Harper,’ she sing-songed as she answered.
‘Hey, kiddo.’ It was Adele. Big surprise.
‘Hey, chickadee,’ she returned.
‘I have someone on the other line who wants to talk to you, so don’t go anywhere.’
‘Adele,’ Rosie said with a frown, before she realised by the muzak assaulting her ear that she was already on hold. ‘Girl, I’m gonna throw this damn thing in the creek if you’re not—’
‘Rosalind,’ a deep, male voice said.
Rosie sat up straight. ‘Cameron?’
She slapped herself across the forehead as she realised she’d given herself away. If she hadn’t been thinking of him in that moment it wouldn’t have made a difference. Deep, smooth, rumbling voices like that only came around once in a lifetime.
‘Wow, I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Did your stars tell you I was going to call?’
‘You’re thinking of astrology, not astronomy.’
‘There’s a difference?’ he asked.
Her skin did that humming thing which told her that wherever he was he was definitely kidding, definitely smiling.
‘So you are an astronomer, then?’ he asked.
‘That’s what my degree says.’
‘Hmm. I did consider you might be a ticket-seller, but then when I thought back on how hard you were working to not let me buy a ticket I had to go with my third choice of occupation.’
‘What was the second?’
After a pause he said, ‘Well, it wasn’t a choice so much as a pipe-dream. And I’m not sure we know one another well enough for me to give any more away than that.’
The humming of her skin went into overdrive, a kind of fierce, undisciplined overdrive that she wasn’t entirely sure how to rein in. She went with a thigh pinch, which worked well enough.
‘What’s up, Cameron?’
‘I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed my morning.’
She turned side-on so that her back could slump against the doorframe, and lifted her boot-clad feet to the step. ‘So, you did stay for the show. Good for you.’
‘Ah, no. I did not.’
Her brow furrowed. Then it dawned: he was calling to say he’d enjoyed the part of the morning he’d spent with her. Okay. So this was unanticipated.
When she said nothing, Cameron added, ‘I couldn’t do it. The wormholes, remember?’
She laughed, loosening her grip on her phone a little. ‘Right. I’d forgotten about the wormholes.’
‘I, obviously, have not.’
‘If one was smart, one might have thought this morning might have been a prime opportunity to overcome such a fear, since you were already there and all.’
‘One might. But I’ve not often been all that good at doing what I ought to do.’
First calloused hands, now rebellion. Where was the nice, well-liked Cameron Kelly she’d known, and what had this guy done with him?
‘You were in Meg’s year at St Grellans,’ Cameron said. Meaning he’d been asking around about her.
Rosie unpeeled her fingers from the step and lifted them to cradle the phone closer to her ear. ‘That I was.’
‘And since then?’
‘Uni. Backpacking. Mortgage. Too much TV.’ After a pause her curiosity got the better of her. ‘You?’
‘Much the same.’
‘Ha!’ she barked before she could hold it back. She could hardly picture Cameron Kelly splayed out on a second-hand double bed watching Gilligan’s Island reruns on a twelve-inch TV at two in the afternoon.
‘No kids?’ he added. ‘No man friend to give you foot rubs at the end of a long day telling fortunes?’
Rosie didn’t even consider scoffing at his jibe. She was too busy trying to ignore the image of him splayed across her bed.
‘No kids. No man. Worse, no foot rubs,’ she said.
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘Try harder.’
He laughed. Her cheek twitched into a smile. She slid lower on the step, and told herself she couldn’t get closer to being physically grounded unless she lay on the dirt.
‘You’re in a profession which must be teeming with men. How is it you haven’t succumbed to sweet nothings whispered in the dark by some guy with a clipboard and a brain the size of the Outback?’
‘I’m not that attracted to clipboards,’ she admitted.
‘Mmm. It can’t help that your colleagues all have Star Trek emblems secreted about their persons.’
‘Oh, ho! Hang on a second. I might be allowed to diss my fellow physicists, but that doesn’t mean you can.’
‘Is that what I just did?’
‘Yes! You just intimated all astronomers are geeks.’
‘Aren’t they?’ he said without even a pause.
She sat up straight and held a hand to her heart to find it beating harder than normal, harder than it had even when she’d been a green teenager. It had more than a little to do with the unflinching, alpha-male thing he’d found within himself in the intervening years. It spoke straight to the stubborn independence she’d unearthed inside herself.
‘You realise you are also insinuating that I am a geek?’ she said.
This time there was a pause. But then he came back with, ‘Yes. You are a geek.’
Her mouth dropped open then slammed back shut. Mostly because the tone of his voice suggested it didn’t seem to be the slightest problem for him that she might be a geek.
‘Rosalind,’ he said, in a way that made her want to flip her hair, lick her lips and breathe out hard.
‘Yes?’ she sighed before she could stop herself.
His next pause felt weightier. She cursed herself beneath her breath and gripped the teeny-tiny phone so tight her knuckles hurt.
‘I realise it’s last minute, but I was wondering if you had plans for dinner.’
Um, yeah, she thought; cheese on toast.
He continued, ‘Because I haven’t eaten, and if you haven’t eaten I thought
