Cracking the Dating Code Read Free Page A

privacy—they were obviously friends. She didn’t need to be privy to their every word.
    Besides, a little distance might give her time to shake off the aftereffects of his touch and the way that fleeting moment of skin on skin had made her feel. Namely hot and bothered and altogether unsettled.
    The wet one was making his way back towards her, his jeans clinging to those long, muscled thighs she’d noticed before.
    She hadn’t noticed the weight in his crotch before, which given he’d been lying face down wasn’t surprising, but she noticed it now and she swallowed hard and looked away.
    Probably best not to commit that bit of him to memory. It could quite conceivably spoil her for all other men.
    Mal’s boat roared to life and reversed away from the pier. Poppy waved and tried to remain calm as her host drew nearer.
    ‘So how do you want to do this?’ he asked gruffly when he reached her. ‘It’s your show.’
    ‘Well…’ said Poppy, mindful that his head might well be pounding and his temper short. ‘You could always drop me where the computers are, earn my eternal gratitude with a cup of industrial-strength coffee and thenleave me to get started on the work I came here to do. Does that sound all right?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, and shot her a glance she couldn’t fathom. ‘That sounds fine.’

CHAPTER TWO
    S HE wasn’t what he’d expected. Tomas had called Poppy a little grey mouse with an IQ several sizes too big for her, but Seb didn’t see a mouse when he looked at Ophelia West.
    He saw quietness, yes. Adaptability. A certain tolerance for the foibles of others. Calm blue eyes, he saw those too, along with flawless, creamy coloured skin, hair the colour of toffee streaked with sunshine and a lithe, willowy body he had no business noticing.
    As for her lips…they’d been the first thing he’d noticed when he’d opened his eyes and he’d known instantly
exactly
where he wanted them.
    He should have taken it as a warning.
    Hell, he
had
taken it as a warning.
    He’d been all set to send her back with Mal, only somewhere along the way she’d treated him as a man of his word and the next thing he knew Ophelia West was staying andMal was going and everyone was expecting Seb to conjure up a badge of honour out of
nowhere
and be a better man.
    Just like that.
    Damned if she didn’t make him at least want to try.
    He headed for the office, found his sunglasses, put them on and sighed as the light dialled down a notch or four. He tried looking at Poppy West again, mighty relieved when she blended into the surroundings a whole lot better than she had before.
    Maybe he’d just been imagining the calamity of her touch and the way her eyes had widened and those angel’s lips had parted when his thumb had practically encircled her wrist.
    Bacon and coffee. Caffeine and fat. Get those into him, shut her in Tom’s office and, if she was anything like his brother, she might not emerge for days.
    It sounded like a plan.
    He picked up her bag and headed for the quad. Slung his leg over the seat and started it up, wincing at the noisy rumble that played right along with the pounding in his head.
    Lots and lots of caffeine and fat.
    ‘You coming?’ he said, and without a word she slid into place behind him with her bagin between them like a wall. No hands at his waist, no cheerful flirty quip. Just a colleague of Tomas’s who’d come here to work.
    It took them fifteen minutes to reach the house.
    A fifteen-minute ride along a rough dirt track up the side of a steep hill and along a plateau that today boasted a view of endless ocean blending seamlessly into the hazy blue of an unsettled sky. Wind whipped at Seb’s hair and hers and a wayward caramel tendril cut across his cheek before sliding around his neck like a slender hangman’s rope.
    He gritted his teeth, cursed his wet jeans and asked for all the speed the bike beneath him had.
    The roughest patch of track curled around a rock ridge, just before