Getting Red-Hot with the Rogue
Ally Blake
When opposites attract, sparks fly! Dylan Kelly: a devilish rogue and hot-shot businessman, who makes men stand to attention and women’s knees knock…Wynnie Devereaux: a clever, beautiful, but slightly ditzy girl, whom Dylan leaves feeling flustered and frustrated – in more ways than one…The fierce tycoon and the erstwhile protester shouldn’t get along – except sparks of desire fly between them. But will Wynnie get burnt when she gets red-hot with this untameable rogue?
‘Would you do me a favour?’
Dylan’s deep voice rolled over her. ‘You certainly aren’t backward about asking for what you want—I’ll give you that.’
‘I need you to get the key for my cuffs.’
After a long, slow pause he said, ‘The key?’
She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. ‘It’s my top right breast pocket. I can’t reach it. So, unless you do want me to become a permanent fixture…’
The rest of her words dried up in her throat and her eyes flung open.
It seemed she hadn’t had to ask twice. Dylan’s hand was already sliding into the pocket, his fingertips brushing against the soft cotton over her bra—just slowly enough so that a ripple of goosebumps sprang up all over her body, and just fast enough so that she couldn’t accuse him of taking advantage.
All too soon he held up the key. ‘This the one you’re after?’
She hoped to God it was. If he made another foray in there she didn’t know what she might do.
When Ally Blake was a little girl she made a wish that when she turned twenty-six she would marry an Italian two years older than her. After it actually came true, she realised she was onto something with these wish things. So, next she wished that she could make a living spending her days in her pyjamas, eating M&Ms and drinking scads of coffee while turning her formative experiences of wallowing in teenage crushes and romantic movies into creating love stories of her own. The fact that she is now able to spend her spare time searching the internet for pictures of handsome guys for research purposes is merely a bonus!
Come along and visit her website at www.allyblake.com
Ally Blake also writes for the Mills & Boon® Romance series!
Recent books by the same author:
A NIGHT WITH THE SOCIETY PLAYBOY
THE MAGNATE’S INDECENT PROPOSAL
Mills & Boon® Romance:
DATING THE REBEL TYCOON
Dear Reader
After setting most of my books in the cool, elegant, cosmopolitan southern Australian city of Melbourne, in which I now live, when the idea for this story popped into my head I had no choice but to set it in the city in which I grew up.
Brisbane is a city with a young heart. When I think of her I see a gleaming city skyline, sprawling suburbs, the tight curves of her meandering river, lush green hills, warm golden beaches a stone’s throw away, and most of all the kind of stunning year-round weather other cities envy. They don’t say she’s beautiful one day and perfect the next for nothing!
The funny thing is, living away from a place for nearly a decade means things change—favourite restaurants have closed down, shopping precincts that were once cool are now passé, and even street names have disappeared into the cavernous blur that is my memory. But that has given me the chance to rediscover Brisbane in a new way—and more great excuses to head on up to visit my gorgeous family.
And now that I’ve started writing about the fabulous and formidable Kelly family, and their place in the Brisbane landscape, I’m not sure where I’m going to stop! Dylan’s brothers and sisters, and their friends, have all clamoured to the surface of my subconscious, begging for stories of their own.
My only concern is who will be the next to fall in love?
Ally
www.allyblake.com
GETTING
RED-HOT
WITH THE ROGUE
BY
ALLY BLAKE
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To beautiful, sunny Brisbane.
The city which gave me
my first crush, first kiss, and first love.
CHAPTER ONE
‘MR KELLY?’
Dylan looked up from his corner office desk on the thirtieth floor of Kelly Tower to find his assistant, Eric, practically quivering in the doorway. ‘Shoot.’
Eric’s voice tremored as he tried to say, ‘I… There’s… I’m not sure I quite know how to…’
Whistling a breath through the smallest gap between his lips, Dylan pushed back his chair and leant his chin upon steepled fingers. ‘Take a breath. Visualise your happy place. Count to ten. Whatever it takes. Just remember that I am a very busy, very important man and get to the point.’
Eric did as he was told, so quickly Dylan thought the kid might hyperventilate. But he managed to say, ‘I have to get onto your computer for a sec.’
‘Go for your life.’ Dylan pushed his chair back to give the guy room.
Eric slid into place, his fingers flying over the keyboard with the speed of a kid born with a laptop attached to his thighs. ‘A friend of mine works for an online news mag and he messaged me to say I had to see something. This address ought to give us a direct feed.’
Dylan’s cheek twitched. ‘Seriously, kid, if you’ve come in here all a fluster because some blog has footage of me feeding spaghetti and meatballs to that nifty little Olympic diver I met in Luxembourg last week…’
His next words froze on his tongue and he slid his chair back beneath his desk with such speed Eric had to leap out of the way.
The monitor was not in fact showing any footage of him. Or the nifty little Olympian. Or meatballs, for that matter.
Dylan didn’t even have the chance to be the slightest bit ashamed of his own self-absorption as the crystal clear digital footage brought his raison d’être, the family business he championed day in day out, back to the forefront of his mind with a wallop.
The half-acre forecourt keeping Kelly Tower clear of the maddening CBD crowds that traversed Brisbane’s hectic George Street had in its north corner a twenty-foot-high, silver, zigzag sculpture—symbolising the impressive escalation of fortune that securing representation with the Kelly Investment Group ensured.
The sculpture usually stood proud and alone bar a few stray pigeons brave enough to cling to its slick diagonal bars. Today it had been taken over by camera crews and reporters with mini-sound recorders and logo-labelled mikes. That kind of excitement had encouraged a crowd of ten times as many interested onlookers.
No wonder.
From what he could make out through the sudden ache descending upon his head, the excitement in the reporter’s voice, and Eric wheezing in the doorway, in some kind of crazy protest a woman had handcuffed herself to the zig. Or was it the zag?
Dylan had nothing against handcuffs per se. They had their place in the zeitgeist of the single man. Just not in the middle of a busy workday, not in front of his building, and not when as the head of Media Relations it was his job to make the fact that a crazy person had picked that particular statue to attach her daft self seem less interesting than it certainly was.
The crowd parted, and Eric’s friend’s camera slipped into the gap, giving Dylan a better look at the ruination of his afternoon.
She was fair skinned, dark-eyed, with dark wavy hair made all the more interesting by the fact she kept having to shake its wind-mussed length out of her face. A floral top cinched and flowed in all the right places, telling tales of the kinds of curves and hollows that could distract a weaker-willed man. Not to mention the white calf-length trousers into which her second-glance-worthy bottom had been poured, or the pair of the most insanely high-heeled hot pink sandals…
And, of course, handcuffs.
‘What are we going to do?’ Eric said in whispered awe.
Dylan jumped; he and the woman had been having such a moment he’d forgotten his assistant was even there.
The heel of his palm reared up over the mouse, ready to jab the webpage closed, when a sudden gust of breeze blew the woman’s hair away from her face and she looked directly into Eric’s mate’s camera lens.
Dylan’s hand went rigid a breath from touchdown leaving him staring into a pair of brown eyes. Bambi eyes, for Pete’s sake. Big, beautiful, liquid brown with long, delicate eyelashes that made them appear wounded. Vulnerable. Repentant.
His gut twisted. His teeth clenched. A shaft of heat shot him upright, then filled him with adrenalin. Every masculine instinct reached out to him as the deep-seated urge to protect her clobbered him from the inside out. He felt himself rising from his seat, his wrists straightening as though preparing to slay whoever it was who had put that look in those eyes.
