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He acknowledged her with a bow of his head. A small smile. And a glint in his eyes that seemed a hell of a lot like the kind of shockingly hot attraction she was dealing very badly with herself at that very moment.
Caitlyn curtsied. Curtsied! Then stepped back, bumped into someone, spun on her heel, apologised profusely, smacked another dancer, turned to wave to Dax again so that his final impression of her wasn’t her elbowing a stranger in the head, to find he was gone.
She stood a moment in the middle of the dance floor, feeling a little adrift, actually.
When a group of grinning guys in matching ‘Pub Crawl’ T-shirts surrounded her, she came to quick smart. She ducked under their waving arms and aimed her unsteady feet in the direction of Franny.
As her knees shook she couldn’t remember having such an instantaneously intense response to meeting a man in, well, ever. All that from a bit of body contact, a smouldering gaze, and a five-minute almost-conversation. No shy glances, and cheeky first touches there. It had felt as if a bomb had gone off inside her. She held a hand to her stomach to quell the lingering ache.
Alas, intensity was the absolute last thing she wanted or needed. She’d lived through enough intensity to last her a lifetime during her latest break-up.
George hadn’t taken it well, poor love. No wonder, he’d been so sure of her he’d gone so far as to give her his grandmother’s engagement ring. But panic had set in, as it inevitably did, and she’d ended it.
She shook it off, literally shimmying away the discomfort of the whole incident, which was draping itself over her like an old shawl that smelled of mothballs. Things were different now. She was different. At least she was trying to be.
At first she’d tried swearing off men for good. But holing up on the couch every Saturday night had sent her nearly around the bend. Now she’d decided, with Franny’s encouragement, that what she needed wasn’t self-enforced sobriety, just some simple honest-to-goodness fun. A light, easy-going, melt-in-the-mouth kind of guy; sorbet to cleanse her romantic palate.
‘What was that?’ Franny asked, practically bouncing on the barstool.
Caitlyn slid onto her barstool and feigned fascination for her now lukewarm cocktail. ‘What was what?’
‘You and the Suit, that’s what. I thought you were going to tear one another’s clothes off right in the middle of the dance floor. Who is he?’
‘Dax...Somebody.’
‘Well, Cutey Patootey over there might be a cute guy. But that one was all Man.’
Caitlyn glanced at her date to find him sculling beer with the Pub Crawl guys. She winced, and turned back to Franny. ‘You say man like it needs a capital M.’
‘Go ahead and capitalise the whole word.’
When Franny was quiet for longer than Caitlyn thought possible, she looked up to find her friend staring across the room. Caitlyn couldn’t help but follow her lead.
And there he was, Dax...Somebody, standing in a group on the other side of the club. He watched in seeming bemusement as a woman about her age wearing fairy wings was waving her arms at him as if she were about to take off.
Taller than everyone else in sight. Broad too. Dark hair, dark suit. Serious expression. As if he secretly ran the whole world all on his own. As if he always got his way.
Franny was right, he was all Man. Caitlyn breathed in deep through her nose, looking for and finding the tang of his scent, which still lingered on her skin. And just like that the vibration was back, fizzing as potently inside her as it had the moment she’d recognised the heat in his eyes as a direct mirror of hers.
But no matter how much her body was telling her yes, her head knew he was too much for her. All that intensity and heat was a banquet when all she could stomach right then was sorbet.
Pity.
Dax...Somebody discreetly checked his watch, then glanced about the room, his gaze almost colliding with hers.
Cheeks as red and hot as sun-ripened tomatoes, Caitlyn spun away and grabbed Franny by the arm, pulling her friend from a trance.
‘Stop staring,’ Caitlyn hissed as though he might hear her. ‘You’ll get RSI.’
‘It’ll be worth it.’
* * *
It was after two a.m. at the hazy, noisy, malodorous nightclub when Dax decided he’d put in an appropriate amount of time at his sister Lauren’s birthday bash and was quietly working out the fastest route to the door.
His time was rarely his own. He still had a half dozen endowment proposals to which he needed to give the final stamp of approval and foreign markets to check before he could even think about sleep.
But his feet refused to budge. They were fixed to the floor as if they’d been bolted there, and it had nothing to do with the sticky remnants of a night’s worth of spilt booze. He only had a certain someone with dreamy brown eyes to blame.
Dreamy brown eyes that locked on and didn’t let go. And warm skin that had felt like velvet beneath his hands. Then there was that mouth. A soft pink mouth that was made for being kissed, and thoroughly.
