Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  Yes.

  She wasn’t coming toward me after all, though. She was clutching at the towel covering her breasts with one hand and fumbling for the spa tub cover with the other, trying to drag it over, and I was back to “furious.” I got over there fast and said, “I’ll do it.”

  “You have to ...” She wouldn’t look at me. “Lock it up. Make sure.”

  “Did you listen to one single thing I told you? About kids? About kids bloody drowning? Of course I’m going to lock it up. Go inside. I’ve got this.”

  She looked at me. Wide eyes, stricken face, and those tears again. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  The anger was warring with the protectiveness I still felt, that I hadn’t been able to help since the first moment I’d seen her. The protectiveness was going to win, too. I knew that somewhere at the back of my mind, behind the rest of it. I wanted to show her, I needed to show her, that the best sex wasn’t with somebody who was only a body to you, it was with the person you wanted more than anything. The person your heart turned to like a flower turning to the sun. I wanted to tell her that anything else could be fun and hot and physically satisfying as hell, but it wouldn’t change your world.

  How did I know that? I’d just realized it, that’s how.

  I didn’t get to say it. She turned toward the house, and after a second, I heard it, too. The rusty-hinge wail of a hungry baby.

  “Go,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

  “My cardigan,” she said. “On the beach. The tide.”

  “I’ve got it,” I said, possibly through my teeth. “Would you please believe for one bloody second that I’m willing to help you? That I’m wanting to help you? Go.”

  She went. Clutching her towels to her, stumbling a little in the darkness.

  And it hurt.

  30

  Relationship Goals

  Poppy

  I didn’t see Karen and Jax when I went inside. I heard them, though. I changed Isobel, then fed her. I was connected about as much as a person could be to another person, and I felt absolutely alone.

  I wanted to lie on my face and pull the pillow over my head, to drown out the sound of two people in love giving all of themselves to each other, not to mention two people having the kind of sex I’d told Matiu I wanted in the most pathetic session of begging a woman could cringe to recall. I also wanted to bury my face in that pillow to drown my own tears. Instead, they dripped down my cheeks faster than I could wipe them away. My mouth was turned down in my unattractive sad-clown face, my nose running, my shoulders heaving, Isobel shaking in my arms, and there was nothing I could do about any of it.

  No choice but to face it. All these years, while I’d thought I’d been making all the right choices, the mature choices, I’d been making so many wrong ones. Jax had been the one who’d played around, the one who hadn’t got serious for so long, and I’d been the good girl who’d thought I was getting it right. It was what I’d told my dad. I’d got married. I’d had kids. I’d got ahead. I’d built a business, and then I’d built another one. Yet here we were. Jax was a maimed man who wasn’t broken, a contented man with his path stretching out before him straight and true, and I was the one who was alone and unsure and stuck. I was the one who was crying, because in the most important decision of all, I’d chosen wrong, and I’d refused to see it.

  I also needed to see my doctor straight away, because I needed to be tested for STDs. I needed to have Isobel tested, too. They tested early in pregnancy, I vaguely recalled, and if there’d been a problem, I’d have known. But if Max had been sleeping around with more than Violet ...

  All those trips to Shanghai. To Hong Kong. To everywhere. Who knew what he’d done? And I hadn’t even thought of it before tonight.

  I’d risked Isobel, and I’d risked Matiu, too.

  I’d spent so many nights, these past weeks, when the kids were asleep and I was trying to be, during those dark hours when the hard truths appear, thinking about how selfish Max had been. It was a blow to the gut to realize that he wasn’t the only one. This was why you didn’t go from one relationship straight into another. Not just because it wasn’t fair to you. Because it wasn’t fair to the other person. It wasn’t fair at all.

  The real truth? I hadn’t been thinking about Matiu out there, or if I had, I’d only been thinking about how desperately I wanted him. And because of that, I’d hurt him, and I’d been willing to hurt him more.

  I was so cold, my body was shaking. I was still naked, too, because when I’d come in here, Isobel had been crying hard, like a baby who’d needed her mother for too long. When she fell asleep again, I put her in her Moses basket and dragged myself into the shower, turned the water as hot as I could bear it, put my forearms against the wall, let the heat beat down on me, and finally cried out loud; ugly, racking sobs that tore me apart.

  I cried for the stupid, blind woman I’d been, and for my kids, who were paying the price. I cried for the life I’d thought I had, and for the death of that dream.

  And I cried for Matiu. For the anger I’d seen in his body as he’d jerked the cover to the spa tub into place, and for the hurt I knew that anger concealed. Hurt that I hadn’t seen him. That I hadn’t heard him, and I hadn’t recognized him, and I hadn’t known him.

