Once a Rebel... (6 page)

Luc masked his surprise. ‘Nothing. Just never thought we’d have this moment.’

‘Me standing in a skirt on your sister’s verge?’ No doubt.

Luc wasn’t deterred. ‘You admitting to interest in a woman.’

‘I’ve had a lot of female interests. Far more than you, mate.’

Luc wasn’t biting, either. ‘Not like this, Hayds. Not someone normal.’

A laugh shot out of him. ‘Shirley is far from normal.’

‘You’re doing stuff together, getting to know her, flirting …’

He turned for the house. ‘That wasn’t flirting. I was just entertaining myself.’

‘Please. It was practically foreplay. If you’re just amusing yourself then you might want to think about what that will do to her. She’s not in the same league as the other women you’ve dated.’

Luc’s words produced a fiery, blazing desire to be sure Shirley wasn’t tarred by the brush of the many women he’d been with. Which in turn produced the confusing question—
why?
So of course he said the exact opposite of what he thought. ‘She seemed up for it. She’s stronger than she looks.’

‘Steel’s strong, too, until the moment it’s not.’

Time for a new conversation. He swished back towards the house, Luc in tow. ‘It’s not going to be an issue. She’s far too switched on to have a bar of me.’

‘You might surprise yourself, Hayden. If you let someone in, they might want to stay.’

A dark, thick pool deep inside burped up a puff of uneasiness like a boiling tar pit. ‘Maybe I should leave you my skirt, mate. If you’re going to get all huggy on me.’ He snagged up his sports bag full of street clothes. ‘I do this for a living, Luc. For entire corporations. I think I can read one twenty-four-year-old woman, don’t you?’

‘I’m not worried about whether you can read
her,
Hayds,’ he said. ‘I’m worried that you don’t read
you
all that well sometimes.’

Yeah, he did; better than his friend thought. Well enough to recognise when he had no idea what he was doing. Yet. But being in the dark wasn’t the same thing as being oblivious. Leonidas would have agreed. Even if you didn’t know exactly how many were in the opposing force or what weapons they were carrying, just knowing they were over the horizon was a huge advantage.

Forewarned was forearmed.

‘Y
OU
realise the next time you say “Trust me, Hayden” I’ll just laugh and remind you of this moment.’

They stood, suitcases in hand, on the dock of the port. The wrong side of the dock. The bright white, multi-storey cruise liners all lined up on the far side. On this side the dirty barnacleencrusted freight liners slummed it.

Hayden stared at the hulking great vessel in front of them, with its towering patchwork of sea-containers. ‘When you said pack for a sea voyage I had something very different in mind.’

Beside him, Shirley smiled. ‘What did you expect for a hundred bucks each way?’

He sighed and closed his eyes. What had he expected? He’d had vague dreams of crewing on a maxi-yacht, or working for their passage on one of the leisure behemoths on the far side of the port. ‘Not this.’

‘I have a friend at the port authority. She gave me the tip about this vessel. It comes in fully laden and then offloads half its cargo and crew for shore
leave before heading on to New Zealand to drop the rest and return half-full. Then they pick up their shore-rested crew and new cargo.’

She was staring at him with such enthusiastic expectation. He just kept staring at the vessel.

‘So they have room for passengers there and back,’ she went on. ‘The catch is that you only get one day in New Zealand. But that’s all we’ll need.’

He nodded slowly. How else were they going to get to New Zealand for the bungee jumping or Venice for the gondola ride, or the base camp of Everest? The list wouldn’t have been easily achievable even for her mother. Some parts of it they had no hope of delivering.

This was pretty clever. But he wasn’t about to give her that just yet.

‘I hope they’re not expecting me to haul containers?’

She nudged him bodily. ‘Come on, Leonidas, I’ve seen your muscles.’

And that was all it took. An unexpected bit of full body contact and he was totally on board with this crazy plan. He stared at the
Delphi Paxos
and worked hard to ignore the tingling place in his arm where the curve of her breast had just brushed. ‘As long as I can get a satellite signal then I can keep the shareholders happy for the week I’ll be away.’

She glanced up at him. ‘I know it’s not the Ritz—’

Oh, honey, it’s not even The Ritz’s off-site warehouse.

‘—but it’s a virtually free ride to New Zealand and it puts two ticks in boxes.’

Ticks in boxes. Right. Everything was about the boxes with her. How had he forgotten?

She set off across the dock tarmac, pausing to let a kamikaze forklift whizz by. They reached the bottom of a long skinny gangplank. Shirley ground to a halt just in front of him. He peered around her to check her expression.

‘I just … urn …’ she muttered.

He stepped around her and looked at her fronton. ‘You okay?’

She took a deep breath. ‘It’s stupid …’

This whole thing was stupid but it meant something to her so here they were. ‘What is?’

