Playing by the Rules

by Imelda Evans

  ‘Until now.’

  Josh reached out and laced his fingers into hers. The feel of his hand, firm and warm against her own, derailed Kate’s train of thought. Was a flingee’s hand supposed to feel like that? So comforting and strong? Or was the comfort because he was her friend’s brother? Was that a separate thing? Was this supposed to be this confusing? She didn’t have anything to compare it to. She’d never had a fling before. Not deliberately, anyway. And she’d never discussed her romantic history with Alain. But then, he had never asked.

  ‘So you moved a lot,’ Josh prompted.

  Kate pulled herself together, although it was hard, with her hand still nestled in his.

  ‘Yes, we did. Sometimes interstate, sometimes across town, sometimes to a new house in the same suburb. One time, we moved to the country, but that didn’t last long. I think it was too quiet for Mum’s taste.’ Kate spread her free hand on the window. If she angled her head right, she could make the whole MCG disappear behind it. ‘The three years I spent at school with Jo was the longest we spent in one place for my entire childhood.’

  ‘I guess, with that sort of history, my rootless life would seem a bit like the sixth circle of hell. But if you hate moving so much, forgive me for asking, but what are you doing in Paris? Seems to me like that was a move for work – and a pretty big one.’

  ‘Oh, but that was different! That was part of a plan!’

  Josh cocked one eyebrow, exactly the way Jo did.

  ‘And a plan makes it different, does it?’

  ‘Yes! It makes all the difference in the world!’ Kate liberated her hand. Her need for sweeping gestures to support her argument was greater than her need for his touch, lovely though it was.

  ‘The worst part about the moving wasn’t the moving – although that was pretty bad. Being the new girl all the time sucked like you wouldn’t believe. But it was the random nature of it that really got to me. We seemed to move whenever Mum got bored with a place. I know now it probably wasn’t about boredom, but that’s what it seemed like at the time. There was . . . no system to it . . . no certainty . . .’

  ‘No plan?’

  ‘Exactly! No plan. It drove me crazy. I felt like I could never find my feet, much less put down roots. I never felt like a local. Never felt that I belonged. It got to the point where I didn’t even try, because I never knew when I’d have to chuck it all and start again.’

  ‘So now, I guess, you always have a plan.’

  ‘Well, yes, I do.’ Kate made a face as Alain flashed into her mind. ‘They don’t always work out, but at least I know where I stand.’

  Except when she didn’t. Her plans had been great for work but a conspicuous failure for her personal life. The image of Alain sharpened, mocking her stated certainty. Was it always a mistake to make plans involving other people? Would the area of relationships always be shifting ground?

  Josh repossessed her hand and with it, her full attention. The image of Alain pixelated, faded and drifted away to be replaced by Josh’s real, present face. It was a welcome change, but not without its own barb. If ever there was an embodiment of shifting ground in which to plant anything, surely Josh was it. He couldn’t physically stay in the same place for more than a couple of years. And according to his sister and his mother, his relationships were of even shorter duration.

  ‘So, you can’t imagine living a life like mine? Footloose, fancy-free and ready for anything, any time, anywhere?’

  Kate had to smile. It was almost as though he’d set out to confirm what she’d just thought. Except that she’d thought of his changeability as a bad thing and he made it sound good.

  Correction, he made it look good. She suspected he could make anything look good. A girl would have to be blind not to be attracted to almost any suggestion made by Josh. But one man, no matter how handsome – his lips in particular were distracting her more than she cared to admit – was no match for a lifetime of experience. It might be all right for him, but she wanted different things. Her marriage plans had taken a serious blow, but she wasn’t ready to give them up. Not yet anyway. She stuck to her guns.

  ‘Nope. No way. Not a chance!’

  Did the lady perhaps protest just a smidgen too much? Kate shrugged the thought away. Sometimes, a familiarity with Shakespeare was a pain. Josh pouted, sending Kate’s lip fantasies into overdrive, and leaned in close to her ear.

