Once a Rebel...

by Nikki Logan

His eyes dropped away for a moment and when they lifted again they were softer. Kinder. So much worse. ‘Shirley, look—’

  ‘Shiloh.’

  ‘Shirley. There’s a whole bunch of reasons I haven’t been able to progress your mother’s list.’

  ‘“Progress” suggests you’ve actually started.’ Okay, now she was being as rude as he’d been on her arrival. Her high moral ground was crumbling. She lifted her chin. ‘I came because I wanted to know what happened. You were so gutted at the funeral, how could you have followed through on none of them?’

  He shrugged. ‘Real life got in the way.’

  Funny. Losing your mother at fourteen had felt pretty real to her. ‘For ten years?’

  His eyes darkened. ‘I don’t owe you any explanation, Shirley.’

  ‘You owe her. And I’m here in her place.’

  ‘The teacher I knew never would have asked anyone to justify themselves.’

  He pushed past her and headed for his house. She turned her head back over her shoulder. ‘Was she so easily forgotten, Hayden?’

  Behind her, his crunching footfalls on the path paused. His voice, when it came, was frosty. ‘Go home, Shirley. Take your high expectations and your bruised feelings and your do-me boots and get back in your car. There’s nothing for you here.’

  She stood on the spot until she heard the front door to his little cottage slam shut. Disappointment washed through her. Then she spun and marched up the path towards her car, dress swishing.

  But as she got to the place where the path forked, her steps faltered.

  Go home was not an answer. And she’d come for answers. She owed it to her mother to at least try to find out what had happened. To put this particular demon to rest. She stared at the path. Right led to the street and her beaten-up old car. Left led to the front door of Hayden’s secluded cottage.

  Where she and her opinions weren’t welcome.

  Then again, she’d made rather a life speciality out of unpopular opinions. Why stop now?

  She turned left.

  Hayden marched past his living room, heading for the kitchen and the hot pot of coffee that substituted for alcohol these days. But, as he did so, he caught sight of a pale figure, upright and prim on his lounge-room sofa. Like a ghost from his past.

  He backed up three steps and lifted a brow at Shirley through the doorway.

  ‘Come in.’

  Her boots were one thing when she was standing, but seated and carefully centred, and with her hands and dress demurely folded over the top of them, they stole focus, big time. Almost as if the more modest she tried to be, the dirtier those boots got. He wrestled with his gaze to prevent it following his filthy mind. This was Carol-Anne’s kid.

  Though there was nothing kid-like about her now.

  ‘The door was unlocked.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  She pressed her hands closer together in her lap. ‘And I wasn’t finished.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Less was definitely more with this one. The women he was used to being with either didn’t understand half of what he said or they were smart enough not to try to keep up. It had been a long time since he’d got as good as he’d given. One part of him hankered for a bit of intellectual sparring. Another part of him wanted to run a mile.

  ‘I think you should finish the list,’ she said in a clear, brave voice.

  Little faker.

  ‘Start the list, technically.’

  ‘Right.’ She seemed nonplussed that he’d made a joke about it. Was she expecting him to go on the attack? Where was the fun in that when he could toy with her longer by staying cool?

  Now that he looked at her, he could see the resemblance to Carol under all her make-up. Mrs Marr to everyone else, but he’d presumed to call her Carol the first time he’d sat in her class and she’d smiled every time and never corrected him.

  It was Shirley’s irises that were like her mother’s—the palest khaki. He’d have assumed contact lenses if not for the fact that he’d seen them before on a woman too sensible and too smart to be sucked in by the trappings of vanity. Shirley reminded him of one of those Russian dolls-inside-a-doll things. She had large black pupils surrounded by extraordinary grey-green irises, within the clearest white eyeballs he’d ever seen, and the whole thing fringed by smudges of catwalk charcoal around her lashes. Her eyes were set off by ivory skin and the whole picture was framed by a tumble of black locks piled on top. Probably kept in place by some kind of hidden engineering, but it looked effortless enough to make him want to thrust his hands into it and send it tumbling down.

