by Ally Blake
Despite the lightning speed of his grab, he held her wrists gently, turning them over in his large hands, running his long fingers over the edge of the bandages. His face was so grave her heart skipped a beat.
When storm clouds began to gather in his eyes, she buckled. ‘It was the handcuffs. They were cheap. They flared up a latent nickel allergy. I have to put on stupid cortisone cream three times a day. Happy now?’
So happy he burst into laughter. Peals of loud, free, pulsing laughter. Half the café stopped talking and stared. Everyone recognised him. If not as Dylan Kelly then likely as the guy who got coffee there every morning at seven-thirty. Those who did recognise him as Dylan Kelly quickly slid their eyes to her, the woman who had made him laugh.
She felt darts of envy impale her from about seven different points in the café. If they had any clue he had only laughed at her because she had made a fool of herself, rather than from any kind of friendliness, they might not feel so darkly towards her.
She sat on her hands. ‘Are you done?’ she asked between her teeth.
‘For now,’ he said, shifting on his seat and crossing his right foot atop his left knee. ‘Now to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? Or am I to suppose that it is pure coincidence that you are in this exact place at this precise time of day?’
‘Mr Kelly—’
‘Dylan. If this is to be our second shared coffee, I’d suggest the time has come for us to be more…familiar with one another.’
If she hadn’t been on the receiving end of irritation in those daring blue eyes as many times as she already had, she might have thought he was suggesting something altogether more…familiar than he really was.
He was a man with a limited attention span.
She grabbed a hunk of papers from in front of her and said, ‘I’m here to give you specifics on how our plan would work.’
‘Well, isn’t that a great pity?’ he said.
And for a moment, taking in the rich timbre in his voice, and a flare of rare warmth in his eyes, she believed him. She blinked, yet felt it still. She breathed deep enough to catch his scent above the sugar and coffee flavours filling the air—
‘Sorry it took so long,’ a strange voice said instead, cutting so cruelly into her thoughts. ‘They forgot your cinnamon again.’
The bustle at the edge of her vision pulled her gaze from Dylan’s deep blue eyes to find Eric had joined them, was making a little table picnic for Dylan with coffee, sugar, napkin, spoons and a decadent-looking cream bun.
Once settled in the tub chair at the end of the coffee table, Eric pulled out a tiny laptop, sat it on his knees and looked to Wynnie in expectation.
When she looked back at Dylan, he had his newspaper in one hand, a coffee in the other, and to all intents and purposes he seemed to have forgotten she was even there.
She threw her papers onto the coffee table and thought about leaving. Giving up. Moving on to a new target, or maybe a new city. This was just too hard. Trying to work with this man was proving to be beyond her capabilities.
She closed her eyes tight.
And that was exactly why she had to see it through to the very end. Nothing was worth having if it wasn’t a struggle to achieve. The reward at the end would only be greater for the blood, sweat and tears she gave to the endeavour. Maybe this was exactly what she needed to overcome to clear her conscience once and for all.
So she clasped her hands atop her knees and turned to Eric.
‘Hi,’ she said, offering him a friendly smile.
‘Hello.’
Well, so far, in comparison with his astonishingly charismatic boss, he was…not exactly riveting. She managed to not look at Dylan, though she just knew he was smiling.
She had to get to the crunch, and forge a relationship with her new target, and fast.
‘Eric, right? I’m Wynnie.’
‘I know.’
Dylan’s cheek twitched as he flapped the paper loudly and settled back into his seat to read the back sports page.
She leant towards Eric, but not close enough to scare the guy; he seemed a tad skittish. ‘I love your suit. What’s it made of?’
When he gawped at her, she slowly reached out and ran two fingers down the lapel. ‘Worsted wool, right? Perfect choice for Brisbane weather.’
‘Unlike leather,’ Dylan murmured without looking up.
Wynnie nudged her jacket aside with her knee, and turned the full force of her charm back to Eric, who had at least managed to stop looking so bug-eyed.