‘I’ve never been on a boat. It looks so much bigger from here.’

Uh-oh. ‘Never?’

She shook her head. ‘Only river ferries.’

‘Well, that’s exciting then.’ God loved an optimist. Yet the hint of vulnerability certainly wasn’t
un
appealing.

She chewed her lip and raised her eyes up the side of the enormous hull. ‘I hope so.’

‘Once you’re up there it won’t look so big. I promise.’

But he couldn’t promise what a novice would make of the pitch and roll of the Tasman Sea. Her clever solution wasn’t going to look too great when she was face down over a toilet bowl for four days. Or the bow of the ship.

He took her hand and drew her upwards. Took a
step. Then another. She followed him up the long skinny gangplank. They were met at the top by a smiling man who greeted them in heavily accented English.

‘Welcome to ship!’

He glanced around at the heavy fittings, the utilitarian paint job. Yup, definitely a working vessel. But it did at least look solid. And clean. And much less daunting from on deck for his suddenly nervous novice.

Their crew member told them in broken English that Immigration would come through before the ship was cleared for departure and to have their passports ready, and to stay in their cabin until they’d been cleared.

Amongst so many mispronunciations, that little one slipped him right by.

At least until the man flung a small door wide and cheerfully announced, ‘Room!’

The cabin was tiny but it had two neat beds in it. Skinny single beds. Shirley looked at the seaman sideways. ‘Whose room?’

‘Yes. Your room.’

‘But which? Mine or his?’

The lines on his weathered face multiplied. Shirley grew dangerously still and the man started babbling in his own tongue. It was Greek. Greatly evolved from the ancient Greek Hayden had studied during his classical units, but close enough.

He stepped in and fumbled his way to offering to help in classical Greek. The man instantly refocused
on the closest approximation to his own language in the room.

‘How many cabins did you book?’ he said quickly to Shirley.

‘Two. Of course, two.’ Furious colour crept ever higher.

He did his best to communicate the dilemma. The crewman nodded and shot back in rapid-fire Greek.

‘I think he’s agreeing with you.’ The man held up two fingers. ‘Two.’

‘Damn right he is …’ Shirley started to fan her hot face with her passport.

The crewman picked up Hayden’s suitcase and placed it on the foot of the bed and then he picked up Shirley’s and walked out of the room with it, crossed the tiny hallway and opened a door there to a room the twin of the first. He dumped her suitcase on the end of a bed in there. And then turned to check her understanding. Baffled but optimistic.

‘Okay …?’

‘Okay,’ she said through a tight smile.

On the bright side, the distraction seemed to have made her forget all about her sea nerves.

She moved into her cabin.

‘There are worse things in this life than sharing a room with me,’ he joked. ‘Women have cage-fought for less.’

She threw him her most withering glare. He loved that one.

‘Seriously,’ he probed carefully. ‘Why are you so angry?’

She pressed her lips together. ‘Because it was shaping up to be a stupid situation and I’m not accustomed to doing stupid things.’

He snorted. ‘By contrast, I’m delighted to discover that you’re fallible.’ Way too pleased to be bothered at the thought of sharing a room. In fact, one tiny part of him was disappointed. The part that liked her best off-kilter.

She frowned at him. ‘I didn’t want you to think … It looked like …’

She fanned more furiously.

Oh …
She didn’t want him to think she’d planned it that way. Accidentally on purpose. ‘You know you don’t have to come up with convoluted excuses to sleep with me, Shirley. I’m easy. Or haven’t you read the papers?’

She had roughly the same number of glares as smiles and he enjoyed them just as much.

‘Easy? Hardly.’

But she kept her distance, he noticed. He flopped down on one of the tiny beds.

Her startled face returned to him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for Immigration. We might as well save them some time and wait together.’

She grunted and set about transferring the contents of her suitcase into the stand-up locker in the austere room. He watched her crossing back and forth across the tiny space. Her movements were fluid, graceful. More dancing than walking. The items she was unpacking were mostly dark and
plain. Not at all what he’d become used to her wearing.

‘What?’ she challenged on her third pass.

‘I was expecting something more … nautical.’ And how strange that he felt genuine disappointment at its absence. He’d grown used to her particular brand of fashion.

She straightened and turned. Considered him. ‘Not really practical at sea. Most of what I’ve brought is supremely suburban.’

He stared at her. ‘Does that mean no make-up?’

‘
Pfff.
Don’t be ridiculous.’

He tucked his hands behind his head. ‘What if I challenged you?’

She frowned. ‘To what?’

‘You challenged me to do the list on a budget. What if I challenge you to do it in civvies with no make-up?’

‘Why would you?’

He couldn’t think of a clever answer to that so he went for honest. ‘Because I got such a short glimpse of Shirley at Tim’s party. And because that way we’re both out of our comfort zones.’

