The Rules of Engagement

by Ally Blake

  Dax looked around in alarm, as if the gallantry police were about to nab him for letting her kneel there so long. Then with breathtaking strength he grabbed her by the elbows and picked her bodily up off the floor. Her feet landed on the wood with a clack of heels.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked, his eyes wide, his voice gruff.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘No!’ he said so loudly a handful of people at the other end of the bar turned and stared. Caitlyn shot them a half-smile to show everything was okay, even while she had no idea if it was.

  Oh, God, had she misread him so completely? She really was such a screw-up at this relationship stuff! How could she have hoped to have gone from relationship idiot to savant in a day? Reading the creases in his forehead, the flickers in his eyes, as if she really had a single clue—

  Then he was holding out his hand, looking at the ring. He’d asked her to bring it, and now she was about to find out why.

  She passed it to him, putting her future in his hands. Literally. It was one of the more petrifying moments of her life, even though they really were such lovely hands.

  Enough people had seen what she’d done that they now had a small audience. Noticing the gawkers, Dax swore beneath his breath, then grabbed her by the hand and led her to the dance floor, which was half full with slow-

  dancing couples.

  ‘Did I screw everything up again?’ she asked, as she clacked behind him.

  ‘You’ve said your piece and, before you do anything crazy, I want to say mine,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘Fair?’

  She nodded.

  He wrapped his arms wrapped around her, pulling her close. She slid a hand into his and put the other over his heart, which was thumping so hard she could feel it through his shirt.

  ‘Caitlyn.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Look at me.’

  She did as she was told, looking up at dark eyes, dark hair, dark expression. The first time she’d seen him she’d thought him untouchable. This time she reached up and brushed the lock of hair from his forehead, her fingers tingling as they caressed his warm, oh, so touchable skin.

  A muscle worked in his cheek and he pulled her tighter still, the feel of his hard thighs pressing against her taking her breath away.

  Then he said, ‘No more freaking out, okay?’

  She shook her head, no.

  ‘Good, because these past few days have been pure hell. I had to give up the family company just to find something to take my mind off you. I don’t want to go through that again. And for that I have to see you every day. To talk to you whenever I need to. To touch you whenever I want to. To kiss you every chance I get. To make love to you as many times a day as humanly possible. To hold you every night for the rest of my life. And I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Marry you, not marry you. Give you a ring, give you an island. Adopt a rescue llama, adopt Franny. Whatever it takes.’

  He put a finger beneath her chin and lifted her head so that she could see the absolute sincerity deep within his dark eyes.

  And there she saw the depth of his love for her and she understood it completely. And by the smile that slowly beamed across his gorgeous face she could only imagine how bright the love inside her was shining too.

  ‘Forgive me?’ she said, her voice shaky.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For saying yes to other men and not meaning it.’

  ‘Sweetheart, if you had any idea how glad I am you didn’t mean it with them you wouldn’t look so concerned right about now.’

  He tilted her chin a fraction higher as he leant to press his lips to hers. It felt as if it had been weeks, months, a lifetime, since she’d kissed him as an explosion of sensation burst inside her. His kiss melted away any last doubt she might yet have harboured as to his absolute sincerity, or her own.

  She slid her hands into his hair, stood on tiptoes and kissed him back with all her might. The music stopped, or maybe it hadn’t. She couldn’t hear anything over the rampant beating of her own heart. Or was that his?

  When his lips left hers she felt as if she were floating a foot from the ground, as if the weight that had borne down upon her shoulders all her life was finally gone.

  She was loved. Truly, honestly, deeply loved. And she loved someone just as much. It was nothing like she’d even imagined it could feel. More exhilarating. It was a high she knew she’d never get used to, never take for granted. And she had one beautiful man to thank for it all.

  The music started up again and she slowly lowered herself back to the ground, sliding down his body as if parting from it for even half a beat was too much to bear.

  ‘So what do you say to my fine print?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine by me,’ she said, running a greedy hand across his broad shoulders.

  ‘Which parts?’

  ‘The island. The llama. You.’

  He relaxed and then she realised how nervous he’d been about his own declaration. Wow. It only made her love him more.

  She sank against him, limp, warm, happy. And best of all he let her.

  ‘You do realise I am officially unemployed,’ he said, his lips resting on the top of her head.

  ‘We’ll be fine.’ She sighed into his strong chest. ‘I have a good job.’

  She felt him pause a moment, and knew—now that she was more sure of her abilities at reading him—the hesitation amounted to how best to tell her his niftiness with finance had made him worth a mint all on his own. Caitlyn, of course, knew already. Franny. Google.

  She casually slid a hand over his backside and back up to his shoulders again. ‘Will you be okay covering your rent?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice now a growl. ‘Are you offering to help out?’

  ‘Sure,’ she murmured, her fingers now playing with the warm skin exposed by his open collar. ‘My bed’s big enough for two, which we’ve proven admirably. And Franny is a fairly quiet housemate, most of the time.’

