Playing by the Rules Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek: Rules are for Breaking

  For my Mum and Dad

  Who read to me, told me tales, and ‘rolled me in’ to the library, long before I could read. Thank you for the stories.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kate stared into the dregs of her coffee and willed herself not to cry.

  So what if her boyfriend had walked out on her into the arms of another woman? So what if that woman was a blonde bombshell who used to be her friend? So what if they were enjoying a balmy Paris summer together, while she was stuck in a cold and miserable Melbourne winter? Was that going to get her down?

  Too right it was.

  And coffee wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to help.

  Pushing the cup away, Kate abandoned the kitchen for the balcony, hoping some fresh air would lift her spirits. But the grey, pre-dawn city didn’t offer much cheer. She pulled her dressing gown closer and sighed. She couldn’t even summon the righteous anger that normally got her through these moods. She just felt stupid.

  She should have known better than to fall in love with her boss. She should have seen it would all end in tears.

  But she hadn’t seen it, she had fallen. And so here she was, hiding out at her best friend’s flat on the other side of the world, trying to figure out how on earth she was going to go back to work in three weeks with any semblance of dignity.

  Kate groaned and sagged forward against the icy metal railing.

  Ah, dignity. She used to think it was one of her strengths. But that was before she had flung a glass of Bordeaux’s finest in a man’s face in a restaurant full of people. And before she had sent him that angry email, which simultaneously told him exactly what she thought of him and provided him with the address of where she was staying, just in case he wanted to get in touch. As if! Kate shook her head.

  And tonight, there was the reunion.

  She knew she shouldn’t care about the reunion. Compared to the rest of her life, it was nothing. But why oh why did it have to be now? Ten years since she had left school and she was going to look as desperate and dateless as she had when she was seventeen. Kate Adams: the girl most likely to be left on the shelf.

  She tried to tell herself that she was being ridiculous. After all, she still had a job she loved. She was working at the Sorbonne, for pity’s sake. It was her dream job – or it had been, until Alain had dumped her and turned it into a nightmare.

  Okay, so work wasn’t perfect. She still had her friends. She had Jo. Kate raised her head and smiled in the direction of the bedroom where her friend was snoring. Dear Jo. She’d always be there for her. She’d never betray her. Although, come to think of it, it wouldn’t kill her to be a bit more sympathetic about the reunion. Jo was the one insisting Kate had to go.

  Kate frowned again.

  Paris! There was always Paris. Kate felt the frown lines ease as she thought of her cosy little flat in the Latin Quarter. Then she remembered that Alain and Sophie also lived in Paris. Right now, her ex-boyfriend and ex-friend were no doubt sitting at their favourite café – which used to be her favourite café – drinking champagne and gazing into each other’s eyes.

  If her evening involved wine at all it would probably be out of a cask. And she doubted that Chateau Cardboard was going to make her any happier about spending an evening looking at other people’s baby photos and lying about her love life. This was not what she had planned for her homecoming!

  Planned. Plans. Planning.

  That was it! It was only the beginning of an idea, but Kate grabbed on to it as if to a lifeline. Anything was better than this ghastly self-pity. She pushed herself off the railing and absently wiped the condensation off her hands onto her dressing gown as her mind kicked into gear.

  She was good at plans. Planning was how she had got that great job and the flat in Paris. So the plan hadn’t worked so well when it came to Alain. That was okay. Not all plans succeeded. That didn’t mean that plans were bad. She just needed a new plan.

  Something that would restore her confidence, that’s what she needed. A plan that would have her swanning back into work in a few weeks looking not like a woman dumped, but like a woman happy to be released. She swept back into the kitchen as her imagination took over. She had no idea how she was going to effect the change, but she knew what she wanted. No more Kate the mouse, quiet and nice and dull. She would look like a woman with a secret. Glamorous and determined and —

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Startled out of her budding plan, at first Kate couldn’t place the noise. Then it happened again, and she realised it was someone knocking – no, pounding – on the door.

  A flicker of irritation stirred inside her and she encouraged it. Irritation was good. Much better than the numb melancholy that had been her prevailing mood since she’d left Paris.

  Whoever it was knocked again before she made it halfway up the passage and Kate felt the irritation grow to a very satisfying grumble of anger. Men! It was bound to be a man. No woman would knock on a door in such an arrogant way at such an ungodly hour. Especially when there was a perfectly functional doorbell. No, it was a man all right. Well, that was fine. Putting him in his place would be good practice for the new, improved, non-mousy Kate.

  She yanked the door open, scowl in place and ticking-off at the ready . . . and her words evaporated.

  There was a vision standing on the mat. A vision of manly goodness. Tall. Dark. Handsome. She mentally ticked off the checklist and wondered if she was hallucinating. She was jetlagged. She closed her eyes and counted to three, but when she opened them he was still there. A little rumpled, a bit tired-looking around the eyes and decidedly unshaven but no less attractive for that. And he was smiling at her.