  Just to throw her off her game.

  Just to see how it felt sliding through his fingers.

  Instead, he played the bastard. The last time he’d seen her she’d been standing small and alone at her mother’s funeral, all bones and unrealised potential. Now she was … He dropped his gaze to the curve of her neck. It was only slightly less gratuitous than staring at her cleavage.

  Another thing he hadn’t touched in years. Curves.

  ‘Looks like you’ve been on good pasture.’

  The only sign of that particular missile hitting its target was the barest of flinches in her otherwise steady gaze. She swallowed carefully before speaking and sat up taller, expression composed. ‘You really work hard at being unpleasant, don’t you?’

  A fighter. Good for her.

  He shrugged. ‘I am unpleasant.’

  ‘Alcohol does that.’

  His whole body froze. A dirty fighter, then. But his past wasn’t all that hard to expose with a few hours and an Internet connection. ‘I don’t drink any more.’

  ‘Probably just as well. Imagine how unbearable you’d be if you did.’

  He fixed his eyes on her wide, clear ones, forcing his mind not to find this verbal swordplay stimulating. ‘What do you want, Shirley?’

  ‘I want to ask you about my mother.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You want to ask me about the list.’

  ‘Yes.’ She stared, serene and composed. The calmness under pressure reminded him a lot of her mother.

  ‘How did you even know it existed?’

  Her steady eyes flicked for just a moment. ‘I heard you, at the wake. Talking about it.’

  He’d not let himself think about that day in a long, long time. ‘Why didn’t you add your name?’

  She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t invited.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘And I didn’t even know she had a bucket list until that day.’

  Did that hurt her? That her mother had shared it with strangers but not her? A long dormant part of him lifted its drowsy head. Empathy. ‘You were young. We were her peers.’

  She snorted. ‘You were her students.’

  The old criticism still found a target. Even after all this time. ‘You weren’t there, Shirley. We were more like friends.’ He had hungered for intellectual stimulation he just hadn’t found in students his own age and her mother had filled it.

  ‘I was there. You just didn’t know it.’

  He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I used to hide under the stairs when you would all come over for your extra credit Saturdays. Listen in. Learn.’

  What? ‘You were, what, fourteen?’

  ‘Actually, I was eleven when you first started coming. I was fourteen when you stopped.’

  ‘Most eleven-year-olds don’t have a fascination with philosophy.’

  She licked her lips, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral. Except for the tiny flush that spiked high in her cheeks. And he knew she was lying about something.

  ‘Ask me what you really want to know.’ And then go. His tolerance for company was usually only as long as it took to get laid.

  She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you even start the list?’

  Oh … so many reasons. None of them good and none of them public. ‘How many have you done?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Six.’

  Huh. That was a pretty good rate,
given she had been a teenager for the first half of that decade. The old guilt nipped. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Ballooning, horse-riding in the Snowy Mountains, marathon—’

  He gave her curves a quick once-over. ‘You ran a marathon?’ She ignored him. With good reason.

  ‘—abseiling, and climbing the Harbour Bridge.’

  The easy end of the list. ‘That’s only five.’

  ‘Tomorrow I swim with the dolphins.’

  Tomorrow. The day after today. Something about the immediacy of that made him nervous. ‘Won’t you eviscerate if you go in the sun, or something?’

  She glared at him. ‘I’m pale, I’m not a vampire. Stop hedging. Why haven’t you done a single one?’

  She was going to keep on asking until he told her. And she wasn’t going to like the answer. ‘I’ve been too busy besmirching my soul.’

  She frowned. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Making lots of money.’

  ‘That should make it easier to do the things on the list, not harder.’

  ‘Success doesn’t make itself. You have to work hard. Put in the hours.’ So many hours …

  Her lips thinned. ‘I’m well aware of that. But this list was your idea. To remind you of the importance of feeding your soul.’ His own words sounded pretentious on her dark-red lips. ‘To honour my mother’s memory.’

  The distress she was trying to hide under her anti-tan crept out in the slightest of wobbles.

