Playing by the Rules (12 page)

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.

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, it 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 barely-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.

So when they came upon a solitary park bench and Josh sat, pulling her down next to him, they were quite alone.

She didn’t know where to look. She was expecting him to demand an explanation of her outrageous behaviour. He had every right to. The problem was that she didn’t have one. She’d acted on instincts she hadn’t even known she had and was completely at a loss to explain. She’d acted like an animal marking her territory. It was uncivilised and presumptuous and . . . completely out of character. She looked at her fingers, twisted together in her lap and said the only thing she felt able to.

‘I’m sorry.’

His response wasn’t verbal, not at first. Instead, he inserted one of his hands into the nest made by her tangled fingers and with his thumb, stroked her hands into stillness. With his other hand, he cradled her bent head and gently raised it so that she was looking into his eyes.

‘I’m not,’ he said, finally.

Then he kissed her.

Kate lost track of time.

She wasn’t sure how long they sat there, exploring each other’s mouths, with his hands lighting fires under her skin wherever they touched.

All she knew was that she hadn’t been so thoroughly kissed since probably . . . ever. By the time they eventually came up for air, her hair was loose, her lips were swollen, her bottom had moulded painfully to the wooden slats of the seat and things were different.

It was in the way he tucked her hair behind her ears and the way she wiped the lipstick off his cheek. And in the goofy, slightly dazed way they looked at each other while they were doing it. Or was it just her who was goofy?

‘You taste amazing, do you know that?’

Kate snorted and the spell was broken. He had to be winding her up. She swallowed and tried to give as good as she got.

‘Given what I just ate for lunch, I’m fairly certain that I taste of garlic and tomatoes and coffee.’

‘Lucky they’re three of my favourite things, then.’

‘Oh, stop it.’

‘Only if you let me ask you something.’

Kate was trying to put her hair in some sort of order, but she let her hands drop.

‘Back at the restaurant – why did you do that?’

Kate felt blood rushing to her face. Given what she’d just been doing, it was rather silly to be blushing now, but it seemed that while she might be capable of behaving shamelessly, she couldn’t think about it without embarrassment.

‘What? Climb down your throat like a madwoman?’

‘Yep. That,’ he said with a smile.

She pushed down on the knee that had started jiggling and strove for matter-of-fact.

‘I had a point to make.’

‘Point taken! Gladly.’

‘Not to you, you wretch!’ So much for matter-of-fact. ‘To that woman. The one who just pretended I wasn’t there. I know I shouldn’t have done it —’

‘How many times do I need to tell you I’m not objecting?’

‘That’s no excuse! I shouldn’t have used you like that. I’m just tired of people treating me like I’m invisible.’

‘I can’t believe they do that,’ he said, smiling at her.

‘Really? Ask your sister. She’ll tell you. When I was at school, people couldn’t even remember my name.’

‘That’s not what I saw at the reunion.’

Kate hesitated. There
had
been more people than she expected who remembered her. But that didn’t mean the problem wasn’t real. She shook her head.

‘Okay, it’s not everyone. But what about Crystal? She tried to crack on to you right under my nose. And that woman back there did exactly the same thing!’

‘I think she —’ Josh tried to break in, but Kate was on a roll. It was an old grievance and now that she’d started there was no putting this genie back in its bottle. She’d already made a fool of herself for this point, she might as well explain it properly. She peeled herself painfully off the bench and stood, so she had more space to expound.

‘Oh don’t deny it! Look, I know I’m not in their league. I’m not pretty or glamorous. Even when I was little I wasn’t pretty. My mother’s friends used to say I was “such a serious little thing”.’ She looked back at him, the remembered indignity still fresh in her heart. ‘As if “serious” was a bad thing!’

‘Kate —’

‘Oh I know, they probably thought they were being nice, but I heard it in their voices. I heard what they didn’t say: “Shame she’s not pretty.”’

Josh stood up as Kate moved on to more recent wrongs.

‘As for glamorous, I’ve tried that and I just look like a little kid playing dress-ups. The only time I can come close to pulling it off is when your sister helps me. I don’t seem to have whatever it takes on my own. And even if I was good at it, the maintenance would kill me. I don’t know how they do it. But that’s no—’

‘Kate!’

Josh finally succeeded in getting her attention by seizing her upper arms and kissing her until she stopped trying to talk. It didn’t take long. There was something about his kisses, even short, hard ones like this, that made it very hard to think coherently.

‘Can I get a word in, Kate?’

Kate nodded. Now that he’d interrupted her, she was aware that she had been ranting. There seemed no end to her out-of-character behaviour lately.

Josh shook his head. ‘Not that I know where to start.’ He released her arm and tapped her forehead gently. ‘Is it always this confusing in here?’

Kate nodded ruefully. ‘Often. I think it’s a girl thing.’

Josh sighed and led her back to the bench. ‘In that case, I guess I’ll just take this one thing at a time. Will you sit?’

Kate sat and Josh sat next to her and she tried to concentrate on what he was saying, rather than the feel of his knee resting against hers.

‘Okay, first things first. Megan was not trying to crack on to me, or hook up with me, or do anything sexual with me.’ He held up a hand to forestall Kate’s objection. ‘Yes, we did go out a couple of times, but it never came to anything and it really
was
a long time ago – she was only joking about it not being that long.’

Kate wasn’t convinced.

‘So what did she want?’

