Dedication
To the man who was once “just” my friend.
Chapter One
You Are Personally and Cordially Invited to Attend
The Soft Opening of Australia’s Newest FIVE-STAR Luxury Resort
BANDICOOT COVE on Bilby Island.
Bring a plus one if you desire.
All expenses and needs will be catered for
as we test our customer services in preparation for the Grand Opening.
(P.S. Can you believe I got this job, guys? Wow!!
Mack, if you don’t bring Aidan I will thump you. Just saying.
See you soon,
Love, Kylie
XXXX)
“Holy shit!” McKenzie Wood grabbed at her best friend’s sleeve, almost yanking Aidan off his seat and into her lap. “Did you see who that was?”
She swiveled in her own seat, trying like hell to catch a glimpse of the tall-dark-and-freaking-gorgeous man through the restaurant’s crowd.
Aidan, bless his little cotton socks—well, not that little, since the guy had size thirteen feet—didn’t smack her back. Instead, her best friend since she was fourteen disengaged his shirt sleeve from her fist, righted himself on his chair and turned to look in the general direction she was gawking.
“Hugh Jackman?” he guessed, his deep voice rumbling with mirth. “Russell Crowe? Russell Brand? Brandon Routh?” He shot her a sideward glance, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Care to throw me a bone here, Mack, ’cause I haven’t got a bloody clue.”
McKenzie twisted back to him and gave him a wide grin. “Nick Blackthorne.”
Aidan’s mouth fell open. He smacked his palms to the sides of his face, his green eyes wide. “No!” he burst out. “Nick Blackthorne? The Nick Blackthorne?”
McKenzie whacked the back of her right hand against his chest, hiding her grunt of pain under a scowl of exasperation. Damn it, the man’s chest was harder than concrete. “Yeah, yeah, yeah—” she rolled her eyes, “—funny bastard, aren’t you? The last time anyone saw Nick Blackthorne, he was supposedly checking into a sex rehab clinic in Germany for being an addict.”
Aidan cocked an eyebrow. “Sex addict? The guy’s a bloody rock star. The biggest rock star this country has produced. Isn’t he meant to have sex with just about everything in a dress that throws herself at him?”
“No, no, no, no.” McKenzie shook her head. “God, don’t you actually read the rags I write for? He supposedly checked into a sex rehab center because he can’t stop having sex with men.”
Aidan studied her for a long second. Followed by another one.
She sat and waited for him to say something, her hands on his knees, her gaze holding his.
Finally, he shrugged. “Well, to each his own.”
McKenzie leaned closer to him. “You’re missing the point, Rogers. If Nick Blackthorne is here, when everyone thinks he’s in Germany, I could get the scoop.”
“The scoop?”
She grinned, squirming closer to the edge of her seat. “The scoop.”
Aidan let out a sharp breath, turning back to their table and reaching for his beer. “McKenzie,” he said, his voice level, “we are at the soft opening of your friend’s resort. If you go all tabloid-journalist and stalk a guest, Kylie will kill you. Then I will have to explain to Mason why I let his twin sister get killed. And then Mason will probably try to punch me.”
“And what would you do in return?”
Aidan gave her a steady sideward glance. “Depends. Do you like your twin today or not?”
McKenzie thought about that question for a moment, struggling to keep her face composed. Aidan always, always seemed to make her want to grin, even when he was telling her she was being horrible. Prick. “Better not punch him back,” she answered. “He did, after all, pay for the flights up here.”
“Good point.” Aidan took a mouthful of beer before picking up his fork and stabbing at the lobster bisque on his plate. “Although I coulda done without the blackmail to help clean that boat of his he just bought with Trent. Seriously, if Trent wanted to sail up the Australian coastline, how come I get stuck with scraping the barnacles off the hull of the damn rust bucket?”
“’Cause you lost that stupid bet at the airport about whose bag was the lightest—his or yours, remember?” McKenzie offered, picking up her own fork. She had to hand it to Kylie; the girl knew how to throw a party, and the soft opening hadn’t even started yet. Lobster for brunch? Bring it on. “Oh, and you can hold your breath the longest?”
