Getting Red-Hot with the Rogue

by Ally Blake

  ‘I don’t know why I bothered coming to you,’ she said on a sigh as she slid off her desk, grabbed her purse and Hannah’s arm and dragged her from the office and into the long, carpeted hallway lit only by the fluorescent green emergency signs.

  Hannah linked her hand through Wynnie’s elbow. ‘Because I’m such a fun source of moral corruption. Now tell Auntie Hannah what’s really bothering you.’

  ‘Okay. I can’t believe I’m about to say this. He acts like, well, not as though he likes me, but as though he’s finding it really hard not to ravage me on the spot.’ She held on to Hannah’s arm and squeezed her eyes shut tight, feeling ridiculous now she’d said the words out loud. ‘And I know that he’s well-practised at the art, and he’s likely had every other woman in town and that’s the only reason I’m still on his radar, but, still, I can’t help but feel it.’

  ‘And this is a bad thing?’

  ‘It makes it extremely difficult to focus.’

  Hannah’s laughter bounced off the windows and walls until it echoed inside Wynnie’s head. She opened one eye.

  ‘That’s why they call him the smiling assassin,’ Hannah said. ‘He blinds with that beautiful face and body and voice and…Well, that’s enough really. Then while you’re drowning in his eyes he kills your proposal before you’ve even finished shaking his hand. It’s kind of his MO.’

  Wynnie let that sink in, all the way to her suddenly heavy toes. ‘This is common knowledge? What the hell else are the CFC’s researchers leaving out?’

  Hannah smiled and nodded.

  ‘And this is the man you all convinced me was the one I had to lobby? The same man you have continuously tried to convince me to ask out on a date?’

  The nodding and smiling stopped as Hannah obviously saw her point. ‘I’m a lawyer. It’s my job to be able to argue both sides of the same point with equally compelling reason. Besides which, sweetie, you know better than most that a person’s reputation is only a portion of their true self.’

  Wynnie shook her head. This wasn’t about her, it was about ruddy Dylan Kelly. ‘You told me he was a rogue easily enough, why has it taken you until now to tell me this is his business reputation?’

  Hannah sniffed. ‘I’m no gossip.’

  ‘Yes, you are!’

  ‘You’re right, I am. I truly thought we were mucking about. It never occurred to me that you might really be taken with him.’

  ‘How can I not be? He’s all I ever talk about at work, all I ever talk about with my media contacts. He and his business and his family are all I ever think about. I’m saturated by the guy.’

  Hannah grinned. ‘How much do I love that imagery? Now come on, my young friend, he is wealthy, influential, sexy, and available. If you cut out that entire group as possible dating material what are you leaving for yourself?’

  ‘Helpful, thanks.’

  ‘Hey, I’m a realist. Which is why I’m trying to save the planet, and also why I’m not going to rule out any cute guy just because I work with him, or just because he doesn’t have the exact same beliefs as me, or just because he has eight toes on each foot.’ Hannah jabbed a finger at the security doors. ‘It happens.’

  Just before the doors opened Wynnie caught her reflection in the glass—her eyes were wide and dark just from thinking about the guy. She was taken with him. But now she was coming to realise how much that sprang from his contradictions. He played the playboy with such panache, but it still couldn’t hide the depth of his convictions, and his single-mindedness when it came to protecting his family.

  The similarity to her own double life was stunning. How was a girl like her to resist?

  They hit the Toowong street to find it bustling with late-night shoppers, locals strolling after eating out, and uni students herding towards the plethora of local pubs.

  ‘So here’s my two cents,’ Hannah said, ‘for which I’d actually charge four hundred dollars an hour if it was anyone else but you, so pay attention. You’re a sweetheart and if you like him, then he has to be worth liking. If you’re not yet sure if you can trust him, trust yourself.’

  Trust. That was what this whole thing was about. Her rabid inability to trust anyone but herself. Hell, her trust in herself had been worn pretty thin, too. She didn’t need a psychology degree to know it came from being let down in the worst possible way by the closest person to her in all the world.

