Читать книгу Getting Red-Hot with the Rogue - Элли Блейк, Ally Blake - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

‘MR KELLY?’

Dylan looked up from his corner office desk on the thirtieth floor of Kelly Tower to find his assistant, Eric, practically quivering in the doorway. ‘Shoot.’

Eric’s voice tremored as he tried to say, ‘I… There’s… I’m not sure I quite know how to…’

Whistling a breath through the smallest gap between his lips, Dylan pushed back his chair and leant his chin upon steepled fingers. ‘Take a breath. Visualise your happy place. Count to ten. Whatever it takes. Just remember that I am a very busy, very important man and get to the point.’

Eric did as he was told, so quickly Dylan thought the kid might hyperventilate. But he managed to say, ‘I have to get onto your computer for a sec.’

‘Go for your life.’ Dylan pushed his chair back to give the guy room.

Eric slid into place, his fingers flying over the keyboard with the speed of a kid born with a laptop attached to his thighs. ‘A friend of mine works for an online news mag and he messaged me to say I had to see something. This address ought to give us a direct feed.’

Dylan’s cheek twitched. ‘Seriously, kid, if you’ve come in here all a fluster because some blog has footage of me feeding spaghetti and meatballs to that nifty little Olympic diver I met in Luxembourg last week…’

His next words froze on his tongue and he slid his chair back beneath his desk with such speed Eric had to leap out of the way.

The monitor was not in fact showing any footage of him. Or the nifty little Olympian. Or meatballs, for that matter.

Dylan didn’t even have the chance to be the slightest bit ashamed of his own self-absorption as the crystal clear digital footage brought his raison d’être, the family business he championed day in day out, back to the forefront of his mind with a wallop.

The half-acre forecourt keeping Kelly Tower clear of the maddening CBD crowds that traversed Brisbane’s hectic George Street had in its north corner a twenty-foot-high, silver, zigzag sculpture—symbolising the impressive escalation of fortune that securing representation with the Kelly Investment Group ensured.

The sculpture usually stood proud and alone bar a few stray pigeons brave enough to cling to its slick diagonal bars. Today it had been taken over by camera crews and reporters with mini-sound recorders and logo-labelled mikes. That kind of excitement had encouraged a crowd of ten times as many interested onlookers.

No wonder.

From what he could make out through the sudden ache descending upon his head, the excitement in the reporter’s voice, and Eric wheezing in the doorway, in some kind of crazy protest a woman had handcuffed herself to the zig. Or was it the zag?

Dylan had nothing against handcuffs per se. They had their place in the zeitgeist of the single man. Just not in the middle of a busy workday, not in front of his building, and not when as the head of Media Relations it was his job to make the fact that a crazy person had picked that particular statue to attach her daft self seem less interesting than it certainly was.

The crowd parted, and Eric’s friend’s camera slipped into the gap, giving Dylan a better look at the ruination of his afternoon.

She was fair skinned, dark-eyed, with dark wavy hair made all the more interesting by the fact she kept having to shake its wind-mussed length out of her face. A floral top cinched and flowed in all the right places, telling tales of the kinds of curves and hollows that could distract a weaker-willed man. Not to mention the white calf-length trousers into which her second-glance-worthy bottom had been poured, or the pair of the most insanely high-heeled hot pink sandals…

And, of course, handcuffs.

‘What are we going to do?’ Eric said in whispered awe.

Dylan jumped; he and the woman had been having such a moment he’d forgotten his assistant was even there.

The heel of his palm reared up over the mouse, ready to jab the webpage closed, when a sudden gust of breeze blew the woman’s hair away from her face and she looked directly into Eric’s mate’s camera lens.

Dylan’s hand went rigid a breath from touchdown leaving him staring into a pair of brown eyes. Bambi eyes, for Pete’s sake. Big, beautiful, liquid brown with long, delicate eyelashes that made them appear wounded. Vulnerable. Repentant.

His gut twisted. His teeth clenched. A shaft of heat shot him upright, then filled him with adrenalin. Every masculine instinct reached out to him as the deep-seated urge to protect her clobbered him from the inside out. He felt himself rising from his seat, his wrists straightening as though preparing to slay whoever it was who had put that look in those eyes.

Then she licked her lips, shapely pink lips covering the sexiest kind of overbite, and blinked those big brown eyes. As her gaze shifted left she dropped her chin a fraction and she grinned flirtatiously at the person behind the camera.

The trance splintered like broken glass, ringing in his ears as it dislocated around him.

He swore beneath his breath, regained control over his mouse hand, closed the damn webpage and gave his usually exceptionally discriminating protective instincts a good mental kick in the pants.

They knew better. Far better.

The only people he sheltered by way of his vociferous guard bore the name of Kelly. The blood of his blood. That was as wide as his circle of trust stretched.

