by Ally Blake
But it would be a grave error to mistake her allure for anything more.
Which was why he had to deliver her back to her friends, gently and unharmed. Holding that thought as a talisman as he herded her through the stylised gloom, he glanced back to make sure she wasn’t getting too jostled. Her pale face glowed in the strange lighting bouncing off the curved ceiling high above. Her wide grey eyes took on a preternatural gleam.
I have a confession, she’d said.
Anything you want to get off your chest? she’d said.
Giving him the perfect opening to give up Hazel and his side in the whole “stranger in a bar” charade.
It would have felt like kicking a puppy. It also would have negated all he’d done to keep Hazel on his side. And that was where Finn’s base rationale began and ended. Self-preservation.
Finn pulled up short when a group of women stopped in front of him, hugging and squealing as they found another group of women they apparently hadn’t seen in ages.
As it happened, April’s workmates had snagged a booth right there.
At the centre of which sat Jase—what the hell kind of name was that—in his not quite navy suit, his preppy haircut, “puppy dog eyes”, his weak chin. He held a pony-necked beer in one hand, the other cut through the air as he laughed it up with the big boys... at April’s favourite bar.
If it was Pretty Boy’s way of trying to get April’s attention, his seduction technique left a lot to be desired. Maybe he was simply a prick. Either way, self-preservation was a skill April lacked.
Finn stared at Pretty Boy until he felt the force of Finn’s unimpressed gaze. Jase paused mid-sentence and looked up. Swallowed.
April ran a hand up and down Finn’s arm. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped?”
Finn lifted his arm and dragged April under.
She whooped as she danced through the space, grabbing him by the front of his jacket as he pulled her into his arms.
Delight danced behind her eyes as they looked questioningly into his. Such unfairly pretty eyes. So open and clear. Her hair bounced around her shoulders. Her smile creased her face in half. She felt warm and soft in his arms.
Something clenched inside of him. Something raw and unjust.
Then she blinked languidly up at him, one hand playing with the lapel of his jacket. Her sophistication level zilch. She was utterly incorrigible. Persistent. Yet beneath the chutzpah, lurked a vulnerability – making her delicate as a hothouse flower.
For a split second, he questioned why he shouldn’t take what she offered. Before all the reasons fell in on him, like rocks in a collapsing cave.
He pulled her close. Hard. Punishing himself for his divergent thoughts.
Her eyes bugged. “Now what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
Her gaze fluttered to his mouth. She licked her lips. And he couldn’t help but smile.
Which was why his mouth was open as it met hers.
If her first kisses had been a lesson in sweetness, the next were lessons, period. And not because of the fact he was sticking it to Pretty Boy. Or the way the group of women who’d stopped them in their tracks let out a whoop. But because April let go and kissed him back like she meant it. Like she’d been waiting for her chance to have at him again.
Her arms wrapped around his neck. Her fingers dove into his hair. Her knee tucked between his, lifting, rubbing. He wrapped her up tight, until every soft part of her melted into him. Sensation bombarded him from every damn part of his body until the world turned so black he saw stars.
When he pulled away she looked dazed. Delighted. Woozy. She grinned like a sap.
He struggled to make sure he wasn’t doing the same.
“Your boy doesn’t look at all happy with us.”
“What boy?” she asked, her tongue running over her bottom lip.
“The one with the weak chin.”
She frowned in confusion. “Jase?”
“He’s sitting to your right. Don’t look. Trust me when I say we’ve knocked him off his game, big time.”
She looked pained at the effort of not looking. Then, with slow dawning realisation, Finn’s words and actions filtered through until it was written all over her face. Disappointment. And a badly bruised ego.
“Are you really telling me all that was for show?”
He nodded.
“I don’t believe you. I was there.” Her voice quieted on the last word, as if it had caught in her throat. “You weren’t pretending anymore than I was. That kiss was epic.”