  The easy ability to love she’d had as a kid had been stripped away the second she’d opened the door of her Sociology 101 class to find herself face to face with the dean and a handful of policemen.

  Too bad if she was coming to believe that deep down Dylan Kelly might actually be decent.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hannah asked when she realised Wynnie had stopped walking.

  ‘Waiting for the bus.’

  ‘You do this every night?’

  ‘Most.’

  Hannah grabbed her by the sleeve and tugged her up the brightly lit street. ‘You try too hard.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with trying. I have no intention of hopping in a car every day if I don’t even need to.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘My car’s gonna be guzzling gas anyway. I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘Fine. Just let’s talk about something else for a while.’

  Hannah linked her arm through Wynnie’s once more. ‘Ah, what fine weather we’re having.’

  Wynnie laughed. Brisbane almost always had fine weather. But playing along would serve her cause. ‘We sure are.’

  On Friday evening Dylan sauntered into his office, his eyes skimming over the below-the-fold article on the front page of The Australian, a paper cup of fresh coffee warming his other hand, when the hairs on the back of his neck told him he wasn’t alone.

  Jack Colby, an old school mate, and the best private investigator in the country, was sitting in his office chair, feet on his desk, ignoring the stunning, glittering night view of the Riverside Expressway and South Bank bordering the city straight of the Brisbane River.

  ‘Evening, Jack,’ he said.

  Jack’s silhouette nodded. ‘Dylan. How’s things?’

  ‘The amount I pay you I’d hope you know the answer to that better than I.’

  It took him a second to remember when and why he’d hired Jack this time around.

  When? Days earlier. Why? Wynnie Devereaux.

  From the moment he’d looked into those soft brown eyes down the lens of Eric’s mate’s camera he’d found himself in uncharted waters—torn between wanting to slap a restraining order against her stopping her from coming anywhere near his family, and wanting to immerse himself in the heat that flickered deep in her eyes every time they made contact with his, and wanting to do whatever he had to do to ease the aching vulnerability that engulfed her in moments when she let down her guard.

  None of those courses of action was ideal so he’d needed to find another way to cut her off.

  Since there was no way she was merely the frustratingly sexy tree-hugger she appeared to be, she had to have a hidden agenda, a self-serving reason why he was in her line of sight. They always did.

  Indubitably once he knew exactly what her ulterior motives were, she would be rendered far less intriguing. Enter Jack.

  Dylan closed his paper and threw it on the coffee table by the lounge suite in the corner. He undid the buttons at his wrists, rolled up his sleeves and dragged a tub chair over to the guest side of his desk.

  ‘What’ve you got?’

  Jack sat forward and opened up a slim, innocuous-looking Manila folder.

  ‘Rightio. Wynnie Devereaux. Twenty-seven years old. Brunette. Brown eyes. Slim build. Average height. Single. Pretty girl.’

  Jack didn’t know the half of it. Her soft floral scent invaded Dylan’s dreams. He could feel the warmth of her skin caressing his palms in the middle of business meetings. Every time he saw a woman with dark brown hair, anywhere, he found himself looking twice.

  Dylan raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t pay
you to editorialise.’

  Jack grinned. ‘It’s rare this job has such perks.’ He slid a handful of photographs of her across the desk.

  The first was Wynnie walking down a city street the day they’d first met. He’d recognise those thighs in those white pants anywhere. A curly-haired blonde was at her side, hands gesticulating.

  As he moved through the photos Wynnie’s face was serious, shocked, then laughing. Her wrists were bound in bandages. He ran a finger across his lips to stop from smiling.

  In the final picture she seemed to be looking directly into the camera, her brow furrowed, her eyes determined, her dark hair whipping about her lovely face. Eyes like honey. Skin like cream. Her life force bursting from her every pore.

  Dylan’s whole hand rested across his mouth. If that was all Jack could get…

  He threw the photos onto the desk. ‘Nothing I didn’t already know from just meeting her.’

  ‘I was simply waiting until I had your attention.’

