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Just as she was about to give herself a pat on the back for being immensely gifted at picking the right wrong men after all, a concealed doorway opened up within the wall of grey, revealing a figure silhouetted within the gap. A figure with sexily ruffled hair, broad shoulders and shirt sleeves rolled up over the kind of sculpted forearms that made her think this was a guy who knew how to fix a leaky tap.
Cameron. Even cloaked in darkness there was no doubting it was him.
‘I’m late. Again,’ she said, her voice gravelly.
He pushed the hole in the wall open wider. ‘You’re right on time.’
She shook her head and hastened across the path. When she was close enough to see his eyes so blue, like the wild forget-me-nots scattered throughout her wayward back yard, he said, ‘You look beautiful.’
‘So do you,’ she admitted before she even thought to censor herself.
‘Why, thank you.’
She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked anywhere but at him. ‘Where are we?’
‘We’re not there yet.’
Cameron shut the hole in the wall and locked it with a huge padlock, then passed her a great, hulking, orange workman’s helmet.
‘You have to be kidding,’ she said.
‘Put it on or we go no further.’
‘I’ll get hat hair.’
He glanced briefly at the waves that for once had been good to her and curled in all the right directions. ‘While inside these walls, you’re not taking the thing off.’
‘Jeez, you’re demanding. You could try a little charm.’
‘Fine,’ he said, putting his own helmet on and only ending up looking sexier still in a strong, manly, muscly, blue-collar kind of way. ‘Please, Rosalind, wear the helmet lest something drop on your head and kill you and I have no choice but to hide your body.’
She grimaced out a smile. But all she said as she lugged the thing atop her head and strapped herself in was, ‘You’re lucky orange is my colour.’
He stepped in and reached up to twist it into a more comfortable position, then looked back into her eyes. He said, ‘That I am.’
He smiled down at her. She felt herself smiling back, hoping to seem the kind of woman who could get those smiles on demand. It seemed eighteen hours away from him hadn’t made her any more mindful. She wondered if it was too late to feign strep-throat or the plague.
She hoisted her handbag higher on her shoulder and gripped tight on the strap. ‘Is this going to be some kind of extreme-sport type of dinner? Should I have brought knee pads and insurance?’
‘Stick close to me and you’ll be fine.’
Said the scorpion to the turtle.
He tucked her hand into his elbow so that their hips knocked and their thighs brushed, and Rosie felt nothing as straightforward as fine as they tramped over tarpaulins, beneath scaffolding and past piles of bricks and steel girders, until they reached a lift concealed behind heavy, silver plastic sheeting.
Rosie said, ‘I feel like a heroine in a bad movie with people in the audience yelling “don’t go in there!”’
He waved her forward. ‘Go in there. Trust me.’
She glanced at him, at the come-hither smile, the dark-blue eyes, the tempting everything-else. Trust him? Right now she was having a hard time trusting herself.
She hopped in the lift, and for the next one and a half minutes did her best not to breathe too deeply the delicious scent of another freshly laundered shirt. Or maybe it was just him. Just clean, yummy Cameron.
She hoped this date would go quickly. Then at least she could say she’d given it a good old try. And know she could still rely completely on her judgement.
As the lift binged, Rosie flinched so hard she pulled a muscle in her side. Cameron moved to her, resting a hand against her back, and she flinched again. Then closed her eyes in the hope he hadn’t noticed.
She felt the whisper of his breath against her neck a moment before he murmured by her ear. ‘Now we’re here.’
‘Where, exactly?’
‘CK Square.’
The lift doors swished open, and what she saw had her feet glued to the lift floor. ‘Holy majoly,’ Rosie breathed out.
They had reached the top floor of the building, or what would be the top floor. The structure was in place, but apart from steel beams crisscrossing the air like a gigantic spider-web there was nothing between them and the heavens but velvet-black sky.
Cameron gave her a small shove to the left, and that was when she saw the charming wrought-iron table set for two around which candles burned on every given surface, their flames protected by shimmering glass jars. A cart held a number of plates covered in silver domes, and a bottle of wine chilled in an ice bucket to one side.