Then she licked her lips, shapely pink lips covering the sexiest kind of overbite, and blinked those big brown eyes. As her gaze shifted left she dropped her chin a fraction and she grinned flirtatiously at the person behind the camera.
The trance splintered like broken glass, ringing in his ears as it dislocated around him.
He swore beneath his breath, regained control over his mouse hand, closed the damn webpage and gave his usually exceptionally discriminating protective instincts a good mental kick in the pants.
They knew better. Far better.
The only people he sheltered by way of his vociferous guard bore the name of Kelly. The blood of his blood. That was as wide as his circle of trust stretched.
His family needed to stick together. Tight together. For, no matter how sincere people might seem to be in courting amity, the downside of being richer than Midas and more recognisable than the prime minister was that they would always be considered Kellys first, everything else second.
He’d learnt that lesson nice and young. No matter how beguiling a woman might be, how well bred, how seemingly genuine, they all wanted something from him—his wealth, his connections, even his name.
Nowadays he only let himself play with those who wanted the heat of his body and nothing more. No history and no hereafter. It was a process that had worked beautifully for him for some time.
The fact that not a single one of the warm bodies had stoked the fire of his protective instincts like the one with the soft brown eyes was something he had neither the time nor inclination to ponder.
Feeling mighty fractious, he was out of the chair and through the door before Eric even realised he was moving.
‘Sir!’ Eric cried.
Dylan waved a hand over his shoulder, and all but ignored the wave of hellos and bowing and scraping that followed in his wake as he jogged down the hallway towards the elevators.
Eric was puffing, red-faced, and his hands were shaking by the time he caught up. ‘Tell me what I can do!’
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Dylan said as the elevator doors closed so slowly he made a mental note to talk to his brother, Cameron—who, being an engineer, surely knew where to source faster-closing ones. ‘And tell your mother you’ll be late home. I have the feeling this will be a long day.’
Wynnie’s wrists hurt.
That’s what comes from not doing a trial run with newhandcuffs, you duffer.
Ever the pro, she did her all not to let the discomfort show. She dug her fingernails into her palms, hoping it might take away her focus from the itchiness and scratchiness encircling her wrists. And she smiled at the bank of reporters, each of whom had no idea they were about to become her new best friends in this town.
‘What’s KInG ever done to you?’ a voice from the back called out.
She looked down the barrel of the nearest camera, discreetly spat a clump of windswept hair from her lip gloss, and said, ‘They’ve never once returned my phone calls. Typical, right?’
She rolled her eyes, and a few women in the crowd murmured in appreciation.
She made sure to look each and every one of them in the eye as she said, ‘The past week I’ve met with top men and women in local and state government to talk about what we can all do together to help reduce the impact each individual person in this city is having on our environment. Those civil servants, good people with families at home and middle-income jobs, have been full of beans and ideas and enthusiasm. Yet the Kelly Investment Group, the largest company in town, a company with hundreds of employees and capital to burn, has time and again refused to even sit down with me, a new girl in town looking to make new friends, and have a chat over a cuppa.’
More twittering, this time with more volume.
‘What does a company have to do to get a cuppa with a girl like you?’ a deep voice called out from the back.
Wynnie bit her lip to stop from laughing as that question had come from her one plant at the event—Hannah, her close friend, and fellow Clean Footprint Coalition employee—who was currently hiding behind a cup of takeaway coffee and staring at a radio reporter as though he were the one who’d asked.
Wynnie waited until the crowd quieted. She leant forward, or as far as she could with her hands anchored behind her. ‘Kids, today I’m gonna need you all to tap into your imaginations. Hark back to those powerful images of environmentalists in the eighties chaining themselves to bulldozers to stop them knocking down ecologically imperative forests. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and the corporate giants, such as the Kelly Investment Group—’
Better to use their whole name, she thought, rather thanthe cute moniker they’d picked up, or possibly even coinedthemselves.
‘—are the new bad guys. Collectives with power, and resources, and influence who choose to turn the other cheek while you and I do our bit. We take shorter showers to conserve water, we recycle our newspapers, we unplug our appliances when we’re not using them. Right?’
Smiles all around. Lots of nods. If someone held a fist in the air she wouldn’t be surprised. The wave of solidarity gripped her. Her heart thundered all the harder in her chest, her skin hummed, the ache in her wrists all but forgotten.
‘Did you know,’ she said, lowering her voice so they all had to move in closer, ‘this sculpture is lit twenty-four hours a day? Yep. Even now, in the middle of a sunny Brisbane spring afternoon, it has thirty separate lights making sure it always looks as shiny as it can possibly be. Thirty!’
One by one the faces turned to glare at the shimmering silver edifice behind her. She could smell blood in the air. That was a triumph in itself considering the Goliath she was putting herself up against.
Her bosses had done their research, looking at popular fashion stores, television stations, national café chains when deciding who to lobby. But every lead had led back to the same destination. The Kellys.
They were the most famous, respected, fascinating family in town. Their reach was unmatched. Their influence priceless. If she got them on board as the first major corporate partner with the revamped Clean Footprint Coalition, the exposure would be unimaginable, and Brisbane would fall into her lap like a pack of cards.
‘I am a concerned citizen,’ she continued, ‘as are you all, as are my colleagues, the band of environmental groups together known as the Clean Footprint Coalition. While the Kelly Investment Group, with the hundreds of ambivalent corporate clients they represent, is the biggest bulldozer you have ever seen.’
Hannah yelled out a mighty, ‘Yeah,’ and the crowd took up the cry until it all but reverberated around the square.
Wynnie bit back a grin of victory. God, did she love her work. These moments, when she had something to do with making people think about their place in the grand scheme of things, she really felt as if she could change the world.
The rush of pleasure was yummier than chocolate. It was more profound than a Piña Colada on an empty stomach. Hell, it was better than sex. Thank God for that. The hours above and beyond the call of duty that she dedicated to her work were such that she barely remembered what the latter was like.
A sudden ripple of noise from behind her mercifully pulled her from contemplating the extent of her accidental chastity. She turned, as well, and naturally got just far enough that her shoulder jarred, sapping every one of those lovely endorphins with it.
The pain had her sucking in a sharp breath, and hoping the trickle of sweat that had begun its journey down her neck and between her breasts wouldn’t show up on camera.
She needn’t have worried. Every camera panned left, microphones swerved in their wake, all pointing towards Kelly Tower.
And she knew why her audience had dared stray.
The saucy handcuffs and her subsequent introduction to the media of Brisbane as their new avenging angel had been mere foreplay. For any good show to be newsworthy every angel needed her very own personal devil. And she was about to meet hers.
Little spikes of energy skittered across her skin as she imagined who it might be. An overweight security guard with no authority and less of a clue? Some red-faced lackey sent to try to shoo her away?
‘Kelly!’ a radio guy called out.
‘Mate, over here!’ another followed suit.
Kelly? Could one of the gods have come down from the tower himself? She tried to find Hannah’s face within the crowd to share the rush. Hannah had her hands on some guy’s shoulders as she too tried to make out which bright, shiny Kelly it might be.
As she tried to see without causing a permanent injury Wynnie’s mind backtracked over the Kelly family members she’d read about amongst the hundreds of local luminaries she’d been made aware of in the preceding days.
It wouldn’t be Quinn Kelly, CEO, surely. The fellow had always been elusive to the mere masses, and of late had become as reclusive as Elvis. She was kind of glad. His ability to slay even the most steely backed opponent with a single glance was legendary.