  Dylan’s eyes narrowed. ‘You have it.’

  ‘She studied a range of humanities on a scholarship at the University of Queensland when she was eighteen after being home-schooled her whole life, but didn’t finish even a year. She moved to Paris before she turned twenty and once there talked her way into a job with a local parks beautification group.’

  So that made sense of the faint accent at least.

  ‘She’s worked for numerous organisations since, raising funds, lobbying for government help, last of which was an Arena di Verona Restoration Committee. The money she raised and the profile she built for the Opera house would turn even you on a little bit.’

  Dylan shifted in his chair. As if he needed another reason. ‘That’s it? She’s a gifted twenty-seven-year-old lobbyist. You’re slipping, my friend.’

  Jack just leant back in his chair and grinned.

  The hairs on the back of Dylan’s neck stood to attention. There was more. And not just more. There was dirt. A valid reason for him to be on his guard and exceedingly wary of the vigorous way he reacted to her.

  ‘One salient thing I might point out before you file that folder away,’ Jack drawled.

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘Though Wynnie Devereaux is the name on her driver’s licence, her passport, her Medicare card, her employment contracts, it’s not her real name.’

  Dylan placed a finger on the top photo, the one where he could look into her eyes. ‘Then who the hell is she?’

  Jack stood and cocked his hand into the shape of a pistol. ‘I don’t want to spoil all the surprises. The rest I’ll let you read for yourself.’

  He swept from his office, leaving Dylan with a bill, and the thin Manila folder that suddenly seemed a mile deep.

  Dylan stared at it, unusually unwilling to dive right in. Because the truth of it was, even though he’d been the one to have her background plundered for dirt, for some ridiculous reason he’d half believed that maybe, just maybe, he’d met the last honest woman on the planet.

  It seemed he’d been right all along. There was no such creature to be found.

  He opened the folder, flicked through until he found the photocopy of an old news report, and began to read.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON SATURDAY night Wynnie and Hannah’s cab, a hybrid to keep them both happy, pulled up in front of the Queensland Museum at South Bank. The great hulking concrete and glass building was floodlit by blocks of pink and orange light, the pathway ahead swathed in pink and orange chiffon.

  Through the car windows Wynnie watched women in glamorous, barely there, summertime evening dress and men in exquisite tuxedos slip from shiny black town cars that lined the street in front and behind them.

  ‘Charity balls sure ain’t what they used to be,’ she said under her breath. ‘It looks like an orgy waiting to happen.’

  Hannah appeared at the window and Wynnie jumped. Then realised she was still inside the cab, whose driver was waiting for her to vamoose. She shot him a quick smile and hopped out, taking care to keep her knees locked as flash bulbs of paparazzi cameras did their all to catch her in a compromising position in case she was a somebody.

  She held her sparkly silver purse in front of her face, ostensibly to shield her eyes from the lights, but more truthfully it was a move born of instinct.

  Putting herself in the public eye she could handle. But the thousand flashes of a flock of rabid photographers crowding towards her, screaming her name, always took her right back to the time when she had been a ‘person of interest’ in the bombing of a uni science lab, walking from the police station a free woman but with the life she’d known in tatters at her feet.

  Hannah grabbed her hand away from her face. ‘I know I look super-hot tonight, but they don’t know me from a bar of soap. You, Wynnie my sweet, they lurve. So for the sake of my standing with the bosses, for the sake of the money I spent on this dress, and by George, for the sake of the planet, smile for the cameras.’

  Wynnie mentally slapped herself across the back of the head. She was no longer an ice-blonde with pixie-short hair. She no longer wore enough eyeliner to sink a ship. Ponchos and multi-coloured hemp flares were no longer her uniform of choice. And she’d lost the classic freshman fifteen pounds a long time ago.

  So she smiled, she twirled, she tossed her hair. She waved to photographers and cameramen she’d met during her interviews so far. She gave pithy sound bites about the Clean Footprint Coalition to anyone with a recording device. And she thanked her lucky stars for cortisone now that her wrists were clear bar a slight pink ring that nobody would see unless they got really really close.