  ‘So, I guess whisking you away for a dirty weekend is out of the question?’

  ‘Josh!’

  She snapped around to face him and for approximately half a second, he looked suitably chastened. Then he gave himself away with a chuckle.

  ‘Can’t blame a man for wishing, Kate. But don’t worry. I promised Jo I would look after you and somehow, I don’t think dragging you off and having my evil way with you quite comes under that heading. Not this weekend, anyway.’

  He twirled an imaginary villain’s moustache and Kate giggled, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  ‘Besides, we’re booked this weekend,’ he went on, stepping a little closer. ‘Aren’t we?’

  The way he said it, ‘booked’ could have meant almost anything.

  A silence fell in the very small space between them. A silence full of possibilities. Almost certainly unwise, but very attractive, possibilities. And for a moment, standing face to face with him, almost close enough to touch and drowning in the endless chocolate depths of his eyes, she forgot to breathe.

  Then a child, swift of foot, independent of mind and determined to be the first to answer the question about the MCG on her assignment, bumped into Kate from behind. Thrust forward, off balance, Kate banged her head on his chin and for a few minutes thereafter she was kept busy simultaneously seeing stars and clinging to his shoulders as the independent one’s classmates broke around them like waves around a rock.

  The teacher and helper, bringing up the rear, apologised profusely, restored some sort of order and managed to extract them from the crush, but the moment had passed and it didn’t come back. Mostly because Kate was careful not to let it.

  It was all very well for Jo to tell her to have a fling, but Kate was beginning to suspect that the essence of a successful fling was not caring much about the other party to it. And that was not how Kate was wired. Especially not when the other party was Josh.

  She was willing to do a lot to make her mum happy, but, to use Josh’s expression, there was a limit to how much chaos she could take and still stay sane. Or sensible, anyway, which she had always thought of as the same thing. Josh in close quarters exceeded that limit by at least one hundred per cent.

  So, when they went into the glass box of doom, and she had to walk across a clear floor with a clear drop of three hundred metres to the ground under her feet, she did let him hold her hand – but she firmly resisted the temptation to plaster herself to him and hold on for dear life. It turned out that looking through a glass floor at the tiny cars eighty-eight floors below was much less unsettling than looking into Josh’s eyes.

  Likewise, when they went out onto the balcony (wired in, for the insurer’s benefit) and the wind blew her against him, she managed to pull away again almost immediately.

  A small voice in the back of her mind (a voice which sounded a lot like Jo) that told her that she was wasting opportunities. But she opted for sanity and kept him at a polite arm’s-length. It seemed best.

  Until they went to lunch.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Afterwards, Kate sometimes wondered if everything would have been different if they had just chosen a different restaurant.

  It wasn’t as though they didn’t have a choice. They were in the Southbank area, where you could eat out every week for a year without going to the same place twice. But she had a hankering for Italian and she remembered the restaurant from the last time she was home. In the chaos of this trip, her need for continuity was even greater than usual; it seemed a logical choice.

  And as far as the food went, i
t was fine. Her pasta puttanesca was a perfect balance of salty anchovies, sharp capers, pungent garlic and bitey chilli. Josh’s risotto was creamy and contained a generous quantity of more than one variety of mushroom. The house red was perfectly drinkable and the coffee was excellent.

  The management, on the other hand . . .

  The first sign of trouble came as Kate was nibbling on the almond biscuit that came with her coffee and idly gazing out the window at the boats on the river. Josh had gone to investigate the cake cabinet and she was reflecting that food was an excellent subject for small talk. Discovering each other’s eating preferences was much less confronting than a lot of other subjects.

  She didn’t know what made her turn around. Maybe he had taken too long for someone with a penchant for decisiveness. But what she saw drove cake right out of her mind.

