Getting Red-Hot with the Rogue

And she knew why her audience had dared stray.

The saucy handcuffs and her subsequent introduction to the media of Brisbane as their new avenging angel had been mere foreplay. For any good show to be newsworthy every angel needed her very own personal devil. And she was about to meet hers.

Little spikes of energy skittered across her skin as she imagined who it might be. An overweight security guard with no authority and less of a clue? Some red-faced lackey sent to try to shoo her away?

‘Kelly!’ a radio guy called out.

‘Mate, over here!’ another followed suit.

Kelly? Could one of the gods have come down from the tower himself? She tried to find Hannah’s face within the crowd to share the rush. Hannah had her hands on some guy’s shoulders as she too tried to make out which bright, shiny Kelly it might be.

As she tried to see without causing a permanent injury Wynnie’s mind backtracked over the Kelly family members she’d read about amongst the hundreds of local luminaries she’d been made aware of in the preceding days.

It wouldn’t be Quinn Kelly, CEO, surely. The fellow had always been elusive to the mere masses, and of late had become as reclusive as Elvis. She was kind of glad. His ability to slay even the most steely backed opponent with a single glance was legendary.

Brendan Kelly? He was next in charge, the heir to KInG’s throne, but not at all press-friendly from what she’d heard. If it was either of them she’d eat her shoes. Mmm. She liked her shoes. They were one of the only things she’d brought with her from Verona. Maybe she’d eat Brussels sprouts. She hated Brussel sprouts so that seemed a fair compromise.

So if it wasn’t Quinn, and it wasn’t Brendan, and since neither the younger brother Cameron, the engineer, or youngest sister, Meg, the seemingly professional ingénue, worked for KInG, then it had to be the one whose photo she had pulled from the file and stuck to the back of her office door with a great red pin through his forehead. The one she hoped she might finally get to after weeks of negotiating, pushing, prodding, making a nuisance of herself. The one she believed could help her make the Clean Footprint Coalition’s dream a reality.

Dylan Kelly. Vice President, Media Relations. The spare to Brendan as heir. The public face of KInG, he could charm the heck out of any female with her own televisions, was constantly photographed wining and dining the city’s most gorgeous women at benefits, sports events, and everywhere in between, and generally held the gossip-hungry city in thrall.

Wynnie was sure it helped that he appeared to be one of the more beautiful men ever to grace the planet. Her chin had practically hit the conference table when she’d first seen his photo. Heck, if he weren’t a corporate bad guy she might have worked pro bono to have him declared a protected species.

‘Ladies,’ a deep voice rumbled from somewhere over her now throbbing right shoulder. ‘Gentlemen. What a pleasure it is to see that you’ve all decided to come by on this fine sunny day. If I’d have known there was to be a party I would have ordered dim sum and wine coolers for all.’

A few cracks of laughter, several deeply feminine sighs, and the slow flopping of microphones told Wynnie she was losing her audience fast.

She took a deep breath, flicked her hair from her face, and prepared to win them back by beating Mr Slick to an ethical pulp. He might be infamously charming, but she had right on her side, and that had to count for something.

Finally the crowd cleared, and through the parted waters came a man. Standard light blue shirt. Discreetly striped tie. Dark suit. So far not so much the kind of devil she had in mind.

But the closer he got, the more the details came into focus. His suit was tailored precisely to highlight every hard plane of the kind of body that spoke of restrained power, and made walking through big cities at lunchtime a guilty pleasure. His clenched jaw was so sharp it looked to be chiselled from granite. His dark blond hair was short, but with just enough scruff to make a girl want to run her fingers through it. Tame it. Tame him.

But the thing that trapped her gaze and held it was a pair of hooded blue eyes. With all the other inducements he had on show, there was no other colour they’d dare be.

And it was then that she realised they were trained completely on her. Flat, piercing, bewitching baby blue.

And he wasn’t merely looking at her, he was looking into her. As if he was searching for the answer to a question only he knew. Her throat tightened and her mouth felt unnaturally dry, and, whatever the question was, the only answer her mind formed was, ‘Yes’.

She tried to stand straighter—her handcuffs bit, jerking her back. She found herself twisted in what suddenly felt like a wholly defenceless position—breasts pressed forward, neck exposed. For the first time since she’d snapped the handcuffs closed she wondered if this had been entirely the right move.

‘So what’s this all about, then?’ he asked, his eyes skimming away from her and out into the crowd.

Someone actually had to point a thumb back her way. She rolled her eyes.

He took a moment before turning and spotting her again, using all the subtlety of a double take. She squared her shoulders, looked him in the eye and raised an eyebrow.

