Moonlight Mirage: Bandicoot Cove 2 (2 page)

She’d let her golden hair grow long, so long the ends curled over the very tips of her breasts, which looked absolutely dynamite in a low-cut green dress that perfectly matched the emerald sparkle of her eyes. Wedge heels made her slender frame appear taller than what Mitch knew was only five-foot-four. Hayley’s head barely reached his collarbones. He remembered because she’d opened his shirt and placed a kiss right there that night almost two years ago, before she’d released every other button on the garment and…

Mitch slammed his mind down on that memory because it made his cock twitch inside his pants. Aroused was not a state he wanted to find himself in with a six-foot-plus fireman plastered to his back. It would be better if Hayley Bryant got out of his sight right now so Mack wouldn’t guess the impact her friend had on him.

But right now, drinking in the long-missed sight of her, Mitch couldn’t have asked Hayley to walk away even if he still possessed the power of speech. He felt as though some maniacal hand had curled punishing fingers around his heart and squeezed. Love was not only a damned inconvenient emotion, it was an absolute killer.
Oh, Hayley, how did I let you walk away from me? Why did you stay away so long?

Mitch’s heart raced so fast when he heard his sister’s next words, he thought he might suffer an infarction.

“Hales, I need you to frisk my brother.”

Chapter Two

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why would Mack insist I feel up her brother in this one?

Hayley had been so sure of herself, so certain seeing him again would have virtually no impact on her. After all, she’d grown up in the last two years. She’d moved on. She barely ever thought about how he’d cut out her heart and left it bleeding on the floor of his office. He hardly ever entered her mind…unless she was drifting off to sleep or waiting in line or in any way sitting still. Then she thought about him constantly. But other than that? She didn’t think about him at all. Or much, anyway.

She was over him. So totally over him.

But damn, he still looks good.

Hayley tore her eyes from Mitch’s intense blue stare and transferred her gaze to his sister, hating that it took a mammoth effort for her to do it. “Did you say ‘frisk’?”

“He promised he wouldn’t work while he was here.”

Mitch, not working? That would be a first.

“But his phone’s in his pocket. Would you get it for me?”

There had been a time Hayley would have jumped at the opportunity to get into Mitch Wood’s pants. She would have happily leapt into his arms and licked him all over, like the excited little poodle she used to be.

Not so now.

No way.

Hayley returned her gaze to the man Aidan still held captive, carefully constructing an aloof veneer as she looked him over from head to toe. He still kept his sandy blond hair neatly trimmed, short at the back and sides with a little length on top to keep him from looking like an army drill sergeant. The lines of his face were as implacable as ever, his eyes that same ice blue that his business competitors found unnerving and she’d found as mesmerizing as a hypnotist’s watch. His lips were…

Hayley skimmed her gaze quickly over them. She remembered the rugged outline of his lips well enough. She used to live for every rare moment they curved upward, especially the way they used to when he first saw her in the morning, when she brought him coffee or when she showed initiative around the office.

Business initiative. That other sort Mitch hadn’t responded to quite as well.

“Forget it.” Her brusque statement was a reminder to herself as well as an answer for Mack.

“Come on, Hales. I’m getting married in two days.”

“How long are you going to keep milking that?”

“For however long it works.”

“Clearly, it’s not working.” Mitch sent his sister a self-satisfied smirk, the one he sported anytime he outmaneuvered a rival. He shrugged himself out of Aidan’s hold, and this time the other man let him go. “Hayley is a sensible girl who knows better than to blindly follow your orders, Mack.”

I know better than to hang on every word you say too, you arrogant shit.
Who did he think he was, acting like he knew her? He hadn’t seen her in two years. The
girl
he’d thought her was gone, replaced by a woman who knew her own worth and refused to let any man motivate her decisions. She’d been to Paris, for God’s sake. She’d temped in London, waitressed in the ski resorts of Canada, journeyed from one side of the USA to the other on the back of a motorcycle. Hayley had
lived
every moment of the last twenty-two months.

And in the process, learned to live without Mitch Wood’s approval.

As Mitch made to move away, Hayley stepped in front of him and placed a hand on his chest. Beneath his cotton shirt, his flesh was hot, hard and corded with strength.
So? You’ve touched hot, hard men before, Hayley. No biggie.
She raised her eyes to his and tried not to show how the proximity she’d created between them made her heart hammer. “Not so fast.”

With deliberate slowness, she snaked her hand along his chest, over his abdomen—clearly he still rose at five every day to do crunches—and into his trouser pocket. She tried to pretend she wasn’t impressed by the path her fingers followed but doubted she managed it when she saw Mitch’s gaze rest shrewdly on the thumping pulse at the base of her throat.

Was his heart beating as rapidly as hers? Hayley battled the instinct to press her chest flush to his and find out. She fought it with every ounce of self-restraint she possessed because Mack and Aidan were still close by, and because if Mitch was completely unaffected by their proximity, Hayley really didn’t want to know.

Because she was affected. Damn it. After all this time, after all the miles traveled, Mitch still made her skin burn and her nipples peak. He still made her
yearn
for things he’d never allowed her to have.

Holding his gaze out of sheer stubbornness, Hayley located the phone and closed her fingers around it. Her knuckles brushed against something else hard, and Mitch tensed further, his eyes turning as hot as the blue hearts of twin flames.
Okay, so not completely unaffected.
Hayley obtained some consolation from that as she took a step back and handed Mack the phone.

“Great, thanks, Hales.”

Mack gave her a quick hug. Over his sister’s shoulder, Mitch watched her in a way that did nothing to settle her racing heart.

“Mack, we need to get back to the table,” Aidan said. “I think my parents are going to leave soon.”

