Dating the Rebel Tycoon

by Ally Blake

  He took a deep breath through his nose and glanced at his watch. What he saw there brought him back down to earth. And lower still.

  Into his father’s world.

  Quinn Kelly was a shameless, selfish shark who a long time ago had convinced Cameron to keep a terrible secret to keep his family from being torn apart.

  He’d done so the only way he’d known how, cutting himself off from the family business. As he saw it, if the man was as unscrupulous in his business dealings as he was in his personal life, God help the stock holders. Quinn on the other hand had seen it as a greater betrayal, and had cut him off completely, which in the end made for a nice cover as to why the two of them couldn’t be in the same room together.

  It hadn’t for a minute been easy, looking his mother, brothers and sister in the eye while knowing what they did not. In the end he’d worked day and night to establish his own career, his own identity, his own manic pace with nonexistent down-time in which to miss those things he no longer had, or yearn for things he’d learnt the hard way didn’t really exist, or scratch himself, giving himself a reasonable excuse to decline attendance at enough family gatherings that it was now simply assumed he would not come.

  There was the rub. There was no subtle way to sound the others out. The only way to know for sure was to ask the man himself.

  The opportunity was there, winking at him like a great cosmic joke. His father’s seventieth birthday was less than a week away, and that was one invitation he had not managed to avoid. Every member of his family had called to remind him, all bar the big man himself.

  There was no way he’d attend. For if it gave that man even an inkling that deep down he still gave a damn…

  The echo of a bombastic musical-score sprang up inside the domed building behind him, more than matching the clashing inside his head. The star show had begun.

  Cameron looked to his watch again. It didn’t give him any better news. He shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets, turned up the collar of his jacket against the cold and jogged towards the car park, the diminishing crunch of pine leaves beneath his feet taking him further and further from the gardens.

  He turned to watch the great white dome of the planetarium peek through the canopy of gum trees. Quite the handy distraction he’d found himself back there. With her sharp tongue and raw, unassuming sex-appeal, Rosalind Harper had made him forget both work and family for as long a while as he could remember doing in one hit in quite some time.

  He hit the car park, picked out his MG, vaulted into the driver’s seat, revved the engine and took off through the mostly empty car park, following the scents of smog, car exhaust, money and progress as he headed towards the central business district of the river city.

  And the further away he got from all that fresh air and clear open sky—and from Rosalind Harper, her bedroom hair and straightforward playfulness—the heavier he felt the weight bear down upon his shoulders once again.

  The fact that she was still at the forefront of his mind five sets of traffic lights later didn’t mean he’d gone soft. It simply wasn’t in his make-up to do so.

  His parents had been married nearly fifty years. They were touted throughout the land as one of the great enduring romances of the modern age. Such tales had filled newspaper and magazine columns, and at one time they’d even had a telemovie made about them.

  But, if the specifics of their marriage was as good as it could get, he wasn’t buying. Even a relationship that to the world looked to be secure, long-lasting, deeply committed could be a sham. What was the point?

  The short-term company of an easygoing, uncomplicated woman, on the other hand, could work wonders. A dalliance with the promise of no promises. Having the end plan on the table before the project began sat very comfortably with the engineer in him.

  Rosalind Harper had been an excellent distraction, and he knew enough to know that behind the impudent exterior she hadn’t been completely immune to him. The spark had sparked both ways.

  He saw a gap in the traffic, changed down a gear and roared into the spot.

  His stomach lifted and fell with the hills of Milton Road, and he realised if he was going to endure the next week with any semblance of ease a distraction was exactly what he needed.

  That afternoon, after taking a nap to make up for her usual pre-dawn start to the day, Rosie sat on the corrugated metal step of her digs: a one-bed, one-bath, second-hand caravan.

  As she sipped a cooling cup of coffee, she stared unseeingly at the glorious hectare of Australian soil she owned overlooking the Samford Valley, a neat twenty-five-minute drive from the city.