  His laughter rumbled through her. ‘Not going to happen in a thousand years.’

  She smiled from the tips of her highlights to her delighted watermelon toenails. ‘Oh, well. It was a fun thought while it lasted.’

  He wrapped his arms about her waist and slid her against his hardness, which was getting harder by the second. ‘How’s this for fun? Move in with me.’

  ‘Okay.’ She sighed into him, rocking in rhythm with the music while her hands roved over his gorgeous chest, his strong back, his hard stomach, the cold bump of his belt buckle.

  ‘That was easier than expected.’

  ‘You seem to have found me in a strangely good mood.’

  ‘I see that. And I intend on taking complete advantage.’

  ‘Go right ahead,’ she said, closing her eyes as she leaned against his chest, his heartbeat thumping gently against her temple. ‘What do you want? A good deal on a Z9? Done. Anything else?’

  He stopped rocking. She stumbled, her loose limbs taking a moment to catch up with the news. She held his lapels and dragged her blissfully woozy head upright to frown at him.

  His hand slipped to her chin, holding it still as he looked deep into her eyes.

  ‘Marry me.’

  The words tickled at old wounds, and she braced herself for the merest glimmer of fear, but instead she heard nothing but the smooth tripping beat of Stevie Wonder singing ‘Do I Do’.

  Something glinted in the corner of her gaze. The ring. Her ring.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, never more certain of anything in her whole life.

  He slipped the flower of diamonds onto her finger. It looked exactly how she felt, full of delight and sparkle and vivacity.

  She held the ring to her ears. Her grandmother’s earrings, glass chandeliers with tiny flowers at the clasps that she’d picked out with her dad all those years ago from a dime store for her entire life savings of nine dollars and fifty cents, swung softly against her neck. ‘The
y match.’

  He nodded. ‘I know.’

  Of course he knew. He knew where she came from and had every intention of being right beside her wherever she was going.

  Beautiful Dax Bainbridge and she—a perfect matching set.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt of The Secrets She Carried by Lynne Graham.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CRISTOPHE DONAKIS opened the file on the Stanwick Hall Hotel group, which he expected to become the latest addition to his luxury hotel empire, and suffered an unanticipated shock.

  Ironically, it took a great deal to shock Cristophe. At thirty years of age, the Greek entrepreneur and billionaire had seen a lot of bad behaviour and when it came to women in particular he was a complete cynic with low expectations. Orphaned at the age of five, he had survived several major setbacks in life, not the least of which had included foster parents whom he loved but with whom he had not a single thought in common, and a divorce, which still rankled for he had entered his marriage with the best of good intentions. No, what caused Cristophe to vault upright behind his desk and carry the file over to the window to avail of the best possible light was a glimpse of a startlingly familiar face in a photograph of the Stanwick executive staff…a face from his past.

  Erin Turner…a pocket Venus with pale hair that glittered like polished silver gilt and eyes the colour of amethysts. Straight off, his lean, darkly handsome features clenched into forbidding angles. Erin occupied a category all of her own in his memories, for she had been the only woman ever to betray him and, even though almost three years had to have passed since their last meeting, the recollection could still sting. His keenly intelligent gaze devoured the photograph of his former mistress standing smiling at the elbow of Sam

  Morton, the elderly owner of Stanwick Hall. Clad in a dark business suit with her eye-catching hair restrained by a clip, she looked very different from the carefree, casually clad young woman he remembered.

  His tall, powerful body in the grip of sudden tension, Cristo’s dark-as-night eyes took on a fiery glow. That fast he was remembering Erin’s lithe form clad in silk and satin. Even better did he recall the wonderfully slippery feel of her glorious curves beneath his appreciative hands. Perspiration dampened his strong upper lip and he breathed in deep and slow, determined to master the near instantaneous response at his groin. Regrettably, he had never met another Erin, BUT then he had married soon afterwards and only in recent months had he again enjoyed the freedom of being single. He knew that a woman capable of matching his hunger and even of occasionally exhausting his high-voltage libido was a very rare find indeed. He reminded himself that it was very probably that same hunger that had led her to betray his trust and take another man into her bed. An unapologetic workaholic, he had left her alone for weeks while he was abroad on business and it was possible that he had invited the sordid conclusion that had ultimately finished their affair, he conceded grudgingly. Of course, had she agreed to travel with him it would never have happened but regrettably it had not occurred to him at the time that she might have excellent, if nefarious, reasons for preferring to stay in London.

  He studied Sam Morton, whose body language and expression were uniquely revealing to any acute observer. The older man, who had to be comfortably into his sixties, could not hide his proprietorial protective attitude towards the svelte little manager of his health spas. His feelings shone out of his proud smile and the supportive arm he had welded to her spine in a declaration of possession. Cristo swore vehemently in Greek and examined the photo from all angles, but could see no room for any more innocent interpretation: she was at it again…bedding the boss! While it might have done him good to recognise Erin’s continuing cunning at making the most of her feminine assets, it gave him no satisfaction at all to acknowledge that she was still happily playing the same tricks and profiting from them. He wondered if she was stealing from Morton as well.

  Cristo had dumped Erin from a height when she let him down but the punishment had failed to soothe an incredulous bitterness that only increased when he had afterwards discovered that she had been ripping him off. He had had faith in Erin, he had trusted her, had even at one point begun to toy with the idea that she might make a reasonable wife. Walking into that bedroom and finding another man in the bed he had planned to share with her, along with the debris of discarded wine glasses and the trail of clothes that told its own sleazy story, had knocked him sideways. And what had he done next?

  Lean, strong face rigid, Cristo grudgingly acknowledged his own biggest mistake. In the aftermath of his discovery that Erin had cheated on him, he had reached a decision that he was still paying for in spades. He had made a wrong move with long-term repercussions and for a male who almost never made mistakes that remained a very humbling truth. With hindsight he knew exactly why he had done, what he had done but he had yet to forgive himself for that fatal misstep and the fallout those closest to him had suffered. Handsome mouth compressed into a tough line at that reflection, he studied Erin closely. She was still gorgeous and doubtless still happily engaged in confidently plotting and planning how best to feather her own nest while that poor sap at her elbow gave her his trust and worshipped the ground her dainty feet trod on.

  But Cristo knew that he had the power to shift the very ground in an earthquake beneath those same feet because he very much doubted that the reputedly conservative and morally upright Sam Morton had any awareness of the freewheeling months that Erin had enjoyed in her guise as Cristo’s mistress, or of the salient fact that at heart she was just a common little thief.

  That bombshell had burst on Cristo only weeks after the end of their affair. An audit had found serious discrepancies in the books of the health spa Erin had been managing for him. Products worth a considerable amount of money had gone missing. Invoices had been falsified, freelance employees invented to receive pay cheques for non-existent work. Only Erin had had full access to that paperwork and a reliable long-term employee had admitted seeing her removing boxes of products from the store. Clearly on the take from the day that Cristo hired her, Erin had ripped off the spa to the tune of thousands of pounds. Why had he not prosecuted her for her thieving? He had been too proud to parade the reality that he had taken a thief to his bed and put a thief in a position of trust within his business.

  Erin was a box of crafty tricks and no mistake, he acknowledged bitterly. No doubt Morton was equally unaware that his butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth employee played a very creditable game of strip poker. That she had once met Cristo at the airport on his birthday wearing nothing but her skin beneath her coat? And that even the coat had gone within seconds of entering his limousine? Did she cry out Morton’s name and sob in his arms when she reached a climax? Seduce him as only a very sensual woman could while he tried to give the business news his attention instead? Most probably she did, for she had learned from Cristo exactly what a man liked.

  Disturbed that he still cherished such strong memories of that period of his life, Cristo poured himself a whisky and regrouped, his shrewd brain swiftly cooling the tenor of his angry reflections. The phrase, ‘Don’t get mad, get even’ might well adorn Cristo’s gravestone, for he refused to waste time on anything that didn’t enrich his life. So, Erin was still out there using her wits and her body to climb the career and fortune ladder. How was
that news to him? And why was he assuming that Sam Morton was too naïve to know that he had caught a tiger by the tail? For many men the trade-off of as much sex as a man could handle would be acceptable.

  And Cristo registered in some surprise at his predictability that he was no different from that self-serving libidinous majority. I could go there again, he thought fiercely, his adrenalin pumping at the prospect of that sexual challenge. I could really enjoy going there again. She’s wasted on an old man and far too devious to be contained by a male with a conventional outlook. He began to read the file, discovering that Erin’s wealthy employer was a widower. He could only assume that she had her ambition squarely centred on becoming the second Mrs Morton. Why else would a scheming gold-digger be working to ingratiate herself and earn a fairly humble crust? He was convinced that she would not have been able to resist the temptation of helping herself to funds from Sam Morton’s spas as well.

  Her healthy survival instincts and enduring cunning offended Cristo’s sense of justice. Had he really believed that such a cool little schemer might turn over a new leaf in the aftermath of their affair? Had he ever been that naïve? Certainly, he had compared every woman he had ever had in his bed to Erin and found them all wanting in one way or another. That was a most disconcerting truth to accept. Clearly, he had never got her out of his system, he reflected grimly. Like a piece of baggage he couldn’t shed, she had travelled on with him even when he believed that he was free of her malign influence. It was time that he finally stowed that excess baggage and moved on and how better to do that than by exorcising her from his psyche with one last sexual escapade?

  He knew what Erin Turner was and he also knew that memory always lied. Memory would have embellished her image and polished her up to a degree that would not withstand the harsh light of reality. He needed to puncture the myth, explode the persistent fantasy and seeing her again in the flesh would accomplish that desirable conclusion most effectively. A hard smile slashed Cristo’s handsome mouth as he imagined her dismay at his untimely reappearance in her life.