Free The Gift by Portia Da Costa Page B

and lungs. Bereft of strength, she pushed at him, shoving vaguely, like a Victorian consumptive on the edge of expiring. Luckily he got the message and, heaving himself off her, he rolled over onto his back, at her side.
    ‘Jesus.’ He huffed out his breath. ‘Jesus,’ he repeated, as if his entire vocabulary had been erased in the conflagration.
    Typical man … He’s all shagged out and he’s almost forgotten there was anyone else involved.
    Wallowing in entirely irrational disappointment, Sandy’s eyes filled with moisture, but she bit her lip, quashing the autonomic post-coital weepiness. How could she expect anything more of a man she’d only really spoken to for the first time tonight, and fallen into bed with like the easiest of trollops? She was worse than Kat. By a long chalk. Even her friend usually tried to get to know her boyfriends a bit before she dragged them into bed.
    I’ve only got what I deserve.
    Continuing to gnaw her lip, she prepared to sit up, but just then a warm hand patted and probed the bed at her side. When it found her hand, it clasped it, held on hard, then lifted their linked fingers.
    The tears did come when Jay pressed a sweet and very soft kiss against her knuckles.
    ‘Thank you, Sandy. Thank you.’
    Surreptitiously she wiped her face with her other hand, and stole a glance at him. Something in the fractured quality of his rough voice suggested that he might have been crying too. But his face looked composed. In fact, he was smiling. A broad smile, without guile or artifice.
    ‘Er … my pleasure,’ she answered, then found herself laughing again.
    It certainly had been her pleasure. In fact more of it than she’d probably ever had before in her life, with any man. It hadn’t lasted all that long but, boy, had it been intense!
    Jay kissed the back of her hand again, and flashed her a wink.
    ‘Would you think that I’m a crass, horrible, insensitive philistine of a typical man if I said I was hungry now?’ He turned on his side and, giving her fingertips one last kiss, he released her hand. ‘That was amazing but, somehow, I’m starving.’
    Sandy glanced away, suddenly embarrassed, as he plucked at the condom that still enrobed his wilted cock. But she couldn’t help noticing out of the corner of her eye that he was still sizeable when flaccid and, deep in the quick of her, she felt the echo of response.
    ‘No, I’m a bit hungry myself,’ she admitted, wondering if he could read the ambiguity, the half-baked double entendre.
    But it seemed not, because he was already disposing of the evidence, and fastening his trousers, then his shirt. ‘I just hope we can get into the kitchen now. Kat and Greg might have gone back there.’ She tweaked down her skirt, wondering exactly where her knickers had got to this time. ‘We are in her room, after all.’
    Jay was on his feet now, tall, even in his stockinged feet.
    ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that,’ he said conversationally as he cast about for his shoes, then, finding them, slipped them on. ‘But … well …’ He turned to her, smiling again, strangely shyly. ‘It was important to … to get together as soon as we could, you know?’ His muscular shoulders lifted in a shrug.
    She did sort of know, but somehow she sensed there was more to it. A more compelling drive than lust, pure and simple. There were shadows about Jay, things he hadn’t yet told her. Things he might never tell her.
    It just depended how long this relationship, or whatever it was they had, lasted.

Chapter 7
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    Sandy’s head whipped round, and the spoonful of mayonnaise she was dolloping onto the salad sandwich plopped onto the kitchen counter. She wasn’t yet ready to prepare any kind of food on the table, even though she’d gone over it several times with sanitiser spray, and the tablecloth – and the butter dish – were now in the waste bin.
    She wasn’t used to men apologising, especially when they didn’t actually have