Читать книгу The Rules of Engagement - Элли Блейк, Ally Blake - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

CAITLYN stood in the long hall outside her apartment, hand shaking as she tried to slide her key into the door. It didn’t help that Dax was right behind her, his body heat doing crazy things to her nerves.

They hadn’t said a word after piling into the back seat of a taxi, where Caitlyn had barked out her address in a voice that made her sound as if she were impersonating a seal with laryngitis.

Their knees had almost bumped as the taxi rounded each corner, but not. Little fingers had almost touched on the rough fabric seat, but not. Gazes had clashed as they’d sought one another out again and again, threatening to entangle in such a way that had made Caitlyn’s heart feel as if it were about to burst from her chest, but not.

By the time they’d reached her South Yarra apartment block Caitlyn was so wired she was amazed she could walk in a straight line.

‘Let me,’ Dax’s deep voice rumbled behind her. He reached around, pried the key from her claw, and slid it into the lock as if the little hussy had just opened up for him with an easy sigh.

Any pretence at actual food being on offer went out the window when with a sigh Caitlyn spun in Dax’s arms, slid her hands into his gorgeous hair, pressed as high onto her tiptoes as humanly possible and kissed him for all she was worth.

* * *

Postponing gratification as she’d done so many times before had clearly been ass backwards. She’d had barely two conversations with the guy, didn’t even remember his last name, and had never been kissed so thoroughly in her whole life.

He was a pro, or at the very least gifted beyond the constraints of natural law. He did things with his tongue she hadn’t even imagined were possible. Her body didn’t care what was possible or not, it just melted and ached and craved all that and more. More than she possibly knew how to handle.

The intensity brought with it an ache that seemed to fill her very bones, leaving her feeling breathless, and wild with abandon.

Sorbet! she shouted in her head like a mantra when sense threatened to rear its unhelpful head. That was what he was. Sharp, cool, cleansing sorbet. And if by some alignment of the stars he’d had reason to choose her for a one-time thing right when she needed it most, then so be it.

His lips moved to the soft dent below her ear. To the shallow dip at the base of her neck. Nipping along the edge of her collarbone.

Her hands dug into the soft springy hair at the back of his neck, her teeth biting down on her lower lip. Every sense bar the places her body touched his had become so woolly she could no longer feel her extremities.

She only realised that his balance was affected too when they stumbled backwards and the doorknob, key still inside, wedged into her back.

That was when she realised they were still in the hall.

Unknown strength rose up within her and somehow she reached behind her, shoved the door open so hard it was a miracle the doorknob stayed on, and grabbed Dax by the lapels to yank him inside. The door shut behind him, plunging them into darkness. Only a thin vertical stripe of light peeked through the edge of the lounge-room curtains.

They stilled, her fingers curled into his suit jacket, his hot breaths lifting the hair from her shoulders.

The lack of sight made everything suddenly magnified. The whir and clank of her old fridge turning to life. The distant hum of riverside traffic below throbbing in time with her heart.

At the slow, deliberate slide of his hand as it found a happy place in the small of her back, her skin prickled and burned. She pressed deliciously into the hard planes of his body.

And as his lips landed upon hers, insistent and hot as hell, every sound near and far slipped away on a tide of liquid warmth.

He lost his jacket along the way, and his tie. She hoped her shoes had made it inside the apartment but she wasn’t quite sure. All she knew was an almost primal need to get horizontal.

They tumbled backwards through the dark apartment, bumping into couches, lamp tables, a fake potted plant. The folded edge of a twist pile rug almost tripped her up completely.

When something wobbled off some surface and crashed, Dax jerked in surprise, but Caitlyn just grabbed him by the chin and kissed him harder.

Not needing to be told twice, he wrapped his arms around her, lifted her bodily off the floor and found the way to her bedroom without bumping into anything, as though he had some kind of sexual GPS built in.

