by Ally Blake
‘I never assumed they were nice. They might all be stark raving mad for all I know. Nice seems such a bland word to describe…’ She waved a hand at him, her eyes touching on his shoulders, his chest. She blinked quickly as they scooted past the zipper of his jeans.
‘Nevertheless there are many members of your family. Talk to them about your dad. Talk to your dad. And soon.’
He jawed clenched so hard his back teeth hurt. ‘I have my reasons not to.’
‘Which are?’
‘Impeccable.’
She stared him down, wanting more, but there was no more he would give.
When on that dark day many years before he’d discovered his father had been cheating on his mother, he’d realised that the man his family held up with such reverence and esteem—the cornerstone of everything they represented, everything they were—didn’t really exist. And, even if he wanted to explain any of that to Rosalind, unburdening himself would only hurt the others.
When she realised it would take more than silence for him to talk, she said, ‘A few years back my mum accidentally let on that she’d been in contact with my father again. He was living in Brisbane. Had been for years. In all that time, he’d never once bothered to look me up. He passed away before she did, and, ridiculous as I know it is, today I still wish I’d had the chance to meet him—to know him, for him to know me—no matter what kind of man he might have been. I’d really hate for you to one day wake up feeling that way.’
Her big, grey eyes were bright in the lamplight. Dazzling with resolve. Could she really be as staggeringly secure as she seemed?
Either way, this conversation was over. ‘I give up,’ he said, deadpan. ‘You win.’
She rolled her eyes and then bent double from the waist, as if he’d finally exhausted her determination. ‘It wasn’t meant to be a contest. It was meant to be a cautionary tale!’
‘You don’t like winning?’
She brought herself back upright and grinned at him. ‘Depends on the prize.’
Back on solid ground again, on territory in which he was far more comfortable, it took very little effort for Cameron to think of about a dozen prizes he’d happily provide without breaking a sweat. Or, better yet, sweating up a storm.
‘Here we are again,’ she said.
Mmm, there they were again.
It took a moment for him to realise she was being literal. They’d reached the end of South Bank, and turning left would take them back to the Red Fox and their cars.
He could do as he’d originally planned, kiss her cheek, thank her for a most enlightening night and get on with his life.
Considering the awkward particulars she now knew about him, and perhaps even more importantly what he knew about her—that she was no more the easy, lighthearted-dalliance type than he was a court jester—that would be the smart thing to do.
But it seemed tonight he’d left his smarts behind at the office.
‘Thirsty?’ His heart thundered harder than he could have anticipated as he awaited her answer.
‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked, the matching huskiness in her voice making him feel an inch taller.
‘The casino’s only two blocks away.’
She looked up at him, all luminous eyes, wide lips, sparkle and street smarts, pluck and temptation. He wondered, and not for the first time, how he’d managed to get through high school without noticing her. He’d been seventeen. Maybe that was enough.
Her nose creased; she nibbled at the inside of her bottom lip and picked at a fingernail, and took her sweet time deciding. He had the feeling she might be smart enough for the both of them.
‘So, what do you say to one more stop?’ he asked, promising himself it would be the last time.
But then her wide, open eyes gave him his answer even before she said, ‘There’s a tiny corner lounge on the second floor of the casino where they make hot chocolate to die for.’
CHAPTER SIX
ROSIE’S body clock told her it was some time after midnight by the time Cameron walked her from the beautiful old Treasury Casino to her car. Which meant that barring a cat nap in the afternoon, she’d been up for around twenty hours.
No wonder she’d been delirious enough to agree to hot chocolate. Okay, so if he’d suggested they walk the city til they found a greasy kebab van she would have said yes.
She unlocked her old runabout before Cameron reached down to open the driver’s side door.
She threw her bag over to the passenger seat and turned to find him standing close, still holding her door, trapping her in the circle of his arms. Close enough so the street lights above created a glow around his dark hair and kept his face in shadow. But the determined gleam in his eyes could not be hidden by a mere lack of direct illumination.
‘Tonight was…fun,’ he said.
‘Which part? The stream of your friends interrupting dinner. Me annoying you so much you had to throw out half your gelato. Or the bit where I tripped on the stairs at the casino and almost broke your toe?’
One dark eyebrow raised. ‘I saw the look on your face when you had that first sip of hot chocolate. You were having x-rated fun.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The hot chocolate was heavenly. For that I will be forever in your debt.’
That was the moment she should have waved goodbye, ducked into the car and hooned home. But, even though she felt her life complicating with every new glimmer of light that fractured the darkness within him, she couldn’t will herself to leave.
Heck, after she’d let slip that both she and her mum had worked behind the scenes in restaurants, he’d surreptitiously left a crazy-monster tip for the guy who’d served them their hot chocolate when he’d thought she wasn’t looking. How was any girl supposed to just walk away from a guy like that?
Wrong. How could Rosie not walk away?
While her will played games, her body came to the rescue as she was forced to reach up and stifle a yawn. ‘I’m so sorry. I have no idea where that came from.’
‘It’s after two in the morning, that’s where.’
‘It can’t be!’
