The Rebound Guy

by Fiona Harper

  Careful, Kelly. Any minute now you’ll be admitting you like the guy, and that’s far too dangerous.

  Professional. Yes, that was what she’d told him she wanted out of their relationship, and he’d stuck to it. He’d respected her wishes. And maybe she could like him just a little bit for that. A very little bit.

  Joey’s was busy with familiar faces from Aspire when Kelly followed Chantelle and her two friends through the door. A very chivalrous lad from Accounting cleared off a stool and offered it to her. She smiled and said thank you and hopped on top of it. Chantelle ordered cocktails—her treat, she said—and Kelly gratefully accepted hers when it arrived. After the last couple of weeks, she really needed it.

  And, as the minutes ticked on and she joined in a conversation about what was going on in a popular soap opera, she began to feel the tension ebb from her shoulders. Just for a while she was the Kelly she vaguely remembered being, once upon a time. Not somebody’s mother. Not somebody’s harried ex-wife. Not a single parent carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Just Kelly. It was quite liberating.

  In the middle of a discussion about the latest line up of hopefuls for the current TV talent show, she saw Chantelle look in the direction of the door and smile a secret little smile. Kelly was as nosey as she was blunt, so she turned to see who had just walked in.

  Crap.

  She whipped her head back round again and concentrated on her half-drunk cosmopolitan.

  Jason. She should have guessed he’d turn up sooner or later. Chloe would be pleased.

  But the bar was crowded, she reasoned, and there were plenty of Aspire employees ready to kiss up to the boss. There was no reason she would even have to talk to him. She would just carry on chatting to the girls and try not to be aware of where he was. Difficult, though, when her skin prickled every time he came within ten feet of her.

  There it went again. She picked up her glass and took a great gulp while trying to radiate silent messages: I’m not here.... Go and find someone else to talk to.... There are much more interesting people on the other side of the room....

  ‘I wouldn’t have picked you for a cocktail kind of girl,’ a deep voice said from over her left shoulder. Kelly downed the remainder, just to make a point. She tried to pretend she hadn’t heard him, but the guy sitting next to her offered Jason his stool and Jason slid into her peripheral vision. Poop. Kelly’s skin prickled so hard she had to stop herself scratching. At work, she had the added help of a big, sturdy desk between them. Here in the bar, with the lighting low, the hum of conversation around them and the scent of his aftershave filling her nostrils, it was hard to ignore the crazy attraction she had for him.

  At least he was just being friendly, she tried to kid herself. At least her allure had worn off.

  But when she turned to greet him, the flicker of heat in his eyes contradicted her. Kelly felt her legs wobble on the stool.

  ‘Oh, I’m a cocktail girl all right,’ she said, lying through her teeth. ‘Have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

  Jason nodded seriously. ‘So that’s what you keep in that insulated coffee cup on your desk. I had wondered.’

  Damn him. Now she wanted to smile.

  ‘Peach daiquiri today,’ she said. ‘Most refreshing.’

  Jason laughed, and Kelly felt her lips tugging up at the corners.

  ‘Okay, you’re right,’ she said wearily. ‘I like them, but cocktails aren’t usually my thing. I prefer my drinks one at a time, not all mixed together.’

  ‘Like...?’

  She shrugged. ‘I like a good red wine...’ She tipped her head to one side and thought for a minute. ‘But I think my absolute favourite is a cold beer straight from the bottle on a warm summer’s evening.’

  Jason looked at her empty glass then nodded at the barman. ‘Let me get you one.’

  Kelly shook her head vehemently. ‘No. I pay for my own drinks.’

  ‘Didn’t Chantelle buy you that one?’ And he nodded in the direction of the girls she’d come with, all with matching drinks.

  ‘That’s not the same and you know it.’

  ‘So not accepting drinks from men is also part of your no-dating-at-work policy?’

  She nodded. It seemed like a good time to include that clause.

  ‘The same way you don’t want to go out after work with me, but you don’t mind going out in a group?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ she said slowly, feeling that somehow this was a trick question. She saw him nod a greeting at someone, and the look he gave was also a little conspiratorial. She whipped her head round to see who he was looking at and found Chantelle smiling back at him, toasting him with her cocktail glass. Kelly turned to study her boss again.

  Had he...had he set this up? Had he asked Chantelle to bring her down here? Surely not. She looked at her still-empty glass. Who knew that a bit of vodka and cranberry could make you so paranoid?

  ‘So groups are okay?’ Jason said from beside her.

  ‘Huh?’ Kelly frowned and looked up at him. This evening was getting increasingly surreal.

  Jason waved at the barman and leaned over to shout something in his ear. The man straightened and yelled out, ‘Next round’s on the boss!’

  The crowd roared its appreciation and there was a stampede to the bar. Kelly glared at Jason as best she could past the people who had squeezed between their two stools to wave at the bar staff.

  Technically, she’d won. He hadn’t bought her a drink—at least, not just her—but the satisfied smirk on his face made her feel as if she’d just been trumped.

