Nikki Logan - Once a Rebel...

Silence weighed heavily.

She finally broke it. ‘I’ll pick you up at dawn.’

‘I won’t be here,’ he lied. As if he had anywhere else to be.

‘I’ll come anyway.’ She turned for the door.

He shouted after her. ‘Shirley—’

‘Shiloh.’

‘—why are you doing this?’

She paused, but didn’t turn back. He had no trouble hearing her, thanks to the hallway’s tall ceiling. ‘Because it’s something I can do.’

‘She won’t know,’ he murmured.

Her shoulders rose and fell. Just once.

‘No. But I will.’ She started down the hall again. ‘And so will you.’

‘COME on, Hayden,’ Shirley muttered.

She banged the door with the heel of her hand to protect her acrylics. She paused, listened. Stepped back and leaned over to look in the window.

Which bothered her more? The fact that he’d actually left his home before dawn to avoid having to see her again or the fact that she could have turned around a dozen times on the drive over here—maybe should have—but she’d decided not to.

Because she wanted to give him a chance. The old Hayden.

No one could be that much of an ass, surely. She stared at the still silent door.

Looked as if he was the real deal.

‘Ass!’ she yelled out to the empty miles around them, then turned and walked away.

The front door rattled as her foot hit the bottom step on his porch.

‘Is that some kind of greeting ritual in your culture?’

By the time she had turned, Hayden was leaning on the doorframe. Shirtless, barefoot. A pair of green track pants hanging low on his hips and bunched at his ankles. Looking for all the world like he wasn’t expecting a soul.

One hundred per cent intentional.

He was trying to throw her.

‘Good. You’re ready,’ she breezed, working hard to keep her breathing on the charts and her eyes off his bare chest. She’d spent years as a teenager secretly imagining what her mother’s star pupil would look like under all his loose bohemian layers. The sudden answer may not have been what her teenage self would have conceived, but it didn’t disappoint. No gratuitous muscle-stacks, just the gently curved contours up top and the long, angular lines down lower that showed he kept himself in good, lean shape.

And he knew it.

She fixed a brave smile on her face and turned to make room for him on the steps. ‘Shall we?’

‘You don’t actually think I’m going like this?’ he drawled.

No. She hadn’t. But she’d be damned if she’d play his games. She kept her face impassive. ‘Depends if you have swimmers on beneath the track pants.’

His grin broadened, dangerously good for this early in the morning. ‘Nope. Nothing at all under these.’

Her pulse kicked into gear. But she fought it. ‘Well, you’ll have to change.’

‘Easily offended, Shirley?’ He dropped his chin so that he peered up at her across long, dark lashes. It was possibly the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. More theatrics. She took a breath and remembered who she was. And who Shiloh had dealt with and bested in the past.

‘The dolphins.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Wouldn’t want them to mistake you for a bait fish.’

An awful tense silence crackled between them and Shirley wondered if she’d gone a step too far. But then he tipped his head far back and laughed.

‘Give me five …’ he said, still chuckling, and was gone.

She let her breath out slowly and carefully. That could easily have gone the other way. Maybe the last ten years hadn’t thoroughly ruined him, then.

Only partly.

When he returned he was more appropriately clothed in a T-shirt, sports cap, board shorts and sockless runners. The covered-up chest was a loss but at least she could concentrate on the road with him fully clothed. The T-shirt sleeves half covered a tattoo on his biceps, but she’d been able to read it briefly as he stretched his arm up the doorframe earlier.

MΩΛΩN ΛABE. Classical Greek.

She turned for the street.

‘I’m not getting in that.’ His arms crossed and his expression was implacable.

‘Why not?’

He eyed her car. ‘This looks like the floor might fall out of it if you put a second person in it. We’ll take my Porsche.’

Nope. ‘Wouldn’t be seen dead in it. This is a ‘59 Karmann Ghia. Your Porsche’s ancestor.’

‘It’s purple.’

‘Well spotted. Get in.’

‘And it has Shiloh plates.’

‘And here I thought your mind was more lint-trap than steel-trap these days.’

He glared at her. ‘I’m not driving this.’

She snorted. ‘You’re not driving at all.’

‘Well, you’re sure as hell not.’

She swallowed the umbrage. ‘Because …?’

‘Because I drive me.’

‘You had a chauffeur.’ She’d seen him in enough Internet photos falling out of limos or back into them.

‘That’s different.’

‘You’re welcome to ride in the back seat if it will make you feel more at home.’ And if you can dislocate your hips to squeeze in there.

He glared at the tiny back seat and came to much the same conclusion. ‘I don’t think so.’

He folded himself into her low passenger seat and turned to stare as she tucked the folds of her voluminous skirt in under the steering wheel.

‘Not the most practical choice for swimming, I would have thought,’ he challenged.

‘It won’t be getting wet.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Because we won’t or because you have something else?’

She glanced at him, then away. ‘I have something else.’ A something else she never would have worn in a million years if she’d had more than a few hours’ notice that he was coming along. In fact, she would have chosen a totally different box on her mother’s list if she’d thought for a moment that Hayden would actually join her. Something that didn’t involve taking anything off. She’d only asked him along to shake him out of the unhappy place she’d found him. And to get him started on the list.

But parading around in swimwear in the presence of the man who’d made such a crack about her curves—yet who was apparently fixated by them—was not high on her list of most desirable things.

The thirty-minute drive would have been a whole heap more enjoyable if she’d been able to sing to the music pumping out of the phone docked to her stereo. It did prevent much in the way of conversation—a bonus—though it contributed to Hayden’s general surliness—a minus—even after she’d pulled into a coffee drive-through for him. He’d leaned across her to take the coffee from the drive-through window and the brush of his shoulder, the heat of his body and the scent of early-morning man had stayed with her for the rest of the drive. She left her window wound down in the vain hope that the strong salty breeze would blow the distracting masculine fog away.

When they arrived at the beach, Hayden found himself a comfortable spot in the shade to resume napping and she wandered off to change in the public changing rooms.

She peeled off her dark red skirt, top and sandals, stored them carefully in her temporary locker and glanced critically in the mirror at what remained. Black one-piece, sheer wraparound skirt—also black—purple and black striped stockings to her mid thighs.

Swimwear for the undead. If the undead ever went to the beach.

She piled her hair high, smoothed thirty-plus-plus-plus foundation where her neck was suddenly exposed and turned to the mirror.

Pretty good. Nothing she could do about the Boadicean body. She’d had it since she was sixteen and had learned by necessity to love it, even if it wasn’t apparently to the taste of a man more used to size zero. But she still looked like Shiloh. And Shiloh could definitely walk out onto that beach and spend a morning in the water with Hayden Tennant.