And because I’m dying to know what colour your lips really are.
He stared at them now, stained with dark lipstick, and imagined wiping it off with his thumb.

She stared him down. Thinking. ‘All right.’

He knew her too well to imagine she’d just capitulate. All they’d done since meeting was trade—insults, tasks, looks—this wasn’t going to be any different. ‘But …?’

‘I’ll ease up on the make-up while we’re on this trip if you’ll answer a question. Honestly.’

The keen glint of her eye should have been warning enough. But he was too dazzled by it to recognise it straight away. ‘Okay.’

‘What was your fascination with my mother?’

His gut tightened up immediately, the bad old days still not his favourite pre-dinner conversation. But he’d agreed to be honest. ‘She was a great teacher.’

Those eyes so very like her mother’s narrowed. ‘Every Saturday for three years?’

He stood. This conversation just didn’t feel right with him stretched out on the tiny bed. Shirley crossed her arms, taking the leggings she was still holding with her. They bunched across her torso.

‘She knew so much. She gave us one hundred per cent of her focus.’ Which was a bit rough when that left nothing for her daughter, he suddenly realised. But at the time he’d simply craved a motherly connection. Anyone’s mother would have done.

‘I didn’t have … access to my own mother. Spending time with yours was good for me. She helped keep me grounded. Her expectations. She set a high bar.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Shirley muttered, then cleared her throat and said, louder, ‘You were pretty cut up when she died.’

He had been. Everything he’d shoved way down deep to survive his mother’s death had come bubbling back up at Carol’s. Except he had found
something to console him, eventually. A series of somethings: pills, women, alcohol, in that order. And they’d got him through that loss and out the other side. And then they’d propped him up well into the next decade. Until he’d gone cold turkey on all three a few years ago.

Saved his life.

‘Nothing compared to your loss, I imagine,’ he murmured.

She shut that line of conversation down with the not very subtle zip of her empty suitcase. ‘I always wondered where you’d gone for your knowledge fix after that.’

‘I didn’t. It was never about the knowledge for me.’ It was about having a mother figure in his empty life.

She glanced back up at him. ‘Then why do it?’

He shrugged. ‘I was good at it.’

She turned back. ‘I’m sure you were good at a lot of things.’

Not if you’d asked his father. Or his other lecturers. ‘Really? What else? Cutting up the athletics track? Musical accomplishment? Do you think a masterful maths mind lurks in here?’ He tapped his forehead.

‘Masterful enough to run a successful business. Even more successful recently.’

He stared at her, a warm realisation leaching through his body. She’d been checking up on him. ‘Someone else has been busy on Google, then.’

She stiffened, but ignored him. ‘I thought you walked away from your business for a reason.’

Her green eyes bored into him, towards the truth that lurked deep within. ‘I realised it was easier to change the business than myself.’ And who he’d become was so tightly enmeshed with what he did. He’d needed some healthy distance in order to untangle it all.

‘Changed it to what? From what? It’s so hard to tell from your website.’

Why not?
She’d find out eventually. It might as well come from him. ‘I did my Masters in Influence.’

Her snort was the least ladylike and most sexy he’d ever heard. This woman just didn’t care for the slightest pretension. ‘Did you make that up?’

‘No. It’s made me rich.’

‘You have some massive clients. That much I could tell.’

‘Clients who paid generously for a look into the hearts and minds of their future customers.’ She frowned and her eyes grew keen, and he remembered who he was also talking to: Shiloh. But—inexplicably—he also trusted her. ‘Their businesses revolve around knowing where to target likely customers and what will get their buy-in.’

She stared at him. ‘That’s …’

‘The word you’re looking for is “lucrative”.’ It wasn’t, but it was true.

‘Which doesn’t make it any more palatable.’

He tipped his head and granted her that. It was no more than he’d eventually come to think. The day he’d realised how closely all those ‘somethings’
that he consoled himself with were linked to his profession.

‘Show me.’

He looked up. ‘Show you what?’

‘How it works. On me.’

‘Oh Shirley, I don’t think you’re the same as everyone else. I wouldn’t begin to claim I understand how your mind works.’ Disappointment stained her already dark lips. He thought fast. ‘But I can show you how you did it to me.’

Show her how it was inherent in everyone—even the virtuous Shiloh. Bred into the human species.

She sat on the edge of the second bed and folded her hands on her lap. It was entirely demure and insanely provocative.

‘Influence is all about buy-in,’ he started. ‘Once you can get someone to say yes to something small they make a mental commitment to that thing and transitioning them to something bigger is more straightforward. If I want you to buy my car I get you to sit in it. If I want you to borrow money from me as an adult I give you a money box when you’re a child. If I want you to accept my faith I get you to accept something smaller from me first.’

Her eyes slowly rounded as he spoke.

She might as well know who she was dealing with. ‘You wanted me to do the list. You got me to let you into my house first.’