Aidan snorted again, the sound making her grin wider. “Next time Kylie launches a resort opening, I want it to be in the Outback.” He took another mouthful of beer. “Or the Snowies.”
McKenzie laughed. “Don’t tempt her. You know what she’s like. Besides, it was nice to have Mason on the flight with us, even if he did sucker you into cleaning Paradise. At least this way I don’t have to call Mum. She still hasn’t forgiven me for my article on—” A tall man walked past the entrance to the restaurant, oozing brooding sexuality, phenomenal good looks and smoldering arrogance. Nick Blackthorne. In the flesh. She grabbed Aidan’s arm just as he was about to take a drink, sploshing beer over his hand and wrist. “Oh God, it is him, Rogers. It is him! Look. Look!”
Before Aidan could do such a thing, McKenzie jumped to her feet, sending her chair tumbling to the ground. The rather overweight and ridiculously overdressed woman sitting at the table behind her muttered something that sounded very much like “inconsiderate cow”, but McKenzie didn’t care. Nick Blackthorne was here. At Bandicoot Cove Resort. Walking around without any sign of bodyguards, groupies or entourage.
Nick Blackthorne. The world’s biggest rock star.
Here. Within twenty meters of her.
She watched him amble through the opulent foyer, his stunning light grey eyes concealed by a pair of pitch-black sunglasses, his tall, lean frame wrapped in a pair of snug, faded Levis and a R2-D2 T-shirt. Sinewy muscles coiled and flexed as he walked, each stride almost rhythmic, as if he moved to music no one else but he could hear.
A little flutter of something entirely sexual stirred in McKenzie’s core, a tiny throb of base, instinctual interest. For a brief second an image of him throwing her on the massive bed in her resort room filled her mind. His long-fingered hands tore her clothes from her body before, with fluid ease, he sank what was rumored to be a solid and very impressive ten inches into her sodden and very willing pussy.
Her nipples pinched tight and she huffed into her fringe, tracking his path past the reception desk and out of sight.
“We gotta go.” She hooked her fingers under Aidan’s arm and tugged him to his feet. Well, tried to. Shifting a six-foot-three firefighter wasn’t easy, especially when he was looking up at her like she’d lost her mind. “Quick quick,” she begged, resorting to both hands wrapped around his biceps. Bloody hell, when had Rogers bulked up so much? “I need to see where he’s going.”
Aidan—stubbornly—stayed put. “Stalking now? Didn’t you tell me you wanted out of the tabloid business? That it was time to start your serious journalist career?”
McKenzie slapped the back of his head and then snared his arm again, her fingers barely curling halfway around its muscled width. “Shut up. He’s getting away.”
Aidan made a move to pick up his fork again. “Good for him.”
A surge of hot anger stabbed into McKenzie’s chest and she bit back a curse. Aidan was correct. She had told him and Mason on the flight up that she was going to quit her job at Goss when she got back. She had said it was time to actually use her degree in journalism for the greater good. But then Nick Blackthorne had walked past,
and really, wasn’t it for the world’s greater good to know just what he was doing here and where he’d been? And if that “where” had anything to do with the secret activities of ten inches of flesh?
She pulled at Aidan’s arm once more, an ineffectual tug she was almost ashamed of. Almost. “Please, Aidan?” she begged, giving him her most wounded-puppy expression. The kind that always, always made him bail on one of his stubborn stand-offs. “Please? For me?”
He looked up at her, his jaw square, his expression unreadable. He’d been her best friend since before she had her first boyfriend. He’d been her rock, her anchor. Her voice of reason when her journalist’s mind got carried away with her. She didn’t want him upset with her. She needed him with her on this.
He studied her with those deep, direct eyes of his. Eyes that missed nothing. Eyes that seemed to see nothing in the world but her.
A soft flutter constricted in McKenzie’s sex, unexpected and just as eager as her earlier response to Blackthorne.
