The Rebound Guy (5 page)

It started to boil inside her as she nursed the last dregs of her cocktail. Perhaps this was how he was... Tim had been a bit like that, suffering from sudden and overpowering passions for hobbies or pet projects or even TV programmes. Golf had lasted a year. After he'd spent a fortune on getting top of the range kit, of course. Squash had been next. Then paintball. And they hadn't been able to watch one episode of a favourite TV show a week, like normal people. Tim had been all about the DVD box set—multiple episodes per evening until her head had spun with the plot lines and characters and she'd ended up dreaming about them all night.

So, it didn't matter how good Jason Knight's broad shoulders looked in his immaculately cut suit. She didn't need to get enamoured with another man like that. A man who couldn't commit to something for more than a couple of weeks. She'd bet he had a set of clubs mouldering in his hall cupboard too.

So she downed the last of her cosmo and slammed her empty glass on the bar, then she stood up, said a terse goodbye to the group and pushed her way through the crowd to the door.

The delicious air of a spring evening wrapped itself around her as she stepped outside, cooling her skin and sharpening her senses. Sharpening her anger too. The echo of her heels on the paving slabs bounced off the walls of a low bridge as she passed under it and marched down the road to the Tube station.

* * *

Jason looked in both directions when he burst from the door of Joey's and quickly spotted his PA marching off down the street as if she was on her way to execute something. Or some
one
.

‘Kelly!' he called out, but those legs just kept striding. ‘Hey, Kelly!'

She didn't slow or stop, but there was a slight straightening of her spine that indicated she'd heard him just fine. He smiled to himself. He could play it that way, if that was what she wanted.

Kelly's legs might be long, but his were longer and her stride was hampered by both heels and a skirt. It wasn't long before he caught up and fell into step beside her. She didn't look at him.

‘Is something up?' he asked. ‘Did I do something to make you mad?'

He didn't get it. He thought he'd been a great guy this evening, but when she kept her focus on the brightly lit Tube sign a little farther along the street he knew his gut was right. She was mad. Now he just had to find out why.

Most women would have iced him out, punctuating the silence with only a few choice phrases designed to make him quit and go back to the bar. But Kelly Bradford wasn't most women.

She tried, he could tell, but he almost heard the snap in her resolve as she turned to him and opened her mouth.

‘Typical man,' she muttered. ‘The world revolves around you, doesn't it? It has to be all about you.'

‘No,' he said too quickly—and maybe a little defensively.

‘Maybe I just need to get home to my boys,' she added. ‘Maybe there's more to my life than propping up a bar and making everyone think I'm God's gift by cracking jokes and flashing my wallet around.'

She
was
mad at him! He knew it!

‘Kelly...are you saying that the only reason you're sprinting down this street is because you need to catch a train? That's what all this is about?'

‘Exactly,' she said, and smirked to herself.

Jason smothered his own urge to smile. ‘Then why have you just walked right past the station?'

Kelly let out a short pithy word, turned on her heel and headed back in the other direction. Jason took a moment to enjoy his little victory, smiling at her back as she stalked away from him, and then he began to jog lightly to catch her up.

But as he reached her his smile faded. He gently reached for her wrist. She pulled it away before he made contact, but at least she stopped and faced him instead of walking on.

He needed to know. He needed to know what was driving her nuts. Him, yeah, but it was more than that, and suddenly finding out what was becoming inexplicably important. ‘This isn't just about getting home for bath time,' he said.

Kelly's jaw tensed and she shot him a guilty look. No poker face at all, this one.

‘You said those shoes were your baby,' she said, accusation rich in her tone.

He nodded. Yeah, he had said that. So what?

‘Well, your
baby
is lying critically ill in hospital while you're living it up down at the pub, celebrating.'

He found his blood pressure rising to match hers. ‘So I decided to cheer myself up a little. Hardly a crime! But it's
my
project that's been knocked back,
my
dream lying in the gutter. Who gave you the right to judge? Why should you care?'

Okay, he should pay attention to that throbbing feeling in his temples. It was when he got this way that he did dumb things. Things he regretted. Usually things other people regretted too. But Kelly had a way of making the adrenalin course through his veins, despite all his best efforts to keep it locked away.

