Dating the Rebel Tycoon

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…