She hitched in a silent breath and let his arm go, a lump forming in her throat. “Please,” she muttered, looking everywhere but at the man sitting before her. “Please come with me, Aidan.”
“Fuck it,” she heard him grumble, half a second before his chair scraped over the polished bamboo floor and he stood.
A wave of impish relief surged through her, destroying the wholly unsettling…thing…she’d just felt. Aidan was Aidan. Yes, he was pretty okay to look at and just about every woman within a ten-mile radius threw herself at him whenever she hit the clubs with him, but he was Aidan. That was it.
Grinning up at him, she snared his arm again with her fingers, giving his hard biceps a small squeeze. “You are so bloody awesome, Rogers.”
“I know,” he growled, moving away from the table and taking her with him. “Just promise me no muck-slinging, no trash-flinging and no lies. We follow the guy, you ask him for a comment and we leave. All over, Red Rover, in ten minutes. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He pointed a finger at her nose, a stern glower darkening his otherwise friendly face. “And no asking him if he’s gay. A bloke doesn’t like being asked such a thing whether he is or not, got it?”
McKenzie cocked her head, quickening her step to stay abreast of him. “Are you gay, Rogers?”
His eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“I only ask ’cause you’ve never gone out with anyone for more than a day or two. Like, ever.”
Aidan let out a harsh breath and turned his glare forward, all but pulling her out of the restaurant. “I’ve had girlfriends.”
“Really? When? The longest you ever went out with a woman was that police officer from Newcastle Command and that lasted for a little less than a week.”
His fingers curled harder into her arm, his stride lengthening. “Why the hell do I put myself in these situations?”
McKenzie skipped into step with him. “’Cause they’re fun?”
“Yeah,” he grunted, not looking at her. “Like a root canal.”
They walked through the foyer, McKenzie’s stomach flipping and flopping in a strange little way she didn’t understand. Part of her wanted to slide Aidan a little sideward glance, just to be sure it was still Aidan storming along beside her. She’d known him forever, well, what felt like forever. She’d met him in her second year of high school when his family had moved to Newcastle. The minute he’d walked into the science lab, towering over just about every boy in the class, and the teacher as well, she’d smiled. It had nothing to do with the way he looked—which even at fourteen she knew was pretty damn good. She’d smiled because his eyes said, there’s mischief to be had. Who wants in?
The rest of the girls in her year, and quite a few above and below, threw themselves at him straightaway, but he never took any of them up on their far-from-unsubtle advances. It wasn’t until he’d been at school for a week when she finally spoke to him—right after she’d accidently kicked a soccer ball straight into his groin during a Phys Ed class.
Of course, she’d run over straightaway and dropped to her knees, rubbing his groin and making sorry sounds before she realized what she was doing. She had six brothers, after all, one of them being Mason, her twin. Male anatomy wasn’t something mysterious or dangerous to her. She’d seen more penises by the time she was fourteen than she could remember—especially Mason’s. Damn, her brother had zero interest in personal privacy. When Aidan had looked up at her, squirming under her palm, his face red with pain, his eyes wide with stunned shock, she’d realized what she was doing and promptly burst out laughing. She’d laughed all the way to the principal’s office after being sent there by her mortified Phys Ed teacher for inappropriate touching of a fellow class member. Aidan had found her at lunch, plonked down beside her on the rickety metal bench, said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a handjob quite like that before,” and that had been it. They’d been best friends since.
She’d never ever thought of him in any kind of sexual way. Ever. So why had her belly done that weird squirmy thing just now in the restaurant?
Because you’re excited. You’ve just seen Nick Blackthorne. The Nick Blackthorne. Of course, you’re going to be all squirmy. Not just ’cause the guy’s as freaking hot as sin, but because he’s your ticket. One exclusive exposé about Nick Blackthorne’s sexual tendencies, and you can write your own meal ticket out of tabloid trash hell and land yourself that serious job you’ve ached for forever.
The reasoning made little sense. Write trash to stop writing trash? But McKenzie wouldn’t let herself analyze it any more. If there was more to the way her belly was behaving, she’d deal with it later. Nick Blackthorne was in front of her and Aidan was beside her. Currently, the two most important men in her life.