She put her hands on her hips, glared at him with glistening eyes. ‘Because you made me care, damn you!'

Her words were like a slap. That couldn't be right. Nobody cared about the things he cared about. Because all he cared about was having a good time and messing up other people's lives, apparently. Now the adrenalin was pumping harder, faster, but it brought with it a chill he recognised, a chill he didn't care for, and he realised he couldn't
let
Kelly care. Because if she cared, he would care, and that was something he really didn't want to do. He'd better do something about that fast. Something to make her not care. Something to make her believe he was exactly who she thought he was.

He didn't even think about his next move; he just did it. He looked down at her shining eyes and her full lips, and the next second his arms closed around her and he was tasting those lips. She went rigid, and somewhere in the back of Jason's brain a thought knocked to be let in. A thought that maybe this was the
dumbness
talking and maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

For the first time in his life, he was on the verge of stepping back and apologising for kissing an attractive woman.

And he might have done too, if not for the fact that she started to kiss him back.

FIVE

Something inside Kelly's
head was screaming at her, tugging at her frantically, telling her to pull away, have a little dignity. She slapped whatever it was into silence by snaking her arms around Jason's neck and pulling him closer.

Oh, she'd forgotten just how
good
this could be. Just how simple and uncomplicated and wonderful a first kiss could be.

It had been more than a decade since she'd had one of those. And, in the interim, kissing had turned from blissful and passionate to comfortable and familiar and finally to infrequent and guilt ridden. On Tim's part, anyway. At the time she hadn't known why he'd avoided her touch. In her darker moments she'd thought he'd been put off by the thought of kissing a woman who'd just been diagnosed with cancer.

But this—she sighed against his lips—this was perfect.

Then a chink of reality invaded her lovely warm haze.

This was also her boss. Wonderful as it might be, this was definitely not ‘simple and uncomplicated'.

He'd shocked her, though. The moment she'd responded to him he'd stilled, as if he was surprised. Odd, when he'd been the one to initiate the kiss, when surely that was what he'd been slowly building up to all evening. The stillness hadn't lasted long, however. Moments later he'd pulled her to him and shown her just how high and how hot the flames of their insane chemistry could burn. She was surprised the illuminated Tube sign above their heads hadn't exploded in a shower of sparks.

The kiss quickly deepened into something more primal—and far less decent. If they kept this up, they were in danger of getting arrested.

It seemed Jason had come to the same conclusion because he pulled away. ‘Which way is home?' he whispered in a husky voice that sent shivers down her spine.

That was the logical conclusion to what they'd just started, she knew. They'd gone
way
beyond a polite, end-of-a-first-date kiss, even though they'd skipped the date and gone straight for the lip action. But suddenly that
wonderful
something she'd been feeling congealed and became much more cold and slimy.

She couldn't take this guy home with her! What was she thinking?

More importantly, what was
he
thinking?

Scratch that. She knew exactly what Jason was thinking, and she needed to put him straight fast. She unhooked her hands from around his neck and dragged herself from him, backing away a few steps to put some distance between them. Maybe she should have felt better to see that, far from being slick and in control, he seemed to be just as disoriented as she was, but she didn't. She didn't want to feel any kind of sympathy for him at this moment. She needed to be angry with him. Because if she was angry with Jason, she couldn't be angry at herself for being so weak and stupid.

‘We're not doing this,' she told him shakily.

Jason just looked a little confused.

‘I told you it was a bad idea,' she reminded him. ‘Against my personal policy—and it really should be against yours too!'

‘I remember what you said,' he replied, ‘but that was
before
you were on the verge of ripping my shirt open. I kinda guessed you'd had a rethink on those rules of yours.'

Thinking hadn't been any part of the equation, unfortunately. But, now her brain had kicked in again, it felt very much the same as it always had done on the subject of Jason Knight and an illicit office fling.

‘I'm not going to be your consolation prize for losing the McGrath deal,' she told him. ‘Hot, angry sex with me will not solve anything.'

The look on Jason's face said he begged to differ. And Kelly was regretting her choice of words too. They'd conjured up all sorts of images that really weren't helping her sudden attack of self-control.

‘I don't know...' he began, regaining some of his usual swagger.