‘Do you live near here, too?’ she asked.
He flicked a glance at his boss, who rolled his eyes in response before waving a defeated hand.
‘Chapel Hill,’ Eric said.
Having only lived in her uni town for a few months several years ago, her geography was a tad shaky, but Chapel Hill was on the bus route from the big draughty old house she’d shared with Hannah and a half-dozen others while at university.
‘But that’s a half-hour drive from here!’ She poked a thumb in Dylan’s direction. ‘Does he make you drive all this way every morning to order his coffee?’
Eric’s chest puffed out. ‘I’m happy to do it.’
‘By that he means no, I don’t make him drive all this way,’ Dylan drawled as he glanced her way. ‘The kid’s enthusiastic. Something you two have in common.’
Wynnie scowled. Eric blushed. And Dylan’s long stare had her blood thrumming.
He wasn’t generally nice. He didn’t have any kind of natural inclination to do the right thing by the world at large. He was stubborn, antagonistic, cynical and infuriating. Yet she desperately, deplorably, immediately wanted to sleep with him. A futon, a king-sized water bed, the coffee table digging into her calves. She didn’t care where. She didn’t care when. All she cared was that it would happen. It had to happen. Or she might never be able to think straight again.
Maybe it was his very decadence that grabbed her so hard. His very wrongness and badness. Like her latent nickel allergy, his type was an itch she’d had her whole life that only now had been brought to the surface by circumstance.
Wynnie Gracious Devereaux Lambert, she yelled inside her head. Present your pitch, get the hell out of here, then get thee to a yoga mat, or better yet an ice bath!
‘So, Eric,’ she said, her voice sounding as unnaturally tight as her body felt, ‘has Dylan filled you in on our plans?’
‘My plan,’ Dylan interjected, ‘was to read the paper in peace. Your plans are yours alone.’
If only he knew exactly what she’d spent the past minute planning in precise detail!
She crossed her legs the other way so that her body faced Eric, then picked up a simple bulleted list typed on recycled paper. ‘We can start out by focusing on simple insulation tricks, lessening plastic waste, paper waste, electrical waste and putting into place greener working methods for the future.’
Like a good little assistant Eric took the page and read it over. ‘Seems easy enough,’ he said with a nod.
She shot a testing look at Dylan. ‘Doesn’t it just?’
Dylan lifted his large paper cup to his lips and took a long swig. Wynnie found herself concentrating on his long fingers instead. Fingers that had stroked her breast, touched her lower back, caressed her sore wrists, and a hell of a lot more than that in her dreams.
She lifted her eyes to his to find his drinking had stilled and he was watching her. If her pupils weren’t the size of dollar coins she had been let off lightly.
‘Eric,’ he barked and her list fluttered from the kid’s hand to the table as though it had burnt his fingers.
‘Yes, Mr Kelly.’
‘I have the horrible feeling I left the iron on.’ Dylan dangled his house keys at the young man.
Eric was on his feet in a second, and gone in another, leaving Wynnie and Dylan alone in the cosy corner of the café.
The clatter of laptop keys, the rich smell of really good coffee, the hiss of steaming milk all became height
ened as Wynnie’s senses went on full alert.
As did the realisation that below the table Dylan’s foot was about an inch from her own, and that through the entire encounter with Eric and the keys Dylan’s eyes had never once left hers.
She reached for her cup to find it had been taken by a waitress when she hadn’t been paying attention. So she looked away instead, anywhere but at his deep, confusing, confronting, tempting blue eyes.
There were people everywhere—mums with prams, school kids with backpacks, other men and women in suits getting an early start to their days.
Nothing nefarious could happen here.
She relaxed enough to say, ‘You think you left the iron on?’
Dylan’s intimate, rumbling laughter filled the air and everyone else in the room faded away. ‘He’s dedicated, and consistent, and likeable, but so damn eager he never questions me. The day he does is the day he’ll move up in the company.’
