Playing by the Rules (15 page)

Because he did. He knew that now.

Josh thumped his closed fist into his thigh in frustration. Hard. Then he did it again. It hurt, but the pain was a welcome distraction from the ache in his chest. This was unacceptable. He couldn’t stand by and let her go back to that French git. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. There had to be another way. He had to think!

So he thought. Pacing up and down, as Jo had, running his hands though his hair, he thought. And before long he felt the beginnings of a smile turning up the corners of his mouth.

So what if Alain had come back? That was a setback, but not the end of the story. He hadn’t expected to have to fight Alain for Kate. Until tonight, he hadn’t even known how much he wanted her. But he did now. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything. If he had to fight for her, fight he would. And he would fight to win. Not physically, of course. Kate had already shown she would take a fairly dim view of that. But there was more than one way to win a fight. All was fair in love and war – and this was both.

With a sudden resolve, Josh reached for his keys and headed for the lift. Tonight had been a skirmish. Tomorrow the battle would start in earnest – and he would be ready.

Kate looked at the cup of coffee that Jo had put in front of her and thought about the difference a week could make. A week ago at this time she had been perfectly well, but miserable because Alain was thousands of miles away. Now she was hungover and miserable because Alain was here and wanting to be with her. It was very confusing.

Kate sank her head onto her hand and examined her feelings yet again. Last week, she had been ambivalent about Alain. She had simultaneously wanted never to see him again and half-hoped that he’d walk through the door. Today, she couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry. Virtually overnight, she had become indifferent to a man with whom she had spent more than a year of her life. A week ago, she would have given anything to see him, if only to slap him; today she was dreading his arrival. It was way more than confusing. It was frightening.

She did her best to rationalise this sea change. She tried to convince herself that she had finally come to terms with ‘moving on’. She tried to believe that Jo’s advice and her cure for the ‘loser boyfriend blues’ had worked. She tried to persuade herself that dancing, drinking and sightseeing had cured her of the man she had thought was ‘the one’.

But none of it worked. She knew perfectly well that the difference between last week and this morning had nothing to do with clothes, or booze, or dancing, or attitude. Instead, it had everything to do with skin the colour of the latte rapidly going cold in front of her; with long wiry hands; with curly black hair; with a body to die for; and eyes so deep and dark she could get lost in them.

Kate rubbed her eyes and groaned. The problem was that knowing that Josh was the source of the change didn’t help. It made things even more bewildering.

Kate put her head up and winced as a stray shaft of sunlight slipped through the curtains and shone straight into her eyes. For about the fiftieth time since she had hit the bathroom the night before, she wondered what she had been thinking, to drink so much. She’d drunk more in the past week than she had in the past year. If this was what happened when she changed her usual routine, no wonder she stuck to it so religiously under normal circumstances.

The doorbell rang. It sounded, to Kate’s already hurting head, like an avalanche of anvils and she cursed Jo under her breath. It was all very well to go out for fruit – Kate agreed that it was probably what she needed right now – but could she not have used her bloody key to get back in? Did she have to ring the doorbell?

Kate flounced down the hallway. She would have liked to stomp, but her bare feet wouldn’t have been very effective stompers, and her fragile head wasn’t up to the thumping, anyway. So she flounced, and arrived at the door in a fine temper. She wrenched the door open, prepared to give Jo a piece of her throbbing mind, and saw Josh standing on the mat.

It wasn’t the first time Kate had stood stupidly in Jo’s doorway, staring at Josh and lost for words. This time, though, Josh didn’t wait to be invited in. He pushed gently past her and then leaned over the bag of groceries in his arms to kiss her, very delicately, on the cheek.

‘Are we feeling a tiny bit fierce this morning?’

‘More than a little,’ Kate replied, wondering whether she should object to the kiss. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t kissed her a lot more thoroughly than that. It was more that now, with Alain back in the picture, nothing to do with Josh was simple any more.

Although, to be fair, it never had been simple. Not really. And it was hardly surprising. Take one old crush, pass him off as a new fiancé, mix in a broken heart, a couple of mothers and a best friend with ideas and things were bound to get complicated.

Not that he seemed to think that anything was complicated. He had disappeared down the hallway to the kitchen and she could hear him singing and bashing about, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Maybe she was being oversensitive. Maybe that was what happened when you were so blinded by lust for someone that all they had to do was walk in the door with a bag of shopping and kiss you on the cheek to leave you clinging to the doorknob for support.