He took her wrist, and turned it until the soft part underneath was facing upwards. A small frown appeared between his brows. ‘You don’t wear a watch.’
She shrugged. ‘Even when I used to wear one it never occurred to me to look at my wrist. So I gave up.’
His gaze travelled up her arm to her face. ‘I must look at my watch a thousand times a day.’
‘Think what you could have done with your lost time if you hadn’t been so centred on knowing what the time was.’
Even in the darkness she could sense the sexy grooves dinting his cheeks as he smiled at her. ‘You have a strange way of looking at the world, Miss Harper.’
‘I look at it exactly the same way you do, Mr Kelly. Just from a few inches closer to the ground.’
‘Perhaps. Though what happens to that information when it gets beyond those gorgeous eyes of yours and hits that wild, wily brain, I’m sure I’ll never know.’
Rosie hadn’t heard all that much past ‘gorgeous eyes’. Dangerously familiar and long-since buried parts of her began to unfurl, warm and throb.
When Cameron ran a careless thumb over the raised tendons of her inner wrist, he created even more havoc within her. If he thought her mind a wild and wily place, it had nothing on the state of her stomach.
‘Rosalind,’ he rumbled. Boy, the guy had a way of saying her name…
‘Yes, Cameron?’ she sighed.
He closed his hand about her wrist and tugged her away from the protection of the car door. The sigh became a moan, thankfully quiet enough that he would have had to be two feet closer to have heard. Two feet closer would mean his lips would have been close enough to kiss.
She stared at them a while in silent contemplation. A good while. So long a while that the night stretched between them like a tight rubber-band, and if somebody didn’t speak soon Rosie was afraid it would snap.
‘I’d really like to see you again,’ he said.
Snap! Rosie’s eyes flew north til they met his. Deep, blue heaven…‘Seriously?’
He laughed. She bit her lip.
Just because he used her full name in such a deferential way, and how more than once she’d caught him looking at her like she was the most fascinating creature on the planet, didn’t mean she should go forgetting herself. On the contrary, she never intended on being just who she seemed in someone else’s eyes.
He said, ‘Do you want a list of reasons why, or would you prefer them in the form of a poem?’
She shook her hair off her face and looked him dead in the eye, tough, cool, impassive. ‘Is that the best you can offer? No wonder you had a blank night in your calendar.’
‘Who says it was blank?’ he rumbled.
Rosie’s heart danced. She blamed exhaustion. She knew that taking guidance from one’s heart was as sensible as using one’s liver for financial-planning advice, having witnessed first-hand what listening to the dancing of your heart could do to a woman. If she needed any further reason to call it a day…
And then he had to go and say, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’
Her heart did the shuffle. She tried to concentrate on her liver instead. But it seemed every organ was on Cameron-alert.
‘Tomorrow?’ she said. ‘I’ll be sleeping. Eating. Watching telly. Looking up. The usual. You?’
‘Working. Working. And working some more. Though I too will need to fit some eating in at some stage.’
‘What a coincidence.’
‘Dinner, then?’ he insisted. ‘This time just the two of us.’
The two of them. Didn’t that sound nice? She looked skyward, but couldn’t for the life of her see a star above the canopy of cloud and bright city-lights with which to anchor herself.
She took care to get her next words just right. ‘How about you check you diary, and down the track, if you have a window, call the planetarium and they’ll get a message to me, and I’ll get back to you if my window matches up, and we’ll see how we go?’
He let her wrist go which gave her a moment of reprieve before he brushed a lock of hair from her cheek, his fingers leaving trails as light as a breeze across her skin.
‘I need a diary,’ he said, ‘Like you need a watch. And it would make things simpler if you’d just give me your home number.’
He brushed a lock from the other cheek, leaving his hands resting on either side of her neck, leaving her feeling extremely exposed. She’d had to work so hard in her youth to be seen, she’d never had the need to develop a poker face. But she needed it now. All she could do was look at the top of his shirt, where a triangle of tanned skin peeked out from the expanse of blue.
‘Can’t do that,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t have one.’
‘You don’t have a home phone number?’
‘Too difficult, considering…’
‘Considering?’
She paused then, wondering quite how to put it in such a way that a man who’d likely never felt a need to deny himself pleasure for the sake of reason would understand. In the end she really saw no choice but to say, ‘I live in a caravan.’
Instead of flinching at the very thought—oh, it had happened to her before!—Cameron laughed. Uproariously. As though she’d turned into all the comedians in the world combined.
Her eyes flew up to clash with his. ‘What’s so funny about living in a caravan?’
‘Nothing at all,’ he said, his voice still rippling with amusement. ‘I think if you owned some suburban Queenslander or lived in a flash city-apartment I’d have been disappointed.’
He’d moved closer, his face now lit by the reflections in a shop window behind her. ‘So, tomorrow night. Dinner. Just the two of us. I’ll call the planetarium with a location.’
‘You could do that.’ She bit the inside of her lip only to find that, now he was within the required proximity, it was practically swollen with the desire to lock with his. ‘Though I do have a mobile phone.’
