Cracking the Dating Code by Kelly Hunter

Author:Kelly Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781408972748
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2012-03-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEY were in a bar. One of those tropical beach resort bars that made heaven look insipid. The swimming and wading pools surrounding it seemed to run for ever and the smell of luxury drifted through the air and seeped into the skin of the people who filled the place.

Money had never been an issue for Poppy. Her family had always had it and her own efforts to accumulate it were not insubstantial. Walk-in room rates had been easily paid. A frock for the evening had been easily paid for too and, though it was not of the calibre of the baby-doll dress and trench coat Ruby had bestowed on her at Christmas, it did have lovely lines and a classy casualness about it that matched the tropical location. The colour was a deep, muted pewter—not her usual pastel fare—and the bodice fitted her closely and the skirt floated around her ankles like sea foam. The shoes were black and strappy and the heels were almost three inches high. The shoes were hot.

The bar was full of confident, beautiful people and Seb was at her side looking more at home and confident than all the rest. Women watched him, their eyes sharply acquisitive.

Men watched him too, some with acquisition in mind and some who just wanted to protect what was theirs.

She’d opened her mouth to make some savvy entertaining remark half a dozen times already, and shut her mouth again without uttering a word. There was a chasm between learning how to flirt with a man and actually doing it and that chasm was never so deep as it was now.

She didn’t belong here. Didn’t feel comfortable or confident or knowing. Give her an almost deserted island and a tiger shark any day. Give her people who knew about the way she shrank in crowds and didn’t care that she wasn’t the life of the party and never would be.

Deep breaths in the hope of finding courage from somewhere. A small casual question to answer as Seb asked her what she wanted to drink.

‘Whisky,’ she said, so he ordered two and she stood beside him wordless, motionless and wishing herself somewhere, anywhere, else.

‘Bartender’s cute,’ he murmured as they waited for their drinks.

The bartender was a woman.

Funny how reality never quite delivered what the imagination could.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she admitted quietly.

‘You could always try and relax. I guarantee it’d help.’

The bartender gave them their drinks. She drained it in one gulp.

‘Not like that,’ he said dryly. ‘I think all this rampant flirting with me’s doing your head in. How about we try something easy?’

‘Like what?’

‘Smile.’

She couldn’t even do that.

Seb couldn’t fault Poppy’s dress sense, her figure or her face. She did gamine beauty to perfection, her presentation was flawless, and it worked on him as it was working on at least half the men in the room.

But her bravado of last night had disappeared completely and Seb was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t just the mechanics of flirting that Poppy had trouble with.

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