It Felt Like a Kiss

  About the Book

  Ellie Cohen is living her dream. A great job at an exclusive Mayfair art gallery, loyal mates, loving family, and really, really good hair. Well, there’s the famous rock-star father who refuses to acknowledge her and a succession of ‘challenging’ boyfriends, but nobody’s perfect.

  But when a vengeful ex sells Ellie out to the press, she suddenly finds herself fighting to keep her job, her reputation and her sanity. Then David Gold – handsome, charming but ruthlessly ambitious – is sent in to manage the media crisis . . . and Ellie.

  David thinks she’s a gold-digger and Ellie thinks he’s a shark in a Savile Row suit, so it’s just as well that falling in love is the last thing on their minds . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  About the Author

  Also by Sarra Manning

  Copyright

  It Felt Like A Kiss

  Sarra Manning

  Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Shaw who was always the most exemplary of fathers.

  Thanks

  Thank you to my bestie, Kate, who talked me down from so many ledges this year, and Lesley Lawson, Sophie Wilson and Sarah Bailey just for being there. Thanks also to Sam Baker, Sarah Franklin, Anna Carey, Julie Mayhew and my Twitter friends, who keep me sane and hooked up with cute pictures of doggies.

  I have meant to say thank you to Leanne Forrester for an unconscionably long time, so, Leanne, thank you so much for all your support. And I would also like to give big, big, BIG thanks to Sue Goodyear, who has waited patiently for over two years to have her name in this novel after she very generously bid in the Authors for Japan auction. Sue, I hope you like your namesake!

  As ever, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wonderful agent, Karolina Sutton, and Catherine Saunders, Helen Manders, Alice Lutyens and all at Curtis Brown. I’d also like to thank my editor Catherine Cobain and Sophie Wilson (yes, I know two Sophie Wilsons), Madeline Toy, Sarah Roscoe, Sophie Holmes, Vivien Garrett and all at Transworld.

  twitter.com/sarramanning

  www.sarramanning.co.uk

  It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult.

  Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale

  Camden, London, 1986

  He was the most beautiful man Ari Underground had ever seen.

  ‘I could eat him for breakfast,’ she said to her friend Tabitha as they stood at the bar of the Black Horse. ‘He looks like a cross between James Dean and Serge Gainsbourg.’

  ‘He’s married,’ Tabitha said flatly. ‘Even if he wasn’t, he’s bad news.’

  He might be married but he was also brooding and dark, and Ari wanted to lick the sneer right off his pretty face.

  And if he was married then he had no right to be staring back at her.

  Afterwards, when she’d come off stage in the tiny room above the bar, still high on the applause, the buzz, the sheer thrill of playing songs that hot-wired people’s hearts, and was packing her amp and her guitar into the back of the van that Chester had borrowed from his dad, she suddenly felt a pair of eyes painting pictures on the back of her neck.

  Ari turned round and he was there, right there. Didn’t say a word, just took a step nearer, and another one, until she was pressed between the van and his hard body. This close she could see how long his eyelashes were, and the sneer disappeared because they were close enough that she could purse her lips and blow it away. It was a lot like kissing without actually kissing.

  They weren’t touching either, though his body hustled her against the side of the van. When Ari panted a little because he was so intense, so silent, and she’d never been so turned on, it was as if he caught her every breath.

  A door banged behind them, then she heard Chester say plaintively, ‘I’ve got to have the van back by midnight or my dad’ll kill me,’ and the spell was broken.

  In the time it took to blink, Billy Kay wasn’t there any more.

  Chapter One

  Camden, London, The Present

  It had rained hard that lunchtime. There was still a damp, peaty smell rising up from the undergrowth in Regent’s Park, but the sharp scent of wet grass was fading as Ellie Cohen walked home from work. There was a luminescence to the early evening; soft and light, no crispness in the air. Ellie slipped off her jacket and hoped that the good weather would last until the end of the week when she was off to Glastonbury. Spending three rainy days battling the elements and trudging through squelching fields of mud with the risk of getting trench foot would not be fun.

  Ellie would spend most of the week anxiously clicking refresh on the Met Office website, but now it was Monday evening, which was household chores night. Then, as a reward for their hard work, Ellie and her flatmates would watch trashy TV and eat like queens, courtesy of Theo, owner of the Greek restaurant downstairs, who needed to get rid of any food left from the weekend. The thought was enough to have Ellie quickening her pace as she left the park by Gloucester Gate and hurried towards Delancey Street.

  Five minutes later she was outside her flat but before she could pull out her keys, the door opened to reveal Tess and Lola. For two women who had hummus, lamb kebabs, stuffed vine leaves and back-to-back episodes of The Only Way Is Essex in their immediate future, they didn’t look very happy.

  ‘Why are you both looking so grim?’ Ellie asked, as they made no effort to step aside and let her in. ‘Is it the thought of the pre-cleaner tidy-up? Come on, you know the thought of it is worse than the actual doing of it.’

