Dating the Rebel Tycoon

Before Rosie had the chance to tell Miss Granger she was barking up the wrong man, Adele called out, ‘Send ’em on in, hon! Who are we to turn away those ready and raring to learn about the mysteries of the universe?’

‘Who indeed?’ Cameron asked.

Rosie steadfastly ignored him and his rumbling voice as Miss Granger heaved the heavy side-door open again, letting in wisps of cool late-winter air and a throng of kids in green tartan school uniforms, half-mast beige socks and floppy wide-brimmed hats.

They slid into the arena like water spurting through a bottle neck. But at the first sign of a break Cameron slipped through until he stood beside Rosie, well and truly within her personal space.

She kept her eyes dead ahead, but couldn’t ignore the tug of his gravitational pull, the scent of new cotton, winter, and clean male skin. She breathed in deep through her nose, then pinched the soft part of her hand between her thumb and her index finger in punishment.

‘Any feet seen touching any chairs will be forcibly removed!’ Adele said as she was carried away with the noisy crowd.

And all too soon it was just the two of them again. Alone, in the unforgiving fluorescent light that couldn’t seem to find one bad angle on him.

‘It seems you really do have to get to work,’ Cameron said, a hint of something that sounded a heck of a lot like the dashing of hope tinging his words.

Rosie’s heart twitched, and kept on twitching. She coughed hard, and it found its regular steady pattern once more.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ she said, turning to him, thus allowing herself one last look before she brought this strange encounter to a halt.

Looking was allowed. Looking at pretty, bright, hot things was her job. And as it was much safer doing so from a great distance she began backing away, thus setting in motion the next fifteen years until they crossed paths again.

‘It was great seeing you again, Rosalind.’ A glint lit eyes that she was entirely sure had been that exact cornflower-blue from the moment he’d been born.

A jaunty salute and she was gone, hitting the top step at a jog and not stopping until she reached the control room at the bottom, as from there she couldn’t tell if he had turned and left or if he’d watched her walk away.

The outer door shut behind Cameron with a clang, sending him out into the cold over-bright morning.

He stood on one spot for a good thirty seconds, letting the winter sun beat down upon his face, savouring the pleasant, hazy blur that an encounter with an intriguing woman could induce.

Rosalind Harper. St Grellans alumnus. How had he managed to go through the same school without once noticing that soft, pale skin, those temptingly upturned lips that just begged to be teased into a smile and the kind of mussed, burnished waves that made a man just want to reach out and touch?

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 tele-movie 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.’