The First Kiss

by Stephanie Ash

Genres: Romance; Erotic & Steamy Romance

Synopsis

He tangled loving fingers in her beautiful hair and fixed her eyes with his most penetrating gaze.

Amelia Ashton is a woman with ambition. A singer-songwriter determined to make it to the top of the music business, she finds her plans going awry as one record producer after another falls for her long red hair rather than her sweet music.

When an invitation to her mother's fifth wedding in Las Vegas arrives, Amelia decides to take a break while she does her daughterly duty, but a chance meeting with an old friend makes for a surprisingly exciting trip. And when Amelia returns to London, she is more than ready to sort out her affairs, both musical and otherwise . . .

Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey will consume this intensely romantic and sensual story of true love.

Previously published as Musical Affairs.

Release date: November 10, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

JERRY ANSON LIKED to get surprises on his birthday. Well, thought Amelia, he certainly would be surprised when he woke up on this particular
birthday. Very surprised indeed.


In fact, Jerry wasn’t asleep at all. He was lying in bed, eyes half closed, listening to the sounds floating up from the kitchen.
Crash, bang, shatter. Amelia boiling an egg. Jerry smiled slowly. She was useless in the kitchen. Fabulously beautiful, with
the body of a goddess, but useless all the same. Which was why, he justified to himself, he hesitated over making an honest
woman of her. And why he didn’t feel too guilty about always keeping one eye open for someone new.


And that, unbeknownst to Jerry, was why Amelia was in the kitchen. Not, as Jerry thought, preparing him a sumptuous birthday
breakfast but packing up her share of the kitchen crocks. There had been one blonde hair too many on her side of the bed.


Crash! She’d always hated that bloody novelty teapot.

Jerry pulled the duvet up to his chin and rolled over, unperturbed. He hoped Amelia had remembered that he’d recently given
up taking sugar in his coffee.


Click. That was an incongruous sound in the breakfast repertoire. Slam. So was that.

An hour of silence passed before Jerry sat up in bed and allowed it to cross his mind that something might be wrong.

By which time Amelia was en route to a new flat and a new start in Kentish Town in Jerry Anson’s own new car.

‘Damn, damn, damn.’

Amelia stalled the jeep at the traffic lights for the second time in as many minutes. ‘Why are there so many bloody sets of
traffic lights in this damn town?’ she asked no one in particular very loudly.


A middle-aged man in a white Porsche Carrera with the top down smiled up at the outburst. He gave the pretty red-haired driver
of the Shogun what he assumed was a sexy wink. She gobbed her chewing gum out of her window and onto his passenger seat in
reply.


‘Oh no, not again!’ Amelia cried. She could feel the tears welling up like an ocean behind her eyes. That was the exact same
model of Porsche that Jerry had been driving when he took her on their first date … The memory pricked her. Things were so different back then. He had opened the door of the car for her,
taken her coat in the restaurant, pulled out her chair. So gentlemanly. So full of chivalry. Until he got what he wanted.


Amelia wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

‘I’m not going to think about it,’ she told herself.

She had held out for so long because she wanted to make sure that she was special to him. Not like all the other bimbos he
met through his work.


Jerry Anson was a celebrated record producer. They had met at a music industry party. Amelia was there with an old friend,
a gay pop singer, who was using her as a foil for the press. The headlines which appeared in the tabloids after that evening
had been faintly amusing, Amelia remembered. Johnny had ended up punching Jerry and the tabloid press had reported that it
was because Jerry had stolen Amelia, Johnny’s beautiful mystery date, straight out from under his celebrated nose. Little
did they know that the whole fracas had blown up because Jerry had insulted an inebriated Johnny’s favourite orange Moschino
tie.


In the circles in which Amelia had been moving at that time, relationships were based on strict theories of equity and exchange.
At first glance, Jerry had seemed to Amelia to be about as attractive as an overweight bulldog chewing a wasp, but he wanted her and she wanted a record contract. He talked music, he talked production, he talked sessions. Even
though they didn’t turn out to be quite the sessions she had in mind.


