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‘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.’
She glanced at the restaurant, and said, ‘Sod it. I’m starving. Let’s eat.’
‘Good. Because I went ahead and reserved a table.’
Her now glinting eyes swung back to him. ‘Sure of yourself much?’
‘Just enough it would seem. And hungry enough if you’d said no I might have left you here while I ate by myself.’
Her eyebrows shot up a half-second before she burst out laughing. ‘Way to make a girl feel special!’
Dax motioned to the maître d’, then turned back to her as he said, ‘I think we both know I have other ways.’
The pink in her cheeks flooded to her neck, creeping across her collar bone. He ached to feel the heat of her skin, the blood surging so near the surface. He wished he’d never brought up dinner and asked another question instead.
But by then the maître d’ was there, and Caitlyn had grabbed her tiny bag and slid off the stool.
He placed his hand in the small of her back and they wove through the growing crowd towards the small table in a low-lit corner of the restaurant, her skin feeling as if it were burning hot against his hand even though the many cruel layers between them meant it was physically impossible.
* * *
After five minutes of watching Caitlyn eat her bruschetta, slipping slivers of tomato from the top and sliding them into her mouth, then slowly licking the olive oil from the tips of her finger, Dax knew he needed a new focus or they’d never make it past the entrée. Hell, it wouldn’t have mattered to him if they didn’t but she’d seemed so excited about dessert.
‘So tell me about yourself,’ he said, his throat tight.
Caitlyn frowned at him as if he’d said something objectionable, then lifted her shoulders and said, ‘What you see is what you get.’
‘Really?’ He leant forward, enjoying very much the way her breaths hitched every time he did so. ‘Then I’m thinking only child. Grew up on a goat farm. Captain of the high-school girls’ lacrosse team until you were suspended for ball tampering.’
Her tongue did a sweep of her bottom lip, which made him lose his train of thought, but he picked himself up ably.
‘But you went on to complete your schooling in the end, and thank goodness, otherwise you would have missed out on all those lingerie pillow fights with your university roommates.’
Her eyes sparkled deliciously as she licked a stray speck of oregano from her finger. ‘You done?’
‘My powers of deduction have reached their limits. Though if I missed any of the highlights, or the sordid juicy lowlights for that matter, now’s the time to tell me.’
She stilled, her eyes dancing between his, a furrow appearing between her brows. ‘You really want to know?’
‘You’re the one who ordered the soufflé, remember,’ he said, sitting back, giving her space. ‘We have time to fill.’
When he waited for her to fill the silence, she slowly released her breath, like a balloon losing air through a tiny hole, then said, ‘Fine. Only child, yes. Never played lacrosse though. Dancing in front of my bedroom mirror with a hairbrush was about as athletic as I got in high school. And...I grew up on the Central Coast and have never even seen a goat in the flesh.’ She frowned at her fingernails. ‘My mum lives there still. Same place. Same house. If we didn’t have the same knocked knees I’m not sure either of us would believe ourselves related.’
She shook her head, then sat on her hands as if they were the ones she was upset with.
‘And your father?’ Dax asked, surprising himself at wanting to know when before it had been just conversation.
She gave him a blank stare. ‘He didn’t have knocked knees.’
His silence stretched again.
She rolled her shoulders, and her eyes for good measure, before saying, ‘Mum always said I got my dad’s elbows and his nerve. I reckon I look just like him, in fact. He was the complete opposite to her. All spirit and fire. Couldn’t stay still even if you sat on him. He travelled constantly. He was a pro rally-car driver actually. A really good one. Did the Dakar rally a few times. He died on the job when I was eleven.’
The speed with which she got out the words and the soft, sad little shrug told him more about her relationship with her dad than even her words had. They’d been close. She missed him still. It was the complete antithesis of the relationship he’d had with his parents, then and now.
‘And the pillow fights?’ Dax asked, his voice unusually deep.
She slowly looked up at him under her long auburn lashes and the revival of the sparkle in her eyes wiped every other thought from his mind. ‘Well, they were way more fun than you could ever imagine. Your turn.’
Dax was still trying to get his head around the image of Caitlyn bouncing about in her underwear, when he heard himself saying, ‘Grew up here. Still live here. My parents are both gone.’
