Your Bed or Mine?

‘Women just don’t do it for me.’

‘You did kiss Melissa Butler.’

‘I was thirteen, Poppy!’ she howled. ‘And you dared me to!’

Alex lifted his eyebrow at Matt before looking through the crack of the door and wincing.

‘What’s Tori’s story this time?’ he asked in a low voice, also seemingly reluctant to walk into the lounge.

Tori…Matt tested the name on his tongue and found that he liked it. He rubbed his hand over his forehead.

‘I just got here but, as far as I can tell, she got home and her partner had arranged a surprise for her,’ Matt quietly replied as he dropped his laptop case to the floor next to the battered hall table.

‘Tori loves surprises so what’s the big deal?’

‘The surprise was a threesome which I gather she didn’t expect and certainly didn’t agree to.’

Alex tossed out a curse. ‘And, let me guess, Tori’s pretending it’s a joke. Classic Tori.’ Alex shrugged out of his coat and Matt saw his fist clench, release and fist again as he struggled to control his reaction. ‘I’d happily rearrange his face, the bastard.’

Interesting, Matt thought. He knew that Alex was with Lara and could see that the guy was crazy mad over her. So why the instinctive reaction to protect Tori? And why didn’t he like it? ‘So that’s the third friend they are always talking about.’

‘Mmm. She, Poppy and Izzy have shared this flat for years and years but Tori moved out a couple of months back. I’m in her old room and you’re using the turret room—Izzy’s old room.

‘I warned her about Mark. God, why didn’t the bloody woman listen?’ Alex muttered. Matt was beginning to think that none of her friends liked Tori’s threesome-loving boyfriend. Alex peeked through the door and raised his eyebrows when he heard Tori laugh. ‘She’s taking it very well…knowing how melodramatic Tori can be, I expected her to be throwing glasses and, possibly, furniture.’

Matt shuddered at the thought. He was grateful that she wasn’t; he had to deal with enough drama from his clients without coming home to a hysterical, furniture-throwing woman.

And he put up with a fair amount of drama from his sports-star clients. As their agent, looking after the business side of their sporting careers was easy, he could negotiate deals blindfolded, but playing the role of psychologist, older brother, agony aunt and best friend was emotionally draining. That was why he was renting this room in an eclectic flat on the fringes of Notting Hill for the duration of his stay in London. He loved his job but he had so much to do while he was over here that he didn’t want, or need, his UK clients dropping in on him at odd hours of the night or day.

Having them calling him all the time was enough of a pain. He was pretty sure that he was getting a repetitive strain in his elbow from constantly holding his phone to his ear. He planned to have a mini-holiday from being their agony aunt, their solver of all problems. As for women…he was sort of avoiding them too since his last hook-up back in Cape Town turned out to be a mini-stalker, utterly determined to be the first Mrs Cross.

There had only ever been one Mrs Cross—his mum—and he had no intention of changing that.

Ever.

Alex reached for his coat and shrugged it back on. Grabbing Matt’s coat off the hook, he slapped it against his chest and tipped his head.

‘Tori is the type that when she walks into a room and she’s happy, birds sing, mountains move and the lights grow brighter. When she’s miserable, tsunamis form, lava churns and demons howl. She sounds reasonably together now but she can turn on a dime. Besides, do we really want to hear about their thoughts on our junk?’

‘Really don’t.’ Matt nodded his agreement.

He was happy to leave, if only to give the distress-concealing, lava-churning beauty some space. The friends wouldn’t be able to talk, or chew the heads off bats, or do whatever females did when their worlds got turned on their heads if a stranger was in the room.

‘Let’s go to Isaac’s place and grab a beer,’ Alex suggested. ‘He’s not there but what the hell?’

‘Which bar? He has a couple.’

‘Red. It’s an easy tube ride. We’ll sneak back in later when the coast is clear.’

That, Matt decided, resisting the impulse to take another peek at the woman who could launch tsunamis and make demons howl, was the best idea he’d heard all day.

As they clattered down the stairs Alex threw a conversational grenade over his shoulder, straight at Matt’s head. ‘By the way, I’ll wipe the floor with your face if you mess with Tori.’

Matt nodded. Warning received.

CHAPTER TWO (#ud80f8b98-2ec8-53f7-8612-86c8be602872)

TORI, LYING ON THE super uncomfortable, lumpy and thin single mattress in the cramped boxroom, looked at the flashing display of her mobile and ignored Mark’s call.