The moonlight pouring through the sheer curtains at her bedroom window was oh, so thankfully brighter, giving her a perfect view of Dax’s supreme male body. His shirt and trousers were gone leaving him in black cotton boxers. She felt herself smiling at how conservative his underwear was considering what they were about to do. Then he breathed deep through his nose, like a stallion sensing a mare in heat, and took a step her way and what they were about to do took precedence over every other thought.

He found the zip of her little cocktail dress, lowered it slowly, and her vertebrae collapsed in upon themselves in empathy.

Clothes off, protection on, the backs of her knees found the edge of her bed and she sank back, he moved with her. Big, strong, firm, confident, and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Only he would not be breaking her heart. And she would most definitely not break his. As though that was the final permission she needed she reached up, slid her hand behind his neck and pulled him down to kiss her.

The slip and slide of skin on skin made her breathless, as if her body couldn’t process both oxygen and the mad tumble of sensations pummelling her at the same time. Maybe it was the heretofore untried naughtiness of a one-night stand. Maybe because it was a one-time deal she’d given herself permission to just let go.

Maybe it was Dax.

Then he was inside her. It was sudden, shocking, but she was more than ready. Her legs wrapped around him, she needed the feeling intensifying inside her more than she’d known she could. As if this was what she’d been waiting for her whole life. Not that romantic mushy stuff she’d lived on, but this.

His lips created havoc wherever they touched, ravaging her to the point of bonelessness. Making her feel defenceless, vulnerable—

No! This was about her taking back control over her emotional life.

Finding a last vestige of strength, she spun him around until she was on top. His hands found her hips, his thumbs sliding across her hipbone, the tremors shuddering through her all but cutting off any kind of ascendancy she might have had.

She ran her fingernails down his chest, over the solid undulation of slick brown skin. And when his desire-filled eyes closed, and he needed to open his mouth to take in enough breath, she felt formidable. Renewed.

Sensations built, cutting off all thought and feeling bar the desire flooding through her, hot and relentless.

Then all sensation contracted to the size of a pin-head. To some tiny point deep in her core. As swirls of blood-red heat crashed through her mind, through her body, bombarding her senses with more pleasure than she could process, the only vaguely coherent thought was that in her whole short life she’d never known it could feel like that.

Never.

This from the first guy she’d ever looked at and said, This is a one-time deal.

Frankly, considering why she’d gone looking for sorbet sex in the first place, it was more than she deserved.

* * *

Caitlyn sat back in the big leather chair, eyes closed as it hummed blissfully beneath her. A thump to her right told her Franny had finally arrived at their regular Sunday morning date at the Shangri-Lovely Nail Bar.

‘Good morning, sunshine!’ Caitlyn bubbled.

‘How could you start without me?’ Franny grumbled.

Caitlyn opened her eyes to find Franny hunched down in dark sunglasses, her hair pulled back into a scraggy ponytail, grunting as she jabbed in her favourite settings on the massage chair. ‘You weren’t even home when I left; I thought I might have to go solo today.’

Franny gave a double thumbs-up to her usual pedicurist indicating a double espresso, in a mug, before glancing pointedly at the half-eaten packet of biscuits Caitlyn had resting atop the glossy magazine she hadn’t yet found a chance between daydreams to open.

‘Chocolate chip? At this time of the morning? It’s not as though you worked up an appetite after I left.’ Her eyes swung slowly back to Caitlyn. ‘Or did you?’

Caitlyn licked a smudge of chocolate from her finger, images of the night before skipping and tripping through her mind like an old silent film. A slideshow of muscled arms, and broad shoulders, and acres of beautiful warm skin turning red beneath her grasping fingernails as she—

A hot flush landed hard and fast upon her cheeks. ‘Don’t change the subject. We’re here to talk about you and the Leather Jacket.’

But Franny was pointing at the pretty pink polish the pedicurist was sliding onto Caitlyn’s toenails. ‘Look! You did! You got lucky, you dog!’

‘What on earth does my toenail polish have to do with anything?’

