Dating the Rebel Tycoon(24)

Rosie was on her feet, spare tripod gripped in her hands, eyes narrowed,   searching the shadows, when Cameron appeared through the brush, tall,   imposing, stunning. It was as though a girl could simply imagine a man   like him into existence through sheer wishful thinking.

'What the hell are you doing here?' Rosalind cried, waggling a big black metallic object Cameron's way.                       
       
           



       

He snuck both hands out of the warm pockets of his jacket and held them   in front of him in surrender. 'I tried calling your mobile several  times  but you didn't answer. So I called Adele.'

'Adele?'

'She gave me her home number when I first rang you at the planetarium. I assumed in case of emergencies.'

Rosalind glowered, but at least she was lowering her weapon at the same   time. 'Sounds like her. Though you've got her motives dead wrong.'

'Either way, she told me how to find you in the dead of the night in   this crazy middle-of-nowhere place, where anything could happen to you   and nobody would ever know.'

He stepped forward, shoes slipping in the soft, muddy earth. By the look   in her eyes-behind glasses that made her look smart enough to be an   astrophysicist, yet somehow still her usual effortlessly sexy self-she   was far from happy to see him.

He didn't blame her. He'd acted just the way Dylan had when they'd been   boys, wiping the chess board clean at the first sign the game wasn't   going the exact way he'd intended it go.

After she'd gone, he'd lasted about three hours before his furniture had   begun mocking him. The stool she'd sat upon when he'd kissed her stuck   out from under the bench stubbornly. The beige rug on which her pink   shoes had been haphazardly dumped, and the cream couch where her bright   poncho had been suggestively draped, had seemed drab and bare. Even the   fire had hissed at him, and, whereas for her it had been roaring, for   him alone it had crumbled into a sorry pile of ash.

He'd told himself he felt like there were ants crawling under his skin   because she was out there feeling upset and it had been his fault. But   the truth was his home had felt empty because she wasn't in it. Because   he'd expected more of their night together. Before he'd acted like such  a  lummox, he'd planned on having more time to familiarise himself with   her soft skin, to let her sexy hair slide through his fingers. To know   those lips as intimately as he could. And the rest.

He needed boundaries, but they also had unfinished business he hoped to take care of-if he could convince her.

'Can you put down the truncheon?' he asked. 'It's making me nervous.'

Rosalind bent at the knees, set the metal object onto a backpack and   stood up, her dark-grey eyes on him the whole time. 'You've told me how   you got here, not why. And hurry up. I have to get back to work.'

He picked a reason that she couldn't say no to. 'I was watching the sky   through my bedroom window when I remembered you telling me that I  hadn't  seen stars until I saw them from this spot. I thought, what the  hell?  I'm awake anyway, let's see what the fuss is all about.'

She glared up at him over the top of her glasses. 'So what do you want to see?'

He was looking at it. But he said, 'Show me something spectacular.'

'You've picked a rubbish night.' She dragged her eyes away and looked up   into the clear heavens. 'Huh, well, what do you know? Five minutes ago   you were all hiding. But in he waltzes and there you all are, all  bright  and shining and cheerful. Capricious brutes, the lot of you!'

She glowered back down at him. 'Well, go on, then. There it all is for your viewing pleasure.'

Cameron looked up into the clear sky, and there it all was, the Milky   Way, spread across the sky like someone had scattered a bag of jewels on   a swathe of black velvet.

He looked down at her; her nose was tilted skywards, her chin   determined, her long, pale neck and wavy hair glowing in the moonlight.   He breathed out through his nose. Spectacular.

As though she sensed him watching her, she turned her head just enough   to make eye contact. She blinked at him, then leaned down towards the   eyepiece and found a bearing using the naked eye. She twirled knobs,   gently shifted the lever, changed filters, then with both eyes open   pressed one eye to the eyepiece and carefully adjusted the focus.

A minute later she stood back and made an excessive amount of room for   him to have a look. He took her place, looked through the lens, and the   view therein took his breath away.

She'd given him the bright side of the moon. Craters and plateaus in   stark white-and-grey relief faded into the creeping shadow of the dark   side. So far away, yet it felt so close.

He pulled away, blinked up at the white crescent high in the sky and   said, 'I also came here because I don't like leaving a conversation   unfinished.'

He felt Rosalind cross her arms beside him. 'Oh, I think we both had ample opportunity to say what we wanted to say.'                       
       
           



       

'Can I ask … if I hadn't kissed you … ?'

She shivered, and this time he knew it wasn't the cold. He wanted to   wrap her up in his jacket, but he knew she wasn't near ready for that.   Not yet.

'What do you want from me, Cameron?'

'Truth?'

'Always.'

'I didn't like watching you walk away tonight.'

She said nothing. The conversation it seemed would be all up to him.

'I've been having a great time being with you. I get a kick out of your   frankness. You must have noticed that I have huge trouble keeping my   hands off you. And none of that has changed. All I've ever hoped is that   we might continue to enjoy one another's company for as long as it's   enjoyable. And not a minute longer.'

He felt her breathe in. Breathe out. 'And who gets to decide when that minute's up?'

'You can, if it needs to be that way.'

'And if I think that minute has already passed?'

'Do you?'

He looked down to find she was no longer staring at the moon; she was   watching him, her eyes wary, calculating, her mind changing back and   forth with every passing second.

'I don't want to hurt you,' he said.

Her chin lifted. 'I don't plan on getting hurt.'

She was talking in the present tense. And, though she wasn't smiling at   him, neither was she scowling. He'd done enough. Relief poured through   him, its intensity rather more than he would have expected.

'Aren't you cold?' she asked.

And he realised he was shivering. She might have been rugged up like she   was about to spend a week on Everest but he was still in his jeans,   T-shirt and track top.

'I'm absolutely freezing,' he said. Now he'd noticed it, he really   noticed it. He rubbed his hands down his arms and stamped his   sneaker-clad feet before they turned to ice.

'You have to make the most of your body heat.'

He stopped jumping about like a frog and asked, 'My body heat?'

'One's body heat,' she reworded.

'I was going to say, that was a line I hadn't heard before.'

'Hey, buddy, I have no agenda here. I was out here minding my own business. You came looking for me.'

Still no smile, but the bite was back. Attraction poured through him   like it had been simply waiting to split the dam behind which he'd held   it in check.

'I did, didn't I?'

She stared at him, the wheels behind her eyes whirring madly. Finally   she demanded, 'Get inside the tent, unzip the sleeping bag, and wrap it   around you. It's thermal. You'll be toasty in a matter of minutes.'

'Who knew you had such a Florence Nightingale side to you?'

'You're too heavy for me to carry you back to your car if you freeze to death,' she muttered, then gave him a little shove.

From outside the tent Rosie watched as Cameron's head hit the roof as he snuck inside.

He'd come looking for her. In the middle of the night, along unmarked   roads and through wet, thorny bushland, he'd come. That was an entirely   new experience. Men had left before but none had ever come back. Not   one.

She hadn't had any past experiences from which to extrapolate the right   course to take. All she'd been able to do was follow her instincts.   They'd gently urged her to let him back in. To understand that his dad's   betrayal ran deep and that had caused his panic. And that, now that  the  boat had righted itself, things would be as they were.

She didn't have time to decide if she'd been cool and sophisticated or   simply stupid, as right then his elbow slid along the right wall of the   tent, making an unhappy squeaking sound against the synthetic fabric.   The next loud 'Oomph,' meant she had to go in after him in case he   managed to break any equipment worth as much as her caravan.