“Okay.” She released Hayley and waggled the phone at Mitch. “I’ll return this in the morning, if I’m feeling generous.”

Mack and Aidan took their leave, unaware of the situation they were walking away from. Mitch never took his eyes off Hayley, his attachment to his electronic devices apparently forgotten for the moment. If any other man had looked at her like that, Hayley might have smiled in invitation, let him take his best shot and see where it led.

But this was no ordinary man. This was Mitch, and as sure as she knew the sun would rise perfect and pink on the blue Pacific horizon in the morning, Hayley knew he would do nothing about the attraction that arced between them.

“Hello, Hayley.”

The gravelly rasp of his voice scraped over her skin like a welcome caress. He looked her up and down and there was no mistaking the appreciation in his perusal. Although she tried really hard, Hayley couldn’t keep the huskiness out of her own voice. “Hello, Mitch.”

“You look so…”

“So…?”
Say it, Mitch. I look sexy and experienced, and you want to take me to a quiet corner right now and kiss me, touch me, slip your hand under my dress and—

His brows scrunched tight. “That dress is short.”

He didn’t sound the least happy about it. Didn’t seem he was going to take her to a corner and kiss her anytime soon. Figuring it would aggravate Mitch even more, Hayley stuck out her leg in a model’s pose and said, “Isn’t it, though? I may not have much leg, but I’ve decided what I have isn’t so bad.”

Mitch made a sound in the back of his throat, something like a growl. “We should dance.”

His brusque statement made Hayley lift a brow. “Should we?”

“Mack’s been insisting I have fun. You’d be doing me a favor.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t owe you any favors, Mitch.”

Remorse flashed in his eyes before he averted his gaze with a wince. For a moment Hayley felt sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault she’d fallen in love with him three years ago. As her boss and Mack’s eldest brother it had all been very awkward for him.

Hayley hardened her resolve and her heart. For him it had been awkward. For her it had been soul-destroying.

Mitch moved closer to her, as though he couldn’t resist the force that compelled him to be near her any more than she could tell herself to bolt before he enchanted her all over again. He reached for her hand, enclosing her slim fingers easily in his. “Let me start again. Hayley Bryant, will you do me the honor of dancing with me? I want to hear all about your trip.”

Oh hell.
That softly persuasive tone was more effective than any order he could have given her. Hayley felt herself being drawn into his arms as though falling into a trance. His hand burned her lower back just as the reggae tune coming from the sound system segued into an old Nick Blackthorne ballad, a song about broken hearts and love lost.

Appropriate lyrics that made Hayley’s eyes sting. She stared at the front of Mitch’s white button-down shirt as he moved her against him, refusing to raise her gaze to his and show him all the emotion churning inside her. She took a breath, and the woodsy scent of his cologne filled her, as it had that night they’d almost made love.

Or had
sex
.
That’s all it would have been on Mitch’s part. He’d made that patently clear with all his talk of inappropriate dalliances and workplace harassment and sexual misconduct. Talk about shattering a young girl’s romantic dreams.

By the end of her first week as an intern at Wood and Markham—the job Mitch had given her as a favor to Mack, who never had shucked the habit of offering Hayley a helping hand when she needed it—she’d been madly, hopelessly in love with her former mentor’s big brother. Occasionally she’d caught him gazing at her as though he felt the same way, but Hayley had waited a year for him to make a move and he never did. In the end she’d gotten up the courage to kiss him one night while they were working late.

That one fiery kiss they’d shared was burned in her memory. She’d wanted so much more, yet to Mitch, finishing what they’d started would have been nothing other than a lewd fuck on his office desk, something he would need a lawyer to clean up.

“It’s been a long time, Hayley.”

His rumbled words reminded her that she was supposed to have grown up and grown stronger over the long time Mitch referred to. Hayley straightened her stance, forcing distance between their bodies.
You’re not a twenty-two-year-old idiot with a crush any longer, Hales.

“I had no idea you’d be gone two years.”

Was that a note of censure she detected in his voice? “My around-the-world ticket was open ended. I told you that when I resigned.”

“Everyone was sorry to see you go. I was…”

Hayley’s heart skipped a beat at the unfinished sentence. Had Mitch regretted her abrupt departure from his company, from his life?

Not likely. Her leaving let him off the hook, after all.

“You were an excellent employee,” Mitch finally finished. “You haven’t been easy to replace.”

“But not impossible, right?”

Mitch ignored her barbed query. “Mack tells me you’re back on Australian soil permanently.”

“I loved traveling but I missed home,” Hayley admitted truthfully. “I missed my family.”

“Are you going back to Newcastle?”

“To visit Mum and Dad, yes. I’m not sure I want to move back. I grew too used to the Queensland sun the year I spent here.”

She’d gotten used to a lot of things that she’d had to get un-used to in the past couple of years. Her sporty red car. A full wardrobe of clothes. Mitch’s smiles.

“Do you have a job lined up?”

Trust Mitch to think of that immediately. Work was never far from his mind. “Not yet. I’m considering my options.”

Drawing back, he searched her face, his expression calculating. “Who’s made you an offer?”

Hayley would have laughed, but his nearness made her too breathless. He actually thought she was fielding job offers from his business rivals. What was he going to do—give her her old job back? She couldn’t possibly accept. “So far only Kylie.” At his perplexed look she elucidated. “She said I could waitress here for a while if I wanted.”

“Waitress.” Mitch stared at her. “But you’re a business graduate.”

“Who’s been supporting herself slinging drinks and running tables for two years.”

“No one will hold that against you. You’re a smart woman, well qualified. You could get a good job.”

“You mean a
real
job, don’t you?” Hayley bit out. “One that consumes my life, like yours does.”

“It doesn’t
consume
me.”