‘All last week you were red. Sex-starved, man-eater red. And today you pick this tiptoeing-through-daisies pink? Something happened between last night and this morning.’

Caitlyn blinked, stumped that she’d given herself away so easily. ‘Moody-looking dude in leather jacket first.’

‘Fine. As it turns out all that bad-ass leather stopped at the door. His name’s Eugene and he lives with his mother. They breed ferrets. Inside the lounge room. None of which I realised until I did the walk of shame this morning. Past his mum. Who had folded my clothes into a neat pile on the chesterfield in the lounge room—’

Franny waved both hands madly over her face. ‘I just want to forget the whole thing. Now. Your turn. Did Cutey Patootey come back?’

‘No-o-o!’

‘Who, then? Not Ivan?’

‘The bartender?’ For that Franny deserved no more than a blank stare.

Franny frowned, clearly stumped.

Caitlyn hoped she’d stay that way. Hoped she could hang onto the mild buzz she was still wearing like a cloud of exotic perfume all those hours later a little longer before Franny dissected it to death.

Then Franny’s foggy morning-after eyes focused fully for the first time.

‘The Suit! You hooked up with the Suit! You sly dog!’ Franny squealed loud enough the traffic outside the salon would have heard every word.

‘Shh. I’m sure everyone else here could care less about the intimate details of my nightscapades.’

Franny glanced around. ‘Are you kidding me? Why else do you think women come to places like this? It’s hardly rocket science to slap on a dash of nail polish at home. Details. Please. Before I give up men for good.’

Franny leant so far forward on her chair she almost landed in the tub of water at her feet. Her pedicurist arrived in time, shoved her feet in the water and gave her a quelling stare. Franny looked dutifully chastised. ‘So who is he? Did he live up to all that glorious potential? Are you seeing him again?’

Caitlyn breathed out long and slow. She wasn’t going to get a moment’s peace until she gave Franny something. Then, staring hard at her toes, she said, ‘Fine. His name was Dax. Dax Something Starting With B. Banner? Bale? He looks even better out of the suit than in it. And, no, we didn’t make plans to catch up again. Happy?’

Franny grinned as she shook her head and slipped her smart phone from her purse and plugged in a few letters. ‘Dax Something Starting With B? Miss March, you sit there with your cute freckles on your little nose looking like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but you are so full of surprises.’

Caitlyn knew exactly what she was about to do. She tried to grab the phone but Franny was quicker than she looked.

‘Still!’ her pedicurist demanded.

‘This is important,’ Franny said, glaring right on back.

The pedicurist shrugged and set to sloughing away the dead skin on Franny’s soles.

‘Please don’t Google the guy, for Pete’s sake!’ Caitlyn begged.

Franny snorted. ‘Are you kidding me? In this day and age it’s the first thing you should do the second you learn a guy’s name. Heck, if I’d been smart enough to Google Mr Lame from last night I’d have avoided ever knowing what ferret poo smells like. Trust me. I’m doing you a favour.’

Caitlyn set her teeth and stared blindly at the small golden cat with its bobbing head on the cashier’s counter. She knew trying to stop Franny was a waste of time. And while she knew it was unlikely she’d ever see the guy again, no small part of her did wonder how a guy who looked like that, and kissed like that, and who’d learnt how to do the things he’d done to her the night before, had managed to get so far in life without being hogtied and hitched at gunpoint.

When Franny had been quiet for all too long Caitlyn glanced at her to find her eyes growing larger and larger until they looked as if they were about to pop out of her head.

‘I knew it!’ Franny blurted.

‘What?’ Caitlyn asked despite herself. ‘He’s married. Of course he’s married. Oh, God. How could I have been so—?’

‘He’s not married.’

Caitlyn’s rant came to a halt. The relief flowing through her was totally misguided. Especially since it wasn’t relief that he hadn’t cheated on his non-existent wife. It was relief that he was actually on the market.