  There it was again. The weird pang of empathy. ‘They’re meaningless, Shirley. The things. They won’t bring her back.’

  ‘They keep her alive. In here.’ Pressing her long, elegant fingers to her sternum only highlighted the way her dress struggled to contain her chest. And the way her chest struggled to contain her anger.

  ‘That’s important for you; you’re her daughter—’

  ‘You were her friend.’

  His gut screwed down into a hard fist. He pushed to his feet. Forced lightness to his voice. ‘What are you, the Ghost of Christmas Past? Life goes on.’

  Those eyes that had seemed big outside were enormous in here, under the fluorescent glow of her sorrow. The silence was breached only by the sound of her strained breathing.

  ‘What happened to you, Hayden?’ she whispered.

  He flinched. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I believed you, back then. When you sat at my mother’s funeral looking so torn up and pledged to honour her memory.’

  She stared at him. Hard. As if she could see right through him. And for one crazy moment he wished that were true. That someone could drag it all out into the open to air. Instead of festering. But the rotting had started long before he’d begun to go to her house on Saturdays.

  He clenched his fists behind his back. ‘That makes two of us.’

  ‘It’s not too late to start.’

  He needed to be moving. ‘Oh, I think the time for me to make good on that particular promise is long past,’ he said, turning and walking out of the room.

  She caught up with him in the kitchen, grabbed his arm and then dropped it just as quickly. Did she feel the same jolt he had?

  Her steady words gave nothing away. ‘Come to the dolphins with me tomorrow.’

  ‘No.’

  She curled the fingers she’d touched him with down by her side. ‘Why not? Scared?’

  He turned and gave her his most withering stare. ‘Please.’

  ‘Then come.’

  ‘Not interested.’

  The smile she threw him was tight, but not unattractive. ‘I’ll drive.’

  He glanced down at her boots. ‘You’re just as likely to get your heel speared in the accelerator and drive us into—’

  At the very last moment, his brain caught up with his mouth. She didn’t need a reminder of how her mother had died.

  Silence weighed heavily.

  She finally broke it. ‘I’ll pick you up at dawn.’

  ‘I won’t be here,’ he lied. As if he had anywhere else to be.

  ‘I’ll come anyway.’ She turned for the door.

  He shouted after her. ‘Shirley—’

  ‘Shiloh.’

  ‘—why are you doing this?’

  She paused, but didn’t turn back. He had no trouble hearing her, thanks to the hallway’s tall ceiling. ‘Because it’s something I can do.’

  ‘She won’t know,’ he murmured.

  Her shoulders rose and fell. Just once.

  ‘No. But I will.’ She started down the hall again. ‘And so will you.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘COME on, Hayden,’ Shirley muttered.

  She banged the door with the heel of her hand to protect her acrylics. She paused, listened. Stepped back and leaned over to look in the window.

  Which bothered her more? The fact that he’d actually left his home before dawn to avoid having to see her again or the fact that she could have turned around a dozen times on the drive over here—maybe should have—but she’d decided not to.

  Because she wanted to give him a chance. The old Hayden.

  No one could be that much of an ass, surely. She stared at the still silent door.

  Looked as if he was the real deal.

  ‘Ass!’ she yelled out to the empty miles around them, then turned and walked away.

  The front door rattled as her foot hit the bottom step on his porch.

  ‘Is that some kind of greeting ritual in your culture?’

  By the time she had turned, Hayden was leaning on the doorframe. Shirtless, barefoot. A pair of green track pants hanging low on his hips and bunched at his ankles. Looking for all the world like he wasn’t expecting a soul.

  One hundred per cent intentional.

  He was trying to throw her.

  ‘Good. You’re ready,’ she breezed, working hard to keep her breathing on the charts and her eyes off his bare chest. She’d spent years as a teenager secretly imagining what her mother’s star pupil would look like under all his loose bohemian layers. The sudden answer may not have been what her teenage self would have conceived, but it didn’t disappoint. No gratuitous muscle-stacks, just the gently curved contours up top and the long, angular lines down lower that showed he kept himself in good, lean shape.