  And, maybe, that even when he’d put himself out there, had exposed his heart to me and dared to show me his truth ...

  That I hadn’t loved him.

  In the morning, it was better.

  A lesson you had to keep learning, apparently: that if you kept trying, you could usually, eventually, make it better.

  Or maybe it was just that I was too busy to mope, and I’d been blessed with pretty good levels of the happy sort of hormones, even if it didn’t feel like it now. Dopamine, serotonin, all that.

  I still felt bad about Matiu. I still felt terrible about Matiu. In fact, my heart was sinking into my stomach at the thought of the look on his face as I’d left him, as I strapped Isobel into her carrier and got Olivia into her clothes. I needed to do something about that. I needed to explain, but most of all, I needed to apologize. He didn’t want me anymore? That didn’t let me off the hook.

  I couldn’t think about it more at the moment, though, because Karen was bursting into the room, looking, as usual, like she had an electric wire down her back instead of a spine, and saying, “Hope finally had the baby! Hemi just called, and I talked to both of them. How can it still be so exciting the fourth time? And before you ask—they’re both fine, he’s huge—almost nine pounds, and since Hope’s normally about ninety-five pounds, I can’t even imagine the horror—and—oh—obviously, I guess, he’s a boy. Tane Wiremu Te Mana, which is about the most wonderful name I’ve ever heard. Koro’s name, and Tane’s. Or, you know, Tane, the god of the forest, because Koro’s a bit like that, like they say. Like a totara tree, old and strong. Anyway, that’s him, and I can tell Hemi’s thrilled to have another boy. To have two of each. They didn’t find out the sex on these last two kids, because Hope said she had clothes for either one now, and she just wanted to be surprised.”

  I said, “That’s wonderful. And I did that too, this time. It was fun, finding out at the end.”

  “It can’t have been too fun not having anybody there but Matiu, though,” Karen said. “Awkward, especially since he, ah ...” She glanced at the kids. “Covets your person.”

  I laughed. “Well, yeh. You could be right about the ‘awkward’ part. At the time, though, I was just glad to see him, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t coveting my person at the moment.”

  She said, “Yeah. It’s a pretty nasty business. I was there for Hope’s first baby, for Aroha, and let me just say—I’m definitely getting drugs. Hemi sounds like he may have to check into a nursing home to recover from the strain, but Hope looks blissful. I’d say drugs, but she still doesn’t get drugs, because she’s crazy. She says she wants to feel it. Ugh. I wouldn’t want to feel it. Pain sucks. Anyway, from how hoarse Hemi’s voice was and h
ow exhausted he sounded, they should’ve given the drugs to him. She always makes him sing. Can you imagine Hemi Te Mana, the great and powerful, bellowing out Maori waiata in a very expensive Manhattan maternity hospital? Somebody should film that for blackmail purposes, except too late, because he swears they’re done, and anyway, she’s thirty-eight and he’s turning fifty this year. He says he’s a late bloomer, which is another thing that makes me laugh. I’m leaving today to go spend a couple weeks there and help out, but first, I need to go see Koro and tell him the news. He likes to hear things in person, especially this. I’ll go right after breakfast. Do you want to come?”

  “I want to come,” Olivia said. “Because he has very many lollies, and I like lollies.” Focusing on the essential point.

  “Well, obviously,” Karen said. “Here.” She ran out of the room again, came back with the hairbrush and ties, and started fixing Olivia’s hair like she knew exactly how to do it, which she clearly did. After that, she got Hamish to stick his head under the sink, since his own hair was sticking up wildly all over his head, and started brushing his hair, and I went into the kitchen to start breakfast.

  Jax was making coffee. When I came in with Isobel, he turned and smiled at me. “Hey,” he said. “Sounds like you heard the good news, though it means I’m losing my wife for a wee while. And that was a bit awkward last night, eh.” Putting my dopamine and serotonin levels to the test.

  “Oh, you know,” I said, hauling out a pot and filling it with water in preparation for poaching eggs. “Only extremely. Could be good, though. Now you know how a woman actually looks postpartum. Helpful information.”

  Karen came in with the kids behind her and said, “Just exactly wrong, because there’s no choice here. Jax had better be worshiping my postpartum body. I don’t care how it looks. I’m demanding a guarantee in advance, buddy, or it’s not happening.”

  Jax smiled, as calm as always, and said, “You’ve got that guarantee. Your postpartum body is safe with me.”

  “What’s a partum body?” Hamish asked, while I started slicing fruit and thought about the value of setting your expectations high.

  “It’s how you look after you have a baby,” I said, because why not? And because I was going to train my son to be a Jax. “You get a big tummy when you’re pregnant, and it takes a while for your tummy to get small again, even after the baby comes out. Some people may think you don’t look as pretty for a while, but it’s good for the daddy to think you do, because the reason you look different is the baby you made together, and all the work your body did to make it.”