  She wasn’t sure if she liked that, but he’d had a rough day. McGrath’s refusal had been a disappointment, and maybe teasing her now that they were out of the office was his way of blowing off steam. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  She ordered a second cosmo. Beer seemed too...chummy. Cocktails were suitably aloof. As she sipped it she tried hard to remain equally aloof and detached from her boss.

  It didn’t work very well. She kept forgetting and getting absorbed in a funny story he was telling the people gathered around them, and then she’d start laughing and smiling. That in itself wasn’t so bad, but then she’d catch Jason’s eye and discover it held a twinkle just for her.

  What was worse, she liked it. Liked feeling as if they were a unit of two amidst the larger group of Aspire employees. Co-conspirators, even.

  But soon she began to wonder why he was on such top form that evening. Wasn’t he disappointed too? She searched for signs of it, but when someone asked him directly about the McGrath deal, he just batted the subject away, as he would a pesky fly, telling the person who’d asked that it was no big deal.

  That was when Kelly started to get angry with him.

  She’d worked really, really hard on that project, had become invested in it emotionally, because she’d believed in the shoes. She’d believed in Jason Knight and his passion for them.

  Once again she’d been suckered in by a good-looking man with a line. Because now he was laughing it all off as if it didn’t matter.

  It started to boil inside her as she nursed the last dregs of her cocktail. Perhaps this was how he was... Tim had been a bit like that, suffering from sudden and overpowering passions for hobbies or pet projects or even TV programmes. Golf had lasted a year. After he’d spent a fortune on getting top of the range kit, of course. Squash had been next. Then paintball. And they hadn’t been able to watch one episode of a favourite TV show a week, like normal people. Tim had been all about the DVD box set—multiple episodes per evening until her head had spun with the plot lines and characters and she’d ended up dreaming about them all night.

  So, it didn’t matter how good Jason Knight’s broad shoulders looked in his immaculately cut suit. She didn’t need to get enamoured with another man lik
e that. A man who couldn’t commit to something for more than a couple of weeks. She’d bet he had a set of clubs mouldering in his hall cupboard too.

  So she downed the last of her cosmo and slammed her empty glass on the bar, then she stood up, said a terse goodbye to the group and pushed her way through the crowd to the door.

  The delicious air of a spring evening wrapped itself around her as she stepped outside, cooling her skin and sharpening her senses. Sharpening her anger too. The echo of her heels on the paving slabs bounced off the walls of a low bridge as she passed under it and marched down the road to the Tube station.

  * * *

  Jason looked in both directions when he burst from the door of Joey’s and quickly spotted his PA marching off down the street as if she was on her way to execute something. Or someone.

  ‘Kelly!’ he called out, but those legs just kept striding. ‘Hey, Kelly!’

  She didn’t slow or stop, but there was a slight straightening of her spine that indicated she’d heard him just fine. He smiled to himself. He could play it that way, if that was what she wanted.

  Kelly’s legs might be long, but his were longer and her stride was hampered by both heels and a skirt. It wasn’t long before he caught up and fell into step beside her. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Is something up?’ he asked. ‘Did I do something to make you mad?’

  He didn’t get it. He thought he’d been a great guy this evening, but when she kept her focus on the brightly lit Tube sign a little farther along the street he knew his gut was right. She was mad. Now he just had to find out why.

  Most women would have iced him out, punctuating the silence with only a few choice phrases designed to make him quit and go back to the bar. But Kelly Bradford wasn’t most women.

  She tried, he could tell, but he almost heard the snap in her resolve as she turned to him and opened her mouth.

  ‘Typical man,’ she muttered. ‘The world revolves around you, doesn’t it? It has to be all about you.’

  ‘No,’ he said too quickly—and maybe a little defensively.

  ‘Maybe I just need to get home to my boys,’ she added. ‘Maybe there’s more to my life than propping up a bar and making everyone think I’m God’s gift by cracking jokes and flashing my wallet around.’

  She was mad at him! He knew it!

  ‘Kelly...are you saying that the only reason you’re sprinting down this street is because you need to catch a train? That’s what all this is about?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, and smirked to herself.

  Jason smothered his own urge to smile. ‘Then why have you just walked right past the station?’

  Kelly let out a short pithy word, turned on her heel and headed back in the other direction. Jason took a moment to enjoy his little victory, smiling at her back as she stalked away from him, and then he began to jog lightly to catch her up.

  But as he reached her his smile faded. He gently reached for her wrist. She pulled it away before he made contact, but at least she stopped and faced him instead of walking on.

  He needed to know. He needed to know what was driving her nuts. Him, yeah, but it was more than that, and suddenly finding out what was becoming inexplicably important. ‘This isn’t just about getting home for bath time,’ he said.

  Kelly’s jaw tensed and she shot him a guilty look. No poker face at all, this one.

  ‘You said those shoes were your baby,’ she said, accusation rich in her tone.

  He nodded. Yeah, he had said that. So what?