‘So why did you send him away?’
Dylan folded over his broadsheet and placed it on the table. He leant forward and she breathed in a nose full of his clean, tangy scent. ‘You’re not going to get to me through Eric.’
She wrapped her hands about her knees, lest she give into temptation and reach out and stroke the hard edge where his cheek met his chin. But her voice was still giveaway husky as she asked, ‘Then how am I going to get to you?’
His eyes darkened, his neck tensed and his nostrils flared as he took in a long slow breath. ‘That’s not your problem, Miss Devereaux. You get to me. Far more than I wish you did.’
She felt it then, as if she was being dipped slowly into a deep hot bath—the sling and slide of mutual sexual awareness.
When she’d thought it had just been her, that had been discomforting enough, but to know, without a doubt, that she brought out a rumble in his voice, a heaviness in his eyes, and who knew what other physical responses, made the ground beneath her feet no longer feel quite so stable.
She breathed in slowly so that he would not pick up on the trembles running through her, and she pretended to misunderstand.
‘Then let me in,’ she said. ‘Let my people in. We can do it in secret. At night. With your people on top of us every step of the way. Let us see how you operate, allow us to come up with a plan to do it greener, and you will be shocked at how cost effective, and beneficial those changes will be in the short and long term. From the extra pride your staff will take in your workplace all the way to how your clients and your city perceive you. If you just opened yourself up to the possibility one tiny little bit, you’d see how perfect we are for one another.’
When his eyes turned dark as night she qualified, ‘How perfect the CFC and KInG are for one another.’
His eyes remained locked on hers—hot, dark, as focused as she’d ever seen them. ‘Wynnie, you are wasting your time tilting at the wrong windmill.’
She leant right forward, not caring how deeply into his personal space she’d gone. ‘What can I say or do to make you change your mind?’
The words ‘I’ll do anything’ seemed to cling to the air between them. Though she hadn’t said them, hadn’t really thought them, she wondered if the time might be nigh that it all mattered so much that she’d mean them.
His jaw clenched, and his eyes flickered at the ceiling. Then eventually he said, ‘All the statistics in the world won’t convince me. I’m no pen-pusher, or cheque-signer like those you’ve come up against before. Think of me as a pit-bull guarding the gates of my family lore. Push me too hard, take one step too close, and I will bite.’
‘I’m pushing too hard,’ she said, her voice catching on the final word as she found herself caught in the rare moment of candour in his unpredictable eyes.
He nodded, and seemed to lean nearer to her still. His shirt bunched into waves against his stomach muscles. The tendons in his hands stood out in tanned ridges as though he, too, was holding himself at bay.
‘I’m getting too close?’ She was asking herself as much as she was asking him.
One of his hands braced the coffee table, resting mere millimetres from hers on her knees. If she took too deep a breath their fingers would touch.
‘Wynnie, you’ve been too close since the moment you set foot on my forecourt.’
Wynnie felt the air between them contract and pulse. She took a deep breath through her nose and it bled from her mouth in a most unsteady exhale.
Before she had the chance to come up with anything sophisticated or coherent in response, Dylan’s hand slipped away, reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone, which he pressed to his ear. She hadn’t even heard it ring.
‘Kelly,’ he said, his eyes not leaving hers. But as the seconds passed the clarity therein slowly, eventually, completely dispersed. They lit with a glinting smile that, no matter how appealing, felt to her as though the shutters had come down with a clang.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said into the phone, then flipped it shut. ‘That was Eric, wondering in which room I might have been using my iron.’
She slid her hands tight between her knees to stop them from tingling as though he were still close, still within reach. ‘If you own an iron I’ll walk out of here today and never bother you again.’
His eyes crinkled. ‘To think, a hundred bucks’ worth of electrical appliance is all it would have taken.’
