Read Online Don't You Want Me? by India Knight - Free Book Online Page B

figgery. Not that I’d admit it to him in a millionyears, hence my – I hoped – off-putting reply. But instead of looking down shamefacedly and muttering, ‘I don’t know what came over me’ (to which the correct answer would have been ‘A fig, mate’), Cooper smiled in rather a pleased way, winked again, and put his hand on my thigh under the table.
    Now obviously there comes a time when a girl has to make decisions, and clearly this was one of those times. What to do? I’d seldom found anything as profoundly ridiculous as the fig display – thank God we didn’t have oysters, or mussels, or clams, or he’d have probably tongued those as well, making some ghastly remark about them ‘tasting of the sea’ – but, on the other hand, beggars etc. Not that I think of myself as a beggar, quite, but this definitely constituted an offer, and offers have been thin on the ground in my neck of the woods. (Still, what a thing to do: I couldn’t – can’t – conceive of a situation where I’d be out at dinner and get it into my head that it would be a really terrific idea to impress the man next to me by cheerfully fellating a sausage. Imagine if you got it all the way in and choked a bit and had to be rescued by your hosts, the head, as it were, of the sausage peering helplessly out of your parted lips.)
    So,
que faire
? I was given a few minutes’ respite by Emma, on Cooper’s left, asking him whether it was really true that liposuction was bad for you, and during these minutes I am sorry to say that I decided, Yes. I decided that since I was practically rusty from lack of sexual use, I’d give Cooper a go. Why not? He was remarkably good-looking, he clearly had the horn, he had quite a long tongue and I never needed to see him again, so who cared if his seduction techniques involved violating fruits? The moreI thought about it – fortifying myself with another couple of glasses of wine – the more it seemed to me that Cooper coitus was really rather a good idea: the perfect way of easing myself back in the saddle, as it were – a neat, no-nonsense solution to my problem. I’d go somewhere with him after dinner, have a quickie, prove to myself that I was still capable of having sex, perhaps an orgasm, and go home. Perfect. It was about time I slept with someone who wasn’t Dom, and got on with my life. Once the decision was made, I began rather looking forward to it.
    Barbara and I exchanged phone numbers over coffee in the drawing room, and then I looked at my watch and started making noises about baby-sitters. ‘Could you call me a cab?’ I asked Isabella.
    ‘Which way are you going?’ William Cooper asked, on cue.
    ‘Primrose Hill.’
    ‘I’ll drop you off,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, do,’ said Isabella with tremendous unsubtlety.
    ‘I’ll do that.’
    ‘It’s not much of a detour. We can’t have Mrs Midhurst going home on her own.’
    ‘Quite,’ said Cooper.
    I thanked Isabella – pausing briefly to wonder whether it was the done thing to say, ‘Thanks so much for organizing a rogering for me’ – said goodbye to the assembled crowd – Tree pressed her phone number on me too – and got my coat (‘Get your coat, you’ve pulled,’ I giggled to myself, knowing by now that I’d had too much to drink). William’s coat was a navy-blue number with a velvet collar, of thekind favoured by small nanny-accompanied children in Kensington Gardens.
    His car was parked just outside the house: a black Jeep with leather seats. Once he’d opened the door, we sat in the particularly harsh, unforgiving light for half a minute, during which time I realized that his tanned face – what is it with me and men with orange issues? – came out of a bottle, and that his hair was most probably dyed. Both these observations were sobering. But only a little bit.
    ‘Well,’ said William, once the light had gone out, giving me a wolfish grin, his teeth glinting in the dark, quite sexily: there’s something about