Free The Rebound Guy by Fiona Harper Page B

managed to put the brakes on at the last second. Seemed that working for Jason was teaching her new skills in self-control.
    â€˜How you...hypnotise...them,’ she finally said, watching Jason’s smile grow slowly even more wicked. ‘At least, that’s what I assume you do, because any woman in possession of her full senses would see through you in a flash.’
    â€˜Like you do,’ he said, his voice low and velvety.
    â€˜Precisely.’ She straightened her spine, turned and walked away, ignoring the knowledge that he was silently laughing at her as she headed back to the safety of her desk.
    But at least he hadn’t pressed the matter or decided he was in a teasing kind of mood. She really didn’t want to know how good in bed he was. Chloe would say it was because she’d regret what she was missing, but it wasn’t that. When the sex was good, it was a nice extra in a relationship, but it couldn’t be the foundation. She’d had that kind of chemistry with Tim and look how well that had turned out.
    Oh, she knew it wasn’t always a disaster—Chloe and Dan being a case in point—but good sex, even off-the-charts sex wasn’t a guarantee of any sort, even if those wonderful endorphins it produced were such good liars, telling you it meant something when it didn’t, making you feel that something cosmically earth-shattering had occurred, when really it was just some well-designed biology to keep the species going.
    She didn’t believe in ‘soulmates’ anymore. You just had to find a good match, someone you got on with, who wanted the same things out of life as you did, and if there was a spark there so much the better.
    Never again would she be one of those silly women like the ones on Jason’s list. The ones who believed too much, who saw a god when there was really only an ordinary fallible man. No, Kelly had her eyes open now, and she was never going to be tricked that way again. The happiness of her and her boys depended on it.

SIX
    Kelly arrived at Greenwich Park the following Saturday with a firm grip on each of her sons and a cool bag slung across her body. The strap dug into her shoulder more with every step, but she wasn’t going to let go of Cal and Ben until they’d reached their destination. There was no telling where they’d run off to otherwise and the park was a big place.
    Thankfully, she soon found some faces she recognised on a flat expanse of grass just before the landscape dipped dramatically to meet the Thames. Across the river, the sun glinted off the skyscrapers in Canary Wharf. It seemed odd for the towering buildings to be so close when she was standing in a royal park that was so old the sense of a rural idyll still clung about it.
    She sighed and looked up at the bright sun climbing steadily in the sky. Weather forecasting was obviously not her talent, because the day was as clear and warm as any that blessed Los Angeles. Well, that was what Kelly imagined. The furthest west she’d ever been was St Ives.
    As they neared the growing sprawl of Aspire employees, she tried to stop herself scanning the crowd for Jason. And failed miserably.
    It didn’t matter. He wasn’t there yet. She shook her head and concentrated on laying a tartan blanket out on the warm grass, forbidding herself from looking up and checking for who else had arrived once she’d finished. That done, she sat down and leaned back on her hands, legs stretched in front of her, enjoying the sun on her face and the slight breeze that ruffled the loose hair around her shoulders.
    At least, she enjoyed it until she was felled by two small boys who’d launched themselves at her. They were alternately strangling her, bouncing up and down and eyeing the play park at the bottom of the vast hill.
    â€˜Can we go to the swings, Mummy? Can we? Can we? Please? ’
    Kelly unhooked Ben’s arm from around her windpipe and gasped for