She wasn’t. Sure it had been six months since she’d broken up with George. Not just broken up, she reminded herself, called off her engagement. But she was done with all that: relationships, and dating, and blah blah blah.

Yet she found herself leaning towards Franny and saying, ‘Then what?’

‘Your Dax Something Starting With B was Dax Bainbridge, as in CEO of the Bainbridge Foundation. Heard of them?’

Caitlyn blinked. Several times. ‘Them yes. A representative of the Bainbridge Foundation is a no-brainer on any launch list, though they never accept. They’re less A-list party-hard types, more old money, right?’

‘You should know your guest lists better.’

Caitlyn crossed her arms. ‘I know everyone who buys sports cars, and everyone who wishes they could buy sports cars. Everyone else is a blur.’

Franny eyeballed her. ‘You’re really sitting there and saying this guy is a blur?’ Franny turned her phone around and shoved it at her. And Caitlyn found herself staring at a picture of the man who’d driven her wild in bed the night before.

Dark hair, straight eyebrows, hooded hazel eyes, a haughty nose straight out of a Jane Austen novel, a jaw line that would have sent Michelangelo shopping for marble. God, he really was as gorgeous as she remembered him.

Her hormones went on such a sudden spree it caused her heart to leap into her throat and stay there. If she’d been wearing a tie she would have loosened it.

Franny shoved her phone into her massive bag, apologising to her pedicurist with a smile for having dared move. ‘His place?’ she asked.

‘Ours.’

‘Of course. Home-ground advantage.’

Franny probably didn’t know how right she was. The thought of having to creep out of bed and get dressed in the same clothes as the night before would have put her in far too fragile a position, and the night before had been about getting control back over her life. Her place had been the right place for sorbet sex. She couldn’t get any funny ideas about possible permanence if it was up to her to kick the guy out.

‘So is he the next almost Mrs Caitlyn March?’

Caitlyn shook her head so hard it hurt. ‘It was—’

Exhilarating, euphoric, erotic, she thought.

What she said was, ‘It was a one-time deal.’

‘Good,’ Franny said. ‘For the best if it stays that way.’

Caitlyn nodded absent-mindedly as her leather massage chair began its sequence of thumping rolls down her back.

They’d had that same discussion a dozen or more times in the weeks since poor George’s ignominious departure from their lives. Franny had even come up with a mantra she was sure Caitlyn ought to have stamped on her forehead, at least for the next little while: Men can be for fun, not only for for ever.

Which was partly why she didn’t tell Franny that at the last second she’d given Dax her number, scribbling it down on the back of a grocery receipt and shoving it into his jacket pocket as they’d made out like teenagers in her apartment doorway at some ungodly hour of the morning.

‘Stop,’ Franny said.

The pedicurist looked up with a frown. Franny rolled her eyes at her before pointing a thumb at Caitlyn. The pedicurist gave her a knowing nod before heading back to her manic buffing.

‘Stop thinking about him. It’s dangerous.’

‘Are you kidding me? I can’t move without being reminded of my midnight acrobatics,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I can still smell his cologne on my hair. Trust me, it’s not that easy to just turn it off.’

Franny spun on her big massage chair and looked Caitlyn in the eye, grabbing her by both hands. This time the pedicurist didn’t complain. She looked up at Caitlyn too, eyes questioning, buffer poised over Franny’s toes.

‘Cait, my sweet,’ Franny said, ‘listen to me this once. You don’t smoke. The hardest drug I’ve ever seen you take is really strong caffeine. You don’t pick your nose in public. But your one true vice is romance. You get so caught up in it I could dance naked in front of you right now and you wouldn’t see it for the stars in your eyes. You, my friend, are addicted to love. It’s your one and only failing. But as failings go it has potential to be a doozie. It’s a failing that can and has dragged chaos and catastrophe in its wake.’

Caitlyn squeezed Franny’s hand. ‘I can handle this. He’s not... It was nothing like the others. I promise.’

‘If you say so.’ With that Franny slid on her dark sunglasses and proceeded to fall asleep in her chair.

