All He Wants For Christmas...: Flirting With Intent / Blame it on the Bikini / Restless. Kelly Hunter
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exactly parted on the best of terms? Cool and distant? Politely dismissive? What? All he had to do was give her a clue and she would follow his lead. ‘Nice headband.’
Was he … teasing her?
‘Thank you.’ This one had a chiffon butterfly perched above her left ear. ‘Not too plain?’
‘Not at all.’ A twitch of his lips. ‘It’s very festive.’
‘Well, I try.’ A swift glance down at his elegant charcoal tie, white shirt and charcoal suit, followed by the arch of her eyebrow told him exactly what she thought of his attempts at brightening up a person’s day.
Damon’s smile widened and Ruby felt herself relax, just a little. She turned back to Lena to find the other woman getting rid of a grin but leaning rather heavily on her cane. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you all waiting,’ she said. ‘I hear the dining experience here is superb. Shall we take the champagne in and be seated?’
That took time, and ordering the meals took more. Conversation flowed around food likes and dislikes, and how long Ruby had been living in Hong Kong, and what she liked best about the expat lifestyle. From there it moved on to people’s favourite places around the globe, a conversation even Poppy joined in, albeit shyly.
Social lubrication—Ruby was good at it, she’d been tutored by the best. But she’d been tutored in leading a conversation, not letting it ebb and flow at will. Get so-and-so to talk about this, her father would say, and sometimes he’d simply been training her and sometimes he’d been after information. Not a skill she wanted to employ at this table.
Don’t lead. It was her second motto for the evening, right up there behind don’t drool on Damon.
She managed to avoid both for quite some time. Right up until Russell mentioned that she’d soon be leaving his employ and Damon speared her with a glittering sapphire gaze.
‘Why?’ he wanted to know curtly, all pretence of social distance shattered.
‘I want to get back to practising some kind of law,’ Ruby offered carefully. Nothing to do with Damon, or what had transpired between them; she needed him to know that. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. And then a remark someone made to me recently about my particular skill set cemented the notion that maybe I shouldn’t have given up on a law career quite so quickly. You know how it is.’ She smiled a quick smile. ‘Sometimes it takes a stranger with a fresh eye to point out the obvious.’
‘Will you stay in Hong Kong?’ Another Damon question.
‘There’s no pressing need to stay here, no,’ murmured Ruby. An answer Damon would probably find hypocritical given her fully voiced views on his inability to settle in any one place. ‘I might try Geneva.’
‘Are you interested in humanitarian law?’ asked Poppy tentatively.
‘Maybe. It’s worth exploring as an option, at any rate. I’d need to retrain. Not that that’s a problem.’
Ruby glanced at Damon and found him staring at her as if perplexed, and then his gaze cut to her choice of hair accessory as if that perplexed him even more. ‘It’s just a headband, Damon. A festive touch for a festive occasion. It doesn’t define me.’
‘I noticed that,’ he countered quietly and held her gaze, and Ruby cursed herself for her oversensitivity when it came to what this man thought of her, and for revealing that sensitivity to him and everyone else at this table.
Time to reach for her wine and shut her mouth and hope that someone else’s manners would prevail when clearly hers had not.
‘Geneva’s a pleasant city,’ said Damon as a waiter appeared from nowhere to top up everyone’s wineglasses. ‘I was there this time last week, on my way through from a job in Brussels. Catching up with an old employer.’
Damon didn’t look at her as he delivered his words. He didn’t look at anyone, just locked his gaze on the entreé another waiter placed in front of him and kept it there. ‘He took me on a backdoor tour through the Palace of Nations. I recommend it.’
Ruby wasn’t the only one who stared at him in astonishment. Both Lena and Poppy were gaping at him too.
Where to begin? What to pick up on? What to leave the hell alone?
‘Huh,’ said Lena, amazement running deeply through that one incautious sound.
Ruby couldn’t even manage that.
‘You didn’t tell me you were in Brussels?’ said Poppy, and her voice held disappointment and sorrow rather than amazement. ‘We could have met up somewhere. Oxford’s not that far away.’
‘Sorry, Poppy.’ Damon shot Poppy a guarded glance. ‘You know I don’t do family when I’m working.’
What the hell did Damon West do for a living that he had to eschew his family while he was doing it?
But Damon didn’t say and Ruby sure as hell didn’t ask. She just looked at him and Damon looked back, his bleak gaze meeting hers, and there was no smile in them, no invitation, just a man who knew he’d said too much already and had to shut it down before he came unstuck completely.
‘Pretty place, Brussels,’ she said, in a weak attempt to halt the growing silence. ‘It’s probably my favourite city centre of all the European cities. Not too big or overwhelming.’ Unlike, say, Damon’s attempt at openness and transparency. ‘And then there’s the chocolate.’
‘And the waffles,’ said Lena, joining the rescue party. ‘And the beer.’
‘Cherry beer,’ said Ruby.
‘Trappist beer,’ said Lena, and with a gamine grin, ‘Warm beer. Something for everyone.’
‘Indeed.’ Ruby could come to like Lena. A lot. ‘Damon, what did you like best about Brussels?’ Keeping it casual, forcing a direction, and to hell with letting the conversation find its own ebb and flow. Ruby had the helm now, and she was keeping it.
‘The history,’ he said, and talk turned to the fields of Flanders and the hallmarks of war.
Wine flowed and the food was indeed superb. Conversation flowed too, and turned to future endeavours. To Lena hoping to build her strength and get back to work, and Poppy, who couldn’t decide whether to learn Korean or study Mayan script, and to Russell, who wanted to expand his banking services into Shanghai. No one asked Damon what lay on his horizon and he didn’t say.
Washington, DC, perhaps? Maybe some other old employer would whiz him through the White House in their spare time?
Dessert was worth waiting for, and then it was time for Ruby to thank Russell for the marvellous meal, wish them all a Merry Christmas and see herself home.
She thought she’d executed a clean getaway as Damon rose to pull out her chair.
Until Russell insisted on everyone heading to the hotel foyer together, presumably so they could see her into a taxi, only by the time they got there Russell had rearranged events to his liking, in that everyone could fit in the limo, and his chauffeur would drive everyone home.
Ruby knew when to cut her losses and go with a superior plan, only by the time they arrived at Russell’s high rise the plan had changed again.
Ruby didn’t even see it coming until Russell alighted and helped Lena and Poppy from the car, and then leaned back down and asked Damon to see Ruby home, and by then the limo door was closing, and the limo—with her and Damon in it—was pulling smoothly away from the kerb.
‘Old fox. He planned that,’ she murmured, and Damon responded with a smile. ‘And you let him.’
‘My father has a chivalrous streak,’ countered Damon.’ Surely you know that by now.’
She did know that. ‘And you? What kind of streak do you have?’
‘Right