But Amelia’s initial pragmatism had been replaced by a very real lust. Like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she had emerged one evening from the ladies’ room in Quaglino’s or Le Café D’Amour (as they had romantically dubbed it),
to see him chatting earnestly by candlelight into his mobile phone and fallen hopelessly in love. She couldn’t explain it.
Was it something to do with the soft wave of his hair, the square set of his jaw, the way his ears stuck out at 90 degrees
…? Or the fact that he was talking to someone very big at Sony on her behalf …?


‘For goodness sake, Amelia, he’s so ugly!’ she told herself vehemently, slamming her hands on the steering wheel. An elderly
woman passing by on the pavement with her dog shrank back in surprise.


It was no use. It was hopeless. She was so deeply in love with that horrible little man, they would have to send Jacques Cousteau
in after her.


As she wiped away her tears again she caught the lingering scent of Jerry’s skin on her hand. His aftershave, his sweat, even
his semen. It had been so hard to tear herself away from his side that morning. Even after her worst fears about his new PA
had been confirmed by the blonde hair on her pillow and the naff silver earring under the sink. His hands could still mould
her anxious mind as they caressed her agile body. His lips could still take any unhappy words straight out of her mouth with one tender, careful
kiss …


But last night they had made love for the last time. The realisation stuck in Amelia’s throat as she waited for the go-ahead
at another set of lights and she gave out a strangled sob. She had let him nuzzle her soft pink breasts and draw a last path
slowly up the inside of her thigh with his velvety tongue. He had pulled her close to him and entered her so slowly, so carefully,
so reverently, that it was as if he too had grasped the finality of it all. With her shuddering orgasm, she had shed hot and
salty tears. But he had settled into a deep sleep straight after without seeing those bitter teardrops at all.


She would never, never, never let herself become so enslaved by a faithless man again. He may have given her flowers, and
he may have given her earth-shattering orgasms, but, Amelia reminded herself, Jerry Anson had never once given her a piece
of his heart.


In his neat Victorian terraced house in Kentish Town, Richard Roberts paced the little sitting-room, setting straight the
African knick-knacks and tossing unspeakable debris into the raffia wastepaper basket that stood by the door. The ad about
his spare room had only gone into Loot the day before. The paper couldn’t have been out for five minutes when he got the first call. A girl. Desperate, she sounded.
She said she didn’t care how big the room was, or how much he wanted for rent, as long as she had a bed and a piano. Ah yes, the piano. He’d put that
in as a selling point and it had obviously worked, as a selling point that was … he wasn’t sure about it’s usefulness as a
musical instrument.


Anyway, this girl had practically left him no choice. She was being made homeless, she said. She would have nowhere to go
but the gutter if he didn’t let her stay with him. What could he do when faced with such a dilemma? He told her she could
move in the very next day. Richard glanced at his watch. She would arrive any minute now.


Amelia had said that she would pick up the keys from next door if he wasn’t going to be in or up when she arrived, but Richard
had called in sick so that he would be there to meet her. He was dying to see just what he had let himself in for. The feel-good
factor of saving someone from a night on the streets had been replaced by a nagging question. Why did she have to leave her
old flat so suddenly? He had a vision of a brutally murdered landlord on a brown carpeted floor. No, she didn’t sound like
an axe murderer. That was the worst case scenario. The best case was that she would turn out to be a complete stunner. Richard
smoothed his thick dark hair down hopefully as he polished the mirror which stood on the mantelpiece.


Rat-tat-tat.

Richard swung the door open and in flew the first of four suitcases.


‘Give me a hand, will you?’ shouted a vaguely familiar voice.

Richard trotted out to the Shogun, which was parked half on the pavement outside his house, and duly obliged the flame-haired
siren who was slinging coats, vases and saucepans out of the passenger door and onto the pavement.


‘That’s it,’ she announced, when Richard had been all but buried in a pile of cotton dhurry rugs.

Amelia slammed the car door and kicked it, hard. As Richard winced with that peculiar male automobile-empathy at the foot-shaped
dent, she relieved him of a natural-coloured rough linen lampshade and marched into the house. There she collapsed, sobbing,
onto the sofa.


Full of trepidation, Richard stretched out a welcoming hand.

‘I’m Richard,’ he said.

‘Amelia,’ she wailed in reply. Her shoulders continued to twitch up and down and she limply took his hand in hers. Her fingers
were wet from wiping her face.


‘I’m sorry,’ she snorted into a handkerchief. ‘I’m not normally like this, Richard. I promise.’