  Standing next to the cake cabinet and much too close to Josh was a woman who made Crystal look like she wasn’t trying in the glamour stakes. She was tall – although that could just have been the ludicrous, invitation-to-a-broken-ankle platform stilettos. Her suit was a statement in bright royal blue and very sharp indeed, if two inches too short, in Kate’s opinion, for a workplace. And her perfectly done makeup made Kate feel about as presentable as the scruffy schoolkids they had recently escaped from.

  But it was the shirt that did it. The low-cut, partially unbuttoned advertisement for the very expensive bra that it wasn’t quite hiding. As the unknown glamazon leaned in to put her hand on Josh’s chest, she turned far enough towards Kate for her to see the carefully framed cleavage – and Kate saw red.

  What was it with these women and thinking Josh was fair game? Was she going to have to fight off the whole of Melbourne to get him to her mother’s dinner as, at least nominally, her partner?

  It was probably just as well that the restaurant was fairly empty at the time, as the speed with which Kate made it across the room would have left upended drinks and broken china in her wake otherwise.

  ‘Are you going to introduce me to your friend?’ Kate almost didn’t recognise her own voice. She didn’t think she’d ever managed that combination of perky ingratiation and irritation before. Josh gave her a funny look, but obliged readily enough.

  ‘Kate, this is Megan. We used to work together, many years ago.’

  ‘Among other things,’ Megan replied, with a wink at Josh. ‘And it wasn’t that long ago.’

  She might not have meant anything by it. She might have flirted like that with all her old – and current for that matter – workmates. But to Kate it made one thing very clear. Crystal clear. She didn’t even see Kate as competition. She’d barely spared her a glance before turning all the force of her considerable charms back on Josh.

  Once upon a time, Kate might have folded in the face of such a man-eating display. Comfortable, about-to-be-engaged Kate wouldn’t have had any defences against it.

  But that was before Alain had dumped her, before she’d had her carpet of nice, comfortable certainty pulled out from under her, before she’d hijacked an innocent bystander into being her fiancé to get the better of an old rival and before she’d found that kissing an almost-stranger could be amazing.

  Now, she might have reservations about getting close to Josh, but she wasn’t about to let someone else do it right under her nose. She might not be wearing a belt masquerading as a skirt and presenting her breasts like a bouquet to be sniffed, but what she lacked in looks she could make up for in other ways.

  She held out her right hand, forcing the other woman to remove hers from Josh in order to shake it.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Megan. Always nice to meet old friends of Josh’s.’ She put a slight emphasis on the ‘old’ and was rewarded with a sharp glance. That had got her attention. She held it by inserting herself under Josh’s arm and sliding her arm around his waist. ‘But I’m afraid we can’t stay to chat; we’re expected elsewhere.’ She smiled sweetly up at Josh. ‘Aren’t we, darling?’

  Josh looked amused, but he played along.

  ‘If you say so . . . darling.’

  Kate nearly lost her thread. The combination of that word with those eyes, looking down into hers, was almost overpowering. But she dragged her eyes away from him to smile, with as much sweetness as she could muster, at the woman she suspected of being an ex-girlfriend.

  ‘Could you be a dear and show us where to pay?’

  The other woman indicated the till, looking more confused than anything, as if she wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. They paid and Kate thought they’d made a clean getaway. But as they left – they were actually outside the door – she heard the telltale clatter of ludicrous shoes in a hurry and up Megan popped, like an under-dressed jack-in-the-box, to thrust her card into Josh’s hand, plant a kiss on his cheek and invite him to call her.

  People who didn’t know Kate well were sometimes surprised by how competitive she could be. Many a card player and professional rival had discovered to their cost that quiet didn’t mean a pushover. But she’d never fought for a man before. She’d never needed to and, if she had, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that she could win that kind of contest.

  But besting Crystal for the first time had woken something in her and it wouldn’t – couldn’t – let a blatant challenge like that go unanswered.

  There was a bar running along the front of the restaurant, open to the concourse. Quickly, before she could think better of it, she steered Josh into a slightly concealed corner of it, where they were out of sight of the few remaining diners, but still well within view of Josh’s ex, and turned towards him.