His family needed to stick together. Tight together. For, no matter how sincere people might seem to be in courting amity, the downside of being richer than Midas and more recognisable than the prime minister was that they would always be considered Kellys first, everything else second.

He’d learnt that lesson nice and young. No matter how beguiling a woman might be, how well bred, how seemingly genuine, they all wanted something from him—his wealth, his connections, even his name.

Nowadays he only let himself play with those who wanted the heat of his body and nothing more. No history and no hereafter. It was a process that had worked beautifully for him for some time.

The fact that not a single one of the warm bodies had stoked the fire of his protective instincts like the one with the soft brown eyes was something he had neither the time nor inclination to ponder.

Feeling mighty fractious, he was out of the chair and through the door before Eric even realised he was moving.

‘Sir!’ Eric cried.

Dylan waved a hand over his shoulder, and all but ignored the wave of hellos and bowing and scraping that followed in his wake as he jogged down the hallway towards the elevators.

Eric was puffing, red-faced, and his hands were shaking by the time he caught up. ‘Tell me what I can do!’

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Dylan said as the elevator doors closed so slowly he made a mental note to talk to his brother, Cameron—who, being an engineer, surely knew where to source faster-closing ones. ‘And tell your mother you’ll be late home. I have the feeling this will be a long day.’

Wynnie’s wrists hurt.

That’s what comes from not doing a trial run with new handcuffs, you duffer.

Ever the pro, she did her all not to let the discomfort show. She dug her fingernails into her palms, hoping it might take away her focus from the itchiness and scratchiness encircling her wrists. And she smiled at the bank of reporters, each of whom had no idea they were about to become her new best friends in this town.

‘What’s KInG ever done to you?’ a voice from the back called out.

She looked down the barrel of the nearest camera, discreetly spat a clump of windswept hair from her lip gloss, and said, ‘They’ve never once returned my phone calls. Typical, right?’

She rolled her eyes, and a few women in the crowd murmured in appreciation.

She made sure to look each and every one of them in the eye as she said, ‘The past week I’ve met with top men and women in local and state government to talk about what we can all do together to help reduce the impact each individual person in this city is having on our environment. Those civil servants, good people with families at home and middle-income jobs, have been full of beans and ideas and enthusiasm. Yet the Kelly Investment Group, the largest company in town, a company with hundreds of employees and capital to burn, has time and again refused to even sit down with me, a new girl in town looking to make new friends, and have a chat over a cuppa.’

More twittering, this time with more volume.

‘What does a company have to do to get a cuppa with a girl like you?’ a deep voice called out from the back.

Wynnie bit her lip to stop from laughing as that question had come from her one plant at the event—Hannah, her close friend, and fellow Clean Footprint Coalition employee—who was currently hiding behind a cup of takeaway coffee and staring at a radio reporter as though he were the one who’d asked.

Wynnie waited until the crowd quieted. She leant forward, or as far as she could with her hands anchored behind her. ‘Kids, today I’m gonna need you all to tap into your imaginations. Hark back to those powerful images of environmentalists in the eighties chaining themselves to bulldozers to stop them knocking down ecologically imperative forests. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and the corporate giants, such as the Kelly Investment Group—’

Better to use their whole name, she thought, rather than the cute moniker they’d picked up, or possibly even coined themselves.

‘—are the new bad guys. Collectives with power, and resources, and influence who choose to turn the other cheek while you and I do our bit. We take shorter showers to conserve water, we recycle our newspapers, we unplug our appliances when we’re not using them. Right?’

Smiles all around. Lots of nods. If someone held a fist in the air she wouldn’t be surprised. The wave of solidarity gripped her. Her heart thundered all the harder in her chest, her skin hummed, the ache in her wrists all but forgotten.

‘Did you know,’ she said, lowering her voice so they all had to move in closer, ‘this sculpture is lit twenty-four hours a day? Yep. Even now, in the middle of a sunny Brisbane spring afternoon, it has thirty separate lights making sure it always looks as shiny as it can possibly be. Thirty!’

One by one the faces turned to glare at the shimmering silver edifice behind her. She could smell blood in the air. That was a triumph in itself considering the Goliath she was putting herself up against.

Her bosses had done their research, looking at popular fashion stores, television stations, national café chains when deciding who to lobby. But every lead had led back to the same destination. The Kellys.

They were the most famous, respected, fascinating family in town. Their reach was unmatched. Their influence priceless. If she got them on board as the first major corporate partner with the revamped Clean Footprint Coalition, the exposure would be unimaginable, and Brisbane would fall into her lap like a pack of cards.

