Your Room or Mine?:. Charlotte Phillips

myself.’

      ‘That’s why it’s overrun then,’ she said. ‘It would be like me handing over the plans for a garden and just letting the project cruise along rudderless. Things just don’t get done sometimes if you’re not there to kick butt.’

      The implication that the delay was down to him irked a little and he made himself ignore it. To be fair, she had a point. He might have total focused control over his work but leaving things to chance in any other area of his life was clearly also a bad move.

      ‘It should be finished in a day or two,’ he said. ‘And it’ll be great to have somewhere to stay that feels like home,’ he said. ‘When I’m in London at least.’

      ‘So you stay in hotels a lot then. For work?’

      He thought he picked up a slight edge to her tone, but her face hadn’t changed.

      He nodded.

      ‘I’m pretty good at living out of a suitcase. After a while it becomes second nature, luggage gets pared down, you start to use the same places in the same cities. It gets to be a way of life.’

      ‘Doesn’t it get lonely, being away like that?’

      Something in that sentence touched him, and he paused for a moment to sip his drink and rationalise it. Loneliness was just a word. It meant focus and drive. It was a positive not a negative if you wanted success. And he could always find company if he wanted it, a non-committal brief encounter was easy to come by on the international hotel circuit.

      ‘It helps if you like your own company,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you come across the same work contacts. It varies. Sometimes you meet new people. It doesn’t have to be isolated if you don’t want it to be.’

      She sat back a little in her seat, her gaze holding his, a hint of knowing in the grey-green eyes that he couldn’t fathom.

      ‘Like tonight, you mean. Like me.’

      He nodded.

      ‘Yes. Room service or dinner with you. No contest.’

      Her posture stiffened almost imperceptibly, as if some thought had occurred to her. The gaze didn’t waver and she tilted her chin as she looked at him, an almost judgemental look in her eyes. Then she looked down at her champagne flute and the moment was gone.

      Izzy took a sip of her champagne. Serial hotel guest… lots of travel for work…doesn’t have to be isolated if you don’t want it to be.

      She pushed her plate to one side.

       Don’t get even. Get even better…

      Curiosity needled at her. Hotels, girls, one-night-stands. Was this the way Joe had behaved when he was away supposedly working towards their future? Did he single out the best prospect and ask her to dinner? Was that how it had started? Was she seeing that dark mirror image of her own life?

      She wanted, needed to see more. This had nothing to do with revenge, this was about understanding. For the first time she had a flash of the type of woman who inhabited Joe’s alternative fun life, that foil to herself – the type of woman who held things together at home. An image of her mother flashed unbidden into her mind, the person she’d vowed never to become. Fifties cupcake housewife living in the wrong decade. Izzy might have bucked that trend with her traditionally male-dominated work, but she’d fallen right into the same trap in her relationship.

      This was her chance. Her opportunity to flout the rules and be the other woman for once instead of the homemaker. Exactly what was the fun she was missing out on? Her heart picked up speed in anticipation of where this thought process might lead.

      ‘It must be difficult to keep a relationship going when you’re travelling a lot,’ she said, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

      Oliver finished his main course and pushed the plate to one side.

      ‘I imagine it would be,’ he said. ‘I don’t do them.’

      She stared at him.

      ‘Not at all?’

      ‘Not in the long-term sense.’ He took a sip of his drink. ‘My work comes first, it always has. I need that focus and I can never predict the hours I’ll be working or where I’ll need to be. It wouldn’t be fair to drag another person along on that ride.’

      Nothing detracted from the need for irreversible success, that aim which never quite felt within reach. Allowing a relationship to distract him from work would be unheard of, would go against every instinct he’d learned growing up.

      ‘Relationships are not all they are cracked up to be,’ he said.

      She gave a rueful laugh.

      ‘I’ll drink to that.’ She raised her drink and he nodded and picked his own glass up in response.

      ‘Relationships, relationships,’ he said. ‘All that grief, all that input.’

      ‘It’s not a one-way street,’ she said. ‘You’re meant to get something back.’

      ‘Doesn’t sound like you did,’ he countered, but she didn’t reply, just met his gaze with her grey-green eyes.

      ‘Relationships sap the energy from what can be a perfect meeting of the physical,’ he said.

      He watched carefully for her response to that and noticed her shift almost imperceptibly in her seat.

      ‘You mean a fling.’

      He shrugged.

      ‘If you want to call it that. It’s perfectly simple. You’ve obviously been messed around by some idiot who’s treated you badly. Doesn’t sound remotely like fun to me. The way I play it, things never get beyond the fun stage. You never discover the loathsome habits. You never even make it to your first argument. I don’t have time to deal with any of that.’

      ‘You don’t even date?’ she clarified.

      He shook his head.

      ‘Why let things get that far?’

      A tiny smile touched the corner of her mouth and his pulse began to climb.

      ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said.

      ‘Is it?’

      She toyed with her glass. As he watched the slender fingers slowly and rhythmically turning the stem of it, heat began to tingle low in his abdomen.

      ‘I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been feeling a bit low,’ she said. ‘The break up came out of the blue, smacked me between the eyes.’ She looked up. ‘It’s all fine though, I have a planned strategy.’ She gave him another smile.