‘She was asking for a favour. She’s applied for a job with the hotel chain I work for and she wanted me to give her a reference.’

‘And you just happened to be here at the right time? That’s convenient!’

Josh grinned at her. ‘You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.’ Kate would have liked to deny it, but it was so palpably, if preposterously, true that she didn’t know how. He went on. ‘As a matter of fact, Miss Suspicious, she emailed me last week and asked if I could do it. I was happy to – because she is very good at her job, not for any other reason, before you ask – but since I was likely to be here soon, I said I’d go one better and take her into the hotel and introduce her to some people. Yes, it was a coincidence that she happened to be in the restaurant when we were, but there wasn’t anything sinister in it. She just wanted to give me her new mobile number.’

Which meant that Kate had just made a complete arse of herself. Was there no end to her capacity to do so around him?

‘Oh. So she probably thinks I’m really rude, then.’

Josh chuckled. ‘Possibly. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Unless she’s changed a lot, she’s not the kind of person to worry about that sort of thing. Put it out of your mind. Put
her
out of your mind, because now, I want to talk about you.’

About how she was a rude, irrationally jealous, crazy person perhaps? Kate braced herself for the worst.

‘Do you really not know how beautiful you are?’

What? She jerked her head up so fast that her partially restrained hair fell in an unruly tumble across her face. He reached out and gently smoothed it back.

‘I’ll take that as a no. You know, for a very smart woman, you are really bad at taking a hint. Didn’t you listen to anything I said the other night? Or do we have to have the conversation again about me meaning what I said?’

She looked away, unable to meet his eyes. ‘I heard you.’ Through a haze of unbelief and horror, but she had heard him. ‘I thought that was part of the bit you exaggerated.’

Josh shook his head.

‘Did your loser of a boyfriend never tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘That you’re beautiful!’

Kate shook her head, feeling as though she were in a dream. Surely this conversation wasn’t real?

‘Alain didn’t say things like that. Or not very often, anyway. He’s not – he wasn’t – demonstrative.’

Josh made a face.

‘So he’s blind as well as stupid, then?’

‘Josh!’

‘What? It’s the truth. He had you and he let you go. That makes him stupid. He didn’t tell you how beautiful you are. That makes him blind and stupid.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.’

‘But I’m not . . .’

‘Not what, Kate? Not pretty? No, you’re not. I didn’t know you when you were a little girl, so I can’t tell whether you were then, but you definitely aren’t now. I didn’t say you were pretty.’

Kate’s head started to spin, trying to make sense of this.

‘What? But I thought you said . . .’

‘You’re not pretty. Pretty is a word for sweet little girls. Either baby ones or cute teenagers with their hair in pigtails. You’ve never been cute, Kate. Even when you were a teenager.

‘And before you ask, no, you’re not glamorous either. Glamour is something put on. You are so much more than that.’

He reached out and ran his fingers, feather-light, down her face from hairline to chin, as if learning the contours. ‘Pretty and glamorous, they’re nice, but they’re like . . .’ He waved his hand, as if grasping for an analogy. ‘Fireworks. That’s what they’re like. They’re fireworks. They’re sparkly and bright and might impress you a bit, but they don’t last – and you wouldn’t want them to. They’d get boring if you had them around all the time.’

Kate felt as if parts of her were beginning to melt into the uncomfortable park bench.

‘Compared to them, you’re like . . . you’re like the sun. With you in the room, you can’t even see them.’

Kate took a shaky breath and let it out again on a wobbly kind of laugh.

‘I don’t think other people see me like that.’

Josh repeated the tracing of her face with his fingers and Kate thought that if she were the sun, she might be about to have a solar flare.

‘Sure they do. Why do you think Crystal doesn’t like you?’

‘I don’t know! Because I beat her for the literature prize? Because our French teacher liked me better? Because she’s crazy?’

‘Because she’s envious of you. Maybe partly because you’re smart. But I think it’s mostly because she works so hard on her looks and you eclipse her without even trying.’

Kate tried to breathe normally, but she couldn’t. She was far from convinced that Crystal thought she was beautiful, but that was irrelevant. Josh did. Which meant that the goofiness wasn’t just her. She took another breath, but it was even shakier than the last. He had shifted closer and she was fairly certain that, if she didn’t stop him, he was going to kiss her again.

‘Josh.’

‘Hmm?’ he replied, more or less into her neck.

‘I’m not sure I can do this.’

He drew back far enough to look her in the eye.

‘Do what?’

She shifted back far enough to be out of range of his irresistible scent and flapped her hand back and forth in the space now between them.

‘This! This whatever-it-is between us! I don’t even know what it is. How can I know how to handle it if I don’t even have a name for it?’

Josh captured her flailing hand and pinned it down between both of his.

‘Kate Adams, I don’t think I have ever met anyone who thinks as much as you do. But much as I admire your giant brain, you’re overthinking “this”. Why does it have to “be” anything? Why does it need a name?’

‘Because I . . . I . . .’

He squeezed her hand and she fell silent. Easy enough to do, when she had no idea what to say.

‘Okay, how about this,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we just go on the way we planned to? I know you love a plan and this one is still good. Nothing’s really changed. We’ll just continue playing tourist and getting to know each other and we’ll go to your mother’s dinner at the end of the week. And we’ll see what happens. How does that sound?’

Like crazy on a cracker. Like solar flares on Mercury. Out of control and terrifying.

And irresistible.