took it from him as he shut the doors and noticed a muddy sticker supporting a Sydney football team near the handle and another for an Australian brewery. He looked like a man who knew his way around a ball. And a beer.
Leo had drunk gin.
Kent looked down on her. The morning sun fell on the pale skin of her throat and he noticed the pulse beating there. ‘Got your pills?’ he asked gruffly.
She patted her bag. ‘At the ready.’
‘Should you take one now? I’m not going to stop every two minutes for you to throw up.’
Sadie ignored his warning. Stopping every two minutes didn’t exactly sound like a picnic to her either. ‘I’ll wait till we get out of the city. Save my performance for the windy bits.’
Kent narrowed his eyes as he took the opportunity to study her face some more. She had dark rings surrounding the deep grey of her irises, which seemed to lure him in even further. ‘Just how trippy is trippy?’
Sadie realised his mouth was quite near and she had to wonder what it would look like kicked up a little, those creases becoming deep grooves, because it looked pretty damn perfect as it was. As if some old master with an eye for masculine perfection had sculpted it just for him, and the artist in her, never far from the surface, appreciated its flawlessness.
The woman, on the other hand, was just plain jealous.
Her own ridiculously plump mouth, devoid of collagen despite what every catty woman she’d ever met had implied, seemed garish by comparison. It was why she rarely wore lipstick or gloss.
Her mouth did not need any more attention.
Kent felt her gaze on his mouth and the pull of those incredible eyes as she studied him. ‘Sadie?’ he prompted.
Sadie blinked as she realised he was frowning and she was staring. Not only that, but she’d lost her place in the conversation. Her brain scrambled to catch up. She took a step back from him. What had they been talking about?
Pills. Right. ‘I sing,’ she said. ‘Loudly. And not very well.’
Kent grimaced. Great. Stuck in a car with karaoke Barbie. ‘Try to refrain.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘Let’s go.’
Sadie took a deep breath as she headed to the passenger seat. Her heart thudded in her chest on a surge of adrenaline. The call of the wild? The excitement of a new adventure? The beginnings of an illustrious career?
She hoped so because the alternatives weren’t palatable. Dread at the oncoming nausea. Or, worse, being alone in a confined space with an unimpressed man whose mouth had her wishing she’d paid more attention in sculpting classes.
She’d climbed up into the high-clearance, all-wheel drive. At five eight, she wasn’t exactly short, but Sadie still felt as if pole-vaulting lessons would have been handy. The sturdy cab felt like a cocoon of armour around her, even if the ground seemed a long way down.
As soon as she buckled up Kent thrust a folded up map at her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve marked the journey in red.’
Sadie looked at him as the mere thought of having to read and travel made her feel ill. ‘You don’t have a GPS?’
Kent shot her an impatient look. ‘We’re doing this the old-fashioned way,’ he said and started the engine.
Fabulous. ‘And what happens if we lose the map?’ she enquired sweetly. ‘Do we use the stars?’
Kent suppressed a smile at her derision. He held her gaze. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t bring my sextant.’
That look—intense, focused—fanned over her like a sticky web, doing strange things to her pulse and causing heat to bloom in her belly and other places further south.
Oh, he’d brought his sextant all right...
TWO
Even though she was looking out of the window, Sadie didn’t notice the city streets of Sydney giving way to the red rooves of suburbia or to the greenery of semi-rural market gardens. She was too busy puzzling over her reaction to the man sitting an arm’s length away.
On the surface, he was everything she didn’t usually go for. Physically impressive. Outdoorsy. A beer and football kind of a guy.
But then there was his age.
Through some online investigation last night she’d discovered he was thirty-six and she did have a track record with older men.
Leo had been twenty years her senior.
She supposed a psychologist would say she had a Daddy Complex. Her father had left when she was twelve and got himself a new family, including a set of twins who’d turned into sports-mad little boys.
She’d always felt the fact that she was a girl and had been more arty than sporty had been a huge let-down for her father. And after years of trying to win his attention and affection she’d finally conceded defeat as she’d headed off to college.
So, maybe his abandonment had spread invisible tentacles into her life.
Whatever.
It didn’t change the facts. Nothing else about Kent Nelson should have appealed.
Yet somehow it did.
She studied his profile as he drove, his eyes fixed on the road. His buzz cut melded into the stubble of his sideburns, which flowed into that covering his jaw, hugging the spare planes of his face, emphasising cheekbones that stood out like railings. It made him look...severe. A far cry from the bearded guy who had been laughing at the camera in the snap from the gallery.
It made him look intense.
Guarded.
It made him look haunted.
As a journalist, and a huge fan of his work, it was exceedingly intriguing.
As a woman—it scared the hell out of her.
Kent gripped the steering wheel as Sadie’s speculative gaze seemed to burn a hole at the angle of his jaw. After almost eighteen months in and out of hospitals and another six months of physical therapy, it had been a while since he’d had any kind of constant company—female or otherwise—and her concentration was unnerving.
He turned to look at her and almost rolled his eyes as she quickly pretended she hadn’t been staring at him by feigning interest in the scenery outside her window.
Very mature.
His gaze fell to her legs, the denim riding well and truly up above her knees and pulling taut across thighs as lush and round as the rest of her. Rubenesque slipped into his brain and he flicked his gaze back to the road.
‘I hope you brought something warmer—it’s going to get cold out at night.’
Sadie blinked. They’d been in the car for over an hour and this was the first thing he said to her? She really, really hoped he wasn’t one of those men who thought there was a direct correlation between her cup size and her IQ.
She slapped her forehead theatrically. ‘And I only packed bikinis and a frilly negligee.’
Kent gripped the steering wheel as images of her in a bikini screwed with his concentration. ‘A lot of people think of the outback as hot,’ he quantified, still not looking at her. ‘But it cools down really quickly at night.’
Sadie shot him an impatient look. ‘Thank you. But how about we assume from now on I’m a reasonably intelligent person who wouldn’t go on any trip without having thoroughly researched it first?’
Kent turned his head at the note in her voice. It was more than sarcasm. It was...touchy. As if she’d had to prove her intelligence one too many times. He guessed with her assets people didn’t often see beyond them.
He looked back