  For a girl who’d been happy to travel for many a year, the second she’d seen the spot she’d fallen for it. The gently undulating parcel of land had remained verdant through the drought by way of a fat, rocky stream slicing through a gully at the rear. High grass covered the rest of the allotment, the kind you could lie down in and never be found. A forest of achromatic ghost-gums gave her privacy from the top road, lush, subtropical rainforests dappled the hills below and in the far distance beyond lay the blue haze of Moreton Bay.

  But it was the view when she tilted her head up that had grabbed her and not let go.

  The sky here was like no other sky in the world. Not sky diffused with the glare of city lights, distorted with refraction from tall buildings or blurred by smog. But sky. Great, wide, unfathomable sky. By day endless blue, swamped by puffy white clouds, and on the clearest of winter nights the Milky Way had been known to cast a shadow across her yard.

  She wrapped her arms about her denim-clad knees, quietly enjoying the soothing coo of butcher birds heralding the setting of the sun.

  A mere week earlier her work day would have been kicking off as Venus began her promenade across the dusk sky, masquerading as the evening star. Now that Venus had begun her half-yearly stint as the morning star, Rosie was still getting used to the crazy early starts to the day, and finding it tricky to know what to do with her evenings.

  This evening she had no such trouble, filling it ably by reliving her curious encounter with Cameron Kelly. The way one side of his blazer collar had been sticking up as though he’d left the house in a hurry. The way he still hadn’t worked out how to stop his fringe from spiking out in all different directions. The way she’d felt his smiles even when he’d been little more than a Cameron-shaped outline. The way her skin had continued to hum long after she’d last heard his deep voice.

  She sighed deep and hard, and figured she’d at least get some pleasant dreams out of it!

  All of a sudden her bottom vibrated madly. When she realised it was the wretched mobile-phone Adele had made her buy when she’d moved back to Brisbane—lest they live within the same city but never see one another—she picked it up, stared at the shiny screen, and jabbed at half a dozen tiny buttons until it stopped making that infernal ‘bzz bzz’ noise that made her teeth hurt.

  ‘Rosie Harper,’ she sing-songed as she answered.

  ‘Hey, kiddo.’ It was Adele. Big surprise.

  ‘Hey, chickadee,’ she returned.

  ‘I have someone on the other line who wants to talk to you, so don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Adele,’ Rosie said with a frown, before she realised by the muzak assaulting her ear that she was already on hold. ‘Girl, I’m gonna throw this damn thing in the creek if you’re not—’

  ‘Rosalind,’ a deep, male voice said.

  Rosie sat up straight. ‘Cameron?’

  She slapped herself across the forehead as she realised she’d given herself away. If she hadn’t been thinking of him in that moment it wouldn’t have made a difference. Deep, smooth, rumbling voices like that only came around once in a lifetime.

  ‘Wow, I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Did your stars tell you I was going to call?’

  ‘You’re thinking of astrology, not astronomy.’

  ‘There’s a difference?’ he asked.

  Her skin did that humming thing which tol
d her that wherever he was he was definitely kidding, definitely smiling.

  ‘So you are an astronomer, then?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what my degree says.’

  ‘Hmm. I did consider you might be a ticket-seller, but then when I thought back on how hard you were working to not let me buy a ticket I had to go with my third choice of occupation.’

  ‘What was the second?’

  After a pause he said, ‘Well, it wasn’t a choice so much as a pipe-dream. And I’m not sure we know one another well enough for me to give any more away than that.’

  The humming of her skin went into overdrive, a kind of fierce, undisciplined overdrive that she wasn’t entirely sure how to rein in. She went with a thigh pinch, which worked well enough.

  ‘What’s up, Cameron?’

  ‘I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed my morning.’

  She turned side-on so that her back could slump against the doorframe, and lifted her boot-clad feet to the step. ‘So, you did stay for the show. Good for you.’

  ‘Ah, no. I did not.’