The pedicurist shrugged, clearly disappointed, and got back to work.

While Caitlyn picked up her magazine, and pretended to read it while the words chaos and catastrophe swam in front of her eyes. That and the look on George’s face when she’d tried to give back the ring. No shock. No anger. Just resignation, as if he’d seen it coming before she had. Her chest compressed, masking for a moment Dax’s spicy scent lingering on her skin.

Because the truth was, George wasn’t her first.

Caitlyn had been engaged more than once.

Three times in fact.

Franny might have thought it an endearing character quirk, but she was probably the only one. Caitlyn was fairly sure her mother thought her a strumpet, and that was when she wasn’t thinking her a grave disappointment. Not that she’d ever been given a hint as to what she could have done right on that score.

She shook off the sense of dejection her mother’s particular lack of affection had always engendered. If ever she needed a trigger to send her running into the arms of the first guy who smiled her way, her mum’s cold shoulder was a good one.

Sometimes that was all it took—a sexy smile, a second glance, a fleeting nod across a crowded bar—and suddenly weeks had gone by and she was hurtling along the same old path. High on the rush of feeling adored.

And if someone adored her enough to ask her to marry them? God... Was there any way to feel more cherished?

Problem was, that was when she realised the view from the top wasn’t what she’d imagined it would be. And there was no way to go but down, the weight of a ring hanging uncomfortably on her finger making the descent all the faster.

Caitlyn flipped the magazine shut and closed her eyes, wriggling her toes under the fan drying her toenail polish as she tried to take the edge off the chill that had wrapped itself around her.

That little bit of heat was enough to rip her from the highs and lows of her past and right smack bang into last night.

To Dax. His name shifted through her on a heady sigh.

Everything about Dax had been different. He hadn’t looked at her once as if she was all his dreams come true. He was assertive. Yet elusive. All outer cool and inner heat.

She wriggled in her chair as the familiar slip and slide of desire began to sizzle inside her. Whoever said you needed to love a guy to enjoy sex had either never had great sex with a stranger before, or was justly using the myth to convince teenage girls of that fact.

And by jumping straight into bed with him she’d missed some of the most addictive steps in the process—the long walks holding hands, the casual touches that heralded so much more, all the intimate stuff she seemed to mistake for love every time.

Did that mean she had a string of one-night stands with random guys to look forward to in her future?

She scrunched up her nose and decided not to think about how disquieted that made her feel. Better to just enjoy the gorgeous warm loose feeling she’d been indulging all morning.

She’d earned it. For she was on the right track to not getting caught in the same emotional trap again.

* * *

Dax tossed a Berocca into a glass of water—his third of the day. As he watched the orange tablet fizzing giddily to the bottom of the glass as it dissolved he ran a hand up the back of his neck, ’til his fingers hit hard plastic.

He took off the baseball cap and held it in his hands, bending the brim. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone into the office in jeans and a baseball cap. If ever.

What had Lauren said? Something about him never wanting to appear anything less than implacable?

If so it was only because he knew he needed to exude confidence and above all trust. They needed to trust he could do the job. Those qualities that the Bainbridge name alone had once evoked he’d had to work damn hard to rekindle after his parents had thrown it all away in the name of hard and fast living.

But the thought of throwing on a suit that Sunday morning and controlling the unruly spikes of his hair had been beyond even him.

He’d yet to go to sleep. How could he? Every time he’d closed his eyes he’d been bombarded with images of a lissom redhead. Her head falling back, gasping for breath as she closed tight around him. Then the dense blur that had set in around him before scattering to the very edges of his consciousness, taking with it every thought, every ‘to do’ list, every agenda until all was quiet for a moment. Which was a moment more than he’d had in a long time.

The clouds outside his tenth-storey window parted, sending a shaft of painfully bright spring sunshine right onto the papers scattered across his desk, the whiteness giving him an instant headache. He closed his eyes and skulled the fizzy drink, wiping away with it all thoughts of the night before.