Caitlyn...Something. Even her name had him shifting in his shoes. Shoes that remained stuck, while his eyes began to rove.
The crowd of loose sweaty bodies rolling with the beat of some obscure song shifted and swayed, revealing glimpses of faraway corners of the club, before swallowing them up in the writhing mass once more.
Dax ran a hand hard and fast up the back of his head, attempting to shake loose the tension coiling through him. A glimpse was all he wanted. A flash of auburn hair and pale skin and warm curves, a memory to take home to his
empty bed.
The crowd parted. And there she was. Perched on a stool at the bar. Hair shimmering in the down lights, legs crossed, high heel bouncing up and down, shoulders bare in that so-sweet-it-was-sexy little dress.
The next thing he noticed was the other half-dozen pairs of male eyes zeroed her way. Seedy eyes with one thing on the minds behind them. How a woman like her expected to make it out of a place like that alive was anyone’s guess.
Perhaps he ought to make sure she did. Now that he knew her name he felt a kind of responsibility over her. Especially when he knew how much trouble that brazen little mouth of hers could get her into.
That mouth...
His suit began to feel too snug. Too hot. He shifted uncomfortably but it didn’t help. If he was honest with himself he knew there was only one thing that would.
He’d never liked loose ends. Never believed some things were better left unsaid. If he wanted any kind of legacy it would be that he was a man who always finished what he started.
His shoes unstuck and he set off—
‘Man, you look like you have fleas,’ Rob, Lauren’s husband, said as he clapped a hand on Dax’s shoulder, yanking him back onto his heels.
Dax breathed out hard through his nostrils like a racehorse locked into the starting gate.
‘Or an itch needs scratching,’ Rob said, motioning towards the bar. Towards her. ‘Saw you two out there dancing before. Who is she?’
Caitlyn. Again her name slid through his mind like a siren song. He shoved his hand into the pockets of his suit trousers and levelled his gaze at his brother-in-law. ‘There was no dancing, merely a great deal of crowd jostling, and I made sure the lady didn’t get trampled.’
‘Right,’ Rob said, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Jostling.’
Dax realised too late that knowing who Rob was talking about had been his big mistake. He dragged his eyes back to the dance floor. ‘It was quite a crowd.’
‘Or quite a girl.’
Quite a girl? At the mere thought of the end result of the crowd-jostling, heat broke through him like a wildfire with a forest full of dry scrub in its path. Dax sought out a bunch of leg hairs and tugged, but it was to no avail.
Brutal honesty was.
She was a girl who clearly had a defective self-defence mechanism if the way she’d melted against him, a complete stranger, was anything to go by. She’d do better with the nice guy, the Robs of the world, not a hard-headed realist like him, despite the sexual attraction they no doubt shared.
It wasn’t enough to warrant pursuit. Especially when he knew nothing about her apart from the fact that she could get his blood boiling with a mere glance. The Bainbridge name brought with it certain advantages. But those same advantages attracted elements best left alone.
His eyes sought out Lauren, who was laughing and dancing. She’d been so young at the time of their parents’ accident. So disorientated by the avalanche of chaos they’d left behind and therefore a perfect target to the sharks who’d smelled blood in the water.
It felt so long ago now; he twenty-two, and saddled with not only a shell-shocked sixteen-year-old sister he’d barely known but the rotting carcass of his family’s hundred-year-old business. The future he’d imagined for himself gone in a puff of smoke.
He coughed, the haze before his eyes for real. Someone had gone overboard with the club’s smoke machine. Through the smog his eyes disobediently sought out the shapely outline of an auburn-haired spitfire.
His self-preservation instincts had been well honed. They’d had to be. Never again would he be as unsuspecting, as stunned to the very core, as he had been by the selfish and systematic fraud his parents had perpetrated so slyly before their deaths.
Though if Caitlyn was a shark in damsel’s clothing then he’d change his name to Susan.
Unlike plenty before her, she hadn’t looked at him as if he was the answer to her girlhood dreams of diamonds and furs. More like she was a diagnosed sweetaholic and he was the biggest doughnut she’d ever seen.
He felt hot, he felt tight, he felt wide awake. As turn-ons went it appeared her particular brand of upfront, in-your-face, sexual frankness was it.
Could he? Should he?
He glanced at his watch and frowned, unsure if that one move had been a mistake, or his saving grace. It was nearing half-past two. He had work to do. And it had been a long time since his time had been his own.
‘Right, I’m off,’ Dax said, overly loud to his own ears though the vigour was likely lost in the thump of the booming beat.
