The Rules of Engagement

by Ally Blake

  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 pursuit. Especially when he knew nothing about her apart from the fact that she could get his blood boiling with a mere glance. The Bainbridge name brought with it certain advantages. But those same advantages attracted elements best left alone.

  His eyes sought out Lauren, who was laughing and dancing. She’d been so young at the time of their parents’ accident. So disorientated by the avalanche of chaos they’d left behind and therefore a perfect target to the sharks who’d smelled blood in the water.

  It felt so long ago now; he twenty-two, and saddled with not only a shell-shocked sixteen-year-old sister he’d barely known but the rotting carcass of his family’s hundred-year-old business. The future he’d imagined for himself gone in a puff of smoke.

  He coughed, the haze before his eyes for real. Someone had gone overboard with the club’s smoke machine. Through the smog his eyes disobediently sought out the shapely outline of an auburn-haired spitfire.

  His self-preservation instincts had been well honed. They’d had to be. Never again would he be as unsuspecting, as stunned to the very core, as he had been by the selfish and systematic fraud his parents had perpetrated so slyly before their deaths.

  Though if Caitlyn was a shark in damsel’s clothing then he’d change his name to Susan.

  Unlike plenty before her, she hadn’t looked at him as if he was the answer to her girlhood dreams of diamonds and furs. More like she was a diagnosed sweetaholic and he was the biggest doughnut she’d ever seen.

  He felt hot, he felt tight, he felt wide awake. As turn-ons went it appeared her particular brand of upfront, in-your-face, sexual frankness was it.

  Could he? Should he?

  He glanced at his watch and frowned, unsure if that one move had been a mistake, or his saving grace. It was nearing half-past two. He had work to do. And it had been a long time since his time had been his own.

  ‘Right, I’m off,’ Dax said, overly loud to his own ears though the vigour was likely lost in the thump of the booming beat.

  He patted Rob hard on the back and searched out his sister. He found her bouncing from one foot to the other, the antenna on her head and fairy wings on her back bobbing right along with her.

  ‘Hey, brother! Don’t tell me you’re off.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must. I have a conference call at six.’

  ‘So stay ’til then. Get your dancing feet on.’ She did a solo tango to illustrate.

  ‘Alas I left my tap shoes in my other car.’

  Tango done, she levelled him with a stare. ‘At least promise me you had fun?’

  ‘More than I can possibly say.’ Having a nubile redhead wrapped about him a definite highlight, though he knew better than to let Lauren in on that score.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, sighing dramatically. ‘Go. Get your beauty sleep. It wouldn’t behove you, or the foundation, if you appeared anything less than implacable.’

  After blowing him a kiss, she shimmied and boogied away into the crowd. Whatever things he might wish to change about his past, bringing her up wasn’t one of them.

  Dax resisted the urge to look towards the bar one last time and turned towards the exit.

  Something slithered down his neck. It felt as if it had legs long enough to belong to a bird-eating spider, so he flapped his suit jacket madly ’til whatever it was either flew away or was summarily squished.

  He took a step, only to feel his foot slipping out from under him. He caught himself just in time, took a moment to find his breath, then lifted his shoe to find something twinkling at him from the dark wooden floor.

  Braving the possibility of disease by letting his fingers stray that close to the layer of sticky ooze, Dax bent to pick it up.

  It was long. It was shiny. And it was no bird-eating

  spider.

  * * *

  ‘What are you doing?’ Franny asked. ‘The cab’s waiting.’

  Caitlyn, who was at that moment on her hands and knees—with paper napkins keeping all four from actually touching the precarious Sand Bar floor—blew a strand of hair from her mouth. ‘I’ve lost an earring.’

  Franny threw out her hands in supplication. ‘It could be anywhere by now!’

  ‘Which is why I need to get a move on looking for it.’ With a shiver Caitlyn flicked a stray piece of random cocktail fruit from her wrist. ‘They were Gran’s. The chandeliers with the little flowers at the clasp.’

  ‘Oh,’ Franny said, looking suitably understanding. She knew the history those earrings had. Still she glanced longingly towards the door where the guy she’d spent half the last hour dirty dancing with was waiting to take her to heaven and back.

  They’d promised to drop Caitlyn home on the way as her lift had evaporated once Cutey Patootey was no longer around to escort her. He’d disappeared into the wee hours after Caitlyn had made it clear, by not letting him stick his tongue in her ear, that she wasn’t going home with him that evening.

  Caitlyn wasn’t all that disappointed. Not about that. Her gran’s earrings on the other hand... They meant something deeply. Her heart clenched hard at the thought of losing them for ever.