Brendan Kelly? He was next in charge, the heir to KInG’s throne, but not at all press-friendly from what she’d heard. If it was either of them she’d eat her shoes. Mmm. She liked her shoes. They were one of the only things she’d brought with her from Verona. Maybe she’d eat Brussels sprouts. She hated Brussel sprouts so that seemed a fair compromise.
So if it wasn’t Quinn, and it wasn’t Brendan, and since neither the younger brother Cameron, the engineer, or youngest sister, Meg, the seemingly professional ingénue, worked for KInG, then it had to be the one whose photo she had pulled from the file and stuck to the back of her office door with a great red pin through his forehead. The one she hoped she might finally get to after weeks of negotiating, pushing, prodding, making a nuisance of herself. The one she believed could help her make the Clean Footprint Coalition’s dream a reality.
Dylan Kelly. Vice President, Media Relations. The spare to Brendan as heir. The public face of KInG, he could charm the heck out of any female with her own televisions, was constantly photographed wining and dining the city’s most gorgeous women at benefits, sports events, and everywhere in between, and generally held the gossip-hungry city in thrall.
Wynnie was sure it helped that he appeared to be one of the more beautiful men ever to grace the planet. Her chin had practically hit the conference table when she’d first seen his photo. Heck, if he weren’t a corporate bad guy she might have worked pro bono to have him declared a protected species.
‘Ladies,’ a deep voice rumbled from somewhere over her now throbbing right shoulder. ‘Gentlemen. What a pleasure it is to see that you’ve all decided to come by on this fine sunny day. If I’d have known there was to be a party I would have ordered dim sum and wine coolers for all.’
A few cracks of laughter, several deeply feminine sighs, and the slow flopping of microphones told Wynnie she was losing her audience fast.
She took a deep breath, flicked her hair from her face, and prepared to win them back by beating Mr Slick to an ethical pulp. He might be infamously charming, but she had right on her side, and that had to count for something.
Finally the crowd cleared, and through the parted waters came a man. Standard light blue shirt. Discreetly striped tie. Dark suit. So far not so much the kind of devil she had in mind.
But the closer he got, the more the details came into focus. His suit was tailored precisely to highlight every hard plane of the kind of body that spoke of restrained power, and made walking through big cities at lunchtime a guilty pleasure. His clenched jaw was so sharp it looked to be chiselled from granite. His dark blond hair was short, but with just enough scruff to make a girl want to run her fingers through it. Tame it. Tame him.
But the thing that trapped her gaze and held it was a pair of hooded blue eyes. With all the other inducements he had on show, there was no other colour they’d dare be.
And it was then that she realised they were trained completely on her. Flat, piercing, bewitching baby blue.
And he wasn’t merely looking at her, he was looking into her. As if he was searching for the answer to a question only he knew. Her throat tightened and her mouth felt unnaturally dry, and, whatever the question was, the only answer her mind formed was, ‘Yes’.
She tried to stand straighter—her handcuffs bit, jerking her back. She found herself twisted in what suddenly felt like a wholly defenceless position—breasts pressed forward, neck exposed. For the first time since she’d snapped the handcuffs closed she wondered if this had been entirely the right move.
‘So what’s this all about, then?’ he asked, his eyes skimming away from her and out into the crowd.
Someone actually had to point a thumb back her way. She rolled her eyes.
He took a moment before turning and spotting her again, using all the subtlety of a double take. She squared her shoulders, looked him in the eye and raised an eyebrow.
He took two slow steps. To an untrained eye he might have seemed as if he was out for a stroll, to her he was clearly a predator stalking his prey. Either way he was nowhere near as cool as he was making himself out to be.
‘Well,’ he drawled, ‘what have we here?’
With the cameras whirring over his shoulder she found perspective. The man before her might be one hell of a kick start for a sorely undernourished libido, but she had to remember he was the devil—though one with enough influence to make a real difference, and she had every intention of making him renounce his bad ways.
She managed to gather a breezy smile. ‘Good afternoon.’
He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers, drawing his shirt tight across his chest, and drawing her eyes to his zipper region in one clever move. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Peachy,’ she said, dragging her eyes north. ‘Some weather we’re having, don’t you think?’
His cheek twitched. And he ambled to a halt—close enough that she could all but feel the choleric steam rising from his broad shoulders, but far enough away that every camera on site had access to his captivating face.
He looked away for a moment, and she let go of a lungful of stale breath. He glanced briefly at her high heels, and she figured he planned to keep out of kicking distance. It was the move of a man who’d been in danger of being castrated before. Her confidence came back in a whoosh.
Until he moved closer still. Close enough she could see the rasp of stubble glinting on his cheeks, a loose thread poking out of one of his shirt buttons, the shadow of impressive muscle along his upper arms.
Her nostrils flared as she sucked in oxygen, and the immediate intense physical reaction stunned the hell out of her.
‘You’ve got yourself quite a crowd here,’ he said, loud enough everyone could hear.
The cameras and the desperate hush of a dozen journalists reminded her why that was. She gathered her straying wits, tilted her chin downward, batted her eyelashes for all she was worth and, with a cheery smile said, ‘Haven’t I just?’
The crowd murmured appreciatively. But that wasn’t the thing that made her cheeks feel warm, her belly feel tumbly, and her knees feel as weak as if she’d been standing there for days. That was purely due to the fresh, devilish glint in Dylan Kelly’s baby blues.
She stood straighter, accidentally jerking her arms and twinging her shoulder, which created a fresh batch of friction at her itchy wrists. Wynnie sucked in a breath to keep from wincing. She kept it all together admirably, promising herself an extra twenty minutes of meditation on the yoga mat when she got home, as she said, ‘The handcuffs brought them out. But it’s what I have to say that’s keeping them here.’
‘And what’s that?’
Research and appearances backed up the notion that he wasn’t a silly man, but he’d just made a silly move. The first rule in shaping public opinion was never to ask a question you didn’t know the answer to.
Buoyed anew, she said, ‘Since you asked, not a moment before you graced us with your presence, we all agreed that you have been acting terribly irresponsibly, and that it’s time you pulled up your socks.’
Before she had the chance to provide some beautiful sound bites dripping with the kinds of statistics newspapers loved, Dylan Kelly grabbed a hunk of suit leg, lifted it high to show off a jet-black sock and enough tanned, muscular, manly calf to create a tidal wave of trembling through the predominantly female crowd.
Okay, so he wasn’t at all silly. He was very, very good. Who knew naked male calf could trump handcuffs?
Dylan took the attention and ran with it, on the face of it focusing back on her, but she knew his words were for everyone else. ‘You oughtn’t to believe all you read in the glossy pages. I’m not all bad. My mother taught me always to wear clean socks, and the hideous memory of my father trying to teach me about the birds and the bees when I was twelve years old scared the bejesus out of me so much it made me the most…responsible man on the planet.’
He might as well have pulled a concertina row of condoms from his pocket as he said it, for the feminine trembling turned to almost feverish laughter as the lot of them got lost in thoughts of Dylan’s underwear and what it might be like to be the one with whom he might one day act altogether irresponsibly.
The men in the crowd were no better. She could read them as easily as if they wore flashing signs on their foreheads. They wanted to buy him a beer, and live vicariously through him for as long as he’d let them near.
Unless she pulled a shoe-sale sign and a Playboy bunny from somewhere her hands could still reach she might lose them all for good. It was time her press conference was brought to a close.
‘Mr Kelly,’ she said, using her outside voice. ‘I concede that your socks are indeed…up. And since my points have obviously fluttered over your head, perhaps I need to be clearer about what I want.’
