PROLOGUE
SHE COULDN’T TAKE her eyes off him.
Sitting on the crimson velvet banquette that curved around a table upon which sat a bottle of bubbles chilling in a bucket, Georgie Wallace took a sip of champagne and felt it fizz down her throat to join the unfamiliar buzzing in her stomach.
Her pulse thudded in time to the beat of the sultry music drifting over from the dance floor. The blood pounding through her veins was thick and hot. This pull, this dizzying breathlessness, this inability to concentrate on the conversation going on around her had never happened to her before.
But then, she’d never seen anyone quite like him before either.
She’d noticed him the moment he’d entered the room what felt like an eternity ago but could only have been a matter of seconds. One minute she’d been laughing at something one of her friends had said, the next the air had started vibrating with a strange sort of electric tension that had sizzled straight through her, igniting her nerve-endings and robbing her of all coherent thought. Her gaze had located the source of it with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, and the impact of seeing him had dealt a blow to her senses from which she’d yet to recover.
Now he was striding across the floor away from her, dominating the space as if he owned it, all towering height, confident authority and purposeful intent. Anyone in his way instinctively stepped out of it. No one appeared inclined to inform him of the club’s no-jeans policy.
‘Magnificent,’ Georgie murmured to herself, watching transfixed as he slid onto a stool at the far end of the busy bar and summoned the bartender with nothing more than a barely perceptible lift of his head.
That was what he was.
In command.
Compelling.
And clearly in need of a drink, if the way he knocked back the one that appeared in front of him was anything to go by.
‘Huh?’ said Carla, her oldest and best friend, who was sitting beside her and who she could see out of the corner of her eye was bopping to the music while plucking the bottle from the bucket to refill her glass.
‘The guy at the bar,’ Georgie said, unable to wrench her gaze away.
‘Which one?’
Wasn’t it obvious? ‘Far left. Dark hair in need of a cut, checked shirt.’
‘Big and broad with his sleeves pushed up?’
‘That’s him.’
Carla replaced the bottle in the bucket and sat back. ‘A bit dishevelled for my liking,’ she said after a moment’s consideration. ‘Nice back, though. Good shoulders.’
‘Very.’ With muscles clearly visible beneath the cotton that stretched across them, they were possibly the finest set of shoulders Georgie had ever seen.
‘Did you get a look at his face?’
‘Not properly.’ Just a tantalising glimpse of a strong masculine jaw and straight nose as he’d stridden past her.
‘It would be helpful if he shifted round a bit more.’
‘True,’ Georgie said with an assessing tilt of her head. ‘But even if he did, he’d still be too far away to make out the details.’
‘Shame.’
It was indeed, because just imagine if his face matched up to the promise of his body. He’d be breathtakingly gorgeous and that was something she wouldn’t mind taking a good, long look at.
But, intriguingly, what was equally as arresting as his physique on the move was his stillness and his containment as he sat alone at the bar. Now furnished with another drink, which he was taking more slowly than the last, he seemed to be utterly lost in thought, an island of immobility in a sea of activity, his bleak sobriety a sharp contrast to the hedonistic atmosphere of the club, and oddly desolate.
Who was he?
What was he doing here?
And would he like some company?
At that distantly familiar thought, Georgie inwardly stilled, her heart skipping a beat before racing.
Oooh, how interesting.
Once upon a time, as an out-of-control teenager desperate for parental attention and discipline, she hadn’t thought twice about approaching good-looking men in bars for a spot of light flirting or dirty dancing, and she’d been extremely good at it.
But ever since she’d come to the distressing realisation at the age of sixteen that if she wanted boundaries she’d have to set them for herself, she’d given up that sort of reckless, impulsive behaviour and had knuckled down to the serious business of adulting. With a love of rules that had been missing from her upbringing, she’d pursued a career in law—much
to the horror of her hippie parents—and had slowly built the structure she craved into her life.
She’d had dates, of course, relationships even, but they were casual affairs with guys at college or, later, with men she generally met at friends’ dinner parties, men she already faintly knew instead of random strangers picked up in bars.
And, while she’d liked and respected and fancied all of them, none had made her heart race particularly fast. Her last relationship—six months with a perfectly nice but ultimately unexciting banker—had fizzled out over a year ago and she’d neither lamented its demise nor been on the lookout for another.
For the last twelve months, in fact, she’d become so engrossed in the job she loved, so determined to get the promotion she’d been after, that she hadn’t given the opposite sex a moment’s consideration. She hadn’t wanted the distraction. She hadn’t needed the hassle.
Tonight, however, with her promotion in the bag and her foot easing off the accelerator a fraction, it appeared she wouldn’t mind some of both.
‘Good song,’ Carla said in response to a shift in the music as she bopped about on the seat a bit more energetically. ‘Want to dance?’
Not particularly.
In fact, Georgie wanted something quite different. Because, while hitting the dance floor with her friends and forgetting all about the brooding hunk at the bar would be by far the safest, most sensible option, she didn’t want to forget about him. And for once she didn’t want to be sensible. She wanted to meet him. Talk to him. Flirt with him. She wanted to give in to the scorching heat and the dizzying lust rushing through her and see where they took her.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d experienced such an intense and immediate attraction, or felt so alive. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed the heady thrill of sexual excitement, how long she’d been treading water. Besides, it was her birthday. If she couldn’t let her hair down tonight of all nights, when could she?
‘Maybe later,’ she said, her stomach tightening and her pulse racing at the thought of what could happen if she went for it.