  ‘Well, your baby is lying critically ill in hospital while you’re living it up down at the pub, celebrating.’

  He found his blood pressure rising to match hers. ‘So I decided to cheer myself up a little. Hardly a crime! But it’s my project that’s been knocked back, my dream lying in the gutter. Who gave you the right to judge? Why should you care?’

  Okay, he should pay attention to that throbbing feeling in his temples. It was when he got this way that he did dumb things. Things he regretted. Usually things other people regretted too. But Kelly had a way of making the adrenalin course through his veins, despite all his best efforts to keep it locked away.

  She put her hands on her hips, glared at him with glistening eyes. ‘Because you made me care, damn you!’

  Her words were like a slap. That couldn’t be right. Nobody cared about the things he cared about. Because all he cared about was having a good time and messing up other people’s lives, apparently. Now the adrenalin was pumping harder, faster, but it brought with it a chill he recognised, a chill he didn’t care for, and he realised he couldn’t let Kelly care. Because if she cared, he would care, and that was something he really didn’t want to do. He’d better do something about that fast. Something to make her not care. Something to make her believe he was exactly who she thought he was.

  He didn’t even think about his next move; he just did it. He looked down at her shining eyes and her full lips, and the next second his arms closed around her and he was tasting those lips. She went rigid, and somewhere in the back of Jason’s brain a thought knocked to be let in. A thought that maybe this was the dumbness talking and maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  For the first time in his life, he was on the verge of stepping back and apologising for kissing an attractive woman.

  And he might have done too, if not for the fact that she started to kiss him back.

  FIVE

  Something inside Kelly’s head was screaming at her, tugging at her frantically, telling her to pull away, have a little dignity. She slapped whatever it was into silence by snaking her arms around Jason’s neck and pulling him closer.

  Oh, she’d forgotten just how good this could be. Just how simple and uncomplicated and wonderful a first kiss could be.

  It had been more than a decade since she’d had one of those. And, in the interim, kissing had turned from blissful and passionate to comfortable and familiar and finally to infrequent and guilt ridden. On Tim’s part, anyway. At the time she hadn’t known why he’d avoided her touch. In her darker moments she’d thought he’d been put off by the thought of kissing a woman who’d just been diagnosed with cancer.

  But this—she sighed against his lips—this was perfect.

  Then a chink of reality invaded her lovely warm haze.

  This was also her boss. Wonderful as it might be, this was definitely not ‘simple and uncomplicated’.

  He’d shocked her, though. The moment she’d responded to him he’d stilled, as if he was surprised. Odd, when he’d been the one to initiate the kiss, when surely that was what he’d been slowly building up to all evening. The stillness hadn’t lasted long, however. Moments later he’d pulled her to him and shown her just how high and how hot the flames of their insane chemistry could burn. She was surprised the illuminated Tube sign above their heads hadn’t exploded in a shower of sparks.

  The kiss quickly deepened into something more primal—and far less decent. If they kept this up, they were in danger of getting arrested.

  It seemed Jason had come to the same conclusion because he pulled away. ‘Which way is home?’ he whispered in a husky voice that sent shivers down her spine.

  That was the logical conclusion to what they’d just started, she knew. They’d gone way beyond a polite, end-of-a-first-date kiss, even though they’d skipped the date and gone straight for the lip action. But suddenly that wonderful something she’d been feeling congealed and became much more cold and slimy.

  She couldn’t take this guy home with her! What was she thinking?

  More importantly, what was he thinking?

  Scratch that. She knew exactly what Jason was thinking, and she needed to put him straight fast. She unhooked her hands from around his neck and dragged herself from him, backing away a few steps to put some dista
nce between them. Maybe she should have felt better to see that, far from being slick and in control, he seemed to be just as disoriented as she was, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to feel any kind of sympathy for him at this moment. She needed to be angry with him. Because if she was angry with Jason, she couldn’t be angry at herself for being so weak and stupid.

  ‘We’re not doing this,’ she told him shakily.

  Jason just looked a little confused.

  ‘I told you it was a bad idea,’ she reminded him. ‘Against my personal policy—and it really should be against yours too!’

  ‘I remember what you said,’ he replied, ‘but that was before you were on the verge of ripping my shirt open. I kinda guessed you’d had a rethink on those rules of yours.’

  Thinking hadn’t been any part of the equation, unfortunately. But, now her brain had kicked in again, it felt very much the same as it always had done on the subject of Jason Knight and an illicit office fling.

  ‘I’m not going to be your consolation prize for losing the McGrath deal,’ she told him. ‘Hot, angry sex with me will not solve anything.’

  The look on Jason’s face said he begged to differ. And Kelly was regretting her choice of words too. They’d conjured up all sorts of images that really weren’t helping her sudden attack of self-control.

  ‘I don’t know...’ he began, regaining some of his usual swagger.

  That helped. Seeing him almost vulnerable after he’d broken their kiss had not. But now he was looking more like his usual self and that helped her remember who Jason Knight really was.