  ‘Kate? Is that you?’

  There was a slight delay as the sound penetrated her tired brain cells. Just long enough for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the hallway and recognition to zip through her like a static charge.

  ‘Josh?’

  She looked harder. Sure enough, it was Josh. Jo’s brother had filled out in the ten years since she’d seen him, but there was no mistaking those deep, chocolate eyes and that smile. It had melted her heart when she was sixteen and as she gazed at it now, Kate felt the years dissolve and her adolescent crush came rocketing up out of her subconscious, as fresh and vivid as it had ever been. She was suddenly horribly aware that she was wearing a very old, coffee-stained dressing gown, and she hadn’t washed her hair since she got off the plane.

  The vision-that-was-Josh nodded. Kate gripped the doorframe and decided that the universe most definitely had it in for her.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Kate.’ About as much as she had been expecting to see him. ‘That is, assuming this is still Jo’s place and she hasn’t skipped town while I was away.’ He grinned, obviously joking. There might be
siblings closer than Jo and Josh but Kate hadn’t met them.

  ‘Oh no! She’s here. And I am too.’ Obviously. Present and babbling. ‘I just got in last night. It was . . . a bit of a last-minute thing.’

  ‘We have something in common, then,’ he said, unleashing another smile and setting off flutters in body parts she had forgotten could flutter. ‘I had some leave due and the airlines made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’ Belatedly, she noticed a large suitcase parked at his side and remembered that he, too, had been working overseas. What had Jo said he was doing? Something in hotels? ‘Was it the same for you?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she managed. It would have been more honest to say that she had fled the country to save face, but she was pretty sure that came under the heading of too much information for the circumstances. She made a stab at a smile and improvised. ‘My mum’s been pestering me for months to come home for a visit.’

  Too late, she realised that that reason would have made more sense if he had found her staying at her mother’s place. Luckily, Josh didn’t seem to notice. He laughed – a deep throaty sound that was as different from his boyish bark as his broad shoulders were from the much skinnier eighteen-year-old she remembered. Funnily enough, the effect it had on her insides seemed much the same.

  ‘I haven’t told my mum that I’m here yet. She would have come to the airport and I really just need to crash for a few hours first before she starts giving me the third degree about my love life. So . . . can I come in?’ He looked at her hopefully and Kate felt a blush surge up her cheeks, as she realised she really shouldn’t have left her hostess’s brother standing on the doorstep all this time.

  ‘Oh, of course! Please do.’

  Trying for poise, she stepped back and pulled the door wide with a flourish. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until her foot connected with something warm and furry that she remembered that Jo’s cat liked to sleep over the heating vent behind the front door.

  The average cat is likely to take exception to being woken by a kick in the ribs. Cleopatra was no exception. With a howl that would have done a banshee proud, she sank both teeth and claws into Kate’s outstretched heel, before streaking off down the hall in a flurry of fur to less dangerous environs.

  Whereupon Kate, torn between horror and agony and doing a fair banshee impersonation herself, leapt forward, tripped on the edge of the hall rug, and pitched headlong into the astonished Josh, who finished up shoved against the opposite wall with his arms full of worn chenille and his face full of hair.

  For a moment, Kate was too shocked and winded to be embarrassed. Then the shoulders she was leaning against started to shake and she felt, rather than heard, another laugh ripple through Josh’s chest.

  ‘Well, Kate, you certainly know how to make a man feel at home. I can’t say I was expecting such a welcome, but I rather like it.’

  If Kate had thought she was blushing before, she was on fire now. Gathering as much dignity as she could muster, she straightened up to look him in the eye – and froze. His eyes had always been her weakness. So brown they were almost black and with a wicked glint that was exactly the same as the one in his sister’s, which had got Kate in so much trouble over the years.

  The dressing-down she had been planning to give him melted from her brain. Between the eyes, the lingering effect of her remembered crush and the sheer comfort of being held firmly in warm, masculine arms, Kate found it was all she could do to stay upright. For some reason her knees seemed to have forgotten how to hold her up and were sagging against him in a manner that would have been alarming, if she had been able to think straight.

  How she would have got out of this situation if left to her own devices Kate was, fortunately, not left to find out. Jo, having been roused by an indignant Cleopatra and consequently pretty indignant herself, chose that moment to make a dramatic, orange-pyjama-clad appearance.

  ‘Kate! What in the name of all that is holy is going —’

  Here she paused for a surprised breath, as she got an eyeful of the impromptu embrace in the hallway.

  ‘Well, hel-lo! What is going on here? I must say, Kate, I would have thought it was a bit early in the morning for —’

  Jo seemed destined not to finish many sentences that morning. In her presence, Kate had suddenly managed the disentanglement from Josh that, a minute before, had seemed impossible, and now Jo had seen his face.