  Deliberately, without rushing, she slid her hand from the side of his waist to the small of his back and pulled him towards her until she was nestled firmly against him from knee to groin. Then, turning slightly, so that anyone watching would get the full benefit of the view, she slid her free hand inside his jacket at the waist and slowly ran it up onto his chest. At about pocket height, she paused, and spread her fingers, to get the full benefit of his pecs. After all, who knew when, if ever, she would get the chance to do this again? She might as well make the most of it. Then her hand was moving again – up to his shoulder, then along his collarbone and over his collar, until she was able to curl her fingers around the back of his neck.

  The slightly rough skin at his hairline felt amazing. As her fingertips revelled in the sensation, Kate felt her concentration slipping, but she forced herself to focus. She had a point to prove. That much was clear, although, had anyone asked her, she might have been less clear on exactly who she was proving it to.

  So instead of turning to jelly in his arms, as she was more than somewhat tempted to do, she braced herself against him, pulled herself onto her toes and eased her upper body towards his at a leisurely pace until her breasts were resting lightly against his chest.

  Then, spreading one hand on his back to hold herself steady, she let her other hand continue its journey up his neck, until her fingers tangled in his curly hair. Here she paused; then she pulled his mouth down to hers.

  That was when the whole plan fell apart.

  Until their lips joined, Kate had been holding it together. She had set out to show that predatory female – and him and possibly herself – that she wasn’t an invisible, disposable mouse any more. The kiss, much as she expected to enjoy it, was just a means to an end.

  But by the time she pulled his face towards hers, it seemed Josh had decided she wasn’t going to get things all her own way. She had been planning to pull him down, kiss him hard, leaving Megan in no doubt as to whether he was likely to call, then let him go so that they could leave. That was the plan.

  But Josh was obviously working from a different script. As she pulled down, he resisted her – not enough to stop her altogether, but enough so that when his lips finally touched hers, it was softly, almost hesitantly – and it was devastating.

  This wasn’t the hard, sexy-looking but impersonal smooch that she had intended. Instead, it was a bar
ely-there caress, a gentle and testing touch that felt very personal indeed. It was sweet, it was tender and it had an extraordinary effect on Kate. Far from wanting to pull away, she found that this tiny and brief contact acted like a magnet to the iron filings of her libido. As his soft bottom lip grazed her top one, it was as if it had set a match to a fuse wired directly to her crotch. A powerful current of desire rocketed up through her body, and she pressed herself against his body and claimed his mouth with an urgency that had nothing to do with making a point and everything to do with an overwhelming, raging need to join herself to him.

  All thoughts of their audience evaporated from Kate’s mind like mist in the desert. Megan, who a moment ago had been the driving force in the drama, was reduced to a bit player. The other staff and the patrons ceased to exist at all. There was only Josh: his mouth, his body and this kiss.

  It wasn’t until a passing teenager suggested loudly that they should get a room that sanity returned. Josh raised his head and shook it, as though waking suddenly from a dream. Kate knew how he felt. His arms were still around her but the loss of his lips had left her disoriented, with barely any idea of where she was, much less what she was doing.

  Luckily, Josh seemed a bit more in control of himself. His arm shook a little, but he managed to turn her around and usher her up the stairs with sufficient presence of mind that she was out in the fresh air before the embarrassment hit.

  ‘Josh, I —’

  ‘Hold that thought.’

  He squeezed her hand and kept up his long stride towards the road, forcing her to hustle to keep up. So she held her peace, although holding the thought was harder, as she was far from clear on what the thought should be. What did one say to a man one hardly knew after putting one’s tongue down his throat in a public place?

  The silence deepened as they crossed the road, went down the broad shallow steps by the bridge and into the parkland behind the rowing sheds. It was surprisingly quiet there. The noise of the traffic was muffled by the trees, and the rowers, being a morning-loving species, were long gone. Kate knew there were probably possums and fruit bats in the trees, but they would be asleep, and the few people braving the cold to stroll or run mostly preferred the path closer to the river.