in the same way that you were meant to have memorised the fat units, carb content and calories in every M&S Ready Meal and know what time each morning TopShop got their new deliveries.