The crowd quieted and Dylan Kelly slowly lowered the leg of his trousers. Again when he looked at her she felt as if he were looking deep inside her. Testing her mettle? Hoping the force of his gaze might make her explode into a pile of ashes? Or was he after something beyond her comprehension?
The ability to stick one’s hands on one’s hips was underrated. As was the ability to cross one’s arms. She could only stand there, torso thrust in his direction, staring back.
His voice dropped until it was so low it felt vaguely threatening. ‘Tell me, then, what it is that you want from me.’
‘I want you to take the same duty of care with your business practices, in the example you set for your employees and clients with regards to your impact on the environment, as you do your choice of footwear. I want your company to do its part and reduce its prodigious impact on the environment.’
He slid his feet shoulder-width apart, his toes pointing directly at her. ‘Honey, I’m not sure what you think we do in there but we sit at computers and wangle phones. Not so much rainforest felling as you might believe.’
‘You might not be the ones swinging the axes, but, by not being as green as you can be, you may as well be.’
While he looked as though he was imagining ways in which he might surreptitiously have her removed from the face of the earth, she kept her eyes locked on his and was as earnest as she could be when she said, ‘Just hear me out. I promise you’ll sleep better at night.’
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. For a moment she thought she might have pierced his hard shell, until his exquisitely carved cheek lifted into a smile. ‘I sleep just fine.’
And she believed him, to the point of imagining a man splayed out on a king-sized bed, expensive sheets barely covering his naked body as he slept the sleep of the completely satiated. Okay, not a man. This man. That body right now unfairly confined by the convention that city financiers wear suits.
She blinked, and her lashes stuck to her hot cheeks reminding her she’d been standing in the sun for half an hour, strapped to a sharp, uncomfortable, metal statue. ‘Come on. What do you say? Don’t you want your family name to stand for something great?’
Finally, something she said worked. The chiselled jaw turned to rock. The blue eyes completely lost the roguish glint. His faint aura of exasperation evaporated. And right before her eyes the man grew into his suit.
Debonair and cheeky, he was mouth-watering. Focused and switched on he might, she feared and hoped, be the most exceptional devil this angel was yet to meet.
His blue eyes locked hard and fast onto hers, pinning her to the spot with more power than the manacles binding her hands ever could. Her skin flushed, her heart rate doubled, her stomach clenched and released as though readying her to fight or fly.
His voice was rough, but loud enough for every microphone to pick it up as he said, ‘Both KInG and the Kelly family invest millions every year in environmental causes such as renewable energy research and reforestation. More than any other company in this state.’
‘That’s excellent. Truly. But money isn’t everything,’ she shot back, holding his gaze, feeling the cameras zoom in tight. ‘Action is the marker of a man, and the actions within that building beside us in the last year have added up to the waste of more than forty thousand disposable paper cups a month, more water usage than the whole of the suburb I live in, and enough paper waste to fell hectares of old forest. What I want from you is the promise that you are going to become the solution rather than being the problem.’
When the devil in the dark suit didn’t come back with an instant response her heart thundered with the thrill of a battle won, with the knowledge that the cameras had their sound bite. And if Dylan Kelly, VP Media Relations, was worth his salt he knew in that moment there was no way that he could just walk away.
‘So what do ya say?’ she said, bringing her voice back down to a more intimate level, loosening her grip, relaxing her stance and slipping on a warm, friendly and just a little bit flirty smile. ‘Invite me in for a coffee and a chat and I’ll spend tomorrow bugging someone else.’
She felt the whole forecourt hold its collective breath as they awaited his next move.
When it finally came, Wynnie was again glad of her shackles, uncomfortable as they had become, as this time when those blindingly blue eyes met hers they were filled with such self-possession, such provocation, such blatant reined-in heat her knees all but buckled beneath her.
‘You want to come up to my place for coffee?’ he asked, his voice like silk and melted dark chocolate and all things decadent and delectable and too slippery to hold on to. ‘Now why didn’t you just say so in the first place?’
CHAPTER TWO
AS THOUGH Dylan Kelly had a magic button in the pocket of his trousers, Security arrived at that moment to discreetly move the onlookers away. The city workers and tourists had had their free lunchtime show. The press had their story. Wynnie’s awareness campaign was off to a flying start. Everyone was happy.
Everyone except Dylan, who was staring at her as if she were a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
‘That was a cheap trick you just pulled,’ he growled quietly enough that only she could hear.
Wynnie shook her hair out of her face. Now the crowd had dispersed, the breeze whipping up George Street was swirling around her like a maelstrom. ‘I prefer fearless, indomitable and inventive.’
‘In the end it will be they who decide one way or the other.’ He motioned with a slight tilt of his head to the row of news vans on the sidewalk.
‘Lucky for me,’ she said with a smile.
‘Mmm. Lucky for you.’ He glanced at his watch, then back at her. ‘So did you want to conduct your bogus meeting out here or were you planning on staying here for the night?’
Wynnie twisted to get her hands to the tight back pocket of her capri pants, which had been ideal for the Verona autumn she had left behind, but in the warm Brisbane spring sunshine they stuck to her like a wetsuit. ‘Oh, no. I’m done. Horizontal is my much preferred method. Of sleeping,’ she added far too late for comfort.
She glanced up to find him thankfully preoccupied enough to have missed her little Freudian slip. Unfortunately he was preoccupied with the twisting and turning of her hips.
His voice was deep, his jaw tight, when he said, ‘I could have had you arrested, you know. This is private property.’
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘The globe belongs to none of us.’
He’d moved closer, having seemingly reconciled himself to the fact that she wanted to get out of the handcuffs as much as he wanted her to, and that her shoes were made for looks and functionality, not for use as a secret weapon. Without the clamour of the crowd making the square smell like a fish-market, she caught a waft of his aftershave—clean, dark, expensive. Suddenly she felt very, very thirsty.
Despite his focus, she twisted some more. Her shoulder twinged but better that than have to keep trying to appear professional while cuffed to the statue, and while the touch of his eyes made her skin scorch beneath her clothes.
Her fingers made it to the bottom of the tight coin pocket to find it was empty. Her heart leapt into her throat until she remembered she’d put the tiny key inside the breast pocket of her shirt at the last minute.
Naturally when she tried to reach it, she couldn’t. She stood on tiptoes, looking for Hannah, knowing it was a lost cause. She would have been back at the office the minute lunch hour was up.
Wynnie closed her eyes a moment, took a deep breath and said, ‘Would you do me a favour?’
Dylan’s deep voice rolled over her. ‘You certainly aren’t backwards about asking for what you want, I’ll give you that.’
‘I need you to get the key for my cuffs.’
After a long, slow pause he said, ‘The key?’
She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. ‘It’s in my top right breast pocket. I can’t reach it. So unless you do want me to become a permanent fixture—’
The rest of her words dried up in her throat and her eyes sprang open.
It seemed she hadn’t had to ask twice. Dylan’s hand was already sliding into the pocket, his fingertips brushing against the soft cotton over her bra; just slowly enough to make a ripple of goose bumps leap up all over her body, and just fast enough she couldn’t accuse him of taking advantage.
All too soon he held up the key. ‘This the one you’re after?’
She hoped to God it was. If he made another foray in there she didn’t know what she might do.
She nodded and looked up into his eyes. Up close they were the colour of the sky back home, the unspoilt wilds of country Nimbin—the kind of wide-open blue found only in the most untouched places on earth. But the colour was the only virtuous thing about them. Barely checked exasperation boiled just below the surface.
She lifted her hand to take the key, was reminded why he had it in the first place, then gritted her teeth as she twisted so that she could expose her wrists, and her back view, to him instead.