There were papers he had to get a handle on before open of business Monday. Memos from a forensic accountant he’d hired on a hunch that so far did not herald good news. Far from it. He might have been blind to the depths of his parents’ transgressions, but his instincts had never seen him wrong since.

If following those instincts meant putting aside far more pleasant thoughts in order to maintain the distinction of credibility, then that was what he’d do.

Implacable? He’d been called far worse, but that was what the foundation had needed when he’d been forced to take it over. The choice then had been ruthlessness or ruin. The success he’d wrested from near-disaster had given him no reason, no chance, no option, to change.

He slid the cap back onto his head, the narrow brim thankfully blocking out the harshest hit of sunlight.

When there was work to be done, daydreams of sweet-lipped redheads would simply have to wait their turn, along with everything else in his life.

* * *

Caitlyn’s excuse for spending way too much time on the factory floor Monday morning was that she was in charge of throwing a massive bash to launch the product kept under tight wraps down there. The fact that it also meant she had the opportunity to drool over the first Pegasus Z9 sports car fresh off the production line might have had a little to do with it too.

Like something out of an original James Bond movie, the Z9 was all soft leather interior, glinting spoked wheels, warm deep-set headlights, and curves luscious enough to take on the most buxom cheesecake pin-up of the same era.

It was beautiful, brilliant and built to last, just as anything well designed ought to be.

‘Honestly, Doug,’ she said to the mechanical engineer who, computer tablet in hand, was giving his beloved creation the third once-over that day, ‘she’s delectable. The second sexiest thing I’ve seen all year.’

Doug’s bushy red eyebrows rose in question.

Caitlyn grinned. ‘It’s been quite a week.’

Doug glanced at her hands for about the eighth time, making sure she wore the requisite white cotton gloves, and then he went back to the object of his desire, leaving Caitlyn free to daydream at leisure about hers.

She ran a gloved finger over the voluptuously rounded fender of the Z9 until her fingers tingled with the sense memory of springy dark hair sliding through them and she had to bite her fingertips into her palms to stop from moaning out loud.

She’d had to have gone and given Dax her phone number, hadn’t she? Rookie mistake. One she ought not to be punishing herself for, except she kept jumping out of her skin every time her phone rang.

He probably wouldn’t call at all. Probably didn’t have the time. According to those in the know, and Wikipedia, he was something of a workaholic corporate wunderkind who’d taken over the family biz when his parents died in a light plane crash in Aspen or some such rich person playground.

But if he did call, she wondered when that might be. Midweek? Weekend? In Franny’s considered opinion the difference between those two times told a girl everything. Midweek meant date. End of the week meant booty call. If that was true then it was certainly in Caitlyn’s best interest to just stop thinking about it any more until Friday—

Her phone shrilled in her back pocket. Pulling off the gloves, she drew it out between two fingers, as if it might burn, only to find a private number on the display. Likely press. They liked to get the jump on people.

Nevertheless her voice was husky when she answered with a distracted, ‘Caitlyn March.’

‘Good morning,’ said the deep male voice that had been whispering sweet nothings in her imagination all morning.

Caitlyn’s knees gave way and luckily the Z9 was at hand. She grabbed the side mirror so as not to land on her backside. Doug frowned at her. She quickly let go, wiped off the sweat-prints with the hem of her soft jacket, and mouthed an apology.

‘To whom am I speaking?’ she asked, her voice now an example in cool in the hopes of convincing the man on the other end he hadn’t made her blush with a simple good morning.

And on a Monday. She frowned, clueless as to what that could mean.

‘Dax,’ the voice said. Then, ‘Bainbridge,’ was added as an afterthought, the dryness of his voice giving her some indication that he was quietly sure she knew exactly who it was.

‘Oh, Da-a-ax. Hi! How’s tricks?’

She slapped a hand over her eyes. That was definitely too chirpy. But that voice of his did things to her so that she forgot all self-control.