  Her brow furrowed. Then it dawned: he was calling to say he’d enjoyed the part of the morning he’d spent with her. Okay. So this was unanticipated.

  When she said nothing, Cameron added, ‘I couldn’t do it. The wormholes, remember?’

  She laughed, loosening her grip on her phone a little. ‘Right. I’d forgotten about the wormholes.’

  ‘I, obviously, have not.’

  ‘If one was smart, one might have thought this morning might have been a prime opportunity to overcome such a fear, since you were already there and all.’

  ‘One might. But I’ve not often been all that good at doing what I ought to do.’

  First calloused hands, now rebellion. Where was the nice, well-liked Cameron Kelly she’d known, and what had this guy done with him?

  ‘You were in Meg’s year at St Grellans,’ Cameron said. Meaning he’d been asking around about her.

  Rosie unpeeled her fingers from the step and lifted them to cradle the phone closer to her ear. ‘That I was.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘Uni. Backpacking. Mortgage. Too much TV.’ After a pause her curiosity got the better of her. ‘You?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  ‘Ha!’ she barked before she could hold it back. She could hardly picture Cameron Kelly splayed out on a second-hand double bed watching Gilligan’s Island reruns on a twelve-inch TV at two in the afternoon.

  ‘No kids?’ he added. ‘No man friend to give you foot rubs at the end of a long day telling fortunes?’

  Rosie didn’t even consider scoffing at his jibe. She was too busy trying to ignore the image of him splayed across her bed.

  ‘No kids. No man. Worse, no foot rubs,’ she said.

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Try harder.’

  He laughed. Her cheek twitched into a smile. She slid lower on the step, and told herself she couldn’t get closer to being physically grounded unless she lay on the dirt.

  ‘You’re in a profession which must be teeming with men. How is it you haven’t succumbed to sweet nothings whispered in the dark by some guy with a clipboard and a brain the size of the Outback?’

  ‘I’m not that attracted to clipboards,’ she admitted.

  ‘Mmm. It can’t help that your colleagues all have Star Trek emblems secreted about their persons.’

  ‘Oh, ho! Hang on a second. I might be allowed to diss my fellow physicists, but that doesn’t mean you can.’

  ‘Is that what I just did?’

  ‘Yes! You just intimated all astronomers are geeks.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ he said without even a pause.

  She sat up straight and held a hand to her heart to find it beating harder than normal, harder than it had even when she’d been a green teenager. It had more than a little to do with the unflinching, alpha-male thing he’d found within himself in the intervening years. It spoke straight to the stubborn independence she’d unearthed inside herself.

  ‘You realise you are also insinuating that I am a geek?’ she said.

  This time there was a pause. But then he came back with, ‘Yes. You are a geek.’

  Her mouth dropped open then slammed back shut. Mostly because the tone of his voice suggested it didn’t seem to be the slightest problem for him that she might be a geek.

  ‘Rosalind,’ he said, in a way that made her want to flip her hair, lick her lips and breathe out hard.

  ‘Yes?’ she sighed before she could stop herself.

  His next pause felt weightier. She cursed herself beneath her breath and gripped the teeny-tiny phone so tight her knuckles hurt.

  ‘I realise it’s last minute, but I was wondering if you had plans for dinner.’

  Um, yeah, she thought; cheese on toast.

  He continued, ‘Because I haven’t eaten, and if you haven’t eaten I thought it an entirely sensible idea that we make plans to eat together.’

  Oh? Oh! Had Cameron Kelly just asked her out?

  CHAPTER THREE

  ROSIE looked up at the sky, expecting to see a pink elephant flying past, but all she saw were clouds streaked shades of brilliant orange by the dying sunlight.

  To get the blood flowing back to all the places it needed to flow, not just the unhelpful areas where it had suddenly pooled, Rosie dragged herself off the step and walked out into the yard, running a hand along the fluffy tops of the hip-high grass stalks.