This time he managed to have her unlocked without touching her at all. Not even a whisper, an accidental grope, a playful pat. She actually felt disappointed.
When God was handing out the mechanism for knowing who a girl could safely lean on, Wynnie had so-o-o missed out. If there was ever a man in her vicinity who was about to act against her own interests, that was the one she was drawn to.
She shook her head and vowed to ask Hannah to set her up on some sort of blind date and fast. Or maybe just a night out dancing at some dark, hazy club. Or she could take up running. Not as though she’d ever lifted a foot in purposeful exercise in her life, but there was no time like the present to begin! If she didn’t manage to release some of the sexual tension this man had summoned, she was going to make a hash of everything.
She slid the cuffs from her right wrist, sucking in a short sharp breath as the pain of their release grew worse than the dull ache of the wearing of them.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and she looked up in surprise.
For the briefest moment she thought she saw actual concern flicker within his gaze. She blinked and it was gone. She hid the cuffs and her red wrists behind her. ‘I’m fine. Now how about that coffee?’
‘First things first,’ he said, rocking forwards on his heels until her personal space became his personal space. His dark scent became her oxygen. His natural heat her reason for getting up that morning.
Her toes curled and her tongue darted out to wet her lips.
‘I don’t make a habit of having coffee with a woman without at the very least getting a name.’ He held out a hand. ‘Dylan Kelly.’
Wynnie blinked, mentally slapped herself across the back of her head for letting her imagination run rampant, then took his hand, doing her best to ignore the frisson of heat that scooted up her arm as his fingers curled around hers. ‘Wynnie Devereaux.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘French?’
‘Australian.’
His eyebrows slowly flattened out, but the edge of his mouth kicked up into a half smile as he realised she had no intention of illuminating him further.
The truth was that Devereaux was the maiden name of a grandmother she’d never met, and her little brother, Felix, had never been able to pronounce her real name as a baby and had called her Wynnie from the time he could talk.
Felix. The whisper of his name in the back of her mind made her soul hurt, and reminded her how her patchy instinct on who to trust could go so terribly wrong.
Either way, she had no intention of talking to Dylan Kelly, or anyone else, about the existence of her brother. Or, for that matter, her real name.
‘Next,’ he said. Before I inflict you upon my place of business, he didn’t need to say. ‘Are you here on your own whim or as an ambassador for others like you?’
Wynnie raised an eyebrow at his snarky attitude. She then pulled a business card from the skinny travel purse looped beneath her shirt and hanging against her hip.
Her fingers brushed over the crystal and white-stone butterfly clip attached to the strap of her purse, and like the touchstone it was, it helped take the edge off her soaring adrenalin.
She handed her card over, a handcuff still dangling from that wrist.
The whisper of a half-smile tugged at Dylan’s mouth, and her body reacted the same way it had every time that happened. It stretched and unfolded and purred.
Which was insane. He’d made no bones about how unenthusiastic he was about the prospect of spending time with her. And he was a target, not some anonymous hot guy in a club who might, if she was very lucky, turn out to be an undemanding friend with benefits. But she couldn’t help herself. It was as though the laws of nature were having their way with her without her consent.
She whipped the cuffs behind her and unhooked them, shoving one end down the back of her trousers before they became more of a distraction. Or an apparent invitation.
He glanced at her for one long moment more before his eyes slid to her business card. His lip curled as he said, ‘You’re a lobbyist?’
‘Is that better or worse than whatever it was you were thinking I was before you saw the card?’
He tipped her business card into the palm of his hand and out of sight. And if she’d thought he’d filled out his suit before, now he stood so erect he looked as if he’d been sewn into the thing. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure.’
But at least he waved an arm in front of her, herding her towards the formidable Kelly Tower.
As Wynnie’s feet moved under her she realised she was kind of stunned. The spectacle had actually worked. Her employers, whose previous public persona was devout and dull, would come out of this appearing anything but. They would get prime-time news coverage, and she had gathered several leads with reporters who wanted follow-ups. She couldn’t have asked for more.
The fact that she was now heading inside enemy camp meant she was a few steps ahead of the game.
So naturally she had none of the meticulously prepared, Kelly-centric pamphlets loaded with detailed cost projections and time frames on hand to back her up. There was no room in her purse for more than a credit card and house key. And nothing else was going to fit down those trousers.
Well, she’d be fine. She’d just have to wing it. Having grown up with hippy parents in Nimbin, the flower-child capital of Australia, spouting green was what she had been born to do.
She snuck a glance sideways at her silent new acquaintance to find his profile was even more daunting than front-on. His thick, dark blond hair was being lightly and sexily ruffled by the breeze shooting around the building. Those stunning blue eyes were hooded beneath strong brows so that they looked to be peering down at the world via his perfectly carved nose. And then there were those lips.
She wondered which lucky girl out there was allowed to kiss them whenever she pleased. Was able to run her finger across their planes whenever the fancy took her. Was able to lean her chin on her palm and watch them as they talked, and smiled and laughed. Her own lips tingled just looking at them.
His cheek dimpled and she knew she’d been caught staring. As he turned his head her chin shot skyward so that she might pretend to be taken with the facade of the skyscraper named after his equally daunting family.
She lifted her right hand to shield her eyes from the glare shooting off the glass panels of the top floors when pain bit her shoulder. She crumpled in on herself and let out a shocked squeal.
He noticed. This time there was no mistaking the flicker of a supporting arm in her direction. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
She grabbed the handle of a glass door leading inside, using her left hand. ‘Once you’re standing beside me in front of a bank of cameras, telling the people of Brisbane the ways in which you and your company have helped reduce your impact on the planet thanks to the help of the Clean Footprint Coalition, and admitting how easy it will be for every individual sitting there on their couch at home to follow suit, then I’ll be ecstatic. Until then, assume I’m about middling.’
She pulled open the door and, with her head held high, stalked through.
The thick glass wasn’t thick enough to shield her from the surge of laughter tumbling from Dylan’s beautiful lips. Or the ripple of awareness that lathered her entire body at the seriously sexy sound.
She frowned. He didn’t need to be declared a protected species. He needed a warning label stapled to his head. Beware:come within ten feet and your sexual appetite willexceed local limits.
A few more steps inside and Wynnie’s high heels clacked noisily to a halt as she tipped her head back, spun about and assimilated the Kelly Tower’s entryway.
Acres of golden marble floors were only made more stunning by the most intricate black marble inlays. Two-storey-high columns acting as sentinels to a long hallway leading away from the front doors were lit by reproduction antique gas lamps. Numerous arched windows a floor above let in streams of natural light. And a massive clock, twice her height, ticked away the minutes until the banking day was closed.
It was the most stunning space she had ever seen. And that was just the lobby.
The CFC think tank had been spot on. This place, this family were the right choice. If the businesses of Brisbane didn’t all secretly want to be them, if every single citizen didn’t want to do behind closed doors exactly as they did, then she might as well have stayed in Verona.
That would have kept her from spending the past glorious month hanging with Hannah, her closest friend in the whole world. It would have kept her from working for an organisation that rang her bells like no other on earth. It would have kept her tens of thousands of miles from the beautiful place she grew up rather than a few hours’ drive…
‘You can buy a postcard with this exact view from the newsstand on the corner,’ a deep voice rumbled from just behind her.
She turned to him, her legs twisted awkwardly and a hunk of hair caught in her eyelashes. As elegantly as humanly possible she disentangled herself. ‘Not necessary.’
‘Then would you care to accompany me upstairs?’ he asked.
Right. Yes. She might be inside his lair but the hard work had barely begun.
