Four Temptations Read Online Free PDF Page B

you.”
    That way of his. The way you could never tell if he was joking or serious, or what the balance was between the two. He was the kind of man who hid behind jokes, but whose humor always had serious depths. He was impossible to read, and he knew that and played on it, and somehow that was all part of the charm.
    “Stop it, Bran, okay?”
    “I would if I knew what ‘it’ was, babe.” He shrugged and smiled and I wanted to punch him. “So, Words of Love . Out next week, right? Jimmy sent me an advance reading copy. I like. I was surprised to see that there’s so much us in it. I like that, too, I think.”
    “What part of ‘stop it’ don’t you get, Brandon?”
    “You sure have come a long way, babe.”
    Was he deliberately reminding me of my debt to him, or was that just an innocent observation? Either would have been in character.
    Back then I’d been freelancing as a copywriter, doing a spot of promotion for a TV series by some American journalist I’d never heard of. Name of a river. Brandon Tyne, The Traveling Foodie . Not quite a cookery show, not quite a travelogue, but somewhere in between. I’d ghostwritten features for various women’s mags and blogs, pitching him as a bit of a sexy rascal, the kind of man it was okay for a married woman to have a thing for. Indeed, the kind of man it was almost obligatory for a married woman to have a thing for: if you didn’t, you just weren’t normal.
    He’d done that thing, the chat, the spark, the little touches. He’d said he liked my writing but I wasn’t naïve enough to actually believe that. I didn’t mind the flattery, though: the flirting, the attention from a man I’d helped put at the centre of everyone else’s attention.
    Much to my surprise, he’d been serious about my writing. He kept telling me I should write books, and he'd told his agent, Jimmy Abel, all about me.
    The first I knew was a call from Jimmy, asking if I had anything available. Thinking quickly, I’d said I was working on a novel based on a magazine piece I’d written recently. It was about a young woman called Lulu who used her charms to make her way in the world. He asked to see the piece and I emailed it to him, thinking that even if he was interested literary agents were notoriously slow, so I would have plenty more time to think about it and write some more.
    He called back that afternoon, asking to see the book.
    “I might need a couple of weeks,” I told him. “It needs a bit of a polish.”
    “Cool, cool. So tell me, by ‘a bit of a polish’ do you mean you haven’t actually finished a first draft yet?”
    There was something about his voice that put me at ease. “Well,” I said, “if by ‘haven’t actually finished a first draft yet’ you mean I don’t have much more than a chapter where I’ve been trying to turn that magazine feature into fiction, and lots of post-it notes, then yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
    He’d laughed, which I took as a good sign. Then he said, “Just send me whatever you can, whenever you can. I’m keen. I think we could do things with this.” Which I took as an even better sign.
    §
    So... Brandon and his flirting. And he really was flirting.
    “That scent,” he whispered in my ear as we chatted to another of Jimmy’s authors. “Didn’t I buy that for you?”
    “It’s soap.”
    It was actually Madame by John Paul Gaultier, and yes, Brandon had introduced me to it. Call me a heartless bitch, but I hadn’t seen any reason to dump the scent just because I’d dumped the man.
    “It’s okay. I just needed an excuse to lean in close like this,” he said, leaning in close to whisper into my ear again, one hand resting briefly on the small of my back.
    That was the moment...
    Up until then I’d been vaguely amused by his behavior, but now... now I realized he might just be serious, and what’s more, I liked it.
    Yes, I know, I should have known better than that. I write about this all the time: