The Rules of Engagement. Элли Блейк

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