It was game on. His job was easy—all he had to say was ‘no’, over and over again. Hers was nearby impossible—all she had to do was get him to say ‘yes’.
She took a deep breath and followed Dylan into the large art-deco lift. Going with the catch-more-flies-with-honey theory of negotiation, she cocked a hip and smiled at his reflection. ‘Why do I get the feeling I’m not the first girl you’ve invited into your office for coffee?’
Though the rest of him could have been cut from the same marble as that in the lobby, a flicker of heat ignited in his eyes. They were his tell. The one sign that she had that maybe one day his ‘no’ might turn into a ‘yes’. Lucky for her, looking into them was no chore.
As long as she gave no tell of her own. She didn’t need him knowing that her need to get this job done right was as important to her as anything she’d ever done. Or that her body was as attuned to his as a weathercock channelling a coming storm.
Dylan took a seat behind his one of a kind, polished-oak desk, and waited for Eric to lay out a chai latte for his unexpected two-o’clock appointment and a sweet black for him. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves in preparation for whatever the hell else would be thrown at him this afternoon.
Eric moved to the doorway, half terrified and half smitten with the creature ambling about the office. His eyes begged Dylan to let him back in. But this was one meeting he was doing all on his lonesome. Dylan shook his head once and the door closed with a pathetic click.
‘What happened to Jerry?’ Dylan asked as he waved a hand at the couch on the opposite side of his desk.
Wynnie remained standing as she picked up her mug and blew cool air across the top. ‘Jerry who?’
He tried dragging his eyes away from the small round hole formed between her full lips, but then realised he might as well get his enjoyment from this unfortunate meeting where he could. ‘Your predecessor at the CFC.’
‘Oh. He doesn’t work there anymore, and now I do.’
Dylan’s cheek twitched, and not for the first time that day.
Meeting Wynnie Devereaux in the flesh had done nothing to temper the fact that at first glance she’d seemed just the kind of woman he would normally like to sink his teeth into after a long day at work—pocket-sized, hot-blooded, skin like fresh cream.
Half an hour in her presence had told him she was also just about the most infuriating creature he’d ever met. She was a lobbyist, of all the rotten things—a professional charmer who’d chosen his family to lure to her cause. She had to be new in town or she would have known better than to come gunning for him.
Still, for one tiny moment out there in the forecourt, something in those absorbing brown eyes had yet again charmed him. And as that chink in his usually rock-hard armour lay exposed she’d been able to confound him, twist his words and finally outfox him at his own game. All that with both hands strapped behind her back.
His gaze meandered away from her lips to her small hands. Both of her wrists were so pink and painfully chaffed that his own itched and stung in empathy. And the instinct to soothe the hurt, to make it his own, slammed him from nowhere once more. Only this time he managed to catch himself in time before, like a sucker, he asked her if she was okay.
He shifted on his seat. Every part of him uncomfortable, some for different reasons than others. ‘If you’re hoping to find where I keep the busts of the baby seal cubs I club for fun, they’re in my home office.’
Her mouth curved into a smile. ‘Right by the barrels of crude oil you spill into the river at night just for kicks.’
‘You have done your research. So, where were you before the CFC?’
That had her eyes sliding back to his. Despite himself he searched their depths for the singular vulnerability that kept grabbing him through the middle. Now all he saw was the rush and fire of fierce intelligence. Unfortunately it didn’t serve to squash the attraction nipping at his skin.
She said, ‘Where I’ve come from is not important.’
‘It is if you wish to finish that coffee before my burly security guards throw you out on your sweet backside.’
She gave him a blank stare, but she couldn’t hide the rise and fall of her throat as she swallowed. She slowly took her seat, put her half-drunk chai latte on the edge of his desk, crossed her legs and dug in.
He hid his smile as he pretended to look for something in the top drawer of his desk. Poor old Jerry would have been quivering by now. And apologising. And practically offering to throw himself out.
Then again, he would never have accused Jerry of having a sweet backside. True, Jerry had never managed to be alone in a room with him before and he hadn’t been as close to Jerry’s backside as he had to Wynnie Devereaux’s…
The few remaining bits of him that weren’t coiled like springs coiled now, so tight they ached as he relived her turning her sweet backside his way so that he could set her free of her restraints.
Curves poured into tight white fabric, thick but not completely opaque, offering him the faint outline of a floral G-string. A flash of creamy skin peeking out from between her beltline and her shirt. His hand following the gentle curve but not touching. How did he manage to get so close without touching…?
Who was he kidding? The painful pleasure of those few moments of deliberate self-restraint were the highlight of his week.
He shut his drawer, sat back in his chair. Now he really wanted to know where the CFC had found her. And he made a mental note to get HR to headhunt their headhunter.
Her nostrils flared as she took in a breath. ‘Mr Kelly, what I’ve done before is not nearly as important as why I am here. My method of getting the name Clean Footprint Coalition on everyone’s lips may not have been typical by any means, but my mission is a deadly serious one. The CFC is a collective of respectable, hopeful, forward-thinking people. And it’s clear to all of us that KInG needs to go green, and quick smart.’
She sat forward, shuffled her sweet backside to the very edge of her chair and gripped the perimeter of his desk.
‘I need you,’ she said.
Her breathy voice came to him on a plea. A vulnerable, naked, genuine supplication. His own ability to breathe seemed to have gone walkabout as all the blood in his body was suddenly needed elsewhere.
She was good. More than good. She was a siren with a mission. But then, right when she had him where surely she wanted him, she seemed to recognise exactly how she had affected him, and her fingers uncurled from the edge of his desk and she sat slowly back in her chair. Confounding woman.
‘Our organisation,’ she said with added emphasis, ‘needs KInG. And KInG need us. Getting into bed together is win-win for all of us.’
He shifted on his seat again, knowing he was running out of positions in which he could sit upright and not hurt himself. At least he saw a chance to give her a taste of her own medicine.
‘All of us, hey?’ he said. ‘For some reason I’m seeing futons involved and that’s just not my style.’
She shook her head, and seemed to struggle to find her words, the siren lost within the skin of a delightfully befuddled mortal woman. ‘Forget getting into bed.’
‘But now you’ve brought it up, it’s out there. I like big beds, not too firm, with plenty of room to move.’
She held out a steadying hand, as if willing him with every fibre of her being to shut up and let her finish. ‘I meant it’s a win-win situation for both companies. We are looking to make a difference, and just think of all the lovely, happy, warm, free PR that would come to KInG if you led the way on how to be an authentically green business.’
An electronic Post-it note blinked up onto Dylan’s computer from Eric, telling him he had a client waiting. ‘You have two more minutes. Give it to me straight up. What exactly do you want?’
‘A partnership.’
Dylan couldn’t help himself, he laughed. Her responding dark frown was adorable.
‘With KInG?’ he clarified.
‘And the Clean Footprint Coalition.’
He leant forward. ‘Honey, I’m not sure which hay cart you rolled in on, but somebody’s been pulling your leg if they gave you any indication that this company had any desire, need or care to be in cahoots with anyone.’
She leant in towards him, too, recrossing her legs, and giving eye contact as good as she got. ‘But you already are. Your largest corporate clients are in car manufacturing, oil production, shipping, some of the largest polluters on the planet. Is that something you’d rather we were focusing on in our press material?’
The skin beneath his left eye twitched. It was a timely reminder that no matter how adorable her frowns might be she had an agenda, and it involved targeting his family in her tree-hugging games. If she backed him any further into a corner he would have no choice but to claw his way back out, and if she was in his way so be it.
