The Agency by Ally O'Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

felt like I was sixteen. I’m not sure exactly when we both realized that we had crossed the line from strangers into friends, or when we admitted to ourselves that we had already skated past the next line where friends begin to look at each other as lovers. Sometimes an attraction is so obvious that you don’t need to talk about it. It’s just there.
    I really didn’t expect anything to happen. This was one chance meeting, a little memory for me to tuck away, a nothing romance with a “what if” or maybe an “if only” question at the end of it. We both knew, without saying, that we would be fools to acknowledge the reality of what was going on between us. After all, you might fall in love with a house, but if it belongs to someone else and has a great big security fence to keep out trespassers,you’d probably think twice about looking for a way to get inside, right? So the easy thing to do was walk away. Smile. Pretend.
    Except one of the things we talked about was Chihuly glass. Don’t ask me how or why. He told me about the Chihuly ceiling in the lobby at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I told him about the frieze in the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. We both loved the olive-and-turquoise chandelier at the Victoria and Albert. And it just so happened that a Chihuly exhibit was back at the Tate Modern, and I was planning to take a jaunt across the Millennium Bridge to go there on Friday evening, and would he like to see it with me?
    Completely innocent.
    Except we both knew it wasn’t.
    As we stood at the balcony on the second floor of the Tate and stared at this glowing orange sun made up of squiggling snakes of glass, we just naturally held hands. As we paused on the arch of the bridge two hours later, with a mist dampening our hair and the fuzzy lights of the city twisting along the banks of the Thames, we just naturally kissed. It was Friday. My father was in Somerset. The Mayfair flat, sitting empty, just naturally beckoned us, and by morning, we were contemplating the wreckage we were making of our lives and telling ourselves that we had to stop.
    That was a year and a half ago. We haven’t stopped.
    When I heard the drumroll of his fingertips on the door, my heart took off like a racehorse. I scared myself with my emotions, but I was powerless to stop them. The difference between a crush when you are sixteen and a crush when you are thirty-six is merely that you have more gray hairs and fewer inhibitions. As I ran to the door, I may as well have been a teenager fantasizing about Robbie Williams.
    “Tess,” he murmured to me in that oh-so-English voice. “You are a vision.”
    Melting. Rubbery knees. Girlish giggle.
    I pulled him inside and wasted no time helping him off with his charcoal coat, untying his cravat, and wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him until we had sprained our tongues. Hisbig hands lifted me effortlessly into the air. I felt weightless, like an astronaut.
    “It’s lovely to see you, darling,” I said when we took a breath.
    We both laughed. I poured him champagne. We flopped down on the sofa, and I lost myself in his chest. He smelled like Dunhill Original. His chiseled jaw was barbershop smooth. His teeth were a row of snow-white soldiers.
    Darcy is a few years older than I, a youthful forty. He has this swept-back mane of salt-and-pepper hair like one of the Landseer lions. His clothes are Manning & Manning, and they make an expensive hummock of silk and wool on the bedroom floor. He is a towering six foot four with the easy grace of an athlete. In his twenties, he was a tennis player, seeded at Wimbledon, but he suffered a groin injury that short-circuited his career. I assure you that his groin is fully recovered.
    When you are a young male sports star, you assume that the river of money will flow forever, and you spend it accordingly. Darcy has a weakness for the finer things in life. It was a rude comeuppance to find himself broke no more than a year after he