‘Tea?’ asked Richard suddenly. What else could one ask in such a situation, he thought.

Amelia nodded and Richard gratefully escaped his new housemate’s company for the sanctuary of the kitchen.

From the kitchen door he had quite a good view of the new girl. While the kettle boiled he sized her up. She was dabbing at her face with a scrunched up and fast disintegrating
piece of pink tissue. Her eyes were red and piggy from crying. But on the whole, she looked OK. Richard definitely liked her
coppery hair, which was unwinding itself from her kirby grips and falling in waves onto her black-clad shoulders. She was
wearing black jeans and what looked like a black all-in-one that clung tightly to her slim arms. As she blew her running nose,
Richard glimpsed her cleavage. Though she was slim, she wasn’t at all flat-chested. A large pendant of amber hung like a golden
tear between her breasts.


Richard found himself wishing he had made more of an effort with his appearance that morning.

‘Milk?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ came the strangled reply, followed by the sound of a nose being blown.

‘Sugar?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Two.’

He ladled them in with a cleanish-looking teaspoon. She had stopped crying now and was unfastening the latch on a square-shaped
wicker basket. Richard stood with a cup in each hand, unwittingly awaiting the appearance of the second redhead to enter his
life that day. Eliza the cat came hissing out of her box. Fat and grumpy and missing all her top teeth. She hadn’t said anything
about having a cat.


‘She’d like a saucer of milk,’ Amelia announced. ‘Not skimmed.’


Richard put down the steaming mugs and hurried back to the kitchen. A girl, a cat and a large quantity of those stripy Indian
rugs he had always despised. Richard sneezed. Things around here, he thought, are about to change for good.


‘Tell me about yourself,’ Amelia had said before she promptly launched herself into her own life story. She was twenty-five,
born in London to an English father and an American mother, now divorced. She had been educated in England, at a Gloucestershire
convent school, but spent the summers with her mother in California. She’d been to college in the States too, before finally
moving to England for good four years ago. That accounted for the strange accent she knew she had, she said. It was very slight
and rather nice, Richard assured. She had two half-sisters from her father’s first marriage, both older, both married, something
which she would never be. Not after this last fiasco. She wrote songs which were a bit like Carpenters classics on the piano
and wanted to play music for a living. She didn’t have a day job but her wealthy parents still sent her ‘guilt money’ which
would cover the rent.


The words became one long melodious stream of sounds in Richard’s ears. Her face was less wet and blotchy now. The eyes, a
watery blue, were fixed on the traffic-fume dirty window as she recounted a tale about her early life. Richard tried not to,
but found he just couldn’t stop his gaze from wandering down from her face on a journey to her hips. From her hips, down her legs to her … it was then that he spotted
it. On the floor next to one of her dainty lace-up boots. The unmistakable red and black wrapper of a Durex Arouser, ribbed.


‘Ohmigod,’ Richard breathed, barely audibly. His horrified eyes were transfixed. Had she noticed it too?

‘And you, Richard,’ she continued, oblivious to his sudden discomfort, ‘do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘What?’ He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the embarrassing piece of foil on the floor.

‘Do you have any brothers …?’

It was too late. Amelia’s eyes had followed down his line of sight. She shifted her right foot slightly to see what it was
hiding.


‘Oh,’ she blushed. She picked the wrapper up and tossed it into the raffia bin. ‘My favourite sort.’

Richard gathered up the mugs and retired to the kitchen until he could breathe properly again. Ah well. At least she wouldn’t
think that he was some sad guy who never scored.


Her first night in her new home. Amelia felt cramped and cold in the narrow single bed, with Eliza the cat sleeping on her
chest. She surveyed the unfamiliar surroundings. The Liechtenstein print her best friend had given her on that flowery wallpaper.
It just didn’t go. But Richard had said that he would get round to doing this room up soon.


The piano mentioned in the advert stood against the far wall. It was a Victorian upright. With the original curly wooden legs
still in place. Its lid was covered in piles of dusty old sheet music that she had yet to look through. She couldn’t sleep.
Amelia flicked on the bedside lamp and wandered across to her new piano. It was just a little different from Jerry’s white
baby grand … Tentatively, Amelia hit middle C and played . . .