  ‘We need to talk,’ Lola said soberly, and Tess nodded, not looking Ellie in the eye. Instantly Ellie was suspicious.

  ‘Why? What have you done? Have you broken something? Have you broken something of mine?’ Each thought was worse than the last. ‘Did you borrow something without asking and break it? Please don’t say it was my new hairdryer!’

  ‘It’s not about your new hairdryer. We haven’t broken any of your things,’ Tess added quickly as Ellie opened her mouth to fire off a new round of questions. ‘It’s about, well … first of all you should know that we’re not judging you. We love you, but it’s a case of loving the sinner, not the sin, you know?’

  Ellie didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine what heinous act she’d committed that might warrant an intervention. ‘You’re going to have to give me a clue because I don’t remember sinning lately. Anyway, I’m not a Catholic, don’t they have t he monopoly on sinning?’ she asked brightly to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.

  ‘Yeah, and you have the monopoly on bad boyfriends,’ Lola said. ‘After what happened on Saturday night, enough is enough.’

  ‘Richey is bad news. He’s the zenith of bad news,’ Tess elaborated, as she finally stopped blocking Ellie’s way and pushed her into the living room, then marched her over to the IKEA sofa. ‘Sit!’

  It was the tone of voice tweedy women of a certain age used to discipline unruly dogs. Ellie sat. ‘OK, maybe things got a little out of hand on the weekend but Richey is not bad news, he just had a bad Saturday night.’

  ‘Not as bad as our Saturday night was having to deal with his crap,’ Lola said in a tight voice. They were both standing over her, hands on hips. It was Ellie who had brought the two of them together but they still hadn’t quite made the transition from roomies to friends. In fact they argued a lot, so how ironic that they’d finally bonded over the shortcomings of Richey.

  Richey, Ellie’s latest boyfriend, was shaping up to be a fine boyfriend. A great boyfriend. He was very good-looking, almost model standard – not that Ellie was shallow – was gainfully employed as an assistant at a film production company in Soho, had a good sense of humour, didn’t feel emasculated that Ellie earned more than he did, and generally Ellie was starting to feel that the two and a half months that she’d been seeing Richey were turning into something. Maybe even quite a serious something.

  ‘… and really, Ellie, he’s awful. He’s not worthy of you. Not even close,’ Tess insisted so shrilly that Ellie stopped mentally listing all of Richey’s considerable plus points and frowned at her best friend.

  Ellie loved Tess, and often referred to her as ‘my sister from another mister’. She’d bought Tess her first bottle of Chanel No 5 for her twenty-first birthday and had once endured three hours in Topshop as Tess tried on jeans and cried every time she swivelled round and looked at her bum in the changing-room mirror. There’d also been tough love, like the time she’d nursed Tess through an affair with a married man, or when she’d finally persuaded Tess to get her brown hair highlighted and to soldier through growing out her over-plucked eyebrows, and this was how Tess chose to repay her?

  ‘I’ve already said I’m sorry about Saturday night at least ten times and you know I’ll get your dress dry-cleaned.’

  Lola sat down next to Ellie and gently patted her knee. Lola never did anything gently so it was a measure of just how serious they both thought this was; this fuss about Richey.

  ‘Sweetie, it’s not about the dress. It’s about you failing to see what’s blatantly clear to all the people who care about you,’ Lola said softly. ‘We don’t want to see you in a relationship with a smack addict or a meth head, or whatever horrible shit Richey is into.’

  Ellie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. So, there’d been half an hour during an admittedly wild Saturday night that she hadn’t been with Richey and in that time he’d apparently gone on a drug-fuelled bender? This didn’t equate with the Richey that she’d been seeing. He held doors open for her. He gave her back rubs when she’d had a bad day at the office. He was always sending her funny, sweet little texts …

  ‘You’re blowing this whole thing way out of proportion. Yes, he smokes dope, but more people smoke dope than go to church on Sundays.’ Ellie had read that in the Guardian, so it had to be true. ‘And maybe he caned it a bit hard on Saturday night, but really, Lola, you don’t exactly live a blameless life yourself, and Richey’s been going through a rough time …’

  ‘Yeah, like he was going through my drawers. Probably to find stuff he could sell to fund his habit,’ Tess revealed, and Ellie’s heart plummeted, as it did from time to time. Usually when she was seeing a guy and it was all going well, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Then her plummeting heart was the precursor to many nights of not sleeping, and drinking too much wine, and wondering why, when everything else was turning out just as she’d planned, right on schedule, the relationship area of her life was piled high with emotional debris.

  But the thing was that you had to get back on the horse. Keep on trying. Give potential new boyfriends the benefit of the doubt because the alternative was to become one of those embittered women who sat with other embittered women in bars and said embittered things like, ‘All men are bastards. You can’t trust any of them. Better to be on your own than to be with some waste of space who makes you miserable.’