His voice was low and dry as he said, ‘Do you, now?’
‘I never remember to take it with me,’ she justified. ‘And it’s so ridiculously small that I lose it four days out of seven, so I rarely bother giving the number out. But it’s there. If you’d like it.’
‘That’ll do just fine.’
She bent into the car and fumbled through her bag for her phone, and the slip of paper on which her number was written, as she didn’t for the life of her know what it was. Then realised she was giving him a fine view of her tush, and stood up so straight she hit her head on the doorframe.
Pretending she hadn’t, she jauntily threw him her phone. He punched her number into his, and when she looked at him blankly he did the same for hers. It made her feel like she was nineteen again, in a nightclub, half-hoping the cute guy would call, half-hoping he’d leave her be.
She shoved her phone back into her bag so roughly her knuckles scraped on an inner zip. She then looked up and directly into his eyes from barely a foot away. Those relentless blue eyes…
Kiss me, she yearned inside her head.
No, don’t kiss me. Yearning led to pining, which led to languishing. And that was not for her.
He leaned in.
God, yes, please kiss me!
His warm breath slid past her ear as he pressed firm lips against her cheek. With an undisciplined sigh her eyelids fluttered shut, and she let herself open up just a little, just enough so that she could truly feel the moment. His touch, his scent, his strength. The way he made her feel feminine and desirable just as she was.
When he pulled away, her whole body swayed with him. Her eyelids darted open to find his eyes focussed on her lips with such intensity it took her breath away.
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and his eyes clouded over, so dark, so hot. She had two choices: throw herself at him, or remove herself from a situation which suddenly felt like it was getting out of her control.
She slid deeper inside the cover of the car and swung the door between them.
Coming to as if from a trance, Cameron growled, ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
‘It is tomorrow.’
The darkness brightened but the heat remained as his eyes shot to hers. ‘So it is.’
‘And time I got home to my nice warm bed.’
His accompanying smile was so broad she had the perfect view of a pair of sharp incisors.
‘And you to yours,’ she added.
This time his growl came without words.
She took that as the opportune moment to give a noncommittal wave before diving into the car and buckling up while he closed the door for her. The fact that she remembered which pedal was the accelerator amazed her as she drove into the night.
Her head throbbed, her knuckles stung, and the voice in the back of her head pointed out she’d lived in one spot for a while now, and Peru was nice this time of year…
An hour later, after Rosie had realised she was too wired to get any sleep, she took a shower and got changed from her pyjamas back into jeans, a warm jumper, and her mangy brown boots in preparation for heading out to the edge of the thicket in which she often spent her early mornings with a tent, a sleeping bag and her favourite old telescope.
She put the TV on while she made herself some jam on toast, not sure how she hadn’t keeled over from a sugar rush from the amount she’d already eaten the night before.
The name Quinn Kelly barked from her TV, and she spun and leaned her backside against her tiny kitchen bench.
She didn’t know the man, but he was about the most famous personality in town. A charismatic man, with a deep Australian drawl overlaid with enough Irish lilt for it to be unforgettable. He was outrageously good-looking even with his seventieth birthday just around the corner. She recognised him the moment he came on screen in what must have been a repeat of that morning’s financial-news report.
She looked through the crooked smile and stunning blue eyes for a sign that all was not well. Or, more truthfully, for signs that Cameron had been wrong and his father was fine. But, as though Cameron was sitting beside her pointing out the subtle nuances of pain etched across his father’s face buried deep beneath the infamous smile, she knew something wasn’t right.
She’d lived through the sudden loss of one parent and the permanent loss of another, and she wouldn’t wish either situation on anyone. Especially not on the man who’d asked the barista at the casino to put extra marshmallows in her hot chocolate just because he thought she might like it.
She picked up the remote and jabbed at the off switch. The small screen went black. ‘They were marshmallows,’ she blurted at her reflection in the small, black screen. ‘Get a grip.’
She grabbed her backpack and headed out into the frosty darkness.
That next evening Rosie arrived at the mid-city address Cameron had invited her to, only to find there was nothing there. Just a cold sidewalk with a handful of newly planted trees looking drab and leafless in the winter darkness, and grey plasterboard two storeys high lining the entire block.
She banged the soles of her knee-high boots on the ground to warm them, and wished she’d brought a cardigan to wear over her floaty paisley-purple dress. But obviously she’d lost her mind the second she’d agreed to come.
She looked up and down the block. A group of bright young things in even less clothing than she wore skipped merrily across the road, arms intertwined. Their voices faded, then it was just her once more.
Her and her chatty subconscious.
What if he was stuck at work? What if he was alone somewhere, trapped under something heavy? Or, better yet, what if he was about to prove how beautifully unavailable he was, how ideal a choice for a first date, by standing her up on the second?
Just as she was about to give herself a pat on the back for being immensely gifted at picking the right wrong men after all, a concealed doorway opened up within the wall of grey, revealing a figure silhouetted within the gap. A figure with sexily ruffled hair, broad shoulders and shirt sleeves rolled up over the kind of sculpted forearms that made her think this was a guy who knew how to fix a leaky tap.
