‘What are you doing?’ Leila asked.
‘Getting rid of the unnecessary,’ James said. He usually preferred made-up women—he liked the mask, he liked the stranger—but he did not want that from Leila. He wanted her stripped, he wanted her naked, and that started now.
She liked the gentle pressure of his finger on her lips. She liked the way his eyes narrowed as he concentrated on removing the lipstick from her mouth.
And concentrate he did.
‘Now, you’re perfect,’ James said. ‘Almost.’
‘Almost?’
He went in his pocket and pulled out what Leila thought was another lipstick. ‘What sort of man carries lipstick?’ Leila asked, and he simply smiled as he got to work on her very full mouth.
‘It’s lip balm,’ James corrected. ‘If you ski as much as I do, you tend to carry it.’
She liked the waxy feel of it as he applied it. She ran her tongue over her lips and there was a slight taste of vanilla, but still she could not imagine her father or Zayn carrying such a thing.
For all her naivety Leila had not been completely shielded from men. She thought of Zayn’s friends of yesteryear. Cocky playboys who used women, yet she did not feel used tonight. There was something else to James—something that made her smile, made her feel warm, made her feel very beautiful indeed, and that was something she had never felt before.
‘You are like no one I have ever known,’ Leila said.
‘Snap.’
‘Snap?’ Leila checked, because even though her English was excellent she didn’t know what that word meant.
‘It means that I feel the same about you,’ James said, and then he checked himself, because he didn’t get involved in any one woman. He was saying things to Leila that he didn’t usually say and he didn’t want to give her mixed messages.
Tomorrow he would be gone.
‘For now,’ he amended.
‘For now?’
‘I’m very, very bad at relationships,’ James said. ‘I tend not to do them.’
‘Tend?’ Leila checked, for she did not understand that word also, but James took it that she wanted him to elaborate.
‘I’ve had one serious relationship and she chose to go to the press and share every last thing that I’d told her in confidence as well as a lot of salacious details. What about you?’ James asked. ‘Have you ever been seriously involved with anyone?’
‘Never,’ Leila said.
She told the truth; James just never thought that she might mean literally.
More drinks were on the table, but it was not the liquor that made her giddy and laugh. It was this man who asked questions, who gave of himself, who laughed deeply and who simply could not release her hands save to feed her her drink.
‘Do you want dinner?’ James asked, but she shook her head for there was a different sort of hunger in Leila tonight and she told him that.
‘I want to know about you.’