Huh. You really are one for the dramatic, aren’t you?
Shut up. Focus. You’ve got a story to write. How exactly are you going to do that, Ms. I’m-Such-A-Clever-Serious-Journalist?
Her eyes, of their own accord, slid to Aidan and her belly flip-flopped again. She grabbed at her bottom lip with her teeth, an idea coming to her.
If the rumors about Nick Blackthorne were true, she had the most perfect, perfect bait to get her story. Now, all she had to do was convince Aidan of that.
Do you really want to do that, McKenzie? Ask him to…
She cut the thought dead. She wouldn’t just ask him to do it for a story. She would ask him to do it for fun. Aidan had always been one to leap into life. Hell, he’d taken her kicking and screaming on more than one harebrained adventure. Why should this be any different?
Yeah, but you’re going to ask him to…
“I still can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Aidan’s low grumble played over her senses and she started, her stomach tightening again. And not just her stomach this time, but all sorts of other parts of her anatomy: parts of her anatomy that had no right getting tight over Aidan Rogers.
“I remember when you’d do anything for fun, Rogers.” She shoved him with her shoulder, giving his arm a squeeze at the same time. Seriously, when had he become so muscular?
“Fun I can do. Fun I like doing. Stalking celebrities—” he gave her a steady and very pointed sideward stare, “—not so much fun.”
She flashed a grin at him. “You’re looking at this all wrong, Aidan. All you’re doing is walking through a hotel in the same direction as another guy. That’s not stalking.”
“Is this how you live with yourself, McKenzie Wood?” He turned his attention back to the foyer and the broad back of the world’s most Googled rock star. “Delude yourself into believing you’re not being a horrible creep?”
“Yep.”
Her one word answer made him snort, but for a brief second McKenzie glimpsed a hint of a dimple in his left cheek.
Bingo! She had him.
“Just go with me on this one, will you?” She turned her own stare to Blackthorne, her stomach knotting. This time the physical reaction was fr
om nervous excitement. “All I’m going to do to start with is say g’day.”
Aidan snorted again. “Why do I not believe you?”
McKenzie laughed. “I have no idea.”
Nick Blackthorne weaved his way through the smattering of guests milling around the Bandicoot Resort’s massive reception area, a small smile curling at the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t the fact he was here, at the soft opening of the resort, that made him happy, nor the fact he was walking around without a minder or bodyguard or groupie to be seen. It was simply because the woman laughing behind him had a delightfully throaty, infectious laugh.
He stopped himself from shooting a look over his shoulder, concentrating instead on finding the correct passageway that would lead him to the Oasis Bar. He was a touch jetlagged and needed something more than coffee to wake up.
A touch? You’ve been on one plane or the other for the last three days. You’re more than jetlagged, you’re jet-fucking-dragged-through-the-turbines stoned. Besides, the need for something more than caffeine has nothing to do with jetlag. You just want to sit out in the sun and pretend you’re a normal person for a short while, don’t you?
He smiled wider. The truth was always less sensational. It had been a long time since he’d been able to sit at a bar and relax. When his agent had offered him the chance to attend the resort’s soft opening he’d jumped at it. Minimum number of guests, all hand-picked by the hotel’s manager, all—his agent assured him—too discreet or important in their own rights to worry about him being in their presence. A nice change from where he’d just been, that was for sure.
The thought made his smile falter. A little. He wasn’t going to let his mind turn to where he’d just been. Not when he was walking through Eden.
Ah, so the romantic you used to be is still buried in that craven pit you call a soul, is he?
Behind him the woman laughed again, another low, throaty chuckle and, before he could help himself, Nick turned.
Whoa.
She was only a few feet behind, grinning up at a guy almost half again her height, her long, strawberry blonde hair a flaming halo in the sun’s warm rays, her pink lips stretched in a grin that said very clearly, “Yes, I am completely in charge of this situation.”
Tropical Sin: Bandicoot Cove, Book 3 Page 1
