Free One Night with Her Ex by Lucy King Page B

palms went damp in a way that had nothing to do with the condensation that he’d felt on his beer glass.
    With every step she took his head swam just that little bit more, until she stopped right in front of him and, thank goodness, took the decision out of his hands by reaching up and planting a soft, light kiss on his cheek.
    Then she stepped back and smiled up at him, presumably completely unaware of how she was affecting him.
    ‘You look nice,’ she said, giving him a quick once-over that had heat shooting through him.
    ‘You look beautiful,’ he replied, once he’d managed to clear his head of her scent and unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
    ‘Thank you.’
    He cleared his throat. ‘I booked a table.’
    ‘Great.’
    ‘Would you like a drink before we sit down?’
    ‘Would you?’
    ‘If you would.’
    ‘I don’t mind.’
    Feeling as if a swarm of bees had invaded his body, Kit swallowed hard. For crying out loud, this was absurd. He was thirty-two. He ran a global multimillion-pound business. He was known for being decisive, intuitive and utterly ruthless when the situation called for it. Yet here he was, being rendered practically tongue-tied by the prospect of an evening with his ex-wife. His totally calm and in control ex-wife. Who was expecting not a drooling idiot of a dining companion, but a possibly difficult conversation that he’d insisted upon.
    Telling himself he really had to get a grip, with superhuman effort Kit pulled himself together. ‘Let’s just go straight to the table, shall we?’ he muttered, taking her hand and practically marching her across the bar and out onto the sand.

SIX
    This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date.
    As she followed Kit to the table that sat at the water’s edge and was set for two Lily tried to concentrate on the mantra rolling around her head and not on the electricity that emanated from the connection of her hand with his and was zapping through her, but it was proving no more helpful now than it had when she’d been getting ready.
    After going back to her room earlier this afternoon and taking a cold shower, which hadn’t done much to obliterate the hundred or so grasshoppers that had seemed to have taken up residence in her stomach at the thought of the date—no, dinner —with Kit, she’d decided that while donning armour was a must, mainlining tequila probably wasn’t the way to handle the evening. She was in a jittery enough state as it was and with alcohol loosening her already iffy inhibitions who knew what might happen?
    Once she’d made that pleasingly mature decision, she’d called her sister and after that, well, she hadn’t known what to think about anything.
    As she’d dialled the number she’d been planning to tear a strip off Zoe for revealing her whereabouts to Kit of all people. She’d been going to say she understood that her sister was at a heightened level of happiness at the moment, but that she had to realise that not everyone was in search of the same, and that she certainly wasn’t looking for it with Kit. She’d even been prepared to counter-argue the excuse of Kit’s powers of persuasion she was sure Zoe was going to give.
    What she hadn’t been prepared for, however, was her sister’s declaration that she thought Kit still had feelings for her, that he’d said he might still love her and that that was why she’d told him where she was. To give them the opportunity to see whether they had a second chance. Or something.
    In something of a daze Lily had hung up, and it was then that she’d descended into the kind of emotional turmoil she’d spent so long avoiding, her head teeming with questions such as ‘Could he?’ ‘Did he?’ and her heart beginning to swell with what she had the awful suspicion might be hope.
    Which made such a mockery of everything she’d spent the last five years trying to convince herself of that it was no wonder she’d worked herself up into such a