The Rules of Engagement. Элли Блейк

I’d been smart enough to Google Mr Lame from last night I’d have avoided ever knowing what ferret poo smells like. Trust me. I’m doing you a favour.’

      Caitlyn set her teeth and stared blindly at the small golden cat with its bobbing head on the cashier’s counter. She knew trying to stop Franny was a waste of time. And while she knew it was unlikely she’d ever see the guy again, no small part of her did wonder how a guy who looked like that, and kissed like that, and who’d learnt how to do the things he’d done to her the night before, had managed to get so far in life without being hogtied and hitched at gunpoint.

      When Franny had been quiet for all too long Caitlyn glanced at her to find her eyes growing larger and larger until they looked as if they were about to pop out of her head.

      ‘I knew it!’ Franny blurted.

      ‘What?’ Caitlyn asked despite herself. ‘He’s married. Of course he’s married. Oh, God. How could I have been so—?’

      ‘He’s not married.’

      Caitlyn’s rant came to a halt. The relief flowing through her was totally misguided. Especially since it wasn’t relief that he hadn’t cheated on his non-existent wife. It was relief that he was actually on the market.

      She wasn’t. Sure it had been six months since she’d broken up with George. Not just broken up, she reminded herself, called off her engagement. But she was done with all that: relationships, and dating, and blah blah blah.

      Yet she found herself leaning towards Franny and saying, ‘Then what?’

      ‘Your Dax Something Starting With B was Dax Bainbridge, as in CEO of the Bainbridge Foundation. Heard of them?’

      Caitlyn blinked. Several times. ‘Them yes. A representative of the Bainbridge Foundation is a no-brainer on any launch list, though they never accept. They’re less A-list party-hard types, more old money, right?’

      ‘You should know your guest lists better.’

      Caitlyn crossed her arms. ‘I know everyone who buys sports cars, and everyone who wishes they could buy sports cars. Everyone else is a blur.’

      Franny eyeballed her. ‘You’re really sitting there and saying this guy is a blur?’ Franny turned her phone around and shoved it at her. And Caitlyn found herself staring at a picture of the man who’d driven her wild in bed the night before.

      Dark hair, straight eyebrows, hooded hazel eyes, a haughty nose straight out of a Jane Austen novel, a jaw line that would have sent Michelangelo shopping for marble. God, he really was as gorgeous as she remembered him.

      Her hormones went on such a sudden spree it caused her heart to leap into her throat and stay there. If she’d been wearing a tie she would have loosened it.

      Franny shoved her phone into her massive bag, apologising to her pedicurist with a smile for having dared move. ‘His place?’ she asked.

      ‘Ours.’

      ‘Of course. Home-ground advantage.’

      Franny probably didn’t know how right she was. The thought of having to creep out of bed and get dressed in the same clothes as the night before would have put her in far too fragile a position, and the night before had been about getting control back over her life. Her place had been the right place for sorbet sex. She couldn’t get any funny ideas about possible permanence if it was up to her to kick the guy out.

      ‘So is he the next almost Mrs Caitlyn March?’

      Caitlyn shook her head so hard it hurt. ‘It was—’

      Exhilarating, euphoric, erotic, she thought.

      What she said was, ‘It was a one-time deal.’

      ‘Good,’ Franny said. ‘For the best if it stays that way.’

      Caitlyn nodded absent-mindedly as her leather massage chair began its sequence of thumping rolls down her back.

      They’d had that same discussion a dozen or more times in the weeks since poor George’s ignominious departure from their lives. Franny had even come up with a mantra she was sure Caitlyn ought to have stamped on her forehead, at least for the next little while: Men can be for fun, not only for for ever.

      Which was partly why she didn’t tell Franny that at the last second she’d given Dax her number, scribbling it down on the back of a grocery receipt and shoving it into his jacket pocket as they’d made out like teenagers in her apartment doorway at some ungodly hour of the morning.

      ‘Stop,’ Franny said.

      The pedicurist looked up with a frown. Franny rolled her eyes at her before pointing a thumb at Caitlyn. The pedicurist gave her a knowing nod before heading back to her manic buffing.

      ‘Stop thinking about him. It’s dangerous.’

      ‘Are you kidding me? I can’t move without being reminded of my midnight acrobatics,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I can still smell his cologne on my hair. Trust me, it’s not that easy to just turn it off.’

      Franny spun on her big massage chair and looked Caitlyn in the eye, grabbing her by both hands. This time the pedicurist didn’t complain. She looked up at Caitlyn too, eyes questioning, buffer poised over Franny’s toes.

      ‘Cait, my sweet,’ Franny said, ‘listen to me this once. You don’t smoke. The hardest drug I’ve ever seen you take is really strong caffeine. You don’t pick your nose in public. But your one true vice is romance. You get so caught up in it I could dance naked in front of you right now and you wouldn’t see it for the stars in your eyes. You, my friend, are addicted to love. It’s your one and only failing. But as failings go it has potential to be a doozie. It’s a failing that can and has dragged chaos and catastrophe in its wake.’

      Caitlyn squeezed Franny’s hand. ‘I can handle this. He’s not... It was nothing like the others. I promise.’

      ‘If you say so.’ With that Franny slid on her dark sunglasses and proceeded to fall asleep in her chair.

      The pedicurist shrugged, clearly disappointed, and got back to work.

      While Caitlyn picked up her magazine, and pretended to read it while the words chaos and catastrophe swam in front of her eyes. That and the look on George’s face when she’d tried to give back the ring. No shock. No anger. Just resignation, as if he’d seen it coming before she had. Her chest compressed, masking for a moment Dax’s spicy scent lingering on her skin.

      Because the truth was, George wasn’t her first.

      Caitlyn had been engaged more than once.

      Three times in fact.

      Franny might have thought it an endearing character quirk, but she was probably the only one. Caitlyn was fairly sure her mother thought her a strumpet, and that was when she wasn’t thinking her a grave disappointment. Not that she’d ever been given a hint as to what she could have done right on that score.

      She shook off the sense of dejection her mother’s particular lack of affection had always engendered. If ever she needed a trigger to send her running into the arms of the first guy who smiled her way, her mum’s cold shoulder was a good one.

      Sometimes that was all it took—a sexy smile, a second glance, a fleeting nod across a crowded bar—and suddenly weeks had gone by and she was hurtling along the same old path. High on the rush of feeling adored.

      And if someone adored her enough to ask her to marry them? God... Was there any way to feel more cherished?

      Problem was, that was when she realised the view from the top wasn’t what she’d imagined it would be. And there was no way to go but down, the weight of a ring hanging uncomfortably on her finger making the descent all the faster.

      Caitlyn flipped the magazine shut and closed her eyes, wriggling her toes under the fan drying her toenail polish as she tried to take the edge off the chill that had wrapped