Finn stood his ground. It didn’t matter if she kissed like a dream. It didn’t matter that he could still taste her sweetness on the back of his tongue. All she needed to know was that the kiss had been born of pathos. Whether that was true or not. And that it wouldn’t happen again.
They were simply too different. She was sweet, candid, hopeful. While, for him, truth was something to bend to his will and “hope” was been nothing but a four letter word.
When her gaze threatened to slide to her right, he stuck a finger under her chin and waited for her to look him in the eye. “Truth?”
She lifted her chin a mite higher. “Always.”
“Did you join my table tonight because you were hoping it would lead to this, or to make Pretty Boy jealous?”
“Did I...” Her eyes opened wide, her hand fluttered to her chest. Then she breathed out hard. “Okay, fine. I wanted to mess with Jase.”
“Then stop with the sanctimony. And you’re welcome.”
Her disappointment slowly but surely morphed into far more palatable ire. Her eyes grew dark. Sweetness obliterated by determination.
Her voice dropped a notch as she said, “I knew you were a dark man, Finn, but I’d underestimated how dark.”
“I knew you’d get there eventually.”
Glittering eyes flittered between his. “Does he really look livid?”
“Like an overripe tomato.”
Her nostrils flared. “Then I guess our job here is done.”
With that, she took Finn by the hand and led him back to their booth. The trip was interminable – the woman had no idea how to navigate a crowd. And the heat generated by their joined hands throbbed like a fresh injury.
When they reached the booth, their cohorts looked perfectly comfortable.
When April disentangled her hand from his, she rubbed at her palm as if in an effort to wipe away his touch. “Come on, Smith. Clara. We’re leaving.”
Clara scrambled from the booth while Smith gave Finn a long, last once-over. “Already? You sure?”
“More than I can possibly say. So nice to meet you Sally. Bob. I hope tonight was all you were hoping it would be.” With that, April shot Finn one last look – mouth tight, eyes dark – before grabbing her friends and using them as protection as they slithered down the length of The Burrow and out of sight.
Finn’s voice was rough as he said, “Bob, Sally, ready?”
“Young people, these days,” Bob said with a yawn. “No stamina.”
Energy coursed through Finn. April’s energy. Stamina wasn’t even close to being his biggest problem.
Sally eased between the men, sliding her hands into the crooks of their elbows. “Do you think the Slippery Nipple is still open?”
Considering Finn’s luck tonight – of course it was.
For it was nothing but pure luck that Sally and Bob had alighted from their town car earlier that night onto the cracked pavement outside the seedy string of bars and adult shops and loved the place. Otherwise the deal he’d spent the past two months finessing could have blown up in his face.
All because he’d spent his day stuck on the girl with the kiss mark on the glass, and had figured if he got one more hit, he’d be able to let it be.
If he was trying to self-destruct, he was going the right way about it.
Chapter Six
Finn made himself at home at the pointy end of the elegant, oval, oak conference
table at Hamilton Holdings – laptop open, smart phone warm to the touch as he poured over the country’s news services in search of investment opportunities.
The cleaning crew worked around him, wincing in apology anytime they made too much noise. Then a slew of assistants busied themselves setting out agendas and notepaper for a meeting to be held in the room later that afternoon.
Usually the distractions wouldn’t have bothered him. But his mind couldn’t settle. There was a restlessness about him. A feeling of knots fraying. Plans unhinged.
It was one of those rare times he wished he had an office of his own.
Rare because he worked better on the move. Always had. Frank had seen it too. Letting him evolve in the company from investigator to negotiator to provocateur. Allowing Finn to expand his skill set, both learned and inborn, and giving him impunity to acquire a corner of a desk here, the end of a conference table there, a free couch when required.
A muscle twitched in Finn’s jaw as he heard the door swing open yet again.
He ran his hands down his face to find Hazel coming at him like a juggernaut, her heels clacking against the polished wood floor.
