was wearing a dinner suit with the tie casually undone and hanging around his neck.
‘Hi,’ said Kitty shyly.
‘You did very well with your little friend in there,’ he said, sipping from a highball glass.
‘Thanks,’ said Kitty and wondered if he would think her greedy if she got a tray and piled it high with tasty morsels to take back to her bedroom.
‘You the nanny then?’ he asked, eyeing her over and noticing her tiny waist and large breasts in her tracksuit bottoms and long-sleeved thermal top. Kitty wished she had put on a bra when she had jumped out of the bath.
‘Yes,’ said Kitty, trying to cover her breasts with her arms.
‘I had a nanny when I was small. Never looked like you though.’ He raised one dark eyebrow at her.
Kitty didn’t know what to say, so she stood silently.
‘You’re a bit of a kiddie whisperer then?’ he asked.
‘That sounds terrible when you say it like that,’ she said, startled.
‘No, no, no tawdry intention; just commenting on your brilliance with the kiddies,’ he laughed.
‘Are you a friend of Willow and Kerr’s?’ she asked, wanting the conversation with the handsome man to continue.
‘Me? No. I don’t think they have any friends here. I don’t think they have any friends at all actually. No, I’m sleeping with one of the guests, who’s here with her husband,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ said Kitty, shocked and disappointed. Of course a man like this would be with the fabulous people; she had forgotten her place.
‘Are you shocked?’ he asked her, liking the flash of disappointment that had fleetingly crossed her face.
‘Yes,’ she answered honestly. ‘It’s not very nice for the husband.’
‘I suppose not,’ said the man, clearly not caring.
Kitty stood waiting for him to say something else, but the room was silent except for the sound of glasses and plates being packed up by the catering staff.
‘Well I’m off to bed,’ she said finally.
‘Alone?’
‘Yes!’ she said, shocked again.
‘Shame. What’s your name then?’
‘Kitty,’ she said shyly.
‘Goodnight little pussy,’ he said sexily, and Kitty felt herself go weak at the knees.
‘Night then.’ Kitty left the kitchen without anything that she had come for.
Boys had always pursued Kitty, but this one was different, she had thought. The last boy she had slept with she had met at a pub nearby when she was exploring the nightlife in her new city. He was a funny New Zealander who had plied her with vodka and taken her back to his hostel. They’d had quick fumbling sex and she’d passed out on his bunk bed, to awake to him packing his rucksack and telling her he was off to Prague that day and to look after herself.
Kitty had done the walk of shame home to Willow’s, where she had snuck upstairs before the rest of the house had awoken.
After her recent bad experience she was trying to stay away from the opposite sex. She always seemed to choose the wrong ones. She had lost her virginity to Merritt’s friend Johnny Wimple-Jones, which she would never be telling Merritt about. It had been a mistake, she realised in hindsight, but Johnny had been so nice when he had turned up at Middlemist claiming he needed to speak to Merritt urgently. Merritt had already left the country and her father was in London for the night. Brandy and flattery had got Kitty into bed, and Johnny had taken her in a haze of drunkenness and a small amount of pain. Truthfully, she was happy to get rid of her virginity. It sat in the corner of her adolescence, in turn berating her and scaring her until she finally laid the ghost to rest – or Johnny did, so to speak.
After Merritt told her about Eliza cheating on him with Johnny, Kitty was shattered and had vowed to keep her tryst with Johnny secret forever.
The young man at Willow’s party unnerved her. His grace and casual elegance was something she had never seen in a man. Her own father and Merritt were men of the land, all dirty fingernails and work boots. There was a feline quality about this man in his dinner suit, and his upper-crust, lazy accent reminded her of Alan Rickman and Jude Law rolled into one.
She had never seen him since, but she thought about him sometimes, never daring to ask Willow who he was. Instead, when she was lonely in her bed, she would make up her own fantasies about him. It was easier than actually having to have a real