The Rules of Engagement. Ally Blake
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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