the other side of the Z9 Doug cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow. Caitlyn nodded. Yep, the number-one sexiest thing she’d seen all week was on the phone.
To Dax she said, ‘What can I do for you on this fine Monday morning?’
He’d called her on a Monday. Maybe he’d left something at her apartment. Or wanted to know the name of a good mechanic. Or—
‘You can make my day by telling me that you’re free tonight.’
‘I’m sorry—pardon?’ Caitlyn said.
‘Tonight,’ he said, more slowly this time. ‘Are you free?’
Free? But it had been a one-night stand. Sorbet sex. Hadn’t it? ‘For what purpose?’
‘You want specifics?’
Caitlyn looked around. Doug had shooed off elsewhere leaving her, and the Z9, all on their lonesome. She wriggled her toes to keep the blood from assembling in the one hot spot and said, ‘Sure. Why not?’
Through the phone she heard a shuffle and a squeak, and imagined him in a dark suit and tie, up in some lofty city tower, leaning back in a super-comfy leather office chair, looking out of his thousand-storey window, with glorious Melbourne spread out beneath him.
When his voice slid through the phone, deep and slow, the vibrations sent tingles all over her skin.
‘I was imagining we’d...’ He paused. Long enough she held her breath. Then, ‘...eat. We could enjoy a little...soft music. No doubt we would...talk. And later, much later, once I’ve loosened my tie, and you’ve kicked your shoes off under the table, and we’re both nicely pickled in some excellent wine, together we would do...dessert.’
By the time he’d finished she was leaning back hard against the Z9, the cold metal doing nothing to take the edge off her temperature. Somehow she managed to keep her voice from cracking when she said, ‘So you’re asking me on a date.’
Laughter rolled through the phone. ‘I’m asking you to eat dinner with me, but if you’d prefer to call it that—’
‘No-o-o!’ Not a date!
‘No?’ he repeated after several long beats.
Caitlyn bit her lip. Dax was a man she’d taken home from a bar. For sex. Not as some kind of Hail Mary that it might lead to something more. Her strident rejection of the word ‘date’ had given her an accidental out if that was what she wanted.
Was it what she wanted?
What she wanted was to see him again. So badly her whole body ached. The want throbbed in time with her pulse—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—from the soles of her feet to the soft depression at the base of her throat.
Other people, people who weren’t relationship junkies, did that kind of thing all the time. Had dinner. Had sex. Didn’t get engaged to every guy they met. So long as expectations didn’t exceed reality, then nobody needed to get hurt.
‘Caitlyn?’
‘I meant no, I don’t need to call it anything.’
‘Okay.’ His voice slid deep and delicious down the phone. Her shoulders lifted in compensation for the sudden shivers running down her neck.
‘I’m working late,’ she said, ‘so how about we meet up for a drink around nine?’ There, a drink. Casual as could be. She named the bar, a fancy hole in the wall she’d glimpsed on occasion down one of Melbourne’s many cool quirky alleyways. The kind of place tourists missed, and city-workers flocked to.
‘Looking forward to it,’ Dax said, and then he was gone.
She took her phone away to find her ear hot and sore from having the phone pressed against it so hard.
‘That must have been some phone call.’
Caitlyn jumped, hand slapping against her heart. She turned to find Doug standing about three feet away.
‘I’ve never seen a woman’s ankles blush before,’ he said.
‘My ankles are doing no such thing.’
‘If you say so.’
Caitlyn couldn’t help it. She glanced at her ankles, bare between her fitted capris and her glossy high-heeled pumps, to find he wasn’t kidding. ‘Well,’ she spluttered, ‘then you clearly have a lot to learn about women.’
Doug smiled knowingly back as his eyes slid to the phone she had clasped hard in her sweaty little palm. ‘So it seems.’
‘Oh, go suck a squeegee.’
Doug’s laughter rang through the lofty room while Caitlyn spun away and headed back to the lift before she started laughing too, her high heels all but dancing on the concrete floor.
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