He pressed himself to standing. “Hazel, always lovely to see you. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Hazel took the kiss on the cheek—as was her due—before waving him back into his chair. “When Marcy checked in with April on the phone this morning she mentioned you ‘bumped into’ one another last night.”
Finn leaned back. “Of all the bars in all the world...”
“Balderdash. Explain.”
Explain he would. Carefully. For all April’s love affair with confessions, he couldn’t be sure she’d extended them to anyone but him. “We happened to go to the same bar last night. Our parties joined. We chatted. Some people from her work happened by. She seemed distressed. I gave her the opportunity to work out her stress as the parameters of our original agreement.”
Hazel took a moment to let it all compute before her eyes narrowed. “You were helping her.”
“I do what I can.”
“Hmmm. April said much the same thing. Only she told Marcy on her daily catch-up call that she had also admitted to you her association with me.”
Finn stilled. Considered his words. Chose, “That is also true.”
Hazel pulled out a chair and sat, crossing her legs, the sparkle from her shoe catching the light and blinding him for a second. “From what I gather, you did not reveal your part in the caper.”
“I didn’t see how that would help.”
Hazel shook her head. “No. That would have set our undertaking back quite a ways. I’ve spent the morning trying to figure out your angle in all this but, since the client appears to be happy with how things have played out thus far, I can’t work up the energy to chastise you.” A sigh, then, “Girls today. They simply can’t catch onto the nuances of how it ought to be done. The cool refinement, the delicate cat and mouse. No stomach for play.”
A beat pulsed by as Finn waited for more.
But apparently that was it. No mention of the kiss. Kisses. Finn felt an odd kind of relief that those moments had been kept offstage. As if it gave him leave to relive them in private, for a little while longer at least.
Gritting his teeth, Finn shook off that unprofitable thought and leaned forward in his chair. “You asked me to meet the girl, Hazel. So I met her. You asked me to ensure her confidence was boosted. I ensured. Consider the subsequent meeting a bonus. A freebie from me to you.”
“To what end?”
“None in particular.”
“Why see her again? I didn’t ask you to. You have no reason to be in my good books. Or do you?”
Finn allowed himself a smile. “Wasn’t it you who left me that note about being such a gentleman?”
“Mmm. You really are a cool customer, aren’t you, young man?”
“You’ve known me a while now, Hazel. You can’t be all that shocked.”
“You merely surprised me with last night’s move, darling. It was April who continues to shock. There I was, thinking I had a meek little kitten on my hands. When I may well have landed myself a tigress.”
Finn thought of the wild in April’s eyes – the fierceness that had come over her when she’d felt cornered. He knew that feeling. Had been in that position himself more often than he liked to remember.
“Either way,” he said, his voice gathering gravel now, “I believe we can agree the favour has well and truly been dispatched.”
“Mmm.” Hazel uncrossed her legs, stood, and moved towards the conference room door. At the last, she turned, long fingernails curled around the doorway. “She likes you, you know.”
Before he could stop it, he pictured her wide open face as she’d said, I have a crush on you.
Somehow he remained the picture of calm. “You could tell all that from a second-hand phone call? Wow, you are good.”
Hazel smiled. “I was at the bar, remember. The two of you lit up that place like a spotlight shone down upon your heads.”
Finn didn’t move a muscle. He kept eye contact. And said, “Be careful there, Hazel. She’s a sweet kid.”
“Isn’t she, just? You take care too now, darling,” she said, then waltzed out the conference room door.
“Always,” Finn said to the empty room.
“What do you reckon?” April asked.
No response.
“Prince, come on, buddy, I need some feedback here.”
A head covered in tight black curls lifted away from a pair of equally curl-covered paws. His one good eye blinked.
“Nice?” April agreed, pointing to the small framed vintage sketch of Wonder Woman she’d spied in the charity shop window while out on a slow walk with Prince. “You’re right. It looks silly there.”