  Dinner with Cameron Kelly. For most girls the answer would be a no brainer. The guy was gorgeous. She couldn’t deny she was still attracted to him. And there was the fantasy element of hooking up with her high school crush. One of the invisibles connecting with one of the impossibles.

  But Rosie wasn’t most girls. She usually dated uncomplicated, footloose, impermanent guys, not men who made it hard for her to think straight. She liked thinking straight.

  The only time she’d ever broken that rule was with a cardboard cut-out of a gorgeous A-list movie star Adele had nicked from outside a video store for her seventeenth birthday. He was breathtaking, he never talked back. Never stole the remote. Never left the toilet seat up. Never filled any larger part of her life than she let him. Never left…

  She wrapped her hand round a feathery tuft of grass and a million tiny spores flew out of her palm and into the air, floating like fireflies in dusk’s golden light.

  Her mother had been the very definition of other girls. She’d fallen for the wrong man, the man she’d thought would love her for ever, and it had left her with a permanently startled expression, as though her world was one great shock she’d never got over.

  After years of thought, study and discovery, a light-bulb moment had shown Rosie that, contrarily, the way to make sure that never happened to her was to only date the wrong men—those who for one reason or another had no chance of making a commitment. She could then enjoy the dating part dead-safe in the knowledge that the association would end. And when it did she wouldn’t be crushed.

  So, back to Cameron Kelly. He was gorgeous. He was charming. But most importantly beneath the surface there was a darkness about him. A hard, fast, cool character that he was adept at keeping all to himself. He was fascinating, but there was no mistaking him for some sweet guy looking for love.

  And, of all the men who’d asked her out, she knew exactly what she was up against. Cameron Kelly was the least likely man in the world Rosie would again make the mistake of falling for, making him the ideal man for her, for now.

  ‘I haven’t lost you, have I?’ he asked.

  You can’t lose what you never had, she thought, but said, ‘I’m still deciding if I’m hungry enough for dinner.’

  ‘It’s a meal, on a plate. I was thinking perhaps even cutlery may be involved.’ His voice resonated down the phone, until cheese and toast was the last things on her mind. ‘We can reminisce about average cafeteria food, bad haircuts and worse teachers.’

  ‘Wh
en did you ever have a bad haircut?’

  ‘Who said I was talking about me?’

  ‘Ha! You know what? I don’t remember you being this ruthless at school.’

  ‘Have dinner with me and I’ll do my very best to remind you just how bad I can be.’

  Suddenly her hands began to shake. She wiped them down her jeans, dusting off the tiny fragments of plant residue. Then said, ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘Wherever. Fried chicken, a chocolate fountain, steamed mung-beans; whatever you want, it’s yours.’

  ‘Steamed mung beans?’

  She felt him smile, and even without the visual accompaniment it made her stomach tighten. But now that she’d reconciled herself to her attraction to him she let herself enjoy it. It felt…wonderful. A little wild, but she had a handle on it. This was going to be fine.

  ‘I didn’t want to be all he-man and impose my carnivorous tastes upon you,’ he said. ‘For all I know you might well be a vegan, anti-dairy carb hater.’

  ‘So happy to know I give off such a flattering vibe.’

  ‘Your vibe is just fine,’ he said, his voice steady and low and, oh, so tempting.

  She stopped brushing at her jeans and hooked her thumb tight into the edge of her pocket. ‘Imagine me as the least fussy woman you’ve ever taken to dinner.’

  ‘Then I know the place. It’s so informal, it’s practically a dive. They make the best quesadillas you’ll ever have.’

  ‘Mexican for grilled cheese, right?’ How ironic.

  It was his turn to pause. ‘It seems I have failed in my attempt to impress you with my extensive knowledge of international cuisine. Mmm. I’ll have to up my game.’

  Rosie took a moment to let that one sink in. It left a really nice, warm glow where it landed; her hand clutched the fabric of her old black T-shirt against the spot. ‘And I guess dinner would be one way of making up for the astrology jibe.’

  ‘I admit, it was hardly gracious.’

  ‘It was hardly original, either.’