Once a Rebel... Read Free Page A

funeral, all bones and unrealised potential. Now she was … He dropped his gaze to the curve of her neck. It was only slightly less gratuitous than staring at her cleavage.
    Another thing he hadn’t touched in years. Curves.
    ‘Looks like you’ve been on good pasture.’
    The only sign of that particular missile hitting its target was the barest of flinches in her otherwise steady gaze. She swallowed carefully before speaking and sat up taller, expression composed. ‘You really work hard at being unpleasant, don’t you?’
    A fighter. Good for her.
    He shrugged. ‘I am unpleasant.’
    ‘Alcohol does that.’
    His whole body froze.
A dirty fighter, then.
Buthis past wasn’t all that hard to expose with a few hours and an Internet connection. ‘I don’t drink any more.’
    ‘Probably just as well. Imagine how unbearable you’d be if you did.’
    He fixed his eyes on her wide, clear ones, forcing his mind not to find this verbal swordplay stimulating. ‘What do you want, Shirley?’
    ‘I want to ask you about my mother.’
    ‘No, you don’t. You want to ask me about the list.’
    ‘Yes.’ She stared, serene and composed. The calmness under pressure reminded him a lot of her mother.
    ‘How did you even know it existed?’
    Her steady eyes flicked for just a moment. ‘I heard you, at the wake. Talking about it.’
    He’d not let himself think about that day in a long, long time. ‘Why didn’t you add your name?’
    She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t invited.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘And I didn’t even know she had a bucket list until that day.’
    Did that hurt her? That her mother had shared it with strangers but not her? A long dormant part of him lifted its drowsy head. Empathy. ‘You were young. We were her peers.’
    She snorted. ‘You were her students.’
    The old criticism still found a target. Even after all this time. ‘You weren’t there, Shirley. We were more like friends.’ He had hungered for intellectual stimulation he just hadn’t found in students his own age and her mother had filled it.
    ‘I was there. You just didn’t know it.’
    He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I used to hide under the stairs when you would all come over for your extra credit Saturdays. Listen in. Learn.’
    What?
‘You were, what, fourteen?’
    ‘Actually, I was eleven when you first started coming. I was fourteen when you stopped.’
    ‘Most eleven-year-olds don’t have a fascination with philosophy.’
    She licked her lips, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral. Except for the tiny flush that spiked high in her cheeks. And he knew she was lying about something.
    ‘Ask me what you really want to know.’
And then go.
His tolerance for company was usually only as long as it took to get laid.
    She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you even start the list?’
    Oh … so many reasons. None of them good and none of them public. ‘How many have
you
done?’ he asked instead.
    ‘Six.’
    Huh. That was a pretty good rate, given she had been a teenager for the first half of that decade. The old guilt nipped. ‘Which ones?’
    ‘Ballooning, horse-riding in the Snowy Mountains, marathon—’
    He gave her curves a quick once-over. ‘You ran a marathon?’ She ignored him. With good reason.
    ‘—abseiling, and climbing the Harbour Bridge.’
    The easy end of the list.
‘That’s only five.’
    ‘Tomorrow I swim with the dolphins.’
    Tomorrow. The day after today. Something about the immediacy of that made him nervous. ‘Won’t you eviscerate if you go in the sun, or something?’
    She glared at him. ‘I’m pale, I’m not a vampire. Stop hedging. Why haven’t you done a single one?’
    She was going to keep on asking until he told her. And she wasn’t going to like the answer. ‘I’ve been too busy besmirching my soul.’
    She frowned. ‘Meaning?’
    ‘Making lots of money.’
    ‘That should make it easier to do the things on the list, not harder.’
    ‘Success doesn’t make itself.