  ‘You go,’ she said, giving Franny a shove on the ankle, which was the only part she could r
each from the floor. ‘I could be a while.’

  Franny bit her lip, looked from Caitlyn’s no doubt pathetic position and back to the brooding blond in the leather jacket lounging mysteriously by the door.

  ‘Go!’

  ‘All right!’ Franny blushed furiously, then leant over the bar, getting the attention of the bartender. ‘Ivan! See to it our mate Cait makes it safely to a cab all right? And if anyone hands in an earring, it’s hers.’

  Ivan peered at Caitlyn, grinned and nodded.

  Franny said, ‘I won’t be home tonight. Usual place tomorrow for a warm down?’

  ‘If I must.’

  Franny grinned, and took off at a sprint.

  Caitlyn spent the next ten minutes peering at the floor and getting nowhere. Every minute down there had felt like an hour and the further she got, the more concerned she became.

  She and her dad had picked out those earrings for her gran when she was eleven years old. No matter how short a stay he’d had at home between tours, he’d always made time for just the two of them, but she remembered that trip to the shops with him with such clarity. The next time he’d gone on tour he’d never come back.

  Something glinted at her under a barstool! She pulled to a crouch, tucked herself into ball, peered underneath and—

  ‘Cait?’

  At Ivan’s unexpected call, Caitlyn looked up so fast she bumped her head on the underside of the stool. Biting her lip to keep from swearing like a sailor, she rubbed her head and frowned up at him, only to find him holding a long glinting earring made of a dozen pieces of cut glass with a flower at the clasp.

  She scrambled most ungracefully to her feet and grabbed the earring and held it to her chest, spinning around so that her hair slapped her in the face, but she didn’t care. ‘Oh, Ivan! My dear darling Ivan! I love you more than you could ever know!’

  ‘Love him,’ Ivan said with a grin, cocking his head to the right. ‘He found it.’

  Caitlyn spun to a halt, spat a clump of hair from her mouth, and found herself looking into a pair of familiar dark eyes.

  ‘Dax,’ she said, his name a breathy sigh upon her lips.

  Up close and personal he’d been impressive. At enough distance to get a load of the whole lot of him in one go he was...breathtaking. Dark, serious, cool, and with a face that got a girl to thinking she was wearing far too many clothes for comfort.

  He seemed not to notice the feminine tremblings she’d resorted to, thank goodness. He just leaned comfortably against the bar, looking as if he’d been standing there watching her shuffle about on her hands and knees for some time and had been perfectly happy to do so.

  ‘You found it?’ she asked, somewhat redundantly. Though she was pretty impressed she’d been able to get any intelligible words out at all, considering the loudness of the pounding of her pulse in her ears.

  ‘I stood on it,’ he said, his deep voice reverberating inside her so that she might as well have been hollow. ‘If not for my natural grace you and your earring might have single-handedly laid me flat on my back.’

  Dax, flat on his back. The image that created was a keeper. One she knew she’d be trotting out on long, cold, lonely winter nights.

  ‘It must have come loose when we...met.’ The guy made the word ‘met’ sound like a dirty word. Good dirty. Behind-closed-doors dirty.

  Dax nodded to Ivan, who seemed to understand whatever signal he’d sent and moved away.

  Something made Caitlyn almost call out for Ivan to stay. As if being left alone with this man without the aid of loud music, a tightly packed crowd, and low lighting was a kind of peril she knew she couldn’t withstand alone.

  Dax pushed away from the bar and moved closer. Caitlyn curled her toes so as not to sway away. Even in her high heels she had to tilt her head to maintain eye contact.

  He reached out and took her hand. Caitlyn’s breath caught in her throat. Then he turned her hand over and uncurled her fingers one by one.

  Her gran’s gorgeously gaudy earring glinted back at her.

  Relief poured through her, partly because she remembered why he was really there; not for some random seduction scene, but to return her lost property.

  She took a deep breath, centred herself as best she could with his warm male scent curling about her, and turned the earring over in her now moist palm.

  ‘Is it okay?’ he asked.

  The bar at the back was slightly bent, but other than that it was in perfect nick. ‘You’re light on your feet for a guy of your size. You could have mashed it completely. She’s barely bruised and with a little TLC she’ll be as good as gold.’

  She risked looking at him. Her eyes locked to his. Hazel. Her new favourite colour in the whole world. Her breath came hard, for there was no hiding from the patent desire in his gaze. Desire for her.

