‘Can you blame me? You could’ve just bailed me out of jail, jerk-face.’
And...hello, there it was: the tone of voice that had irritated him throughout his youth and into his twenties. Cool, mocking...nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating.
‘Your parents didn’t want me to—they were trying to teach you a lesson. And might I point out that calling me names is not a good way to induce me to do anything for you, Rowan?’
Seb heard her mutter a swear word and he grinned. Oh, he did like having her at his mercy.
‘What do you want, Brat?’
Brat—his childhood name for her. Callie, so blonde, had called her Black Beauty, or BB for short, on account of her jet-black hair and eyes teamed with creamy white skin. She’d been a knockout, looks-wise, since the day she’d been born. Pity she had the personality of a rabid honey badger.
Brat suited her a lot better, and had the added bonus of annoying the hell out of her.
‘When is Callie due back?’
He knew why she was asking: she’d rather eat nails than accept help from him. Since his sister travelled extensively as a buyer for a fashion store, her being in the country was not always guaranteed. ‘End of the month.’
Another curse.
‘And Peter—your brother—is still in Bahrain,’ Seb added, his tone super pointed as he reached for a shirt and pulled it off its hanger.
‘I know that. I’m not completely estranged from my family!’ Rowan rose to take the bait. ‘But I didn’t know that my folks were planning a trip. They never go anywhere.’
‘They made the decision to go quite quickly.’ Seb walked back into his bedroom and stared at the black and white sketches of desert scenes above his rumpled bed. ‘So, now that you definitely know that I’m all you’ve got, do you want to tell me what the problem is?’
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘I need to get back to London and I was wondering whether you’d loan...’
When pigs flew!
‘No. I’m not lending you money.’
‘Then buy me a ticket...’
‘Ah, let me think about that for a sec? Mmm...no, I won’t buy you a ticket to London either.’
‘You are such a sadistic jerk.’
‘But I will pay for a ticket for you to get your bony butt back home to Cape Town.’
Frustration cracked over the line as he listened to the background noise of the airport. ‘Seb, I can’t.’
Hello? Rowan sounding contrite and beaten...? He’d thought he’d never live to see the day. He didn’t attempt to snap the top button of his jeans; it required too much processing power. Rowan was home and calling him. And sounding reasonable. Good God.
He knew it wouldn’t last—knew that within ten minutes of being in each other’s company they’d want to kill each other. They were oil and water, sun and snow, fire and ice.
Seb instinctively looked towards the window and saw his calm, ordered, structured life mischievously flipping him off before waving goodbye and belting out of the window.
Free spirits...why was he plagued with them?
‘Make a decision, B.’
She ignored his shortening of the name he’d called her growing up. A sure sign that she was running out of energy to argue.
‘My mobile is dead, I have about a hundred pounds to my name and I don’t know anyone in Johannesburg. Guess I’m going to get my butt on a plane ho... to Cape Town.’
‘Good. Hang on a sec.’ Seb walked over to the laptop that stood on a desk in the corner of his room and tapped the keyboard, pulling up flights. He scanned the screen.
‘First flight I can get you on comes in at six tonight. Your ticket will be at the SAA counter. I’ll meet you in the airport bar,’ Seb told her.
‘Seb?’
‘Yeah?’
‘That last fight we had about Bronwyn...’
It took him a moment to work out what she was talking about, to remember her stupid, childish gesture from nearly a decade ago.
‘The one where you presumed to tell me how and what to do with my life?’
‘Well, I was going to apologise—’
‘That would be a first.’
‘But you can shove it! And you, as you well know, have told me what to do my entire life! I might have voiced some comments about your girlfriend, but I didn’t leave a mate to rot in jail,’ Rowan countered, her voice heating again.
‘We were never mates, and it was a weekend—not a lifetime! And you bloody well deserved it.’
‘It was still mean and...’
Seb rolled his eyes and made a noise that he hoped sounded like a bad connection. ‘Sorry, you’re breaking up...’
‘We’re on a landline, you dipstick!’ Rowan shouted above the noise he was making.
Smart girl, he thought as he slammed the handset back into its cradle. She’d always been smart, he remembered. And feisty.
It seemed that calling her Brat was still appropriate. Some things simply never changed.
TWO
Six hours later and it was another airport, another set of officials, another city and she was beyond exhausted. Sweaty, grumpy and... Damn it. Rowan pushed her fist into her sternum. She was nervous.
Scared spitless.
It could be worse, she told herself as she slid onto a stool in the busy bar, her luggage at her feet. She could be standing at Arrivals flicking over faces and looking for her parents. She could easily admit that Seb was the lesser of two evils—that she’d been relieved when her parents hadn’t answered her call, that she wasn’t remotely sure of their reaction to her coming home.
Apart from the occasional grumble about her lack of education they’d never expressed any wish for her to return to the family fold. They might—and she stressed might—be vaguely excited to see her again, but within a day they’d look at her with exasperation, deeply puzzled by the choices she’d made and the lifestyle she’d chosen.
‘So different from her sibling,’ her mother would mutter. ‘Always flying too close to the sun. Our changeling child, our rebel, always trying to break out and away.’
Maybe if they hadn’t wrapped her in cotton wool and smothered her in a blanket of protectiveness she’d be more...normal, Rowan thought. A little more open to putting down roots, to having relationships that lasted longer than a season, furniture that she owned rather than temporarily used.
She’d caused them a lot of grief, she admitted. She’d been a colicky baby, a hell-on-wheels toddler, and then she’d contracted meningitis at four and been in ICU for two weeks, fighting for her life. After the meningitis her family had been so scared for her, so terrified that something bad would happen to her—again—that they hadn’t let her experience life at all. All three of them—parents and her much older brother—had hovered over her: her own phalanx of attack helicopters, constantly scanning the environment for trouble.
The weird thing was that while she’d always felt protected she hadn’t always felt cherished. Would her life have taken a different turn if she had felt treasured, loved, not on the outside looking in?
It hadn’t helped that she’d been a fiery personality born into a family of quiet, brilliant, introverts. Two professors—one in music, the other in theoretical science—and her