He patted Rob hard on the back and searched out his sister. He found her bouncing from one foot to the other, the antenna on her head and fairy wings on her back bobbing right along with her.
‘Hey, brother! Don’t tell me you’re off.’
‘I’m afraid I must. I have a conference call at six.’
‘So stay ’til then. Get your dancing feet on.’ She did a solo tango to illustrate.
‘Alas I left my tap shoes in my other car.’
Tango done, she levelled him with a stare. ‘At least promise me you had fun?’
‘More than I can possibly say.’ Having a nubile redhead wrapped about him a definite highlight, though he knew better than to let Lauren in on that score.
‘Fine,’ she said, sighing dramatically. ‘Go. Get your beauty sleep. It wouldn’t behove you, or the foundation, if you appeared anything less than implacable.’
After blowing him a kiss, she shimmied and boogied away into the crowd. Whatever things he might wish to change about his past, bringing her up wasn’t one of them.
Dax resisted the urge to look towards the bar one last time and turned towards the exit.
Something slithered down his neck. It felt as if it had legs long enough to belong to a bird-eating spider, so he flapped his suit jacket madly ’til whatever it was either flew away or was summarily squished.
He took a step, only to feel his foot slipping out from under him. He caught himself just in time, took a moment to find his breath, then lifted his shoe to find something twinkling at him from the dark wooden floor.
Braving the possibility of disease by letting his fingers stray that close to the layer of sticky ooze, Dax bent to pick it up.
It was long. It was shiny. And it was no bird-eating
spider.
* * *
‘What are you doing?’ Franny asked. ‘The cab’s waiting.’
Caitlyn, who was at that moment on her hands and knees—with paper napkins keeping all four from actually touching the precarious Sand Bar floor—blew a strand of hair from her mouth. ‘I’ve lost an earring.’
Franny threw out her hands in supplication. ‘It could be anywhere by now!’
‘Which is why I need to get a move on looking for it.’ With a shiver Caitlyn flicked a stray piece of random cocktail fruit from her wrist. ‘They were Gran’s. The chandeliers with the little flowers at the clasp.’
‘Oh,’ Franny said, looking suitably understanding. She knew the history those earrings had. Still she glanced longingly towards the door where the guy she’d spent half the last hour dirty dancing with was waiting to take her to heaven and back.
They’d promised to drop Caitlyn home on the way as her lift had evaporated once Cutey Patootey was no longer around to escort her. He’d disappeared into the wee hours after Caitlyn had made it clear, by not letting him stick his tongue in her ear, that she wasn’t going home with him that evening.
Caitlyn wasn’t all that disappointed. Not about that. Her gran’s earrings on the other hand... They meant something deeply. Her heart clenched hard at the thought of losing them for ever.
‘You go,’ she said, giving Franny a shove on the ankle, which was the only part she could reach from the floor. ‘I could be a while.’
Franny bit her lip, looked from Caitlyn’s no doubt pathetic position and back to the brooding blond in the leather jacket lounging mysteriously by the door.
‘Go!’
‘All right!’ Franny blushed furiously, then leant over the bar, getting the attention of the bartender. ‘Ivan! See to it our mate Cait makes it safely to a cab all right? And if anyone hands in an earring, it’s hers.’
Ivan peered at Caitlyn, grinned and nodded.
Franny said, ‘I won’t be home tonight. Usual place tomorrow for a warm down?’
‘If I must.’
Franny grinned, and took off at a sprint.
Caitlyn spent the next ten minutes peering at the floor and getting nowhere. Every minute down there had felt like an hour and the further she got, the more concerned she became.
She and her dad had picked out those earrings for her gran when she was eleven years old. No matter how short a stay he’d had at home between tours, he’d always made time for just the two of them, but she remembered that trip to the shops with him with such clarity. The next time he’d gone on tour he’d never come back.
Something glinted at her under a barstool! She pulled to a crouch, tucked herself into ball, peered underneath and—
‘Cait?’
At Ivan’s unexpected call, Caitlyn looked up so fast she bumped her head on the underside of the stool. Biting her lip to keep from swearing like a sailor, she rubbed her head and frowned up at him, only to find him holding a long glinting earring made of a dozen pieces of cut glass with a flower at the clasp.
She scrambled most ungracefully to her feet and grabbed the earring and held it to her chest, spinning around so that her hair slapped her in the face, but she didn’t care. ‘Oh, Ivan! My dear darling Ivan! I love you more than you could ever know!’
