Past Secrets

Marco shrugged, but he looked relieved. ‘If you’re sure…’

‘We’re sure.’ Both girls nodded.

Amber scanned her surroundings idly, her body moving gently to the music. Ella adopted the same laid-back hauteur.

Marco was no match for them. He was fooled.

‘Text me if you need me,’ he said, then turned and was swallowed up by the crowd.

On their own, Amber and Ella clutched each other and shrieked, all pretence at being cool gone. Nobody heard them over the pumping beat. ‘We’re here,’ they screeched and did their own little war dance.

‘Loos,’ gasped Amber, taking Ella by the hand.

In the toilets, they re-adopted adult cool while Amber applied a line of smoky kohl around the rims of her eyes like she’d seen in a magazine. The effect was startling: her beautiful eyes seemed larger and more hypnotic than ever.

‘You really do look twenty-one,’ sighed Ella, pausing in the act of applying another coat of sticky lip gloss.

A woman rinsing her hands at the next basin glanced at them.

‘Thanks!’ said Amber. ‘I’m actually thirty-two but my plastic surgeon is a miracle worker.’

The woman left in a hurry and they creased over laughing again, high on their own daring.

They had enough money to order one drink each, which they’d have to make last all night, and they stood at the bar, nursing their vodkas, trying to look as if they’d been here a million times before and were bored with it all.

Behind her calm façade, Amber was enthralled, watching everyone, envying them the way they all seemed to fit in.

In a corner cordoned off by velvet rope sat a dozen people drinking champagne. All beautiful, having the time of their lives, utterly at home. One slender brunette in faded, sequin-decorated jeans was holding court, talking and laughing, while everyone else watched her with evident fascination. In that one second, Amber longed to be just like her: part of the scene instead of watching enviously from the sidelines.

Then, one of the guys saw her watching them, a guy with dark cropped hair and stubble that was probably five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. His gaze was so intense Amber looked away in embarrassment. Shit, how gauche to be caught staring hungrily like a schoolgirl.

She did her best to stare anywhere else, but she really wanted to look back at the guy and drink him in. She’d never felt that connection before, that instant buzz from another human being, the feeling that she knew him.

But who was she kidding? He was probably only staring at her because it was obvious she and Ella were out of place. She’d thought they looked old enough but perhaps they didn’t and the guy was wondering what a kid was doing there.

‘Nobody’s bothering to chat us up,’ moaned Ella beside her.

‘It’s early yet,’ said Amber with more enthusiasm than she felt. Perhaps Marco had been right and they should have gone out with their own friends, but the football club would seem so tame after this. After him.

‘Are you lost?’ said a low voice.

Amber swivelled round. The dark, crop-haired man stood beside her, staring at her with intense blue eyes. Every nerve in her body quivered into alertness, though she tried to stay calm.

‘Lost? No.’ She shrugged, hopelessly trying to adopt the laid-back aura of the brunette in the VIP section.

‘You weren’t looking for someone?’ he asked. His voice was soft and deep, a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

Amber shook her head.

‘I thought you were looking for me,’ he added, ‘and you’ve found me.’

Amber just stared at him, concentrating on breathing.

Chat-up lines for her usually consisted of the guy asking what class she was in at school. This approach was wildly different. Amber felt her spine lengthen, some new instinct making her stand up straighter, yet slightly closer to him.

‘I wasn’t looking for you,’ she said, nonchalant. How was she doing this? She’d never spoken this way before, like a heroine from a film. ‘I was watching people. I’m an artist: I like watching people.’

‘You draw them, then?’

Amazingly, he didn’t spot that she was making this up as she went along. Buoyed up, Amber lowered her eyelids and gave him a sultry gaze she’d rehearsed in her bedroom in front of the faded line of her childhood teddy bears.

‘If I like the shape of them and the look of them, I might draw them,’ she replied coolly.

‘And me? Do you like the look of me?’ he asked.

It was noisy, so he’d moved till he was very close to her and, despite the gloom of the club, she could see that his face was moulded like a beautiful Renaissance statue: a straight, proud nose, flaring cheekbones, a finely planed forehead and a mouth so sensitive it would take a sculptor months to get right. Tightly cropped brown hair and a filament-thin cotton shirt flattened against his lean body took him into the modern era, but otherwise, he was like the historical princes of art that Amber had grown up admiring.

‘I like the look of you very much,’ she breathed, not bothering to be cool any more.

And he smiled at her, revealing an endearing dimple on one side of his mouth and perfect white teeth. Amber forgot about everything else in the world except this fabulous man. She wanted to touch him, kiss him, feel him wrap his arms around her and press his body against hers for ever. This, she thought, was love at first sight.

Karl was in a band, he told her. She introduced him to Ella and he led them over to the VIP area.

Ella squeezed Amber’s hand in delight as they were ushered past the velvet rope, but Amber was too engrossed in Karl to sense Ella’s message of ‘Wow! Look where we are now!’

Some of Karl’s as yet unsigned band were among the group. The rest, the ones who’d undoubtedly got everyone into the VIP area in the first place, were a band with an album that had just been released, the ones Marco had come to hear.

‘The Kebabs, of course I’ve heard of you! My brother came to hear you play. Tell me, you do, like tours and stuff?’ asked Ella, fascinated, as she was handed a glass of champagne.

As Ella listened to stories of life on the road, Amber barely heard a word. She was conscious only of Karl sitting beside her, with an arm loosely around the back of her seat, his leg casually close to hers.

She didn’t want to hear about anyone else, only Karl.

‘What do you do in your band?’

‘I am the band,’ Karl shrugged as if it was obvious. ‘I write the songs, I sing, I play lead guitar. The band is me.’

‘You’re an artist too.’ She smiled and took his hand, tracing the lines on it with sensitive fingers. ‘I could paint you.’

‘I could write a song about you,’ Karl said, touching her face with his other hand.

Their faces were inches apart now, Karl was drinking in every inch of her, his eyes travelling from her tawny hair, past the softness of her jaw down to the firm, high curve of her breasts highlighted in the tight little T-shirt she’d borrowed from Ella.

‘You’re so sexy,’ he whispered. His eyes roamed lower, past her waist to the rounded curve of her hips and along her jean-clad legs. For once, Amber didn’t bother trying to lift one thigh up so her leg looked thinner. There was no mistaking the fact that Karl liked her the way she was, and that was headier than any alcohol she could have drunk.

‘Get a room!’ shouted someone to them, and everyone creased up laughing.

Amber and Karl didn’t hear the jest or the insistent throbbing of the club music: they were locked into their own beat, aqua eyes in a lean face staring fiercely into grey-and-amber eyes in a gently rounded one, the red stain on each of Amber’s cheeks owing nothing to her make-up.