From the other side of the Z9 Doug cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow. Caitlyn nodded. Yep, the number-one sexiest thing she’d seen all week was on the phone.

To Dax she said, ‘What can I do for you on this fine Monday morning?’

He’d called her on a Monday. Maybe he’d left something at her apartment. Or wanted to know the name of a good mechanic. Or—

‘You can make my day by telling me that you’re free tonight.’

‘I’m sorry—pardon?’ Caitlyn said.

‘Tonight,’ he said, more slowly this time. ‘Are you free?’

Free? But it had been a one-night stand. Sorbet sex. Hadn’t it? ‘For what purpose?’

‘You want specifics?’

Caitlyn looked around. Doug had shooed off elsewhere leaving her, and the Z9, all on their lonesome. She wriggled her toes to keep the blood from assembling in the one hot spot and said, ‘Sure. Why not?’

Through the phone she heard a shuffle and a squeak, and imagined him in a dark suit and tie, up in some lofty city tower, leaning back in a super-comfy leather office chair, looking out of his thousand-storey window, with glorious Melbourne spread out beneath him.

When his voice slid through the phone, deep and slow, the vibrations sent tingles all over her skin.

‘I was imagining we’d...’ He paused. Long enough she held her breath. Then, ‘...eat. We could enjoy a little...soft music. No doubt we would...talk. And later, much later, once I’ve loosened my tie, and you’ve kicked your shoes off under the table, and we’re both nicely pickled in some excellent wine, together we would do...dessert.’

By the time he’d finished she was leaning back hard against the Z9, the cold metal doing nothing to take the edge off her temperature. Somehow she managed to keep her voice from cracking when she said, ‘So you’re asking me on a date.’

Laughter rolled through the phone. ‘I’m asking you to eat dinner with me, but if you’d prefer to call it that—’

‘No-o-o!’ Not a date!

‘No?’ he repeated after several long beats.

Caitlyn bit her lip. Dax was a man she’d taken home from a bar. For sex. Not as some kind of Hail Mary that it might lead to something more. Her strident rejection of the word ‘date’ had given her an accidental out if that was what she wanted.

Was it what she wanted?

What she wanted was to see him again. So badly her whole body ached. The want throbbed in time with her pulse—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—from the soles of her feet to the soft depression at the base of her throat.

Other people, people who weren’t relationship junkies, did that kind of thing all the time. Had dinner. Had sex. Didn’t get engaged to every guy they met. So long as expectations didn’t exceed reality, then nobody needed to get hurt.

‘Caitlyn?’

‘I meant no, I don’t need to call it anything.’

‘Okay.’ His voice slid deep and delicious down the phone. Her shoulders lifted in compensation for the sudden shivers running down her neck.

‘I’m working late,’ she said, ‘so how about we meet up for a drink around nine?’ There, a drink. Casual as could be. She named the bar, a fancy hole in the wall she’d glimpsed on occasion down one of Melbourne’s many cool quirky alleyways. The kind of place tourists missed, and city-workers flocked to.

‘Looking forward to it,’ Dax said, and then he was gone.

She took her phone away to find her ear hot and sore from having the phone pressed against it so hard.

‘That must have been some phone call.’

Caitlyn jumped, hand slapping against her heart. She turned to find Doug standing about three feet away.

‘I’ve never seen a woman’s ankles blush before,’ he said.

‘My ankles are doing no such thing.’

‘If you say so.’

Caitlyn couldn’t help it. She glanced at her ankles, bare between her fitted capris and her glossy high-heeled pumps, to find he wasn’t kidding. ‘Well,’ she spluttered, ‘then you clearly have a lot to learn about women.’

Doug smiled knowingly back as his eyes slid to the phone she had clasped hard in her sweaty little palm. ‘So it seems.’

‘Oh, go suck a squeegee.’

Doug’s laughter rang through the lofty room while Caitlyn spun away and headed back to the lift before she started laughing too, her high heels all but dancing on the concrete floor.