  Ellie didn’t want to end up like that. Half her mother’s friends were like that. She had to stay positive, though sometimes staying positive was really hard. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know how many more times I can say it, but we were all pretty out of it on Saturday night. There were Jäger shots—’

  ‘That doesn’t excuse him trying to steal from us,’ Tess said. She had every right to sound upset – Ellie was upset on her behalf – but there could be a perfectly rational explanation for Richey rifling through her sock drawer, although Ellie couldn’t think what it might be.

  ‘I’m sure Richey doesn’t have a habit,’ she said emphatically, though she was going to be having words with him later. Serious words. ‘It’s not as if I’ve only just met him. I’ve been seeing him for nearly three months now and anyway, how bad can he be? My mum introduced us!’

  ‘We’re getting sidetracked here.’ Tess sat down so she could put an arm round Ellie’s stiff shoulders. ‘Sweetie, this is coming from a place of love. Not a place of judgement.’ Ever since Tess had read How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the hope it would lead to a promotion from freelance dogsbody to permanent researcher on the TV morning show On The Sofa, where she worked, she always used calm, modulated tones when faced with a difficult situation or truculent housemate. ‘Also, I have to point out that Richey is the very worst in a long line of crap men you’ve dated.’

  ‘I don’t date crap men!’

  ‘Lame ducks, then,’ Tess countered, like that made it even better. ‘Oh, Ells, you must have noticed that you always end up copping off with men who are, well, challenging and diff—’

  ‘What Tess is trying to say is that you go out with total losers who hang around the flat with all their neuroses and hang-ups until you straighten them out and then …’ Lola took a deep breath, either for dramatic effect or because she needed oxygen … ‘and then instead of thanking you, they dump you!’

  That was a very harsh way of summarising her previous relationships, and, Ellie thought, a complete twisting of the facts.

  ‘I’m twenty-six, and yes, I’ve dated a few men and it hasn’t worked out. Big deal.’ Ellie folded her arms and glared at her flatmates mutinously. ‘I’m really sorry that I haven’t settled down with my one true love, but then again neither have you, and while we’re on the subject of exes with severe emotional disorders, two words, Lola: Noah Skinner!’

  Lola flushed at the mention of the dissolute fine artist who’d made her life sheer misery for eighteen months as he slept with other women, tried it on with all her friends and had repeatedly ponced money off her even though his family owned half of Shropshire. ‘Everyone’s allowed a couple of bad boyfriends, but you’re stuck in a bad boyfriend loop. It needs to end now.’

  Ellie wasn’t going to give up without a fight. She even opened her mouth to remind Lola that the two of them had first spoken only after Noah had come on to Ellie in the hope she’d persuade her boss at the gallery to represent him, but Tess got there first. ‘Mark, your very first boyfriend, had all those issues with low self-esteem. He couldn’t even walk into a room without genuflecting. Then you encouraged him to talk through his issues with a responsible adult, and his parish priest persuaded him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour, and he entered a seminary instead of coming to Ibiza with us after A levels,’ she said in a furious burst.

  ‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ Ellie ground out, even as she remembered that awful week after A levels when she should have been excited about going to Ibiza an d, well, the rest of her life, and instead she’d stayed in her tiny bedroom, curtains drawn, listening to her mother’s Smiths albums as she began to understand that heartache wasn’t just a word used in sad songs; it was an actual tangible thing and it hurt like hell.

  Tess continued to list Ellie’s past boyfriends: including Alex, the cross-dressing performance artist she’d dated when she was studying at Central St Martins, who she’d caught wearing her underwear and who was now one of Australia’s most celebrated drag queens, and Jimmy the alcoholic, until he’d spent a night drinking with Ellie’s mother and her friends. He’d woken up two days later in a skip, minus his shoes, trousers and wallet. Then he’d decided to go straight edge and dumped Ellie for being a bad influence.

  Then there’d been Andy, the compulsive gambler, who’d once pawned Ellie’s TV but, buoyed up by her belief in his gift for numbers, left her to study for a degree in Applied Mathematics at Edinburgh University.

  Even her attempt at a friend-with-benefits arrangement during her final year at Central St Martins had ended in absolute unmitigated disaster when Ellie broke Oscar’s penis during a particularly vigorous sex session. Or that’s what she thought until the A&E registrar said that it was just a bad sprain.

  ‘Don’t forget Danny,’ Lola said to Tess, as she finished regaling Ellie with this list of lost loves. Not that Ellie needed any reminding. She remembered all of them. Not just the way things had ended, but the way each relationship had begun, with a smile, a joke, or a surreptitious look across a bar. Ellie remembered the good bits: lazy Sunday mornings with tea and toast, and wild nights out in Soho and Hoxton, as well as the bad bits: the rows and accusations and inability to reach a compromise.

  Now Ellie listened as Lola hit the highlights of Ellie’s two-year relationship with lovely, geeky Danny, who she’d been planning on moving in with despite his lax personal hygiene and failure to turn up on dates because he was engrossed in Call of Duty: Black Ops.