His voice was as sharp as cut glass as he asked, ‘So why the hell didn’t you chain yourself to a sculpture outside one of their businesses?’
Rather than sensing how close she was to grave danger, the minx smiled, her eyes gleaming like warm honey. ‘I like yours better.’
Dylan growled. He actually growled, right out loud, and shook his fists beneath his desk. And right when his frustration reached its peak, her voice came to him like hot chocolate on a cold night. ‘Mr Kelly, I told you a small fib when I promised to bother someone else tomorrow. You’re it; the only company I even have on my radar. My every working hour has been and will be focused on bringing you home. So why not save us both some time, and a lot of aggravation and let my people come in here, strip you down to your bare essentials and build you back up again when it comes to energy consumption, consumables and waste? You’ll barely notice the cost and you will go to bed knowing the planet is breathing better for your minimal efforts.’
‘Why me?’ he asked, questioning not only her but whichever god he’d annoyed enough that day to bring this woman to his doorstep.
‘You are the company every other one in the country wants to emulate. Your success is legendary. Your influence off the chart. Where you lead others will follow, and we want them to follow. Turn off one light overnight, who’d notice? Turn off all the lights of Brisbane overnight, and it’s a revolution.’
She took a breath, licked her lips, sent his body temperature up a notch in the process, then said, ‘So what do you think?’
He leant back in his chair, but his eyes never once left hers. ‘Here it is, hopefully clear enough none of it will flutter over your head. I do not respond well to threats. I do not respond well to having my business or my family singled out so publicly by upstarts with an agenda. I think the stunt you pulled out there might be a lucky winner for one news cycle, but in taking me on you have bitten off more than you can chew. I think you should shine your green light elsewhere before you find it’s dimmed forever.’
She blinked up at him, those warm brown eyes somehow holding in whatever it was that she was thinking. Eventually she uncrossed her legs and she stood. She ran her hands down the sides of her thighs and he noticed they were shaking. His gut clenched. He pinched himself on the arm, hard.
She gave a small nod, and said, ‘Okay, then. That sounds like my cue to thank you for your time and let you get on with your day.’
She made her way to the door of his office. He pushed himself from his chair and followed. Halfway there he laid a hand on her lower back to guide her. Guide her? It was a straight line to the office door. He held his hand as still as could be while the muscles of her back and hips slid against him in an erotic rhythm.
There was no professional reason to touch her. If she’d been Jerry he wouldn’t have even left his chair. If she’d been Jerry she wouldn’t have made it past the front door. He was touching her as a lightning rod, as a way to stop himself from doing anything more extreme.
When she reached the hallway and turned towards him, his hand slid around her waist. The twist of her shirt, the soft dip of warm skin… He pulled his hand away quick smart.
She looked at him as though she had no clue as to the commotion raging inside him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for this afternoon. We appreciate your time.’
Suddenly he found himself not quite ready to have seen the last of her. He leant his shoulder against the doorframe of his office door. ‘Thank you for this afternoon. It has to be the most eventful Tuesday we’ve seen around this place since Melbourne Cup Day.’
‘Stock prices soar by triple figures, did they?’
His laughter carried out into the hall and several lackeys rushing past stopped to see why. He ignored them and explained, ‘A bunch of guys and girls from the legal floor dressed up as horses and jockeys and replayed the race for our amusement.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, I can only hope that when you tell the board about our meeting today you do so with as much verve and enthusiasm as you had for an inter-office lark.’
Her voice was pure sarcasm, yet she stayed where she was on the ocean of polished wood with its discreetly papered walls and sculpted cornices, and flurry of assistants keeping the place abuzz, and she clung to her small purse with both hands.
And it hit him like a three-foot fishhook through the guts. She wanted more than their two companies to work together. She wanted him. She was standing there acting as if she had ants in her pants as she was crushing on him big-time.
For the briefest moment he imagined sliding a hand into the back of her hair, pulling her to him and kissing the daylights out of her.
It rankled. He wasn’t the kind of guy to get suckered in by the simple sweet tug of desire. Only those of a particularly cool and indifferent ilk warranted his time. And Wynnie Devereaux appeared neither cool nor indifferent. While she was outwardly vivacious and implacable, he had the sense that on the inside she was as fragile and beautiful as the jewelled butterfly her fingers were tracing on her purse.
She was also a lobbyist working the other side of the table.
He pushed his way back upright and looked into her eyes just long enough that he didn’t feel the strange, warm, encouraging trap closing over him, and said, ‘I’ll plant a tree this weekend and think of you.’
Her full lips curved into a slow smile. ‘Plant a dozen and think of your kids.’
‘I don’t have kids.’ He added a wink. ‘So far as I know. Goodbye, Wynnie.’
‘Till next time, Mr Kelly.’
After one last long look, one he understood all too well, she turned and walked down the hallway.
He couldn’t help but grin when he spotted one half of her handcuffs swaying and bouncing against her sweet backside until she rounded the corner, out of sight.
CHAPTER THREE
WYNNIE nudged her high heels off her feet, let them fall to the floor beneath her bar stool, and massaged one bare foot with the other. She then closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into the tops of her eyelids.
‘What are you doing?’ Hannah asked.
‘Trying to permanently block out several particular moments of my day.’
Hannah laughed. ‘Come off it. You did brilliantly! Better than we could ever have hoped. You’ve already made the four-thirty reports. You actually got inside the building. As far as the CFC is concerned you’re a rainmaker.’
‘Nevertheless I’m still of the opinion that threatening to start a campaign whereby I would blame the most influential business in town with single-handedly poisoning the planet on purpose was a real high point.’
Wynnie let her head thunk onto the shiny red bar of the funky Eagle St Pier beer garden. But the knock to the head did nothing to shift the images stuck fast to the outer curve of her skull.
Dylan Kelly’s knee-weakening half-smiles when she flirted with him. His debilitating dark smiles when she pushed him a step too far. And most of all his delicious parting smile, which had made her think, for one brief shining moment, that maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d spent the afternoon having a professional conversation on the outside and a very personal one on the inside.
‘Nah,’ Hannah said before downing the rest of her cocktail in one gulp and asking for another in one swift move. ‘I’m going to have to vote for the nickel allergy as my favourite Wynnie moment.’
Wynnie lifted her head, flicked her fringe away from her face and ran gentle fingers over the bandages on her wrists. ‘That’s not funny.’
Hannah laughed so loud a dozen heads turned to see what they were missing. ‘Right. You went from making a business contact no one at the CFC has ever managed to wangle, to having a just-out-of-med-school doctor diagnose you with being too cheap to buy quality handcuffs.’
Wynnie sat on her hands. ‘No way was I going to use the funds of a non-profit organisation to spend as much as I could on top-of-the-line handcuffs.’
Hannah only laughed so hard she had to push her stool back so that she could clutch her stomach. Wynnie grabbed her so-called friend by the belt loops of her jeans and tugged her upright before she took out some passer-by.
As Hannah continued to giggle Wynnie took a deep breath, drinking in the aroma of beer and lemon-scented banksias filling big earthenware pots around the floor. It was a deeply Australian smell, and, after many years living abroad, it was unexpectedly comforting. As were the last vestiges of Brisbane spring sunshine pouring through massive skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows.
The labours of her day finally began to ease away.
Wynnie glanced down the bar. ‘I’m not sure if a nickel overdose can make a person thirsty but I am dying for another drink.’
Problem was, since she was on cortisone for her red wrists, she had to stick with pineapple juice, which did nothing to help her forget Dylan Kelly’s brawny forearms, the curve of short thick hair that turned from gold to brown just above his ears and those deep, glinting, hooded blue eyes.