  And he knew it.

  She fixed a brave smile on her face and turned to make room for him on the steps. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘You don’t actually think I’m going like this?’ he drawled.

  No. She hadn’t. But she’d be damned if she’d play his games. She kept her face impassive. ‘Depends if you have swimmers on beneath the track pants.’

  His grin broadened, dangerously good for this early in the morning. ‘Nope. Nothing at all under these.’

  Her pulse kicked into gear. But she fought it. ‘Well, you’ll have to change.’

  ‘Easily offended, Shirley?’ He dropped his chin so that he peered up at her across long, dark lashes. It was possibly the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. More theatrics. She took a breath and remembered who she was. And who Shiloh had dealt with and bested in the past.

  ‘The dolphins.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Wouldn’t want them to mistake you for a bait fish.’

  An awful tense silence crackled between them and Shirley wondered if she’d gone a step too far. But then he tipped his head far back and laughed.

  ‘Give me five …’ he said, still chuckling, and was gone.

  She let her breath out slowly and carefully. That could easily have gone the other way. Maybe the last ten years hadn’t thoroughly ruined him, then.

  Only partly.

  When he returned he was more appropriately clothed in a T-shirt, sports cap, board shorts and sockless runners. The covered-up chest was a loss but at least she could concentrate on the road with him fully clothed. The T-shirt sleeves half covered a tattoo on his biceps, but she’d been able to read it briefly as he stretched his arm up the doorframe earlier.

  MΩΛΩN ΛABE. Classical Greek.

  She turned for the street.
>
  ‘I’m not getting in that.’ His arms crossed and his expression was implacable.

  ‘Why not?’

  He eyed her car. ‘This looks like the floor might fall out of it if you put a second person in it. We’ll take my Porsche.’

  Nope. ‘Wouldn’t be seen dead in it. This is a ‘59 Karmann Ghia. Your Porsche’s ancestor.’

  ‘It’s purple.’

  ‘Well spotted. Get in.’

  ‘And it has Shiloh plates.’

  ‘And here I thought your mind was more lint-trap than steel-trap these days.’

  He glared at her. ‘I’m not driving this.’

  She snorted. ‘You’re not driving at all.’

  ‘Well, you’re sure as hell not.’

  She swallowed the umbrage. ‘Because …?’

  ‘Because I drive me.’

  ‘You had a chauffeur.’ She’d seen him in enough Internet photos falling out of limos or back into them.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘You’re welcome to ride in the back seat if it will make you feel more at home.’ And if you can dislocate your hips to squeeze in there.

  He glared at the tiny back seat and came to much the same conclusion. ‘I don’t think so.’

  He folded himself into her low passenger seat and turned to stare as she tucked the folds of her voluminous skirt in under the steering wheel.

  ‘Not the most practical choice for swimming, I would have thought,’ he challenged.

  ‘It won’t be getting wet.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Because we won’t or because you have something else?’

  She glanced at him, then away. ‘I have something else.’ A something else she never would have worn in a million years if she’d had more than a few hours’ notice that he was coming along. In fact, she would have chosen a totally different box on her mother’s list if she’d thought for a moment that Hayden would actually join her. Something that didn’t involve taking anything off. She’d only asked him along to shake him out of the unhappy place she’d found him. And to get him started on the list.

  But parading around in swimwear in the presence of the man who’d made such a crack about her curves—yet who was apparently fixated by them—was not high on her list of most desirable things.

  The thirty-minute drive would have been a whole heap more enjoyable if she’d been able to sing to the music pumping out of the phone docked to her stereo. It did prevent much in the way of conversation—a bonus—though it contributed to Hayden’s general surliness—a minus—even after she’d pulled into a coffee drive-through for him. He’d leaned across her to take the coffee from the drive-through window and the brush of his shoulder, the heat of his body and the scent of early-morning man had stayed with her for the rest of the drive. She left her window wound down in the vain hope that the strong salty breeze would blow the distracting masculine fog away.