Innocent 'til Proven Otherwise

Ali rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t have time in my life for cavemen, Kitty Kat.’

‘Tonight you do, babe. Tonight you do.’

Ali shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t know Kat … I’ve never been very good at this.’

Kat grinned. ‘Well, lucky for you, I am. Now trust me on this, let’s just stick with your current occupation, okay? Remember, the coffee shop?’

Ali hesitated pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. How could she forget?

‘You promised you’d try,’ Kat implored.

‘Okay, fine.’

Max Sherrington reluctantly followed his best friend, Pete, into the bar. God knew he’d rather not be drowning his sorrows in a public place. He had a nice bottle of aged Scotch at home a client had given him that he’d been saving specifically for this day.

The day of the yellow legal envelope.

There was nothing like twenty-year-old whisky to soothe the tension in a man’s shoulders and dull the ache in his chest.

But Pete had insisted. And Max knew that when Pete insisted he rarely took no for an answer. He also knew his friend only had his best interests at heart. Pete had been worried about Max and his antisocial behaviour for the last eighteen months.

Max figured, on this day especially, he could give Pete a little of his time.

He had no doubt his friend, a chick magnet if ever there was one, would pick up within the hour and then he would be free to go home to an empty house and a full bottle.

‘Right, I’ll get the first round,’ Pete said, his eyes swivelling the length and breadth of the bar, his gaze coming to rest on a blonde in a red dress whose legs went all the way up to her armpits.

And look at that—she had a friend.

He smiled and tapped Max on the chest. ‘I think I see the answer to all your problems.’

Max followed Pete’s gaze and almost groaned out loud. ‘Why on earth would I want a Tori clone? I thought I was here to exorcise my wife.’

‘Ex-wife, bud. Ex,’ Pete pointed out.

Ex. That was right. The papers today made it official. He really was going to have to start thinking of her in the past tense.

‘Ex,’ he said grimly.

Pete slapped him on the back. ‘Relax, the blonde’s mine. The cute friend is yours.’

Max looked at the other woman. She had a nice face, large eyes, a little snub nose and a bow mouth. Compared to the artfully made-up blonde, she was quite understated. No make-up save some glossy stuff on her lips, no jewellery, no fuss.

But then there was the hair. A riot of short corkscrew curls, the kind that you couldn’t get at the hairdresser, sprung from her head. They spiralled like spun sugar and reminded him of butterscotch. An errant one flopped down to brush her eyelashes, which she absently blew away as she swished a straw in her glass.

It was difficult not to notice she also had a great rack.

And looked about as impressed to be here as he did.

‘Cute? What the hell am I going to do with cute?’ he demanded as an image of peeling her bra aside slid unbidden into his brain. It annoyed him further. ‘I don’t need cute,’ he grouched.

‘If you ask me—’ Pete grinned ‘—cute is exactly what you need.’

‘I’m doing fine,’ he insisted.

Pete gave his friend an exasperated look. ‘No. You’re not. You’ve been like a bear with a sore head for the last year and a half. You work twelve- and fifteen-hour days, you’ve been through five PAs and the only thing you have to break your killer work schedule is a punishing training regime for your next bloody marathon. Oh, and you haven’t had sex since Tori left.’

Max grimaced. ‘I should never have told you that.’

Pete looked into his best friend’s shut-off gaze. He shook his head. ‘You really need to get laid.’

Max felt his neck muscles tighten further. If he never got involved with another woman, it would be too soon. Celibacy had been working just fine for him.

He shot his friend a grim look. ‘You do know that going without doesn’t actually kill you, right?’

Pete looked at the shell of a man before him. He’d never met a zombie but Max was doing a fairly good impression. ‘I would dispute that.’

Pete glanced back at the blonde, pleased to see she’d spotted him. He smiled at her and she flashed him a dazzler of her own. He turned back to Max. ‘Go and find us somewhere to sit, and remember—when I bring these women over do not tell them you’re a lawyer. People don’t like lawyers.’

Max gave his friend a belligerent stare. That was easy to say when you had them on tap. ‘They do if they ever get in trouble with the law.’

Pete sighed. ‘Not so much then either, buddy.’

Half an hour had passed since Ali had sent Mr Nice packing and things hadn’t got any better. No matter how hard she tried to be cool about picking up men in a bar or going home with a stranger—it just wasn’t her.

‘Oh my God, hottie approaching ten o’clock,’ Kat murmured. ‘He has a friend too.’

Ali glanced in the indicated direction. Yep. He was a hottie. If you were into overt good looks. Having learned the hard way that there was often not a lot of substance behind a pretty face, she wasn’t as thrilled as Kat.

She couldn’t see his friend. Not that it mattered. She downed the dregs of her third daiquiri. ‘Sorry, Kitty Kat, but I’m done. This just isn’t working for me.’

‘No, wait,’ Kat said, grabbing Ali’s hand as it reached for her bag. ‘Okay, fine, don’t have moving-on sex, go home to the apartment and wallow if you want. Just give me another half an hour.’

Kat glanced up at the rapidly approaching man and Ali followed suit. ‘I want that guy,’ she said. ‘So help a girl out. Just stay for a while, occupy his friend for a bit. I don’t want him to feel like a third wheel. This guy could be the one. I don’t want to put his friends offside from the get-go.’

Ali rolled her eyes. For as long as she’d known Katarina she’d been searching for the one. God knew she’d been through enough men in this crazy pursuit. She looked at the pleading in her friend’s ridiculously blue eyes. She guessed it wouldn’t kill her to stay a little longer …

Especially if Kat’s focus was on seducing herself a man rather than finding one for Ali to seduce. She knew how this game went—she’d certainly played it often enough. She knew her role and she knew when to get lost.

‘Okay. Thirty minutes.’

Kat winked. ‘That’s all I need.’

Pete ushered Ali and Kat over to the low table Max had scored. Four padded seats that looked remarkably like footstools were placed evenly around the table.

‘This is Kat and Ali,’ Pete announced to Max, holding Kat’s hand as she lowered herself onto a stool.

Ali rolled her eyes as she sat herself down unaided.