He took two slow steps. To an untrained eye he might have seemed as if he was out for a stroll, to her he was clearly a predator stalking his prey. Either way he was nowhere near as cool as he was making himself out to be.

‘Well,’ he drawled, ‘what have we here?’

With the cameras whirring over his shoulder she found perspective. The man before her might be one hell of a kick start for a sorely undernourished libido, but she had to remember he was the devil—though one with enough influence to make a real difference, and she had every intention of making him renounce his bad ways.

She managed to gather a breezy smile. ‘Good afternoon.’

He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers, drawing his shirt tight across his chest, and drawing her eyes to his zipper region in one clever move. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Peachy,’ she said, dragging her eyes north. ‘Some weather we’re having, don’t you think?’

His cheek twitched. And he ambled to a halt—close enough that she could all but feel the choleric steam rising from his broad shoulders, but far enough away that every camera on site had access to his captivating face.

He looked away for a moment, and she let go of a lungful of stale breath. He glanced briefly at her high heels, and she figured he planned to keep out of kicking distance. It was the move of a man who’d been in danger of being castrated before. Her confidence came back in a whoosh.

Until he moved closer still. Close enough she could see the rasp of stubble glinting on his cheeks, a loose thread poking out of one of his shirt buttons, the shadow of impressive muscle along his upper arms.

Her nostrils flared as she sucked in oxygen, and the immediate intense physical reaction stunned the hell out of her.

‘You’ve got yourself quite a crowd here,’ he said, loud enough everyone could hear.

The cameras and the desperate hush of a dozen journalists reminded her why that was. She gathered her straying wits, tilted her chin downward, batted her eyelashes for all she was worth and, with a cheery smile said, ‘Haven’t I just?’

The crowd murmured appreciatively. But that wasn’t the thing that made her cheeks feel warm, her belly feel tumbly, and her knees feel as weak as if she’d been standing there for days. That was purely due to the fresh, devilish glint in Dylan Kelly’s baby blues.

She stood straighter, accidentally jerking her arms and twinging her shoulder, which created a fresh batch of friction at her itchy wrists. Wynnie sucked in a breath to keep from wincing. She kept it all together admirably, promising herself an extra twenty minutes of meditation on the yoga mat when she got home, as she said, ‘The handcuffs brought them out. But it’s what I have to say that’s keeping them here.’

‘And what’s that?’

Research and appearances backed up the notion that he wasn’t a silly man, but he’d just made a silly move. The first rule in shaping public opinion was never to ask a question you didn’t know the answer to.

Buoyed anew, she said, ‘Since you asked, not a moment before you graced us with your presence, we all agreed that you have been acting terribly irresponsibly, and that it’s time you pulled up your socks.’

Before she had the chance to provide some beautiful sound bites dripping with the kinds of statistics newspapers loved, Dylan Kelly grabbed a hunk of suit leg, lifted it high to show off a jet-black sock and enough tanned, muscular, manly calf to create a tidal wave of trembling through the predominantly female crowd.

Okay, so he wasn’t at all silly. He was very, very good. Who knew naked male calf could trump handcuffs?

Dylan took the attention and ran with it, on the face of it focusing back on her, but she knew his words were for everyone else. ‘You oughtn’t to believe all you read in the glossy pages. I’m not all bad. My mother taught me always to wear clean socks, and the hideous memory of my father trying to teach me about the birds and the bees when I was twelve years old scared the bejesus out of me so much it made me the most…responsible man on the planet.’

He might as well have pulled a concertina row of condoms from his pocket as he said it, for the feminine trembling turned to almost feverish laughter as the lot of them got lost in thoughts of Dylan’s underwear and what it might be like to be the one with whom he might one day act altogether irresponsibly.

The men in the crowd were no better. She could read them as easily as if they wore flashing signs on their foreheads. They wanted to buy him a beer, and live vicariously through him for as long as he’d let them near.

Unless she pulled a shoe-sale sign and a Playboy bunny from somewhere her hands could still reach she might lose them all for good. It was time her press conference was brought to a close.

‘Mr Kelly,’ she said, using her outside voice. ‘I concede that your socks are indeed…up. And since my points have obviously fluttered over your head, perhaps I need to be clearer about what I want.’

The crowd quieted and Dylan Kelly slowly lowered the leg of his trousers. Again when he looked at her she felt as if he were looking deep inside her. Testing her mettle? Hoping the force of his gaze might make her explode into a pile of ashes? Or was he after something beyond her comprehension?

The ability to stick one’s hands on one’s hips was underrated. As was the ability to cross one’s arms. She could only stand there, torso thrust in his direction, staring back.