What number call was that? Sixteen, seventeen? She placed her forearm over her eyes, feeling drained, exhausted and so, so empty. She’d acted her ass off earlier but she knew that her friends, especially Poppy, hadn’t bought it. Some of it but not all; they were too perceptive for her own good. Sometimes she thought that Poppy and Iz laughed because, knowing her so very well, they knew that was the reaction she was most comfortable with, because she always handled hurt with humour.

Tori hiccupped a sob and couldn’t believe that she was crying over a man…again. It was what she did, she thought, a pattern of behaviour that started in her childhood and she’d yet to break. She’d throw herself into a situation, looking for attention—love, affirmation—and when it ran out, sometimes in minutes, sometimes days, weeks, months, she’d be left feeling flattened and…less than.

She was so tired of feeling less than. But the reality was that she’d never been enough…not for her parents, not for her previous loser boyfriends, definitely not for Mark.

Tori rolled over onto her side and groaned as a particularly large lump dug into her ribcage. On the plus side, she didn’t love Mark, hadn’t been able to open herself up to him and reveal the chronically insecure woman below her flash surface. Maybe if she found a man she could do that with, someone she allowed to peek below the partygirl, flirty-girl surface, maybe that would be the man she could fall in love with, the man who would give her the love and attention and the stability that had always been beyond her reach.

Tori thumped her wafer-thin pillow and rolled over again. This bed was disgusting, the room small and cramped. When she and Poppy and Iz shared this flat—happy, happy days of laughter, girl chats and wild parties—Izzy had used this room to store her clothes and Poppy her medical tomes. This bed had been a place to throw stuff on, now it seemed to be a repository for the lost and strayed, first Izzy, then Lara, now her.

But everything was changing…The flat was like Love Central recently, with Izzy falling head over heels in love with Harry and Alex losing his heart to Lara.

But she’d rather be here, in this horrible bed in the tiniest room in the house with friends who cared about her, than back at Mark’s with or without his plus one. This flat, originally a fire station with its exposed red brickwork and crazy plumbing, was the place she felt most like…well, herself, and the people who lived within its thick walls were more family than her own flesh and blood. Especially Poppy, who knew her in and out and roundabout.

But really, this bed…she’d never get to sleep.

‘Isaac is away…’ Poppy had said.

Isaac is away…mmm, gorgeous Isaac. If he were in residence she’d consider making a play for him; he would be a super excellent way to forget Mark. Tori bit her lip…except that there was a weird vibe between Poppy and Isaac, something that would have her hesitating if Isaac were around…

But, right now, the bed in the turret room directly above her head was big and comfortable and, best of all, empty! She could, at the very least, get a good night’s sleep, something she knew would be next to impossible in this coffin.

Her mobile buzzed again and Tori sighed at the display. For a minute she considered answering it, considered allowing Mark to talk her around, to persuade her to jump into a taxi and come home. She’d make him grovel and, after endless hours of discussion, she’d have a warm body to curl up around tonight…

No! She was not that pathetic, that weak! He’d crossed a line as big as the San Andreas fault line and it was not okay! She was worth more than that…

Mind made up, Tori switched off her mobile, slid out of bed and walked up the stairs to the turret room, avoiding the stairs that creaked and the floorboards that groaned. In the morning, she thought as she opened the door to Izzy’s old room, she would feel better, calmer, and more able to make rational decisions.

Maybe. Or maybe she’d cave and go back to Mark…

‘You’re sounding stronger, Dad.’ Matt leaned back against the headboard, mobile to his ear.

‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’

Matt twisted his lips at Patrick’s sharp retort. Like him, he hated being fussed over, but Matt wasn’t convinced that his dad was fully recovered from the bout of pneumonia that had hospitalised him at the beginning of August. He still sounded weak, although he tried to hide it.

And also like him, his father was a night owl and they often spent time on the phone between the hours of eleven and one in the morning. They’d chat about sport or the news and every so often Matt would explain a complicated deal he was involved in. Despite his years spent working in non-profit organisations promoting sport amongst disadvantaged children, Patrick had never lost his cool, unemotional, law-trained mind and his insights were frequently sharp, concise and devastatingly accurate. He had a way of cutting through the waffle and discarding the emotion to reveal the heart of the problem, the soul of the dilemma.

‘How’s Angela?’ Matt asked, referring to the woman his dad had met a couple of months ago.