Nikki Logan - Once a Rebel...

It was Shirley’s irises that were like her mother’s—the palest khaki. He’d have assumed contact lenses if not for the fact that he’d seen them before on a woman too sensible and too smart to be sucked in by the trappings of vanity. Shirley reminded him of one of those Russian dolls-inside-a-doll things. She had large black pupils surrounded by extraordinary grey-green irises, within the clearest white eyeballs he’d ever seen, and the whole thing fringed by smudges of catwalk charcoal around her lashes. Her eyes were set off by ivory skin and the whole picture was framed by a tumble of black locks piled on top. Probably kept in place by some kind of hidden engineering, but it looked effortless enough to make him want to thrust his hands into it and send it tumbling down.

Just to throw her off her game.

Just to see how it felt sliding through his fingers.

Instead, he played the bastard. The last time he’d seen her she’d been standing small and alone at her mother’s funeral, all bones and unrealised potential. Now she was … He dropped his gaze to the curve of her neck. It was only slightly less gratuitous than staring at her cleavage.

Another thing he hadn’t touched in years. Curves.

‘Looks like you’ve been on good pasture.’

The only sign of that particular missile hitting its target was the barest of flinches in her otherwise steady gaze. She swallowed carefully before speaking and sat up taller, expression composed. ‘You really work hard at being unpleasant, don’t you?’

A fighter. Good for her.

He shrugged. ‘I am unpleasant.’

‘Alcohol does that.’

His whole body froze. A dirty fighter, then. But his past wasn’t all that hard to expose with a few hours and an Internet connection. ‘I don’t drink any more.’

‘Probably just as well. Imagine how unbearable you’d be if you did.’

He fixed his eyes on her wide, clear ones, forcing his mind not to find this verbal swordplay stimulating. ‘What do you want, Shirley?’

‘I want to ask you about my mother.’

‘No, you don’t. You want to ask me about the list.’

‘Yes.’ She stared, serene and composed. The calmness under pressure reminded him a lot of her mother.

‘How did you even know it existed?’

Her steady eyes flicked for just a moment. ‘I heard you, at the wake. Talking about it.’

He’d not let himself think about that day in a long, long time. ‘Why didn’t you add your name?’

She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t invited.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘And I didn’t even know she had a bucket list until that day.’

Did that hurt her? That her mother had shared it with strangers but not her? A long dormant part of him lifted its drowsy head. Empathy. ‘You were young. We were her peers.’

She snorted. ‘You were her students.’

The old criticism still found a target. Even after all this time. ‘You weren’t there, Shirley. We were more like friends.’ He had hungered for intellectual stimulation he just hadn’t found in students his own age and her mother had filled it.

‘I was there. You just didn’t know it.’

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I used to hide under the stairs when you would all come over for your extra credit Saturdays. Listen in. Learn.’

What? ‘You were, what, fourteen?’

‘Actually, I was eleven when you first started coming. I was fourteen when you stopped.’

‘Most eleven-year-olds don’t have a fascination with philosophy.’

She licked her lips, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral. Except for the tiny flush that spiked high in her cheeks. And he knew she was lying about something.

‘Ask me what you really want to know.’ And then go. His tolerance for company was usually only as long as it took to get laid.

She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you even start the list?’

Oh … so many reasons. None of them good and none of them public. ‘How many have you done?’ he asked instead.

‘Six.’

Huh. That was a pretty good rate, given she had been a teenager for the first half of that decade. The old guilt nipped. ‘Which ones?’

‘Ballooning, horse-riding in the Snowy Mountains, marathon—’

He gave her curves a quick once-over. ‘You ran a marathon?’ She ignored him. With good reason.

‘—abseiling, and climbing the Harbour Bridge.’

The easy end of the list. ‘That’s only five.’

‘Tomorrow I swim with the dolphins.’

Tomorrow. The day after today. Something about the immediacy of that made him nervous. ‘Won’t you eviscerate if you go in the sun, or something?’

She glared at him. ‘I’m pale, I’m not a vampire. Stop hedging. Why haven’t you done a single one?’

She was going to keep on asking until he told her. And she wasn’t going to like the answer. ‘I’ve been too busy besmirching my soul.’

She frowned. ‘Meaning?’

‘Making lots of money.’

‘That should make it easier to do the things on the list, not harder.’

‘Success doesn’t make itself. You have to work hard. Put in the hours.’ So many hours …

Her lips thinned. ‘I’m well aware of that. But this list was your idea. To remind you of the importance of feeding your soul.’ His own words sounded pretentious on her dark-red lips. ‘To honour my mother’s memory.’

The distress she was trying to hide under her anti-tan crept out in the slightest of wobbles.

There it was again. The weird pang of empathy. ‘They’re meaningless, Shirley. The things. They won’t bring her back.’

‘They keep her alive. In here.’ Pressing her long, elegant fingers to her sternum only highlighted the way her dress struggled to contain her chest. And the way her chest struggled to contain her anger.

‘That’s important for you; you’re her daughter—’

‘You were her friend.’

His gut screwed down into a hard fist. He pushed to his feet. Forced lightness to his voice. ‘What are you, the Ghost of Christmas Past? Life goes on.’

Those eyes that had seemed big outside were enormous in here, under the fluorescent glow of her sorrow. The silence was breached only by the sound of her strained breathing.

‘What happened to you, Hayden?’ she whispered.

He flinched. ‘Nothing.’

‘I believed you, back then. When you sat at my mother’s funeral looking so torn up and pledged to honour her memory.’

She stared at him. Hard. As if she could see right through him. And for one crazy moment he wished that were true. That someone could drag it all out into the open to air. Instead of festering. But the rotting had started long before he’d begun to go to her house on Saturdays.

He clenched his fists behind his back. ‘That makes two of us.’

‘It’s not too late to start.’

He needed to be moving. ‘Oh, I think the time for me to make good on that particular promise is long past,’ he said, turning and walking out of the room.

She caught up with him in the kitchen, grabbed his arm and then dropped it just as quickly. Did she feel the same jolt he had?

Her steady words gave nothing away. ‘Come to the dolphins with me tomorrow.’

‘No.’

She curled the fingers she’d touched him with down by her side. ‘Why not? Scared?’

He turned and gave her his most withering stare. ‘Please.’

‘Then come.’

‘Not interested.’

The smile she threw him was tight, but not unattractive. ‘I’ll drive.’

He glanced down at her boots. ‘You’re just as likely to get your heel speared in the accelerator and drive us into—’

At the very last moment, his brain caught up with his mouth. She didn’t need a reminder of how her mother had died.