That helped. Seeing him almost vulnerable after he'd broken their kiss had not. But now he was looking more like his usual self and that helped her remember who Jason Knight really was.

‘Everything's a game to you, isn't it?' she said, shaking her head. ‘What would this have been? Another point on your scoreboard? Another notch on your impressive bedpost?'

One corner of Jason's mouth hitched up. ‘My bedpost
is
rather impressive,' he said with a bit of a drawl. Kelly ignored him. She stoked the returning anger until it was good and hot. He was proving her point nicely for her.

‘Well, some of us don't have the luxury of playing life like it's a game,' she told him. ‘You, with your nice suits and your flashy car and your big-money family... Of
course
nothing can touch you! But sometimes...' she felt her lip wobble and willed it to hold ‘...sometimes things happen that make you take life seriously. Very seriously.'

Jason stopped smiling. He gave her a look similar to the one he'd worn when he'd called her into his office about the video. Kelly's knees began to soften. She braced them back hard and looked him straight in the eye, daring him.

‘You're saying that because my family has money nothing bad can ever happen to me?' he asked in a deceptively flat tone.

No, she hadn't meant it that way. She tried to explain further. ‘I'm just saying that you mess around when you could do so much more, that money allows you to get away with that when the rest of us have no such buffer.'

His gaze had turned cold and she did her best not to shiver. ‘So why didn't my daddy's money stop me messing up my shoulder? Why didn't it stop my brother ending up in a wheelchair? Tell me that, Kelly.'

She swallowed. Okay, she might have heard that about him in the past, but she'd forgotten all about those distant
Celebrity Life
articles when she'd been good and angry. There was one thing she did remember, though....

‘The newspapers said that was your fault. They said you caused the accident that crippled your brother.' And she regretted those words the moment they left her lips. She always joked she wished someone would invent a filter that would fit between brain and mouth, and now she wished that not only were there such a device, but that she'd invested in the best money could buy.

The colour drained from Jason's face and he stared at her.

‘You're right,' he said. ‘Hot, angry sex with you
would
be a really bad idea. In fact, any kind of sex with you would be a bad idea.' And then he turned and walked back in the direction of the bar.

* * *

Kelly wasn't usually one for attacks of conscience, but hers niggled her all weekend. Okay, it didn't just niggle. It shouted. It berated. It condemned. By Monday morning she was feeling bruised and sore. The last thing she wanted to do was to go and face Jason, but she arrived early, aiming to catch him while the building was quiet.

She hurried into the building, pressed the button for the lift at least three times and then tapped her foot as it climbed higher and higher. Moments later she was standing outside his office door, listening to the telltale thump of that stupid basketball. She straightened her blouse, took a deep breath and knocked.

‘Come in.' The voice was flat and expressionless. Did he know it was her?

She pushed the door open and leaned her head inside. ‘Is now a good time? Because I can come back later if it's more convenient. I don't want to disturb you, so I'll—'

She was cut off by Jason's short, sharp laugh. ‘You don't want to
disturb
me?'

He sounded incredulous. Sarcastic. That wasn't good. Secretly she'd been hoping that over the weekend he'd turned back into the good old Jason who drove her crazy, who let anything negative roll off him. Unfortunately, the silent, surly, unsmiling Jason was still in residence.

She stepped into the office and closed the door behind her, keeping her hands on the handle and her backside pressed against them. She opened her mouth but no words came. Jason cocked an eyebrow, apparently amused at her speechlessness. She swallowed and cleared her throat.

‘I'm sorry,' she said a little hoarsely. ‘About what I said on Friday night. I overstepped the mark.'

He stared back at her.

‘I...I shouldn't have flung stupid gossip back at you. I know nothing about it—'

‘Seems you know all there is to know,' Jason said, and spun his chair round to face the floor-to-ceiling windows on the other side of the office. ‘You were right. It was my fault my brother ended up in a wheelchair.'

Kelly discovered that while she was very good at dishing out the harsh truth, she hadn't really had that much experience of being on the receiving end—unless you counted Dan, which she didn't, because who ever listened to their brother?

She was scared. Scared of what to say, what to do next. Was this how other people felt when she unleashed her tongue on them? Was this what the stunned silence after one of her outbursts meant? She wanted to run out of the room and pretend this conversation hadn't started, but she couldn't. She wasn't a coward. She reminded herself she'd stared cancer in the face and won, so surely she could do this.