  And she acted for all the world as though beneath her short, slinky tomato-red silk dress she had nothing to hide. Her arms were covered to her wrists, but her legs were bare to mid-thigh, and the thing slithered so close against every inch of her skin the world now knew she had an ‘innie’ for a belly button.

  When they walked through the front doors her eyes almost popped out of her head. The long, thin, three-storey foyer was usually empty, bar stunning, life-sized models of a family of humpback whales suspended in the open space above. This night, bringing the same warm, decadent feeling from the outside inside, backlit swathes of pink and orange crêpe draped from the ceiling creating intimate, warm, rosy, golden light over the ornate, candlelit tables scattered throughout.

  ‘Is there going to be any money left over to give to the charity?’ Wynnie said out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Not our charity tonight,’ Hannah said, ‘so not our concern. Just be grateful the head honchos love you so much they gave us these tickets, and remember we’re here to get you some much-needed fun. To get some booze into you. Then a bit of dance-floor action when the party gets going. Maybe you’ll even meet yourself a nice, cute, harmless yet wild-in-the-sack philanthropist. Because you can’t stay wound up this tight or you’re gonna pop. And there’s nowhere in that dress for you to go.’

  Hannah grinned, picked up the heavy tribal beat of the music booming through the lofty space and boogied away into the pulsating crowd.

  But Wynnie’s feet had stuck to the floor of the wickedly decorated foyer. She wished then that she’d worn a sack, or a large shawl or at the very least an entirely different dress.

  For not ten feet in front of her, looking resplendent in an exquisite tuxedo, stood Dylan Kelly.

  Not now, she thought, not tonight. Not when she still hadn’t come to any logical, sensible, rational conclusions about what she could do with the feelings she had for the guy.

  Still she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Standing in a group of men about his age, all dressed much the same, all exuding that suave, easy, master-of-the-universe air that came of growing up blanketed by privilege, Dylan Kelly stood out as though he walked through life with a spotlight shining down upon him.

  His dark blond hair looked darker, slicked back off his face. He had one hand in the pocket of his black trousers, pulling the seat firmly across a pinch
able derrière. He pointed at something in the distance, stretching his snowy white shirt tight across his torso that made the very most of the kind of build that spoke of sit-ups and a lot of them.

  Her mouth literally began to water.

  As though someone had tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘she’s here’ Dylan glanced away from the group and his eyes found hers. Hot, dark, stunning blue.

  In a nervous gesture she couldn’t control, her hand fluttered to her hair, brushing against her butterfly clip tucked within the waves. But rather than feeling grounded, she felt fragile, breakable, small.

  Without saying a word, Dylan left the group and made a beeline towards her. The crowd parted. His gaze slunk down one side of her underdressed body then up the other, leaving a trail of enfeebling goose bumps in its wake.

  As he came close enough she could pick out the scent of his now all too familiar aftershave his eyes found hers. He conjured the most charming half-smile as he drawled, ‘Of all the museums in all the world…’

  Wynnie gripped her purse so tight sequins left tattoos on her hot palms. ‘Why, Dylan Kelly, what on earth is a man like you doing in a place like this?’

  He moved to stand beside her, clasping his hands behind his back as he looked out over the crowd. ‘Perhaps I knew you’d be here tonight. Perhaps I’ve come to see the creature in her own environment, mingling with her own species. Such a scoop would certainly help me to learn a thing or two about how to defend myself against you.’

  Wynnie smiled and waved to a woman involved with solar energy research whom she’d met through the CFC when she’d first come to town. The woman waved back, though only after fixing her hair in case Dylan’s eyes turned her way, as well.

  ‘You think you need help?’ she muttered. ‘Between you and me you’re doing a bang-up job so far.’

  ‘One must always do what one can to do better.’

  She glanced sideways to find he was no longer interested in the crowd. His attention was one hundred per cent on her.

  She said, ‘It’s fifteen hundred dollars per plate. That’s an expensive experiment.’