When their drinks arrived, the nice barman had added a sugared strawberry to the edge of her glass, and an umbrella for good measure. He also gave her a long smile.
He was terribly cute. She was pathologically single. And obviously in need of some mollifying male company if her performance that afternoon was anything to go by.
But there was a kind of puppy-dog softness about the eyes that told her he was a boyfriend kind of guy. Girlfriends shared stories of family and past folly as pillow talk, something she’d never be able to do, which meant she’d never be a girlfriend kind of girl.
She gave him a short nod, then turned her body away from the bar and towards Hannah, who was grinning at her over her Fuzzy Navel.
‘Wynnie has a new little friend,’ Hannah sing-songed.
‘Wynnie has no such thing.’
‘Give him another five minutes and he’ll be back with a rose between his teeth and a mandolin. Better yet, you order the next round of drinks and save us twenty bucks.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘And why not? A new man for a new town. After the hours you’ve put in this month you deserve to let your hair down some.’
Wynnie raised a hand to her hair, which she’d pinned up off her neck while at the doctor’s surgery, sliding her butterfly clip above her ear to hold back her fringe. ‘It was down today. And look where that got me.’
‘Ah,’ Hannah said, with way too much of an inflection.
‘What does “ah” mean?’
‘It means so that’s why you’re all down about the mouth when considering the success your day has been you should be as high as a kite.’
‘I’m not high because I’m not the one on my fourth cocktail,’ she said out of the side of her mouth.
Hannah waggled a wobbly finger in her general direction. ‘First my little recruit has proven herself professionally, making me look shiny and fabulous for insisting she be hired, and now she has gone and got herself a little crush on Mr Dylan Tall Blond and Handsome Kelly. I’m celebrating!’
Wynnie’s naked feet pointed hard at the floor as some kind of strange physical response shot through her at the mere mention of Dylan Kelly’s name.
She opened her mouth wide to deny everything, but suddenly she was too exhausted to bother. ‘It might have been nice to have a heads up that he is that gorgeous.’
‘I thought the fact that I had to wipe drool from my chin every time his name was mentioned in passing during strategy meetings was giveaway enough.’
‘Not nearly enough. You do know he’s stunning. Matinee-idol, suit-model, high-school-crush, knee-weakening, supermodels-only-need-apply stunning.’
‘Did your voice just crack a little?’
‘It did not,’ Wynnie shot back. Then for some unknown reason added, ‘But it’s not just his looks. He’s sharp, and focused, and canny and funny when you don’t expect it.’
‘So I’ve heard. But I am a respected lawyer, you know. I must show some decorum. Did you? Show decorum?’
Wynnie’s hands went straight to her eyes to rub them again. ‘I might have become a tad tongue-tied on more than one occasion, and made inferences that I wanted to go to bed with him, but that’s it.’
Hannah’s laughter turned heads the whole way around the bar. ‘So are you gonna ask him out or not?’
Her hot hands dropped to cup her blissfully cold glass. ‘For what purpose?’
‘Um, dinner, a movie, the horizontal tango?’
‘Han! He’s the only mark. The one who can make or break this deal.’
‘And that’s why you won’t ask him out?’
‘No. Yes! Well, that and the fact that he’s probably got a line-up of women wiping drool from their chins.’
Hannah’s answering smile was most unfriendly.
‘My working hours are far too full on right now to even think about starting up any kind of anything with any man.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah, he’s just a huge flirt. He flirted with me, every female reporter within eyeshot, some of the men, and a pot plant on the way into his office. It’s pathological.’
‘Finally something I understand! Now this isn’t the kind of thing you would have found in the stuff the researchers gave you, so here goes. The stories do circulate that he is… How do I put this?’ Hannah tapped her chin and looked to the heavens. ‘He’s a man with a limited attention span.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Never appears to date the same girl twice. Though they are all beautiful. All fabulous. All about as warm as ice sculptures.’
Wynnie blinked. ‘And you think I might be interested in being one of those girls of the week, and that I fit that description? I’m not sure which part of that I should be insulted by most.’
Hannah slapped her on the arm. ‘Stop trying to be offended and think about it. You’ve found time this month to come bowling with me, to go out for drinks, to see a movie, a bunch of DVDs. I could sacrifice a little of that down time for the sake of your love life before you start sleeping in the office to get a head start on the working day and unknowingly muttering carbon emission averages beneath your breath.’
Wynnie shook her head. ‘It feels like things have fallen into place for me for the first time in a really long time. I believe in the organisation with every fibre of my being. Their philosophy is my very lifeblood. To be their advocate is an honour and an obligation. Every hour I spend working for them I feel like I am contributing, and helping and redeeming…’
She shook her head hard and let her voice drift away.
Of all the people she could have talked to about her acute need to make amends, Hannah was it. She’d been with Wynnie the day Felix had disappeared—even finding her a great lawyer through her professors at school. But even after all this time, saying the words out loud felt too raw.
‘I’m not asking Dylan Kelly out. Okay?’
She sipped at her drink. All of the excuses were fine but they didn’t come close to her main reticence. She’d been known to do stunningly self-sacrificing things for men she regarded highly, and the only way to never let that happen again was not to put herself in the position where it might.
There were only so many times a girl could change her hair, and her name, and leave town. In comparison, putting up with a little sexual tension was small fry.
Hannah leant her elbow on the bar and her head on her hand. ‘You done?’
She nodded.
‘So you wouldn’t mind, then, if Dylan Kelly and I became hot and heavy.’
Wynnie gripped the straw between her teeth. ‘Not in the least,’ she fibbed.
‘What about me and the bartender?’
Wynnie all but bounced on her bar stool. ‘Oh, do! He seems nice and sweet, the ideal complement to your rabid cynicism. And he could make you cocktails every night. He’s perfect for you!’
Wynnie’s bottom bouncing came to a halt when she realised Hannah had been pulling her leg about the bartender to get a true answer about Lady Killer Kelly. And she’d given it in surround sound, with Technicolor and subtitles.
‘I have to go,’ Wynnie said, finding her shoes with her feet. ‘The local farmer’s market closes at eight and I’m all out of kumquats.’
She grabbed her battered travel purse from the bar, slid her feet back into her shoes, hopped off the bar stool and pressed her way through the crowd.
‘Kumquats? That’s one I’ve never heard before.’ Hannah, three inches taller than Wynnie even in her flats, caught up all too easily. ‘And just because you thought the sun shone from Felix’s you-know-what and he turned out to be a total screw-up that doesn’t mean every man you ever meet will do the same. Trust me.’
Wynnie saw a gap open up within a huge group of uni students and took it. Alone.
A screw-up? Felix hadn’t just been a screw-up. Her kid brother, her only remaining family, the beautiful boy who’d never even had the heart to step on a spider he was so attuned with the world around him, had done something so heinous, so out of character, hurting people all in the name of saving the planet. And to add insult to injury he’d left her to clean up the mess she hadn’t even seen coming. And she’d never laid eyes on him since.
Trust was now a four-letter word.
When she reached the sidewalk she bounced on her toes as her eyes scanned the streets for an empty taxi.
‘Heard from him yet?’ Hannah asked from beside her.
There was no point pretending she didn’t know Hannah was talking about her brother. She shook her head so hard her butterfly came loose. She reached out and caught it before it hit the ground. Her heart thundered in her ears at the thought she might have broken it—the only thing she still had that had once belonged to her beautiful, brilliant, progressive parents. She could only be thankful they had both gone by the time Felix changed.
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