“I’m not taking you to the opera,” Oliver said. “I couldn’t get tickets and my private jet is being detailed.”
Thank God for that. I’d do many things for Oliver, but I drew the line at watching people sing their feelings in languages I didn’t understand. Relaxing slightly, I gave him a quizzical look. “Do I need to be in a red dress?”
“You can if you want to be, but I’m not sure it’s quite your style.
Although”—he offered the jewellery box—“there is something missing.”
“I’m not sure anything else is going to fit in these…” I peered down at myself. “Jeans?”
“You do wear very tight jeans,” agreed Oliver. He flipped open the box to reveal a necklace of Love Hearts—the weird chalky sweets with little messages on them—threaded on elastic. “You mustn’t get too excited,” he went on, “because they’re on loan.”
I gaped at him. “From whom?”
“Well, I can’t say, ‘Don’t get too excited, I bought these for one pound thirty from a sweet shop.’”
“You could say, ‘Don’t get too excited, these are disgusting.’
Which would be true. My rule is never buy a sweet that’s more famous for how it looks than how it tastes.”
Oliver’s brows dipped scowlishly. “Just take the fucking necklace, Lucien.”
I reached out, then hesitated. “You’re going to snap the box on my fingers, aren’t you?”
There was the slightest of pauses. Then Oliver smiled. “For verisimilitude.”
So I reached out, and he snapped, and I tried to look as adorable as Julia Roberts, but I think I mostly looked like someone who’d had a jewellery box closed on his fingers.
“Oh, come on,” said Oliver, “that did not hurt. I was very careful.”
“It’s not the pain. It’s the shock.”
“You knew it was coming. You literally told me you knew it was coming.”
I glared in a not-really sort of way. “Then you try it.”
We swapped roles and I tried to offer him the necklace like I was a multimillionaire with daddy issues instead of a completely normal bloke with daddy issues. He reached and I snapped.
“Ow,” protested Oliver, shaking his hand.
“Sorry. That happened much faster than I thought it would.”
“You have to control it on the way down”—Oliver massaged the red line that was forming across his fingertips—“or gravity takes over.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “You clearly have more jewellery-box-snapping practice than I do. Why do you have jewellery-box-snapping practice?”
He gave a little cough. “I might have rehearsed in the mirror a couple of times. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Oh no.” I took his hand and gently kissed it better. “I’m the worst.”
“I should have known better than to trust you with a dangerous jewellery box.”
“Not going to lie.” I kissed him again. “That was a bad call. We both should have known better.”
The kissing drifted from hands to mouths and ended with Oliver pressed against the wall and me pressed against Oliver as seconds…minutes…slipped past in a haze of heat and homecoming and the pleasure of being together again.
Eventually Oliver—looking nicely dishevelled in an otherwise pristine tux—drew back. “Under normal circumstances, I’d be delighted to take this to its logical conclusion—”
“By logical conclusion,” I asked, “do you mean sex in the hall?”
“Maybe. But, unfortunately, I left some candles burning upstairs and it’s probably best not to leave them unattended for too long.”
I stared at him. “You did candles as well?”
“It’s been a very long week without you.”
This was not making sex in the hallway any less appealing. On the other hand, Oliver had gone to a lot of trouble, and burning his house down would have been a crappy way to thank him. I gestured at the jewellery box. “I think you’re maybe supposed to put it on me?”
In the movie, Richard Gere had stood behind Julia Roberts, gazing passionately into a mirror as he fastened the delicate chain around her equally delicate neck. Oliver had to kind of…stretch a piece of elastic over my face, nearly dragging one of my ears off.
“I feel very sexy and desirable right now,” I said.
Oliver squinted anxiously at me. “Can you breathe? I think it was designed for children.”