Playing by the Rules Read Online Free Page B

that. She was not going to get sentimental over something that had never been.
    After all, romance was lovely, but it wasn’t at the top of her list of must-haves in a man. It was nice, but there were more important things. Stability. Reliability. Permanence. All the things she’d thought she had with Alain. Until she didn’t. How had she got it so wrong?
    She closed her eyes and willed the thoughts away. This lament was familiar. It had been running around in her head and heart for days and it needed to stop.
    But this time there was something else as well. Inside her mind, she again pictured the magnificent roses and behind them a man. Only this time, it wasn’t Matt, but Josh, asking her when romance had stopped being important.
    With a start, her eyes flew open. When had he taken up residence in her head? And where did he get off asking questions like that?
    Of course, it wasn’t actually Josh who’d asked the question. It was something inside her, which her imagination had chosen to dress up as Josh, apparently to make her even more confused than she already was.
    Her head started to hurt. And spin, just a little. She closed her eyes again and reached for Jo’s hallstand to regain her equilibrium. But instead of the sturdy wood she was expecting, her grasping hand met a tall golf umbrella that had seen better decades. And instead of support, it rewarded her blind clutching with a broken rib right in the soft pad of her forefinger.
    It wasn’t what she’d been looking for – it drew blood and hurt like hell – but she couldn’t help thinking, even as she yelped, that this sort of pain was much easier to deal with. She swore softly and popped her finger into her mouth, grateful for the distraction.
    ‘Moving on’ had seemed so easy when she was under the influence of Jo’s energy. But it was going to be hard if she couldn’t even look at a bunch of roses without jumping on an emotional merry-go-round.
    She was still staring at the floor, thinking and sucking on her finger, when a soft, sharp intake of breath made her aware that someone was standing in the doorway. Somehow, she didn’t need to look to know that, this time, it was not a stranger.
    The amazingly resilient butterflies, which had seemed well and truly dead, resurrected themselves
again
and Kate found herself completely unable to make sense of what she had been thinking. It was something about roses . . . and merry-go-rounds . . . and . . . and . . . she gave up.
    Slowly, she raised her head. First into view was a pair of gleaming black shoes. Patent leather men’s dress shoes; the sort not found in the local K-Mart. Or indeed the local mall, unless it was a very upmarket one.
    Sliding past them, her gaze was led inexorably to immaculate, slim-cut trousers, so sharply creased as to be dangerous and so black that they appeared to absorb all the available light. Would that explain why she couldn’t drag her eyes away from them? Or was that down to the drape of the fine wool, perfectly cut to tantalisingly skim all but the curve where his thigh muscles touched the fabric?
    Kate felt a sudden, strong, almost overwhelming desire to see how the fabric handled his behind. The nicely-brought-up part of Kate was shocked. The butterflies, on the other hand, seemed to think it was a great idea. In fact, they were all for her spinning him round and doing some handling herself.
    She quickly moved her eyes upwards, but if she thought she was moving out of danger, she was mistaken. She couldn’t help noticing the way the jacket hugged his slim hips as though it had grown on him. And the way it hung from his broad shoulders and across the crisp white of his shirt made her want to run her hand down the front of it, to see if it could possibly feel as good as it looked.
    With the part of her brain that was still capable of thought, Kate reflected that there was a downside to being an academic. The men she worked with wouldn’t know that clothes