Kate closed the door deliberately and made herself walk slowly and sensibly down the hallway. She would get a hold of herself if it killed her. She had got herself – and him – into this mess and she would get them out of it. Somehow.

By the time she reached the kitchen Josh had covered the bench with fruit, cheese and bread and was squeezing oranges. Kate wondered inconsequentially how he had managed to find the squeezer and boards and things so quickly in an unfamiliar kitchen. She was still finding her way around and she had been there nearly two weeks. She shook her head in wonder. It must be a sibling thing.

‘If you are wondering where Jo is,’ Josh said out of the blue, ‘when last seen, she was at the coffee shop downstairs drinking espresso and arguing with the owner about the merits of the Bauhaus movement. I have a feeling,’ he said, raising one eyebrow, ‘that he got her going deliberately. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves.’

He smiled at her, and Kate risked a smile back. Surely the coffee shop was a nice, straightforward subject of conversation? Maybe she could get through this interaction without things between them getting any more involved. Then Josh walked over to her, handed her a glass of orange juice and kissed her again – on the lips this time.

It was the briefest brush of skin and he moved back to the bench straight away, but Kate was still left feeling decidedly wobbly. She sat down.

She really should stop him now. The kiss on the cheek was one thing, but the one on the lips was quite another. Until she’d spoken to Alain, she really needed to keep a respectable distance from Josh. There were rules about these things. At least, she was sure there must be. And she was pretty certain that kissing someone who was about to be proposed to by someone else was well outside those rules.

The problem was that it didn’t feel wrong. It felt lovely. It felt right. It felt . . . comfortable. But it had no business feeling comfortable! She couldn’t get comfortable about Josh making her breakfast and kissing her while he did it. That was couple behaviour, and they were
not
a couple. They weren’t going to be a couple. She was leaving at the end of the week and, as far as she knew, so was he. Maybe some people could play couples for a fortnight – maybe Josh could – but she couldn’t. That way madness, and a broken heart, lay.

‘Penny for your thoughts.’

Kate looked up with a start, and realised that she had been sitting in a daze, gazing sightlessly at her orange juice, while Josh worked away at the bench. She hadn’t even noticed that he had finished and had come around to stand in front of her until he spoke.

‘Or maybe they aren’t worth a penny, since they seem to be bothering you. You’re frowning again, and I like it so much better when you smile.’

He reached out and gently smoothed her forehead with his finger, then cupped her cheek in his hand and brushed her lips with his thumb. Without thinking, she turned her head and pressed her lips into his palm.

Oh heck.

What was she doing? She had just been telling herself that she couldn’t let him act as though they were having a relationship and then she had to go and do something intimate like that. She must be out of her mind. That was precisely the kind of thing she couldn’t let happen. It wasn’t fair, to either of them. She turned her head away and stood up, separating herself from his touch.

Josh pulled his hand away and mentally kicked himself. He had to go more carefully. He didn’t want to scare her away. But it was so hard to keep his hands to himself. He had been a little afraid when he woke up in the morning that it would all turn out to be a dream. But now, here with her, bloodshot eyes and all, he knew it wasn’t. He loved her. He hadn’t known it at the time, but he’d loved her from the minute she’d opened the door in that dreadful dressing-gown. And his heart had only got more and more entangled with every minute he’d spent with her.

He thought – hoped – that she had feelings for him too. But Jo was right. She did have history with Alain, and he knew she was the kind of person who wouldn’t put that aside lightly. Much as he would like to forget that Alain had ever existed, he couldn’t do that and he couldn’t try to make her do it either, or he would lose her.

On the other hand, he could do everything possible to make her realise what a louse Alain was and how unworthy he was of her. And there was no time like the present. If he didn’t make a start, he would waste the advantage of getting here first.

‘So where’s Alan?’ Josh did his best to sound nonchalant, and thought he succeeded reasonably well, although he couldn’t resist deliberately mispronouncing the French git’s name.

‘Alain,’ Kate corrected absently. ‘He’s not here.’

‘I can see that, Kate. I mean, why isn’t he here?’

‘He came . . .’ Kate began, giving Josh a nasty surprise. He had intended to arrive well ahead of him. Hadn’t Kate told him to stay away till midday? Couldn’t the man do as he was told? He chose to ignore the fact that he hadn’t done as he had been told either. ‘. . . but Jo told him to go away. I wasn’t even up at that point.’

