I frown. “What does that mean?”
“He wants the building. I am not so sure he wants the hotel.”
My eyes widen. “You think he wants to buy the place? Take it off the Singh-Bartholomews?”
Now he mentions it, I remember Louis jokingly offering on the hotel last Christmas, and Mrs. SB laughing him off. Could he? I’d never considered the idea of Forest Manor as anything else, but I guess it would make a beautiful set of flats, or offices, or . . .
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Louis would have told me.”
Lucas stiffens at this. “Food’s ready,” he says, shoving a knife and fork at me.
We eat on the sofa. I expect Lucas to turn on the TV, but instead he grabs a pile of yellow cards from the coffee table and sets about reading them while he eats. I snoop over his shoulder—they look like revision cards.
“Are you studying?” I ask, surprised. He’s never mentioned it.
He nods, chewing. I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t, and he won’t meet my eyes, either. I lean forward for the pack of cards that sits on the table and start flicking through. Modelling consumer decision-making . . . market segmentation . . . perishability vs. stock . . . hotel service delivery . . .
“Hotel management?” I say. “You’re studying hotel management?”
He nods again, flicking to the next card. Like this is no big deal at all.
“Is that your plan, then?” I say, heat rising up my chest. I stab at my stir fry with my fork. “Take over Forest Manor one day?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then you’d be able to boss me around and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”
“Actually,” he says, “my degree is not about trying to beat you at something, Izzy. It is something I’m doing for me.”
“Right,” I say. I’m flustered and miserable and I’m not sure why. I wish I hadn’t mentioned the interior design course I failed to complete. “Well, good for you.”
I’ve always known that Lucas thinks he’s better at the job than I am, but I’ve also always thought he’s wrong. Only now he’s going to go and make it official, getting a degree and everything. Not that any of this matters—he and I will likely part ways in the new year anyway. He can manage some swanky hotel somewhere and I’ll take that waitressing job they’re always advertising in the window of Tilly’s café in Brockenhurst—which is fine. I’d be perfectly content with that.
Lucas stands suddenly, pacing to the French doors opposite us and throwing them open. He’s in just a T-shirt and jeans—he took his jumper off while we were cooking—and it’s freezing outside. I raise my eyebrows as the cold wind hits me a few seconds later and he says, “It’s too hot in here.”
I can’t help it: I think about him in the gym, a bead of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. Christ. How can I find this man so obnoxious and so sexy? Even now, as he steps out onto his little balcony and leans his forearms on the glass barrier, I’m noticing the muscles rolling in his shoulders, the bare, pale brown stretch of his neck.
You’d think all the rejection would make me want him less, but it doesn’t. I don’t know what that says about me. At least I’m consistent. Not easily swayed by, you know, reality.
He just stays there, saying nothing, so I pull the blanket off the back of the sofa and tug it over my knees—a literal comfort blanket. I need it: I feel so unsteady, like there’s a tremor going through the flat, sending everything trembling.
“Izzy,” he says.
That’s it. Just Izzy. He doesn’t even turn around. It’s raining now, that faint, drifting rain that sparkles when it catches the light.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
The question takes me aback. It’s kind of a given, isn’t it? Lucas and I hate each other—everyone knows that. He’s pig-headed and surly and has a temper; he’s deliberately difficult with me at work; and he’s rejected me enough times that even if I had no pride, it would be hard not to bear a bit of ill feeling towards him. And ultimately, fundamentally, he will always be the man who kissed my flatmate on the day I handed him my heart.
“No,” I say slowly. “I don’t like you.”
“You used to like me,” Lucas says, glancing over his shoulder for half a second before returning his gaze to the rain. “And then I kissed your flatmate.”
I tuck the blanket tighter. We don’t talk about that. The one instance when we did talk about that, we ended up screaming at each other across the hotel lawns, and he flew back to Brazil the next morning.