  The house lights slowly lifted, encouraging the dregs to stumble on home. Panic set in. Her hair would be a mess, her lipstick bitten away, her mascara ever so delightfully smudged. Yet his expression didn’t change. The glint in his eyes if anything grew. Scorched.

  OH, GOD!

  And for a girl who in the past had lived for the adrenalin brought on by the mere possibility of a new relationship, she felt as if she were free falling into those hot hazel eyes.

  In the past being the most important part. She wasn’t looking for that brand of blistering intensity that could sweep a girl off her feet before she knew what was happening. She wanted fun and frivolity. She needed...

  Sorbet.

  All of a sudden parts of herself began to click and slide, like the tumbling open of a combination lock.

  What she needed most was emotional catharsis.

  What she wanted was to clear the bad taste in her mouth that her most recent failed engagement had left behind.

  Sorbet sex.

  What kind of sorbet sex she couldn’t be certain, since it was her first time going down that route. Sorbet came in a million different flavours, and if hers came in the guise of a tall, dark, handsome stranger she had no doubt could wipe away the memory of every man she’d ever met, well, then, who was she to argue?

  ‘Closing time,’ Ivan called out, dragging Caitlyn to the present.

  Her breath shook as she wondered how exactly one went about picking up a sexy stranger in a bar by asking for no-strings sorbet sex.

  ‘Hungry?’ she asked, before she even felt the word coming.

  ‘Ravenous,’ Dax said without missing a single beat.

  Well, she thought as he slid his hand around her waist, resting it possessively on her hip as he led her towards the door, even that gentle touch making her feel as if lava were sliding through her veins, that’s how.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CAITLYN stood in the long hall outside her apartment, hand shaking as she tried to slide her key into the door. It didn’t help that Dax was right behind her, his body heat doing crazy things to her nerves.

  They hadn’t said a word after piling into the back seat of a taxi, where Caitlyn had barked out her address in a voice that made her sound as if she were impersonating a seal with laryngitis.

  Their knees had almost bumped as the taxi rounded each corner, but not. Little fingers had almost touched on the rough fabric seat, but not. Gazes had clashed as they’d sought one another out again and again, threatening to entangle in such a way that had made Caitlyn’s heart feel as if it were about to burst from her chest, but not.

  By the time they’d reached her South Yarra apartment block Caitlyn was so wired she was amazed she could walk in a straight line.

  ‘Let me,’ Dax’s deep voice rumbled behind her. He reached around, pried the key from her claw, and slid it into the lock as if the little hussy had just opened up for him with an easy sigh.

  Any pretence at actual food being on offer went out the window when with a sigh Caitlyn spun in Dax’s arms, slid her hands into his gorgeous hair, pressed as high onto her tiptoes as humanly possible and kissed him for all she was worth.

 
* * *

  Postponing gratification as she’d done so many times before had clearly been ass backwards. She’d had barely two conversations with the guy, didn’t even remember his last name, and had never been kissed so thoroughly in her whole life.

  He was a pro, or at the very least gifted beyond the constraints of natural law. He did things with his tongue she hadn’t even imagined were possible. Her body didn’t care what was possible or not, it just melted and ached and craved all that and more. More than she possibly knew how to handle.

  The intensity brought with it an ache that seemed to fill her very bones, leaving her feeling breathless, and wild with abandon.

  Sorbet! she shouted in her head like a mantra when sense threatened to rear its unhelpful head. That was what he was. Sharp, cool, cleansing sorbet. And if by some alignment of the stars he’d had reason to choose her for a one-time thing right when she needed it most, then so be it.

  His lips moved to the soft dent below her ear. To the shallow dip at the base of her neck. Nipping along the edge of her collarbone.

  Her hands dug into the soft springy hair at the back of his neck, her teeth biting down on her lower lip. Every sense bar the places her body touched his had become so woolly she could no longer feel her extremities.

  She only realised that his balance was affected too when they stumbled backwards and the doorknob, key still inside, wedged into her back.

  That was when she realised they were still in the hall.

  Unknown strength rose up within her and somehow she reached behind her, shoved the door open so hard it was a miracle the doorknob stayed on, and grabbed Dax by the lapels to yank him inside. The door shut behind him, plunging them into darkness. Only a thin vertical stripe of light peeked through the edge of the lounge-room curtains.

  They stilled, her fingers curled into his suit jacket, his hot breaths lifting the hair from her shoulders.

  The lack of sight made everything suddenly magnified. The whir and clank of her old fridge turning to life. The distant hum of riverside traffic below throbbing in time with her heart.