Josh felt ridiculously relieved that he had managed to be first through the door.

‘So where is he now?’ Josh couldn’t stop himself looking around even as he told himself it was nonsensical. Did he think Alain was going to jump out from behind the furniture?

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Kate looked as though she didn’t care much, either, and Josh’s heart did a brief spring dance of joy in his chest. ‘I think Jo suggested he should go and walk in the botanical gardens or something. He’s never been to Melbourne before.’

Josh couldn’t believe it. ‘He’s gone
sightseeing?
’

Kate shrugged. ‘Well, he had to go somewhere.’

‘And it’s all right with you that he went, is it? That he did as he was told, and went away?’ Josh was aware that he was being inconsistent in criticising the man first for not doing as he was told and then for doing exactly that, but he couldn’t help it. The very thought of Alain made him angry.

‘Well, what was he supposed to do?’ Kate was frowning and a sensible man might have seen that she wasn’t enjoying the direction this conversation was taking. But Josh was too involved to be sensible. He grunted.

‘Oh, I don’t know – show some backbone, maybe? If I had come all this way to see you, there is no way I would go away and fill in time
sightseeing
 . . .’ the way Josh said the word made it sound like something unmentionable ‘. . . just because your friend told me to.’

‘Oh, so you wouldn’t care what I wanted?’ Kate’s frown had deepened and Josh’s ire, never far from the surface since the French git arrived, rose to match it.

‘Of course I would! If you weren’t ready to see me, I would wait. But I wouldn’t go and be a
tourist
while I was waiting, as though it were all the same to me whether you saw me or not! I’d be camped on your doorstep, with the biggest bunch of roses you’d ever seen, waiting for you to open it and let me in.’

Kate’s expression softened. But Josh was warming to his theme, and instead of quitting while he was ahead, he went on.

‘I wouldn’t have left it two weeks, either. If I had been idiot enough to have you and then lose you through my own stupidity, I would have been here before now.’

‘I’m sure there were reasons why he couldn’t come before now,’ she replied, rather stiffly.

‘Sure there was a reason. He didn’t care enough.’

‘Josh, that’s not fair. It’s not always easy to get international flights in a hurry. He literally might not have been able to get here before now. It’s a long trip.’

‘Rubbish! He could have made it sooner, if he’d wanted to. He didn’t want to, at least, not badly enough. Kate, if it had been me, I would have taken Air Kazakhstan if I’d had to. I would have taken a boat. I would have swum, with the bloody roses between my teeth, to get to you and apologise. But not him! No, he just swans in, in his own sweet time, doesn’t even have the guts to persist when he gets turned away at the door and you are still going to let him talk to you?’

Josh knew he should stop. This wasn’t going the way he had planned. He had planned to come, make juice, ply her with cheese and fruit, show her what a great guy he was, and be here when Alain arrived to show him that there was competition. He hadn’t planned to get angry, or to make her angry at him. But the fear of losing her had him in a terrier-like grip and he couldn’t be calm. If he didn’t convince her now that Alain was wrong for her, he might never get another chance. He stepped closer to her and took her hands in his.

‘Kate, he treated you like dirt. He dumped you for one of your friends. He let you come here, thinking that he didn’t care, and left you alone for two weeks before he bothered to try to come after you. Why would you even want to see him, much less listen to what he has to say?’

Kate didn’t know how to reply. The truth was that she didn’t really want to listen to Alain. Not because she was angry, although she agreed that she had reason to be. Josh hadn’t said anything about Alain that she hadn’t thought hundreds of times already. No. The main reason she didn’t want to see him was that she was going to have to break his heart, and, much as he might deserve it, she couldn’t bring herself to relish the task.

But she couldn’t tell Josh that. If she told him she was going to get rid of Alain, he would want to know why. What could she say? I don’t want to be with him because all I can think about is you? How was that going to make things less complicated?

Kate pulled away from Josh and walked over to the window, wrapping her arms around her middle to try to stave off the pain and confusion as she tried to reason with herself.

There was a word for the way she felt about Josh. Lust. Lust, pure and simple. He was six foot three. She had always liked tall men. He was charming. She was a sucker for charm. He had a kiss that could reduce her to jelly. Well, naturally, she was going to like that. And he thought she was beautiful, which was flattering. These were all good reasons to be attracted to him. All good reasons to have a fling with him. They didn’t mean she was in love with him.