  ‘Josh! Honey! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Being smothered, apparently,’ was his good-natured and quite reasonable reply as Jo had, by this time, replaced Kate in his arms and was hugging him enthusiastically.

  ‘And, of course, getting reacquainted with —’

  He turned to where Kate had been, but she had decided that her new, confident self was still a work in progress; one that could be much better worked on with a closed door between her and handsome, dark-eyed blasts from the past.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Indeed, once she was safely behind the closed door of Jo’s guest room, Kate decided it would probably be best for whatever remained of her dignity if she stayed there for the rest of her holiday.

  But she’d reckoned without Jo. Jo Marchant had always been good at getting her own way, but while Kate had been in Paris she had apparently elevated ‘not taking no for an answer’ into an art form. So, within an hour of Kate’s escape, Josh was gone – packed off to their parents’ place, in spite of his protests – and Kate was no longer curled up in her room, stroking a forgiving Cleopatra and thinking up reasons not to go to the reunion.

  Instead, she was standing, wearing nothing but a strapless bra and undies, in front of Jo’s mirror, watching her friend rummage through an overstuffed wardrobe for, in her words, ‘something decent for you to wear’.

  Given how far Jo had got her already, Kate was fairly sure that she’d be wasting her breath, but she thought she should at least try to object. New Kate would.

  ‘You know, Jo, I’m really not sure I’m up for this.’

  As she suspected, she might as well have appealed to the sleeping Cleo for all the sympathy she got.

  ‘Rubbish! You’re just having an attack of the LBBs,’ came the stern, if somewhat muffled reply. ‘Something decent’ was obviously proving difficult.

  ‘Now,’ Jo continued, emerging flushed, but triumphant. ‘What do you think of this one?’

  Kate pretended to consider it.

  ‘Not your colour.’

  Jo stuck her tongue out at her.

  ‘Smartarse! If you’re going to be like that, you can try on the high heels of death, too. Go on! Put it on. I’ll find the shoes.’

  Kate obediently tried to work out which way was up in the slinky bronze thing Jo had thrust at her. She had not made much progress when Jo reappeared with a wicked-looking pair of strappy gold stilettos.

  ‘Found’em! Aren’t you in that yet? Where did you learn to dress? Here, let me help.’

  With a few deft tugs, Jo settled the drapery around Kate and stood back to admire her handiwork.

  ‘Good. Now put these shoes on. I’m sure I’ve got earrings to go with them, somewhere.’

  Kate felt she was fighting a losing battle, but she made another effort.

  ‘What do you mean, “LBBs”, anyway?’

  Jo had disappeared into the wardrobe again, so it was a disembodied voice that answered.

  ‘LBB stands for Loser Boyfriend Blues. It is caught from Loser Boyfriends – naturally – and it is what you have been indulging in ever since you got here. Ouch! What is that doing there?’ There was a short pause while Jo wrestled a large fishing rod out into the daylight. Kate chose not to ask and Jo continued as though there had been no interruption. ‘You know . . . “My boyfriend’s left me! What did I do wrong? I must have done something wrong! What does she have that I don’t have? Am I ugly? What’s the matter with me? All my friends are getting married, and I can’t even keep a boyfriend . . .” Sound familiar?’

  Kate stopped in the middle of
tying the long strap of one shoe, and looked in the direction of her friend’s voice. Jo’s whiny litany certainly did sound familiar. Hadn’t she been thinking along those lines just this morning? But surely she wasn’t that bad? Surely she didn’t really think like that?

  Horror-struck, she clamped her hand over her mouth as she realised that not only had she been thinking like that, she must have been talking like that, too. Obviously she must, for Jo to be able to rattle it off so glibly. Hearing it from someone else, it wasn’t very attractive. And it wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the devil-may-care attitude she was hoping to perfect before she went home.

  She didn’t have time to think about it, though, as the disembodied voice had not finished.

  ‘Of course, it never occurs to the LBB sufferer that, in fact, there is nothing wrong with her, apart from a regrettable taste in loser men.’

  This stung.

  ‘Alain is not a loser!’

  Jo (having finally emerged from the wardrobe) fixed Kate with a stern stare.

  ‘Hon, he took you out for dinner, the night before you were due to start your lovely summer holidays together, and told you he was in love with someone else. What would you call him?’

  Nothing printable, thought Kate murderously, wincing at the memory of that night. Although she’d called him plenty at the time.

  Fortunately, Jo didn’t seem to require an answer. Dumping a shoebox full of earrings on her bed, she gave Kate a quick hug and steamrolled on.

  ‘Never mind! I have a sure-fire cure for the blues, and you, my dear, are almost wearing it.’

  ‘What do you mean, “wearing it”?’