He could have lied, and she could have gone through with her joke as though it had been a promise. But neither of them did either thing. They sat across from one another, turning a blind eye to their impasse.
She swept a glance to his phone, held between his hands so tight he could crush the poor thing. ‘You should ring him back and tell him you were mistaken.’
Dylan slipped his phone back into his trouser pocket. ‘Nah. He likes to feel useful.’
‘I knew from the moment I met you that you were in league with the devil.’
His smile grew into a grin, but rather than making her head spin, it only made her feel oddly wistful. Now that she’d had a taste of the candour available to her behind the charming mask, the mask would never feel like enough.
Dylan stood and folded his paper beneath his arm. He glanced over her knocked knees, her messy hair and her bandaged wrists before he covered his eyes with his dark sunglasses.
She stood along with him. This was a business meeting after all. ‘So I’m assuming today’s not the day you’re going to sign on with the CFC.’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Then let me give you one last thought to take away with you. When we run out of water, when your backyard backs onto landfill, when you have to wear a mask so as to breathe the air without choking, you’ll be wishing you’d given the bothersome brunette her dues.’
He leant back on his heels, not flinching, not even moving. Until his mouth curved up into a smile. The kind of smile that made her breathe a little harder than normal. Made her heart feel a little more present in her chest.
And then he did the most unexpected thing. He picked up her proposal, and glanced at it for a moment. Just a moment, but it was the most amount of consideration he’d given her yet. Maybe she ought to have imperilled his backyard sooner.
She opened her mouth to tell him to take it with him, but with a shake of his head he let it flutter back to the table.
And this time she had to watch him walk away.
‘Damn it,’ she swore beneath her breath, kicking the edge of the heavy coffee table for good measure. It hurt her big toe, but it was worth it for the excess energy it sent somewhere other than her stormy stomach.
He claimed she’d pushed too hard, but the way she saw it if she wasn’t getting through she wasn’t pushing hard enough.
As to getting too close…The memory of the warmth in his eyes as he’d uttered those words washed over her in a flood of sexual awareness.
When he reached the café door he turned and looked her way one last time. At least her skin thrummed as though he had. With his eyes hidden
behind those dark sunglasses she couldn’t really be sure.
And her deepest instincts when it came to understanding the thoughts and hearts of men had been proven to be disastrously wrong before.
CHAPTER FIVE
THAT night, after everyone else in the office had gone home, Wynnie and Hannah sat on the edge of her glass desk at CFC headquarters.
Feeling like a wind-up toy that had never run out of puff, Wynnie clicked a fingernail manically against her top teeth, and Hannah swung her legs rhythmically beneath the desk as they both stared silently at Dylan’s picture pinned to the back of her office door.
In the past few days, in moments when she had been particularly frustrated with him, or with herself, she’d drawn on a Groucho Marx moustache, a plethora of hooped earrings in one ear, a pirate’s bandana, and a number of missing teeth.
But beneath the pen marks those blue eyes of his constantly shone through—gorgeous, audacious, mocking her, flirting with her, making her whole body feel as if it were wrapped in rubber bands.
‘So he actually read the proposal?’ Hannah asked.
‘He glanced at it.’
‘That’s a good thing. A gal won’t take a dress off the rack and check the price tag unless she likes the look of it in the first place.’
‘Dylan Kelly’s no gal.’
Hannah cocked her head as she looked back at the picture. ‘No, he’s not. And I’m not sure he’d buy off the rack, either. But he looked. He touched. It’s a sign you’re getting through to him and that’s a good thing.’
Wynnie sat on her hands. The way he looked at her…The way he touched her. That might have felt like a good thing, but it certainly was not.
She shook her head. ‘More like a sign to say don’t call me, I’ll call you. Which translates even more specifically into leave me the hell alone before I get my big fancy lawyers to take out a restraining order.’
Hannah’s legs stopped swinging beneath the desk, and she slowly turned to face her. ‘So you think he’s going to call you, huh?’
