All Bets Are On (6 page)

She hauled herself up onto her elbows indignantly.

‘I’m not some teenager with an ASBO,’ she said, through chattering teeth. ‘It was an accident!’

Harry got to his feet and put a restraining hand on her shivering shoulder.

‘You can’t blame him. They probably get loads of drunken yobs messing about on the lake and mentioning your damned organiser isn’t going to miraculously smooth things over. Let me handle it.’

He drew the man aside and disappeared with him inside the café.

Five minutes later and she was wrapped in a thermal foil blanket and slumped in a chair on the suntrap of a terrace. She discarded her squelchy ballet flats and tucked her cold feet underneath her, relishing the sun on her face and the sensation of feeling returning to her freezing extremities. If only the humiliation flushing through her could disappear that easily. People seated nearby were looking at her with interest.

Glancing down at herself, she realised with shock that her grey shirt was translucent when wet. Her pink lacy bra was clearly visible through it below the white goosebumpy skin of her décolletage. She snatched the foil blanket around her and held it tightly closed at the neck just as Harry, a foil blanket around his shoulders, crossed the terrace towards her with a steaming takeaway coffee in each hand.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, the moment he sat down. He put the coffee down in front of her. She waited for him to kick off, knowing she had no defence whatsoever, and trying to squash the rising panic at losing her bag, which was making a comeback now that the more immediate horror of public embarrassment and freezing to death was in decline. The bag was gone, and everything in it. There was no point in stressing about it now.

‘If they manage to turn up any of our belongings they’ll let me know,’ he said.

‘
Our
belongings?’ She stared at him for a moment and suddenly realised what he meant with a rush of anguish. ‘Your sunglasses! Oh, God, I’m so sorry. And what about your phone?’

He shook his head. ‘Didn’t have it with me. Just my wallet.’ He shrugged good-naturedly. ‘Money dries. There must have been something pretty damn mind-blowing in that bag to make you want to jump in after it,’ he said. ‘Life savings?’

She shook her head.

‘My organiser,’ she said.

He stared at her, eyebrows raised, and she sat back in her chair and put her head in her hands.

How could she tell him that keeping tabs on every aspect of her life was vital? Predictability was comforting. She’d had enough nasty surprises in the past to last her a lifetime, thanks very much. She peeked through her fingers and saw his questioning expression. ‘You know, diary, appointments, that kind of thing.’

‘You upended the boat because you couldn’t be parted from your diary.’

Put like that it made her sound like a total control freak.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand. It probably wouldn’t matter to you if you forgot a date or turned up late to a meeting.’

He jerked a thumb back towards the water.

‘The bottom of the lake is the best place for that organiser. Think how liberating it is. Suddenly you’re living in the moment. You can let life just happen to you instead of being controlled by all those appointments, all those obligations. Take it as it comes.’

Alice felt herself pale at the thought.

‘Have you any idea how much my work success relies on me being organised?’ she said. ‘On my planning skills?’

He was watching her, the blue eyes shrewd.

‘Don’t you think that level of predictability is stifling?’

She frowned at him.

‘No,’ she said boldly. ‘I don’t.’

He looked at her questioningly, the ghost of a smile at the corners of his mouth, and she realised exactly how moronic that sounded.

A smile bubbled up before she could stop it and she shook her head in wonder at her own mad behaviour.

‘OK, you might have had a point back there,’ she said. ‘Maybe I am a little strung out.’

He smiled back at her and her heart skipped a little at his understanding.

‘I thought you’d be angry,’ she said. ‘I mean, look at you, what a nightmare. And your glasses. I’ll pay for them, of course.’

She dreaded to think how much that would be; they’d obviously been designer. It was turning out to be an expensive day out.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘What’s done is done. No point stressing about it now. I’ll claim the sunglasses on insurance.’

He was so laid-back he was almost horizontal. She couldn’t quite believe it. She kept waiting for his delayed anger to kick in. It didn’t.

‘For someone so irresponsible you’re surprisingly good at taking responsibility,’ she said.

