Читать книгу Strangers in the Sauna - Caitlin Crews - Страница 6

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.