The Rules of Engagement

Brutal honesty was.

She was a girl who clearly had a defective self-defence mechanism if the way she’d melted against him, a complete stranger, was anything to go by. She’d do better with the nice guy, the Robs of the world, not a hard-headed realist like him, despite the sexual attraction they no doubt shared.

It wasn’t enough to warrant pursuit. Especially when he knew nothing about her apart from the fact that she could get his blood boiling with a mere glance. The Bainbridge name brought with it certain advantages. But those same advantages attracted elements best left alone.

His eyes sought out Lauren, who was laughing and dancing. She’d been so young at the time of their parents’ accident. So disorientated by the avalanche of chaos they’d left behind and therefore a perfect target to the sharks who’d smelled blood in the water.

It felt so long ago now; he twenty-two, and saddled with not only a shell-shocked sixteen-year-old sister he’d barely known but the rotting carcass of his family’s hundred-year-old business. The future he’d imagined for himself gone in a puff of smoke.

He coughed, the haze before his eyes for real. Someone had gone overboard with the club’s smoke machine. Through the smog his eyes disobediently sought out the shapely outline of an auburn-haired spitfire.

His self-preservation instincts had been well honed. They’d had to be. Never again would he be as unsuspecting, as stunned to the very core, as he had been by the selfish and systematic fraud his parents had perpetrated so slyly before their deaths.

Though if Caitlyn was a shark in damsel’s clothing then he’d change his name to Susan.

Unlike plenty before her, she hadn’t looked at him as if he was the answer to her girlhood dreams of diamonds and furs. More like she was a diagnosed sweetaholic and he was the biggest doughnut she’d ever seen.

He felt hot, he felt tight, he felt wide awake. As turn-ons went it appeared her particular brand of upfront, in-your-face, sexual frankness was it.

Could he? Should he?

He glanced at his watch and frowned, unsure if that one move had been a mistake, or his saving grace. It was nearing half-past two. He had work to do. And it had been a long time since his time had been his own.

‘Right, I’m off,’ Dax said, overly loud to his own ears though the vigour was likely lost in the thump of the booming beat.

He patted Rob hard on the back and searched out his sister. He found her bouncing from one foot to the other, the antenna on her head and fairy wings on her back bobbing right along with her.

‘Hey, brother! Don’t tell me you’re off.’

‘I’m afraid I must. I have a conference call at six.’

‘So stay ’til then. Get your dancing feet on.’ She did a solo tango to illustrate.

‘Alas I left my tap shoes in my other car.’

Tango done, she levelled him with a stare. ‘At least promise me you had fun?’

‘More than I can possibly say.’ Having a nubile redhead wrapped about him a definite highlight, though he knew better than to let Lauren in on that score.

‘Fine,’ she said, sighing dramatically. ‘Go. Get your beauty sleep. It wouldn’t behove you, or the foundation, if you appeared anything less than implacable.’

After blowing him a kiss, she shimmied and boogied away into the crowd. Whatever things he might wish to change about his past, bringing her up wasn’t one of them.

Dax resisted the urge to look towards the bar one last time and turned towards the exit.

Something slithered down his neck. It felt as if it had legs long enough to belong to a bird-eating spider, so he flapped his suit jacket madly ’til whatever it was either flew away or was summarily squished.

He took a step, only to feel his foot slipping out from under him. He caught himself just in time, took a moment to find his breath, then lifted his shoe to find something twinkling at him from the dark wooden floor.

Braving the possibility of disease by letting his fingers stray that close to the layer of sticky ooze, Dax bent to pick it up.

It was long. It was shiny. And it was no bird-eating

spider.

* * *

‘What are you doing?’ Franny asked. ‘The cab’s waiting.’

Caitlyn, who was at that moment on her hands and knees—with paper napkins keeping all four from actually touching the precarious Sand Bar floor—blew a strand of hair from her mouth. ‘I’ve lost an earring.’

Franny threw out her hands in supplication. ‘It could be anywhere by now!’

‘Which is why I need to get a move on looking for it.’ With a shiver Caitlyn flicked a stray piece of random cocktail fruit from her wrist. ‘They were Gran’s. The chandeliers with the little flowers at the clasp.’

‘Oh,’ Franny said, looking suitably understanding. She knew the history those earrings had. Still she glanced longingly towards the door where the guy she’d spent half the last hour dirty dancing with was waiting to take her to heaven and back.

They’d promised to drop Caitlyn home on the way as her lift had evaporated once Cutey Patootey was no longer around to escort her. He’d disappeared into the wee hours after Caitlyn had made it clear, by not letting him stick his tongue in her ear, that she wasn’t going home with him that evening.

Caitlyn wasn’t all that disappointed. Not about that. Her gran’s earrings on the other hand... They meant something deeply. Her heart clenched hard at the thought of losing them for ever.

‘You go,’ she said, giving Franny a shove on the ankle, which was the only part she could reach from the floor. ‘I could be a while.’

Franny bit her lip, looked from Caitlyn’s no doubt pathetic position and back to the brooding blond in the leather jacket lounging mysteriously by the door.

‘Go!’

‘All right!’ Franny blushed furiously, then leant over the bar, getting the attention of the bartender. ‘Ivan! See to it our mate Cait makes it safely to a cab all right? And if anyone hands in an earring, it’s hers.’

Ivan peered at Caitlyn, grinned and nodded.

Franny said, ‘I won’t be home tonight. Usual place tomorrow for a warm down?’

‘If I must.’

Franny grinned, and took off at a sprint.

Caitlyn spent the next ten minutes peering at the floor and getting nowhere. Every minute down there had felt like an hour and the further she got, the more concerned she became.

She and her dad had picked out those earrings for her gran when she was eleven years old. No matter how short a stay he’d had at home between tours, he’d always made time for just the two of them, but she remembered that trip to the shops with him with such clarity. The next time he’d gone on tour he’d never come back.

Something glinted at her under a barstool! She pulled to a crouch, tucked herself into ball, peered underneath and—

‘Cait?’

At Ivan’s unexpected call, Caitlyn looked up so fast she bumped her head on the underside of the stool. Biting her lip to keep from swearing like a sailor, she rubbed her head and frowned up at him, only to find him holding a long glinting earring made of a dozen pieces of cut glass with a flower at the clasp.

She scrambled most ungracefully to her feet and grabbed the earring and held it to her chest, spinning around so that her hair slapped her in the face, but she didn’t care. ‘Oh, Ivan! My dear darling Ivan! I love you more than you could ever know!’