He smiled a half smile at her. His hair was damply tousled, his blue eyes crinkling gently at the corners. Even soaked in stinky lake water he was gorgeous and her stomach gave a slow flip. Unfortunately she didn’t need a mirror to know she must look a dripping frizzy-haired wreck. How unfair.

She felt oddly touched by his behaviour. Sewer-rat Simon hadn’t thought twice about her feelings when he’d humiliated her in front of their friends. He’d laughed right along with them.

Today Harry had taken the embarrassment at full force right alongside her. He hadn’t walked off and abandoned her to the anger of the park staff. He hadn’t lost his temper with her, not that she would have blamed him. He’d done everything he could to dig them out of the situation.
Them
, not her. He’d treated them as a team, and afterwards had tried to make her feel she could dust herself down and chalk it up to experience.

Maybe he wasn’t quite like her ex after all. She felt herself thaw towards him a tiny bit.

‘Let’s just say I’ve had some experience of smoothing over unruly teenage behaviour and it’s stood me in good stead for this kind of situation,’ he said.

‘You mean you were an unruly teenager? Why am I not surprised?’

He’d probably led a life of irresponsibility since birth. No wonder nothing fazed him.

An odd little smile that she took to be nostalgic touched his lips.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

He stood up and held his hand out for her empty coffee cup. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was closing the subject. Of course he was. Heaven forbid that she actually find out something personal about him.

Rule #4 A player will not want to share in-depth personal details with you. If he tries to keep the conversation superficial and seems reluctant to talk about himself, chances are what he wants from you is superficial too.

‘I was going to suggest lunch next,’ he said. ‘But under the circumstances maybe we’d better make our way back to the car. It’s pretty hot in the sun now, should dry us off a bit more on the way.’

‘Calling time on it before the first date’s even over?’ she said. ‘Not that I could really blame you.’

She glanced down at herself and offered him a wry smile.

‘I mean, look at me! Oven-ready turkey is
so
not a good look.’

In the soft sunlight her eyes were deep tawny, her damp hair softly tousled from the breeze across the lake. He caught a tantalising glimpse of pink lace underwear as she stood up before she managed to get the foil blanket clamped around her again and heat spiked in his abdomen. The loveliness of her was extremely necessary to counteract the infuriating insane high maintenance of her.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That look has merit—I was actually thinking I’d like to get you out of those wet clothes. But then that would be a bit of a leap ahead in the dating process.’

She laughed and blushed at the same time and his stomach flipped. He hadn’t counted on her having a sense of humour. It was an unexpected discovery after the ice-cool exterior she kept in place at work.

‘Do you really think I’d bail?’ he said.

‘You can’t blame me for thinking you’d end it after one date,’ she said, standing up. ‘Especially after the way it’s turned out. You have been known to do that, you know.’

‘Only when it stops being fun.’

‘And it’s still fun? Despite my tipping us both in the lake?’

He grinned. The boating-lake date had a good track record for success, which was why he’d chosen it. If it went well he simply followed it up with dinner and then back to his place. Easy. No thought required.

For some bonkers reason, after what had happened today the repetitiveness of that process now felt dull. He had no idea what might happen next with her, and in spite of the soaking-wet clothes and the public stares, he found himself enjoying the expectation of that.

‘It’s still fun,’ he said.

‘What I don’t understand is the appeal,’ she said, looping her arm through his as they walked back through the park. His shoes squelched hideously as he steered her away from the shade and tried to walk her in the sunshine as much as possible.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you ever had a longer-than-five-minutes relationship? Don’t you find all the chopping and changing exhausting?’

‘No, I find it liberating.’

He glanced sideways at her for a moment, deciding whether to elaborate.

‘In answer to your question, yes, I have had one or two longer relationships. Not much longer though, maybe a couple of months. Believe it or not I didn’t really date much before I moved to London.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘Bath.’

‘Girls there not good enough?’ She tilted her head towards him and screwed her eyes up against the sun.

