Unsuitable

She moved her toes against him. “I wish it was too. I kept thinking about it. I kept wondering if you still had it.”

He flexed his hips into her foot. “Shit no.”

His hands were still lightly wrapped around her foot. Now he used them to guide her, to bring her instep and heel into play.

“Oh God, Reece.” She could hear her own breathing. He closed his eyes again. She was a thirty-four year old woman who’d been celibate for six years with no prospects for breaking the drought and no intention of looking for a rainmaker. She had a healthy daughter who was bright and cute and everything she’d schemed to have. She’d fought a life threatening disease and won. She had a job she loved and was about to walk into a promotion with more scope, power and money.

She had a twenty-seven year old lover and she was going to make him come in an expensive Chinese restaurant with her stockinged foot. This was the best date she’d ever been on and it was nowhere near done yet.

As abruptly as he’d started using her foot he lifted it away with a groan. He gave her a look that was pure filtered sex. “We have to have dessert whether you want it or not. There is no way I’m fit to walk out of here.”

She laughed and he stopped her with a thumb to her instep. “Behave, Audrey.”

“You started it.”

“You with your nothing under that dress started it. I’ve had a semi since then. I know where Mia gets it. That you won’t see me coming till I’ve already got what I wanted thing. It’s utterly you.” Audrey laughed. “She’s going to be hard to handle when she’s Etta’s age.”

She almost said, but you have experience with sixteen year olds. You’ll manage her better than I will, but she stopped, gulped at her wine instead. That was altogether too much, in a way that making him come in a posh restaurant was the more acceptable alternative.

And he’d done it again, turned the conversation back to her.

“What do you want to be doing in five years time, Reece?”

He narrowed his eyes. “If this is like doing math in your head to hold off an orgasm, it’s okay, I’ve got it covered.”

She laughed. “It’s a serious question.”

“Sky used to ask me this all the time. She was never satisfied with my answers. She thought I lacked ambition, that I had no focus that I was going to wake up at forty and wonder what I’d achieved. The thing is, I could never give her the real answer without it coming across wrong.”

“What’s the real answer?”

“I want my own kindy, a day care centre.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not the kind of work a man should want to do, as far as Sky was concerned, but that’s not all. I want to find a way to encourage more men to feel it’s okay to want to work with kids as teachers in greater numbers, as nannies without the idiot manny tag.”

“That’s admirable.”

“I want my own family. I want to be there, elbows deep in it. Babies and nappies and teens and tantrums and moods, fights over nothing and wet towels on the floor and never a dull moment. I’m good at that stuff. That’s what I couldn’t tell Sky, because I didn’t want a family with her.”

Audrey held her breath. Was he saying he wanted a family with her? She tried to read his face. All she saw was love and it made her eyes sting.

This was how she’d lose him, because she didn’t want any of that. Pregnancy had been difficult and she had no intention of doing it again. This is where the differences between them showed up. She was further along in life than he was, and babies and nappies and a complex family life wasn’t in her makeup. She had no example of how that was supposed to work and no desire to experiment beyond Mia.

She wished she’d drunk more. Wished she’d not asked that stupid question, wished she’d talked him into checking into the hotel they’d walked past and spending the hours they had in bed, inside each other in the most intimate way they knew how

because now her heart was breaking.

And he saw it.

He sat back away from the table, slumped a little, then she saw him recover; catch a waiter’s eye, order coffee and dessert. God she loved him for that too, for not making an issue of what he’d just learned, for keeping the dream of the date alive, for preserving what they had while they could have it.

Their third stop for the night was another mood again, this one much less refined, more drunk and disorderly. It suited her frame of mind. They were dancing on the bar top in this place, the women more strategically undressed, the men very handsy and no one appeared bothered by it. It was well out of her comfort zone. She felt like a delicate hothouse flower amongst mighty robust, fire-retardant natives.

She wondered if it was Reece’s original plan or he’d changed it up. It was too loud to talk in here, the music pulsing, a raw sex throbbing beat she could feel in her chest. He kept her caged by his body while they watched the dance floor. It didn’t matter how rough it got, she’d be protected without him having to do a thing. Surprisingly, he wasn’t the biggest man in the place, but he was the calmest by far. He wasn’t drinking and she felt no particular tension in him, other than sexual. But that was enough to cope with. When he put his hand to the back of her neck and rubbed his thumb up towards her hairline, she had to lock her joints or fall. When he used his mouth on the same path she almost went to her knees.

On the dance floor he brought her against his body and used his hands on her in a way more suited to the privacy of her kitchen counter than a public place. There was no mistake he was marking her out as his territory as his hands went to places that would’ve gotten them separated or thrown out anywhere else. Here they fit right in, even when his fingers went under her dress to find the top of her stockings, to pluck the stay on the belt, to cop a quick feel of her butt cheek and the three bows strung across her sacrum.