The Rules of Engagement

‘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.

CHAPTER THREE

DAX sat in a quiet corner of Echoes, nursing a Scotch, and stretching out the rigid muscles of his shoulders. It had been a long and frustrating day. The kind of day that lived down to the very worst of his disillusions. That nobody could be trusted, that life was every man for himself.

He cricked his neck. The only reason he was upright, and not prostrate at the chiropractor, was the five-minute phone call he’d squeezed in to Caitlyn mid-morning. The knowledge that he’d be within touching distance of that soft skin, that silken hair, those warm arms at the end of that day had made the rest tolerable.

A rush of air slid through the bar bringing with it the scent of outdoors. His eyes cut to the door. A posse of twenty-something men in matching grey suits jostled noisily inside.

His fingers clenched harder on the glass, and a muscle in his cheek twitched, as he searched for will power, which was something he usually possessed in spades. His ability to remove himself emotionally from actions and decisions was necessary in the position he held. Stick a soft touch in charge and the foundation’s coffers would be empty in a week.

Another rush of air tickled his hair, and his eyes snapped to the door once more. More men, more grey suits.

Will power? What will power? With his skills at compartmentalising, the morning’s phone call ought to have been enough to put thoughts of her aside ’til this evening. But it had been something else, something more than just soft skin and silken hair, that had him so gripped with sexual tension if she was another five minutes late the glass was in danger of shattering in his grasp.

The door opened. He felt the breeze, heard the swoosh of traffic, watched the gentle lift of the napkin bedside his glass. He unpeeled his fingers from the now warm glass, one by one; then and only then did he look towards the door.

And there she was, in tight black ankle-skimming pants, a frilled white top and a matching jacket as soft and shimmering as fresh snow. Her hands clutched tight around a tiny beaded purse and her hair was up, soft strands escaping from a low twist. Shafts of silver glinted at her ears. Big eyes the colour of honey scanned the room.

He’d been fully prepared for his memory of her—or more specifically their scorching chemistry—to have been somewhat exaggerated by his euphoric hormones. He’d met her in near darkness, stumbled back to her place in much the same, burned up the bed sheets, and she’d been perfectly content for him to leave while the sun was still warming the other side of the planet. It had been great. Worth repeating. But enough to have him feeling this surge of heat just looking at her?

She licked her lips, and squirmed a little when she couldn’t see him, then jutted out a hip in defiance when it appeared to occur to her he might not be there.

Then, just as her mouth began to turn down at the edges, her eyes finally found his: feisty and wholly corrupting. As a secret smile spread to her lips the heat in her eyes softened to a subtle warmth, and it rocketed him right back to how luminous she’d been in his arms.

He hadn’t been recalling wrong. She was dazzling. As for their chemistry, she was on the other side of the room, a plethora of blustery city types between them, each trying to suck all the energy from the room, yet his skin contracted as if her fingernails were scraping down his bare chest.

As she walked towards him he felt himself rising off the stool as if some ethereal force were pulling them together.

‘Hi,’ she said breathily.

His hand moved to her waist as she leant in, the fabric of her jacket giving slightly, turning his mind instantly to soft, warm skin beneath. Her scent wafted past his nose, fresh and sweet, as his lips brushed her proffered cheek. The urge to slide a hand around her small waist and graze his teeth across her neck was consuming.

‘So, so sorry I’m late.’ Her backside landed on the stool beside his with a thump. ‘We’re crazy swamped at work at the moment with the launch of the Z9 looming.’

She looked at him as though he ought to be impressed, but he had no idea what she was talking about. ‘The Z9?’

‘The new production sports model for Pegasus Motors? I work in their PR department and am heading up the big launch in a few months’ time, remember?’ Her mouth quirked, though her eyes remained locked on his. ‘We never quite got to all that, did we?’

‘No,’ he agreed in a voice so rugged it would have done a pirate proud. ‘So I take it the Z9’s a car.’

She laughed, tossed her purse onto the bar and motioned to the bartender for a cocktail. ‘It’s not just “a car”. It’s a work of art. Poetry in motion. I’ve seen grown men drool just looking at it, and that’s just the engineers who built the thing.’

‘Have a picture on you?’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, ho, no. You’ll have to wait for the big reveal like everyone else.’

Then she snapped her mouth shut and slowly spun on the stool ’til one of her knees slid against one of his. When her eyes grew dark and she puffed out a short sharp breath, he knew she’d felt the same jolt of electricity shoot through her leg that had burned into his.

She said, ‘You’re mocking me, aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And why?’

‘Poetry in motion? It’s a car.’

One corner of her lovely mouth lifted as her eyes narrowed. ‘Were you this cheeky on Saturday? I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have taken you home if you were.’

She finished with a shrug, and a small smile, her eyes skimming over him before sliding away. The subsequent roll of her shoulders was akin to saying, I’m struggling not to picture you naked. No, not imagine. Remember.

And there it was, the thing that had imprinted the hours spent with her deeper onto his mind than usual—her candour.

The way she’d not hidden her attraction to him for a second. The way she’d asked him home simply because she’d wanted to. The way she’d given herself over to him in bed with an abandon he envied. It had all the appearance of being genuine. Even he, the king of the cynics, found himself believing it. Or maybe, that day, he simply wanted to.

He’d spent the morning laying off a guy who’d systematically, over many months, made the foundation’s funds his own. A man he’d hired. He’d vetted. He’d respected and liked. And if there was anything still able to chink his well-buffed armour, it was the bitter indignation of being played. If his inept parents had taught him one thing it was that he never wanted to be blindsided like that again.

So having someone look him in the eye and tell it like it was, was akin to waving a glass of water in front of a man who’d woken up to realise he was alone in the desert.

Gazing at her profile—her slightly dishevelled hair, her thick sooty lashes, her soft pink lips—he took a punt. ‘Hungry?’

At the use of her own come-on line from two nights earlier, she blinked. Fast. Her nostrils flared and pink flooded her cheeks. Desire and doubt warring in her ingenuous eyes. But when he smiled her pupils dilated and he could barely see the honey-coloured circle framing them.

Realising it wouldn’t take much, he said, ‘I know you said drinks, but I missed lunch and could do with a bite.’

Her mouth quirked. ‘I was trying to be all cool and nonchalant, if you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I noticed. You did a commendable job.’