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She blinked, surprised that he would think quite so lowly of her. “Of course not! I’m just very good at getting out of tight situations.”

“I guess I can’t argue with that,” Robb muttered, and Tahnee’s heart fluttered a little. She knew it was probably a bit ridiculous, but she did still think she’d done a pretty good job escaping him all those times, and this was about the most acknowledgement she was going to get.

“Hang on,” Robb said suddenly, standing up and striding out into the aisle, and Tahnee was instantly on the alert.

He stared at one of the ticket readers for a moment, before turning back to her, a triumphant gleam in his eye. “It looks like you can just tap your credit card.”

Tahnee sighed as he pulled out his wallet and held his card to the reader, the machine chiming a couple of seconds later in response. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

Robb’s brow furrowed into an adorable scowl. “So you knew.”

She shrugged. “It’s not my fault if all your vaunted Agency training didn’t provide you with basic situational awareness.”

Robb opened his mouth to reply, but at the same moment, the tram announced that the next stop was The Esplanade.

“Esplanade?” Tahnee said, moving across the aisle of the now mostly empty tram to peer out the window. Sure enough, beyond the general darkness of the evening was a blackness that could only be the ocean, and suddenly she felt a yearning to be out of this tram and down on the beach.

Sure, it was a cold, wet night, but one of the few downsides to living in her beautiful outback home was that the ocean was a very, very long way away. She hadn’t seen it since… well, probably since the last time she saw Robb, bobbing about on Sydney Harbour in a wildly expensive yacht, the both of them so young and so stupid.

Well, now they were old and stupid – or middle-aged and only slightly smarter, anyway – and she wanted to go to the beach with Robb, no matter the weather.

She yanked on the cord, with the tram announcing that the next stop would be Luna Park.

Robb looked at her, appalled. “You want to go to an amusement park?”

“Well, why not?” She shrugged, before putting him out of his misery. “But no, I’m not going there – it’s probably closed at this time of year.”

Robb didn’t say anything, but she could see the relief on his face. Nonchalantly, she added, “We’re going to the beach.”

“We are going to the beach?”

“Well, you’re free to stay on this tram and travel slowly around Melbourne for the rest of the night,” she said, moving to the door as the tram shuddered to a stop. “But I am going to the beach.”

She held her breath. The idea that he might stay on the tram and she’d never see him again was insane, but he was stubborn enough that it just might happen.

Stepping off the tram, she listened for his footsteps behind her – and her heart dropped as she was met with silence.

She turned around, aghast, to see him touching his card to the card reader again.

“I’m just tapping off,” he said, sounding oddly flustered – as well he might, given that the doors were starting to close.

“Come on!” she snapped, reaching in and yanking him bodily out of the tram a split second before the doors closed on him. He stumbled into her arms, and she let out an oof as she staggered under his weight.

She stared into his icy blue eyes, feeling an almost irresistible pull, the mate bond pulsing gently in her chest and sending warmth spreading through her body. She wanted nothing more than to pull him in close to her, to feel his lips against hers, and she knew that he wanted the same – but then it was like a shutter came down over his face, and he pulled back, his jaw set.

Fair enough, Tahnee thought as she tried to calm her racing heart, even as the brolga squawked in protest. I can take my time and wait for him. It’s not like last time, where I was planning to disappear into the night. This time, I want it to last.

I think so, anyway.

Of course she wanted to be with him – he was her mate, after all. But it would be… well, ‘complicated’ didn’t cover the half of it. She had no idea if they could make it work. She didn’t even know if Robb wanted to deal with the difficulties of making such an improbable pairing work.

But she knew that she wanted to at least give it a shot. And if that meant waiting more than five minutes before making out in front of a seedy-looking McDonald’s, then so be it.

She surreptitiously straightened out her wet clothes, suddenly very aware of how her hair had gotten plastered to her head earlier in the evening. She didn’t even want to think about how she looked.

Robb, on the other hand, somehow looked mostly dry, despite having been caught in the same rainstorm as she had. At least the rain had stopped for the time being, and the evening had a clean, fresh feel to it, the streetlights reflecting off the wet road and making everything feel a little bit magical.

Well, as magical as things could feel in what was clearly a bit of a dodgy area, anyway.