Man of the Match: hot celebrity romance (FULL NOVEL)

4. An enchanted evening

[RECAP: Cara, a student, is stunned to discover the man she kissed on holiday is England cricket captain Matt Curran. Matt has a celebrity model girlfriend, though the relationship isn't going very well, and he's asked Cara out to dinner.]

From the moment she met him in the lobby, Cara knew she had made the right decision.

It wasn't just that he was wearing a shirt the exact same colour of her dress, a coincidence that made them both laugh and broke the tension.

It was that when she saw him he was Matt, someone who should really be a total stranger but felt like the exact right person to be with. Her co-conspirator. Her partner-in-crime.

Someone whose smile made her weak at the knees and whose touch, as he lightly held her arm as they went to a taxi, made her skin tingle.

"I was worried you'd stand me up," he told her later. She was surprised to see there was genuine uncertainty in his eyes. He couldn't be used to girls standing him up, surely?

"It was a hard choice between you and the hotel seafood buffet," Cara said.

"The seafood buffet is every night," Matt said and she laughed again.

The taxi driver took them some miles out of the city, away from the coast and into the hills, until they came to a tiny restaurant in such a secluded spot that Cara wondered how it managed to get any clientele.

Her stomach was turning over with nerves and she wasn't sure why. Was it the fear of being seen with him? Was it being with him? Was it a sense of the forbidden?

Cara let Matt order the food as he seemed to be more acquainted with the local cuisine than she was. As a cricketer he had travelled the world and was doubtless used to exotic places, she supposed. Her travels didn't extend much beyond summer holidays to France and Spain. This was the furthest she had ever been from home.

In more ways than one. She was out of her element here, voyaging into the unknown.

Matt started asking Cara about her life. His head told him that this was a mistake, it would be better to keep things superficial and remain strangers as far as possible. But he wanted to know more about her. She intrigued him - his reaction to her intrigued him - and he was trying to figure out why.

There wasn't much to tell, Cara felt. School, then university. It wasn't as though she had even started a proper career yet.

She didn't want to tell him about Declan, but he managed to coax it out of her. She gave him the very bare basics: that there had been someone, but she had recently broken it off.

"Was it serious?" he asked.

"I thought it was at one time, but not now."

"How serious? Living together?"

"No, but we were engaged," Cara told him.

"Surely you're a bit young for that?"

That was what her friends had said. "Maybe. Not that it matters now."

Matt saw a shadow pass over her face and felt bad for asking her. The thought of Cara being engaged made him uneasy, partly because he was still trying to keep Miggy at arm's length and delay what everyone assumed was inevitable.

Added to that, Cara was also considerably younger than Miggy from what he could work out. He hadn't asked her what her age was, but from what she had said about her life so far she couldn't be much past her early twenties.

There was something else that made him uneasy about the topic of her being engaged, but he didn't want to think about that. So he changed the subject to ask her about more neutral things. What she thought of Sri Lanka, where she had travelled.