She nabbed the sketch; moved it behind the arrangement of mismatched coffee cups propped on the highest shelf in the tiny kitchen of her converted-attic apartment.
The array of white fairy lights tacked to her cornices to cover the patchy paint sparked off the old glass. The picture also hid the weird stain on the wall – one she’d never thought it wise to ask her landlady about.
“Much better.”
The place was really coming together. Piece by eclectic piece. She had faith that soon she’d find that one thing to tie it all together and it wouldn’t simply feel safe, comfortable, secure. It would feel like hers.
“Now,” she said, clapping her hands, “cupcake time.”
Prince dropped his chin back to his crossed front paws and wuffled. Fair enough. He was lactose intolerant so, for him, cupcakes were all look no touch. Sad as that was for her little friend, it wasn’t sad enough to stop her.
For no matter how gaga her day, how frustrating her work, how mind-bending her family, the simple pleasure of making something so endearing as a cupcake always took off the edge. Okay, usually. For the feel of the ancient mixer spitting and whirring in her grip and the sugar dust filling the air just weren’t cutting it.
Because, as of this moment, April had a “boyfriend”. No, some gorgeous hapless guy hadn’t run his bike into the side of her car on the way to work. Or spilled coffee over himself right in front of her. A real, live boyfriend would be too simple.
As far as every single employee of Halcyon Whole Foods Wholesale was concerned, April was in the midst of a raging, hot love affair with Finn.
For Jase wasn’t the only one who’d seen her lock lips with a big, hot Viking in a suit. The entire management team had been witness—and were apparently a load of old gossips. Spending their days talking up the benefits of organic psyllium husk, the Halcyon staff could sniff out sweet, juicy distractions like nobody else. And Finn’s stage show the night before was juicy as all get out.
People she’d never met had come up to her asking if it was true that Finn was a mobster/baseball star/foreign diplomat. If he’d really taken her home in a Google car/limo/helicopter. If they’d met when he rescued her from food poi
soning/a magpie attack/ninjas.
Things really got out of control when Stan heard some version of the “news”. Which version, she’d hate to guess. She’d seen him coming, staff bowing in his wake as he took a turn about the floor. Then he’d spotted her, stopped, and made a beeline her way.
“I hear you have a new man in your life, lass,” he’d said in his deep booming voice.
“She does!” That was Smith. If he hadn’t started the rumour mill, he certainly had shares in the thing. “He’s gorgeous, Mr. McTavish. Charming. Worldly. Fills out a pair of suit pants like nobody’s business.”
Stan’s deeply-orange moustache had twitched. “Sounds quite the fellow. I only hope he’s good enough for our girl.”
Then Stan had smiled, all rosy cheeks and warm intelligent eyes. He’d always made April feel like the big, bad world couldn’t hurt her while she as under his gruff protection. Something her father had never done.
She’d opened her mouth to explain his mistake when he’d said, “It’s been too long since we’ve had a proper chat, you and I. Make time to see my assistant. Have her pick out a free lunch in the next few days.”
With that, he’d rapped his knuckles on her desk and headed off.
To think Hazel’s odd advice had actually been right on the money. Being wanted had made her, well, wanted. It felt awfully un-PC, and yet... Things were kind of on a roll now. Stopping them would make her seem flighty, changeable, and a big fat liar. Ironic.
So April now had a big, gorgeous, cool, impossible, fake boyfriend who’d kissed her only to prove that he could.
April near jumped out of her skin when Erica opened the fridge door behind her.
It had been over two weeks since Erica had moved in, meaning neither could pretend it was temporary anymore. She’d probably have to let Mrs. Parsons downstairs know that she had a new tenant – she was still officially the landlady after all.
After staring into the fluorescent depths of the fridge for a full minute and finding nothing, Erica heaved herself onto the kitchen bench, where she yawned, stretching her thin arms over her head before scratching her sleek, wine red hair till it fell about her shoulders in beachy waves.