Foreign Affair by Amanda Martinez Page A

impeccably dressed. She couldn't tear her eyes away as they all stood at the bar doing shots and flirting with the bartender. Looking around the room every woman had their eyes trained on the four boisterous men, same as Kate. Her breath hitched as one looked her dead in the eye and after a moment smirked and lifted his glass to her in a salute. His hair was black and pushed back like a woman had run her finger through it just moments ago and his eyes were dark, the center like two black discs. He was all masculine. The black suit constraining to hold his obvious muscles and the unbuttoned collar of his shirt showing just a tiny sliver of his chest. Dangerous, a man like that was dangerous in the best and the worse sense. The kind of man that thrilled Kate but her mother hated and would just die if Kate ever brought someone like him home. But with that look, Kate could hardly keep herself from crawling on the sticky floor to him, climbing up onto the bar and laying back to let him have his way with her.
    "Did you hear me Kate? Kate!" Kate's vision snapped back to James. He was smiling broadly at her. By all means, James was someone she should fall for. Their life would be comfortable and reasonably happy. But he didn't make her toes curl and she couldn't imagine his blonde hair between her legs. She could still feel the intense stare of the man at the bar. "See someone you know," he asked searching the room for the source of her loss of focus. He looked back at Kate strangely when he followed her line of sight to the men at the bar.
    "I'm sorry, James. They're just so... loud. Makes it hard to hear you," she said, making up any excuse she could find. She smiled, hoping that would placate James.
    "Don't look at them. They look like a bunch of thugs. Do you want me to say something?" He rose to leave the table and confront the men, who definitely wouldn't take James as a challenge to fight. Kate rested her hand on James' to stop him.
    "No, no need James. Tell me more about your trip to Brazil again, would you?" Kate nodded at all of the right times during the story, finishing her drink, all the while feeling that same gaze still on her. She swore she could feel the burn as it traveled from her eyes to her lips, down her neck and over her breasts. Unlike James, this stare turned her on and she wished he wouldn't stop. But it also made her a little uncomfortable, like someone was seeing into her soul.
    "Did you want another drink," James asked, full of hope.
    Kate looked at his face. Trying to think of some reason where she might like this guy. But instead her mouth stretched into an involuntary yawn. "Oh God, I'm sorry. No, I don't think so. I have to be up early tomorrow."
    James smiled and nodded, undeterred from the yawn. "Alright well, let me go to the restroom and I'll get you a cab." Kate nodded as he left the table and then immediately grabbed her compact from her purse. Opening it to check her lipstick. Still perfectly in place, as usual, the red accentuating her full lips. Closing the compact and putting it back in her purse when she felt someone sit down, she looked up to see not James but the man that was staring at her at the bar. His large form relaxed in the chair and his hand swiveling a glass filled with whiskey on the table.
    "Uh... excuse me?" Kate asked raising an eyebrow.
    "That one," the man said tilting his head in the direction James just walked, "is not the man for you." Kate had a hard time understanding him through his accent. British? Australian?
    "What," she said narrowing her eyes.
    "Your date, love. You need more danger in your life than that pansy."
    Kate sat back and crossed her arms. "Really? And what makes an Aussie like you think that?"
    The man smiled and shook his head. "Not Aussie. Irish." He took a sip of his drink. "And I think that because you're bored by him. Too smart, too sexy, too full of passion. I knew that the moment I saw you."
    Kate was simultaneously annoyed and intrigued by the