Page 40 of Suddenly Tempted
“That sounds great,” he said.
“It was, it really was. I was so excited. I thought that working someplace like that might give me the confidence to do something amazing with my life, too. It might help me feel less scared about everything.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing,” Darcy said. “I got the job, used all my money to fly me and my life over here. When I arrived at the place we were supposed to be working they were boarding it up. Turned out the woman who founded it had decided to use the cash for a permanent holiday in Hawaii. I was stuck here, no money, no family to call on. Luckily, I knew some people on Heartbook who put me up in Geneva while I sorted out enough cash for a place of my own. I’ve been drifting ever since.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Devlin said. “That was a very unfair and cruel thing to do to somebody.”
Darcy shrugged.
“I’m used to it,” she said. “Life can be unfair, and it can certainly be cruel. But I survived. Just like this.” She gestured at the window, where the storm raged. “It hurt, but I survived.Wesurvived.”
“You could do a lot of good with £100,000,” Devlin said, but she waved him away.
“I don’t need your money,” she replied. He was about to argue with her, then decided not to. He intended to give her every penny of the money he’d promised, but he didn’t want to make her feel bad about it. Not here, and not now.
“Tell me something about yourself, Devlin,” she said, tucking her legs up under her and fixing him with those amazing eyes. “Something that I won’t have read in the papers.”
He drew breath. The story he was going to tell her came straight to mind.
“I only started designing clothes because of my Mum. I was sixteen, and she had a job interview. Dad had just been sent to prison again, for trying to steal a car. We were broke, and Mum went for a job at a supermarket chain. All she had to wear was this moth-eaten corduroy suit that looked like it was older than she was. I remember seeing her in our kitchen, just standing there, trying to get in the right frame of mind for this interview. But she looked beat. She looked like she’d already accepted she wouldn’t get it.”
“I know that feeling,” Darcy said when he paused. “The right clothes make you a different person, don’t they?”
“Not quite,” he said. “It’s thewrongclothes that make you a different person. They stop you from being you.”
“So you made her something else to wear?” she asked.
“No, I was just a kid. I didn’t know the first thing about designing, or making clothes. But that’s the moment I decided I was going to do it. Mum didn’t get the job, and we stayed poor. But I spent my schooldays in the library reading about tailoring, about stitching and cutting, about the history of fashion. I immersed myself in it.”
He smiled, but the happiness of the memory was tinged with an inescapable sadness.
“And I started making something for Mum. I didn’t have much to work with, but I took that suit and altered it, and dyed it jet black. I stitched designs into the collar and hems with silver thread that I’d pulled out of Mum’s wire dishwashing brush.”
“Seriously?” Darcy asked, wide-eyed. He nodded, still smiling.
“Oh, yeah, seriously. The librarian at our school, Mrs Wallis, was this amazing woman who’d been watching me learn about all this stuff. She had this little jar of antique buttons, all shapes and sizes, all different colours and materials. She gave it to me, bless her heart, and I replaced the frumpy brown buttons of Mum’s suit with these new ones. Little mother-of-pearl fasteners, and these silver buttons on the sleeves. I mean it was such a mix of different styles it never should have worked, but it did.”
“Did she like it?” Darcy asked, leaning even closer. Her hand hovered close to his, like a butterfly about to land on a blossoming flower.
“She was . . . she was blown away,” Devlin said, remembering her face, the way it had opened up in delight and surprise. “I gave it to her one morning — six months and goodness knows how many job interviews after I’d had the idea. She couldn’t believe I was giving it to her. She couldn’t even speak. She thought I’d bought it, and it was only when I told her I’d made it that she really started to cry. She couldn’t accept that anyone could just make something like that. I had to show her the dishwashing brush before she believed me.” He laughed again. “She was mad about the brush, though. She had wondered what had happened to it.”
Darcy laughed, too, and this time her fingers brushed against his hand. It was light, barely there, but it may as well have been a livewire straight to his bloodstream and other places he had no control over. His pulse spiked, heat sliding over his skin. She didn’t pull away. Neither did he. Instead, he felt the ghost of her fingertips against his, teasing and tentative.
And then she did it again. This time, more deliberate.
A slow, delicious ache uncurled in his stomach, spreading lower, the kind of heat he hadn’t expected tonight, not with her, not like this. He let out a quiet breath, his fingers twitching before he made a decision and opened his hand.
She laced her fingers through his, the movement so natural, so intimate, that it knocked the breath right out of him. She didn’t say anything, just studied their joined hands with those amazing eyes, as if trying to decide whether or not this was real.
Adorable. Exceptadorablewasn’t the word anymore. Not with the way her thumb brushed against his, sending another shiver rushing through his body, not with the way her smaller hand fit so perfectly in his, like it had always belonged there. This felt different from the last time he’d held hands with a woman, because this time, he wanted more. Craved it.
Maybe he really had fallen down that crevasse, bumping his head hard enough to cause a wave of welcome hallucinations.
“What is it?” Darcy asked him.
“I just . . .” He swallowed. He didn’t really know how to explain it. “I feel . . . I don’t know.”