‘No. I just had more on my plate back then. Since I moved here I only have to look out for myself. Why would I want to complicate things all over again?’

Right on cue his mind played the age-old flash of memory. His parents in the kitchen, at each other’s throats as usual, and Susie creeping into his room to hide from the row, relying on him to make it go away, to look out for her. It hadn’t been easy.

‘Who else did you have to look out for?’

He shrugged the question off quickly. He certainly didn’t need to be discussing the depths of his family life with her.

‘Family ties,’ he said vaguely. ‘You know.’

‘Not really. I don’t have many of those.’ She looked straight ahead. ‘My family are all...’

He waited.

‘Very independent.’ She shrugged. ‘Like I said before, I don’t see much of them.’

He could tell by the throwaway comment followed by the bright smile that there was a lot more to it than that.

* * *

‘So what’s your success rate, then?’ she asked him as he drove back to her house. ‘With the boating-lake date.’

He grinned, not taking his eyes off the road.

‘A hundred per cent.’

‘Does that include me?’

‘You’re a work in progress. You don’t count yet. But I’m kind of working off-plan now. No one’s made swimming part of the outing before.’

She laughed.

‘At least I can’t be accused of being boring.’

‘No,’ he said, glancing across at her and smiling his gorgeous smile. ‘You certainly couldn’t be accused of being that.’

Something in the depth of his voice caused a dizzying flip of anticipation in her stomach, followed up by crazy racing of her heart, and Tilly’s comment from the other night flashed suddenly into her mind.

Just when would a guy like him go in for the first kiss?

Rule #5 First Kiss. A player will want to move things towards the physical as quickly as possible. Remember his main aim is not to get to know you but to get you into bed.

* * *

Harry was acutely aware of her next to him, the car feeling cosier this time because he’d closed the roof and put the heating on. Too damn cold having the wind pelt at you when you were wearing damp clothes. He could see by the way she was tautly upright, sitting forwards in her seat and staring through the windscreen that she was on edge. Just the way he wanted it. With his track record she’d be expecting him to leap on her like some predator, if not when he stopped the car then outside her front door. And let’s face it, the usual Harry Stephens practice wouldn’t be to make it to the door before he tested the water with a first kiss. Get it in right away and by the time you made it up the garden path you’d teased them into such a frenzy that you had a damn good chance of talking them into bed.

Which was the exact reason he wouldn’t be doing any of those things.

The usual Harry Stephens practice wouldn’t work on her. If he was going to get Alice into his bed, Alice with her player of an ex-boyfriend lurking in her past, he needed to prove there was more to him than a quick lay. He’d been doing pretty well on that front with his out-of-the-ordinary yet still intimate, carefully thoughtful choice of date, until the damn boat attendant had given him away. He needed to gain some ground back now, keep her guessing. And so acting to type wasn’t an option. Plan of action: keep her hanging, then go all out to sweep her off her feet with the second date. By then, she’d be falling at his feet.

He wasn’t about to let the behaviour of some guy in the depths of her past screw things up for him now.

Some guy like him.

No, he refused to accept that. His conscience was clear. She knew perfectly well this wasn’t going to lead to hearts and butterflies, with the pair of them skipping off into the sunset. They both knew the only question between them was how far down the line it would go before one of them bailed; he just needed to make sure they made it to bed before that happened. The thought of reaching that point was slowly filling him with more and more anticipation as he got to know her, with her tightly wound attitude and the occasional glimpse of what fun she might be if she let her guard down. Unwinding her would be an experience to relish. And since she’d be expecting him to push things along as quickly as he could, now was his chance to buck her expectations and grab the upper hand.

* * *

Alice sat, hands bunched in her lap, stomach a squirming knot. She fixed her eyes on the road as he drove back to her house. On edge because she knew perfectly well what was coming next. She knew because she knew him. Her thoughts touched briefly on Arabella, one of many one-night stands. She knew his modus operandi. Simon had been just the same. No qualms about moving things forwards quickly.