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What the hell was he playing at?
Flirting with Bridget Gardiner was a distinctly bad idea, and not just because his sister would rip him a new one.
He knew a bit about Bridget from Mattie and, from everything his sister had told him, he’d been expecting her friend to be a sweet, shy, pretty in an unobtrusive girl-next-door kind of way. Someone who was unequivocally too innocent and saintly for the likes of him, which was good as he was rather more partial to a bit more of a sinner.
Yet what had smacked him across the face the moment he’d been introduced to Bridget had been that there was nothing saintly about her at all. Nothing unobtrusive and nothing low-key. Rather, Bridget Gardiner looked very much like she was a sex symbol stepping right out of the nineteen-fifties or -sixties.
And his body had ached on sight.
A figure-hugging dress moulded itself around her, as though she’d had to be poured into it, encasing generous breasts that made his palms long to cup them, a tapered waist that made his fingers itch to span it, and slinky hips that made his entire body hunger to press up against them.
It was all so ridiculously...adolescent of him.
He was never this out of control. He tried concentrating on her face, but that didn’t help at all. His mouth felt parched even as his eyes drank her in like she was the longest, coolest drink he’d ever had. He didn’t know if it was her large, dark eyes with their slightly startled expression, the pretty oval face framed by the mass of thick, glossy black hair, or the sultry pout that Hayden didn’t think she was even aware of. And as for that tiny but deliciously naughty gap between her front teeth...he wanted to lower his mouth to hers right now and taste it.
Forcing himself to take a step back, Hayden folded his arms over his chest as if it could help him resist this unexpected pull that this woman had over him. This couldn’t happen. It was wrong.
He was about to spend three months working alongside her in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from anywhere. And the fact that she was clearly so damned passionate about her work only appealed to him all the more. Yet having a fling with her would be worse than simply a bad idea, it would be a downright catastrophic idea.
As much as he had a reputation—not entirely fair since he wasn’t anywhere as indiscriminate as he knew rumour painted him, although he would freely admit that he was no monk—he had a strict rule about not mixing professional with personal.
Only right now, at this instant, his head was wrecked and his body was in the process of ripping up the rule book and hurling it out of the window. If he didn’t retake the reins on what little self-control he had remaining, he feared he was going to lose his grip completely. And then...well, he’d have three months in the middle of nowhere with a woman who would want more from him and be hurt and upset that he couldn’t give that to her.
Not to mention a sister who would rip seven shades out of him for devasting her friend.
It might not seem like it now, faced with all the temptations of that luscious body, but it really wasn’t worth the hassle.
‘Your champagne, sir?’
Hayden blinked as the bartender approached them, several bottles in a couple of buckets of ice, along with enough flutes to go around. It took him a moment to recall that he’d ordered them earlier because they were all here to celebrate his sister’s promotion. A fact he appeared to have forgotten in the event of meeting Bridget, despite her mentioning it earlier.
He didn’t care to analyse why it was that he both welcomed and resented the intrusion at the same time.
‘Do you always drink champagne in nightclubs?’
‘Not exactly,’ he told her, taking the magnums and setting them down. ‘We don’t usually do either. But tonight we’re celebrating something big for Mattie. And sometimes it’s good to cut loose, especially after a hard tour. Or before one. Plus, it’s not often we’re all in the same place like this, but with the RAF base down the road and all of us here at the same time, even if we are flying out to different locations, it seemed like the perfect time.’
Bridget didn’t answer, and Hayden turned back to see her staring at the bottles with an expression he could only describe as agonised.
‘Birdie?’
She didn’t react, and before he could stop himself he reached out to gently take her chin in his fingers and tilt her head up to him.
He pretended he didn’t feel the sparks that arced between them.
She startled, freezing for a moment before wrenching her head away, muttering as she did so. ‘It’s nothing.’
It was a patent lie and he shouldn’t want so badly to call her out on it. What did it matter to him if she told him the truth or not?
‘Excuse me, please.’ He turned away to stop himself from pressing Bridget any further when she clearly didn’t want to talk and picked up a bottle before deftly popping the cork.
‘How did you do that?’ she asked suddenly, touching her hand to the inside of his wrist until he opened his hand and she picked up the cork. ‘I had visions of it flying across the room.’
He told himself that his pulse wasn’t leaping at the contact. That it wasn’t the reason why he’d forgotten to pour the champagne into the first flute and it was now effervescing over the top.
Hastily, he remedied the situation and set the bottle down where one of his and Mattie’s mutual friends picked it up, telling him they’d pour if he opened. But his attention was on Bridget, whether he liked it or not.
