Dating the Rebel Tycoon - By Ally Blake Page 0,25

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 surreptitiously 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 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 sexy 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?’

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, impassive. ‘Is that the best you can offer? No wonder you had a blank night in your calendar.’

‘Who says it was blank?’ he rumbled.

Rosie’s heart danced. She blamed exhaustion. She knew that taking guidance from one’s heart was as sensible as using one’s liver for financial-planning advice, having witnessed first-hand what listening to the dancing of your heart could do to a woman. If she needed any further reason to call it a day…

And then he had to go and say, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

Her heart did the shuffle. She tried to concentrate on her liver instead. But it seemed every organ was on Cameron-alert.

‘Tomorrow?’ she said. ‘I’ll be sleeping. Eating. Watching telly. Looking up. The usual. You?’

‘Working. Working. And working some more. Though I too will need to fit some