Jill Mansell - Mixed doubles

This was even more humiliating than being hauled into a police van in struggling-beetle position, as was now happening to Alistair. Liza stared hard at the goings-on at the back of the van and pretended she hadn’t heard Kit Berenger speak.

‘Mine too,’ he went on, releasing his grip on her wrist and offering her his own. ‘Have a feel if you want.’

‘No thanks,’ Liza replied faintly.

‘The thing is, there’s something I’ve been wanting to do rather badly for quite a while now,’ said Kit. ‘Is it okay with you if I give it a go?’

Liza could barely breathe.

‘Not if you’re going to slap my face.’

‘I don’t want to slap your face.’ He turned her slowly towards him, so there was no escaping the look in those extraordinary black-lashed, yellow-gold eyes. ‘I want to kiss your mouth.’

This, thought Liza, is ridiculous .. .

Then she stopped thinking because it was too late now to do anything, let alone think. Kit Berenger’s mouth came down on hers and Liza gave herself up to it, utterly helpless to protest.

Every nerve in her body was going zinnggg. She was only managing to stay standing because his arms were keeping her up. The knees had gone, the stomach had disappeared .. .

Just don’t stop, Liza silently begged him, willing the kiss to go on and on. Please don’t stop.

‘Bloody hell, it’s Kit Berenger,’ exclaimed the reporter, gazing in amazement at the scene confronting him as he made his way back to the car for a fag break. ‘Oi, Joe, over here,’ he yelled, beckoning frantically for the photographer. ‘Look who’s snogging Liza Lawson! Get a shot of this, for Chrissake.’

Alistair was still putting up a terrific struggle, resisting every effort to bundle him into the back of the police van. Hearing the journalist’s words, he twisted round and stared in horror at Liza who appeared to be clinging to Kit Berenger for dear life.

‘You bastard, take your hands off her this minute,’ roared Alistair. ‘Liza, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? Don’t you know who that is?’

In no time they were the centre of attention. The protesters had all stopped to watch. Joe was using up his last roll of film.

‘I always say you can’t beat a bit of privacy,’ Kit Berenger murmured against Liza’s mouth, his hand stroking the back of her neck.

When the Evening Post reporter had been eating his Big Mac earlier, a group of New Agers had hissed ‘murderer’ at him. Now, behind her back, Liza could hear them hissing ‘traitor’ at her.

‘I may not get out of here alive,’ she said, her voice still unsteady, her whole body quivering shamelessly with lust. ‘At least they’re vegetarians, they won’t eat you alive.’ A nightmare thought struck Liza.

‘Why did you do this, to make a fool of me?’

‘Come on.’ Kit half smiled down at her. ‘You don’t really think that. I did it because it had to be done. Before we both drove each other demented.’

Liza nodded. She could no longer deny it; the chemistry was simply there between them. It had been from the word go.

‘How old are you?’ she asked, needing to know the worst.

‘Twenty-three.’

‘I’m thirty-two.’ It sounded terrible. She had never been out with anyone younger than her before. Not even nine months younger, let alone nine years.

‘No you aren’t, you’re thirty-one.’

‘Only until next week.’

Kit grinned. ‘A week’s a long time in politics.’

The protest had by this time pretty much fizzled out. When the protesters’ attention had turned to Liza and Kit, the contractors had revved up their engines and got busy with the bulldozers, to-ing and fro-ing at surprising speed as they shifted great mounds of earth.

The police van, with Alistair’s outraged face glaring out of the tiny back window, bumped and jiggled its way across the churned-up ground on to the main road.

‘You must be joking,’ said Kit when the reporter from the Evening Post asked him for a quote.

‘Liza?’ The reporter looked not-very-hopefully hopeful. ‘She doesn’t have anything to say either.’

‘I think I’d better go home,’ said Liza, when they were alone again. She was floundering, unsure what was going to happen next. He might be nine years younger, but Kit Berenger had somehow automatically assumed control of the situation. If he were to bundle her into that dark-green Bentley of his, Liza thought with longing, and whisk her off somewhere – anywhere – to bed, she would willingly go.

‘I’ve got a heavy day too.’ Kit glanced at his watch – that ludicrous purple Swatch. ‘I’m already running late. Sorry,’ he smiled slightly as he led the way back to their cars, ‘if I’d known this was going to happen, I could have postponed a few meetings. You’d better give me your phone number.’

He leaned against the bonnet of the Bentley and wrote the number on the back of a crumpled ten-pound note pulled from the pocket of his jeans. Liza, who couldn’t bear men with namby-pamby handwriting, was passionately relieved to see how assertive he was with a pen, not nancyish at all.

As he helped her into the Renault, his lips brushed hers, thrillingly, once more.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Kit.

My God, you’d better be, thought Liza, far too proud to ask when.

Chapter 23

‘Did someone slip something into my cocoa?’ Dulcie demanded with suitable drama two days later. ‘Am I hallucinating? Or is this really a photo I see before me in the local paper – on the front page, no less – of my friend Liza snogging with the enemy?’

Liza bit her lip, gazed out of the window and said nothing.

‘And you can turn that sodding answering machine off for a start,’ Dulcie went on, ‘because it isn’t fooling anyone. We know you’re in there. Dammit,’ she wailed the next second, ‘do you want me to die of curiosity?’

That, thought Liza, would be too much to hope for. Chewing her pen, she leafed irritably through the research notes she was amassing in preparation for her new book, a history of Mediterranean cookery.

‘Fine, I get the message,’ said Dulcie in a sing-song voice when it became clear Liza had no intention of picking up the phone. ‘But don’t think you can hide for ever. The minute I can walk again, I’ll be over. I don’t know what you’ve been up to,’ she concluded briskly, – God, now she sounded like Joyce Grenfell on speed – ‘but I’m jolly well going to find out.’

Dulcie rang off at last. Wearily, since the kitchen table might be awash with reference books but that didn’t mean she was getting a stroke of work done, Liza snapped the file shut and switched the kettle on instead. For the millionth time she compulsively checked her watch.

What a hideous day. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing, the poor answering machine didn’t know what had hit it. The story had even been picked up by a couple of the nationals; at lunchtime a call had come through from the Daily Mail, who were keen to include Liza in a feature on star-crossed lovers.

‘We’ve got a pair of besotted MPs so far – one Labour, one Tory – and a vegan who’s fallen in love with a butcher,’ the journalist explained with maddening cheerfulness. ‘The third couple were going to be Catholic-Protestant, but to be frank,’ she lowered her voice to a confiding whisper, ‘your story sounds much more fun.’

Liza stood at the kitchen window, sipping lukewarm tea she didn’t even want. Her so-called story might sound fun to the girl from the Mail but it was a lot less entertaining being on the business end, Liza could promise her that.

She gazed out at the tiny patio garden bursting with tubs of geraniums and petunias, and tried to remember if exam nerves, the real stomach-churning kind when you actually felt sick with fear, had ever been this bad.