Part 7 (2/2)

She unlocked her old runabout before Cameron reached down to open the driver's side door.

She threw her bag over to the pa.s.senger 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 not walk away? 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 s.e.xy 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?' 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, impa.s.sive. '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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.'

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