‘I am a concerned citizen,’ she continued, ‘as are you all, as are my colleagues, the band of environmental groups together known as the Clean Footprint Coalition. While the Kelly Investment Group, with the hundreds of ambivalent corporate clients they represent, is the biggest bulldozer you have ever seen.’

Hannah yelled out a mighty, ‘Yeah,’ and the crowd took up the cry until it all but reverberated around the square.

Wynnie bit back a grin of victory. God, did she love her work. These moments, when she had something to do with making people think about their place in the grand scheme of things, she really felt as if she could change the world.

The rush of pleasure was yummier than chocolate. It was more profound than a Piña Colada on an empty stomach. Hell, it was better than sex. Thank God for that. The hours above and beyond the call of duty that she dedicated to her work were such that she barely remembered what the latter was like.

A sudden ripple of noise from behind her mercifully pulled her from contemplating the extent of her accidental chastity. She turned, as well, and naturally got just far enough that her shoulder jarred, sapping every one of those lovely endorphins with it.

The pain had her sucking in a sharp breath, and hoping the trickle of sweat that had begun its journey down her neck and between her breasts wouldn’t show up on camera.

She needn’t have worried. Every camera panned left, microphones swerved in their wake, all pointing towards Kelly Tower.

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.

His voice dropped until it was so low it felt vaguely threatening. ‘Tell me, then, what it is that you want from me.’

‘I want you to take the same duty of care with your business practices, in the example you set for your employees and clients with regards to your impact on the environment, as you do your choice of footwear. I want your company to do its part and reduce its prodigious impact on the environment.’

He slid his feet shoulder-width apart, his toes pointing directly at her. ‘Honey, I’m not sure what you think we do in there but we sit at computers and wangle phones. Not so much rainforest felling as you might believe.’

‘You might not be the ones swinging the axes, but, by not being as green as you can be, you may as well be.’

While he looked as though he was imagining ways in which he might surreptitiously have her removed from the face of the earth, she kept her eyes locked on his and was as earnest as she could be when she said, ‘Just hear me out. I promise you’ll sleep better at night.’

Dylan’s eyes narrowed. For a moment she thought she might have pierced his hard shell, until his exquisitely carved cheek lifted into a smile. ‘I sleep just fine.’

And she believed him, to the point of imagining a man splayed out on a king-sized bed, expensive sheets barely covering his naked body as he slept the sleep of the completely satiated. Okay, not a man. This man. That body right now unfairly confined by the convention that city financiers wear suits.

She blinked, and her lashes stuck to her hot cheeks reminding her she’d been standing in the sun for half an hour, strapped to a sharp, uncomfortable, metal statue. ‘Come on. What do you say? Don’t you want your family name to stand for something great?’

Finally, something she said worked. The chiselled jaw turned to rock. The blue eyes completely lost the roguish glint. His faint aura of exasperation evaporated. And right before her eyes the man grew into his suit.

Debonair and cheeky, he was mouth-watering. Focused and switched on he might, she feared and hoped, be the most exceptional devil this angel was yet to meet.

His blue eyes locked hard and fast onto hers, pinning her to the spot with more power than the manacles binding her hands ever could. Her skin flushed, her heart rate doubled, her stomach clenched and released as though readying her to fight or fly.

His voice was rough, but loud enough for every microphone to pick it up as he said, ‘Both KInG and the Kelly family invest millions every year in environmental causes such as renewable energy research and reforestation. More than any other company in this state.’

‘That’s excellent. Truly. But money isn’t everything,’ she shot back, holding his gaze, feeling the cameras zoom in tight. ‘Action is the marker of a man, and the actions within that building beside us in the last year have added up to the waste of more than forty thousand disposable paper cups a month, more water usage than the whole of the suburb I live in, and enough paper waste to fell hectares of old forest. What I want from you is the promise that you are going to become the solution rather than being the problem.’

When the devil in the dark suit didn’t come back with an instant response her heart thundered with the thrill of a battle won, with the knowledge that the cameras had their sound bite. And if Dylan Kelly, VP Media Relations, was worth his salt he knew in that moment there was no way that he could just walk away.

‘So what do ya say?’ she said, bringing her voice back down to a more intimate level, loosening her grip, relaxing her stance and slipping on a warm, friendly and just a little bit flirty smile. ‘Invite me in for a coffee and a chat and I’ll spend tomorrow bugging someone else.’

She felt the whole forecourt hold its collective breath as they awaited his next move.

When it finally came, Wynnie was again glad of her shackles, uncomfortable as they had become, as this time when those blindingly blue eyes met hers they were filled with such self-possession, such provocation, such blatant reined-in heat her knees all but buckled beneath her.

‘You want to come up to my place for coffee?’ he asked, his voice like silk and melted dark chocolate and all things decadent and delectable and too slippery to hold on to. ‘Now why didn’t you just say so in the first place?’