She walked over to the bookcase where there was a picture of Jason with two other men. One was older and looked like a sterner, leaner version of her boss. He and Jason were both standing behind the other man, who was seated in a wheelchair. His features were different from Jason's and his hair was a sandy blond, but she could tell this was his brother. There was something about the determination behind those eyes.... In the picture, Jason's brother was wearing a sporting uniform and he had a large gold medal round his neck.

‘What's his event?' she asked, and she heard Jason's chair creak as he turned to see what she was doing.

‘Swimming,' he said, just a hint of surprise in his voice.

‘Like you.'

Jason snorted. ‘Not like me. Brad's got the medals and I haven't—and he does it without the use of his legs.' He met her gaze. ‘Go on. Tell me how uncharitable I am. Tell me how childish I am to talk like that.'

Kelly swallowed. She'd heard the bitterness in his voice. She knew all about sibling rivalry. With two thick-headed brothers to contend with, she'd had to grow up fighting, but the emptiness in Jason's eyes spoke of something more. She looked at the picture again—how the older man's hand rested comfortably on Brad's shoulder, how Jason seemed as if he'd been slotted in afterwards, as if he could easily have been airbrushed out and the balance of the composition wouldn't have been upset in any way.

‘I don't think you're childish,' she said. ‘I think you might have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Empire State Building, but I don't think you're childish.'

Jason's features softened from anger into surprise. ‘Really?'

Kelly let out a dry laugh. ‘When have you ever known me to lie?'

For once, Jason didn't have a smart remark or a joke to fend off the silence. He looked like a little boy who'd been punished for something he hadn't done and then finally told he was off the hook. It made Kelly's heart contract in a way she didn't welcome. She didn't want him to remind her of her boys. It was bad enough to be attracted to this man; she didn't want to feel protective of him too.

‘For what it's worth, I really am sorry,' she said, putting the picture back on the shelf and walking towards him. She glanced back at the frame. ‘If it bothers you so much, why do you keep it there, staring you in the face all day long?'

Jason's mouth flattened into a grim line. ‘To remind me.'

‘Of what?' she asked softly.

He looked into her eyes. It was a shock. For the first time she felt she was seeing the real him—no gloss, no game playing. It made her feel a little bit wobbly. ‘To keep me jealous. To make me want to drive forwards and prove myself.'

And to punish yourself,
she thought. But she didn't say it.

And she got it now. Why the shoes were so important. Why he hadn't been able to bear admitting failure. Why he'd distracted himself with a good night out, shaking it off and pretending that nothing was wrong. And then she'd gone and shattered the insulated bubble he'd created for himself—and if anyone knew how important that bubble could be when tough times came, it was Kelly.

‘I'll clean out my desk as soon as I get a box,' she told him. ‘I just need to go and find one.'

Jason sat up in his chair. ‘Don't.'

Kelly's mouth dropped open. ‘But I... But you...'

He shrugged. ‘I don't think my behaviour on Friday was saintly, either. I don't usually force myself on women.'

Kelly's shoulders sagged. ‘You didn't. Not really.' She hated the next words that came out of her mouth. ‘I mean, I was in it as much as you were.'

There was a flicker of amusement behind Jason's eyes.

‘Doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to repeat the experience,' she added quickly. ‘Far too complicated.'

He gave her a rueful look. ‘I hate to admit it, but I think you're right.'

Kelly exhaled. That was good, wasn't it? That he agreed with her. She should be feeling pleased. And she was. It was just that the morning had been a bit of an emotional roller coaster and the notion still hadn't caught up with her.

‘We're agreed, then,' she said, and watched carefully for his reaction.

‘I guess we are.'

She hadn't realised she'd been holding her breath until she released it in unison with him. ‘What now?'

Jason looked up at her. ‘We start again. There are plenty of other sports figures out there who'd love to endorse Mercury. We just have to find ourselves one and convince them of that.'

Kelly smiled at him. The old Jason wasn't back, but the snapping, snarling one had retreated into his cave. And she kind of liked this new one, the one who looked at her as an ally rather than something to be conquered.