  “Oh,” he said doubtfully. “You don’t have a big tummy anymore, though, and you’re still pretty, so maybe you don’t have a partum body.”

  I set my knife down, crouched low, reached around the lump that was Isobel in her carrier, and gave him a fast, fierce cuddle. “Thank you, my darling,” I told him. “I love you very much. Have a strawberry.”

  “Seriously, though,” Karen said, taking her own strawberry off the cutting board. “You look awesome, Poppy. OK, a little bit extra there, but not that much, and having a bigger butt and even, you know, thighs and all is good anyway, at least I’ve always thought so. I wouldn’t exactly know, but it balances you out, with the boobs and the waist and all, and it’s just plain sexy anyway, right, Jax?”

  Jax paused in the midst of stirring vinegar into the egg water. “I’m trying to work out which way to answer that,” he said slowly, “and deciding that I’m going to pass. Sometimes, there’s no defusing the bomb. You just have to back away slowly.”

  Karen sighed. “Obviously you think I’m hot, even though I’m not curvy, but that’s probably just because I’m confident. And, all right, maybe you’re not going to say your sister’s hot, but we both know she is, since we looked. Matiu obviously thought so, and you know he’s got plenty of standard for comparison. There’s the doctor thing, and then there’s the Matiu thing. So how did that go last night, Poppy?”

  “She may not want to tell you exactly here,” Jax said, “or exactly now. It’s a thought. Make some toast, will you?” The water was boiling, and he began cracking eggs neatly, one by one, into a little bowl, then slipping them into the bubbles as he stirred, giving the task the same precision and concentration he probably brought to bomb disposal.

  “Well, not in detail,” Karen said, popping bread into the toaster oven with no precision at all. “I just wanted the, you know, outline. Like—scale of one to ten. Those adolescent fantasies and all. You can tell me the rest later. I hope.”

  “Prurient interest, you mean,” Jax said, but he was smiling, like a man with full confidence that Karen was never, ever going to need to look elsewhere. Which I more or less knew, because I’d heard Karen last night. It had been bloody depressing, too.

  Wait. What if it wasn’t just Max? What if it was me? What if I was boring, somehow? Should I have been ... I didn’t even know. Louder? More aggressive? Printing out how-to articles about kinky practices or, better yet, texting them to him with coy emojis, followed by breathless phone calls? Buying erotic supplies and leaving them on his perfume-scented pillow with a note? Texting him pictures of sexy nightdresses or leather catsuits or whatever the dress-up idea of the moment was, and asking him which he’d like to see on me? Making dates, possibly for specific ... acts? That could be hot. Why hadn’t I done that? Or, since the past was over, should I be doing that, in my hypothetical future? Was taking things to the next level, and taking charge of that, the new normal, and I, in my blue-hippo and Cheerio-and-cheese-cube haze, hadn’t noticed it?

  Of course, the placing-on-the-pillow and so forth would have to happen after getting the kids to bed, because the image of my hypothetical sexually-satisfied future partner being greeted at the door by the sight of a naked Olivia running around the house brandishing a vibrating purple dildo or whirling a string of anal beads over her head was right there to conjure up.

  Unfortunately, in my experience, by the time I did the dishes and got the kids bathed, into their PJs, read to, sung to, and actually sleeping in their beds, I had a distressing tendency to face-plant onto my own bed. If I wasn’t trying to snatch an hour or two of uninterrupted work time, that is.

  What did women do, though? All right, what did Karen do? I was willing to believe that sex wasn’t meant to be a one-way street. I just didn’t know how to learn to drive better, or how fast you were required to go.

  “Well, yes, prurient interest,” Karen told Jax, yanking me back into the present, which was eggs and pineapple, not leather and lace. “Nice job on the adult vocab, by the way. So, Poppy—pretty please? Teeny bit of sharing?”

  I had my kids right here. I had Jax right here. I couldn’t. Karen wanted to know, though? I wanted to know, too. I settled for saying, “Actually, nothing happened.”

  Karen was still working on the toast. I could tell she was turning to me, but I wasn’t watching. I was arranging my pineapple and strawberries onto a plate and most definitely not watching. She said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” I said. “In fact, it ... didn’t go well. I don’t think Matiu’s the man you think he is. In fact, I know he isn’t. He’s a better man. He’s ... he’s pretty special, actually.”

  “Well, I saw that,” Karen said.

  “No,” I said, and my amusement died. “You didn’t. But I did.”

  31

  Darkness and Light

  Poppy

  We were up at the little house between the sea and the mountains again, and Hamish was playing ball with the dog again. Olivia was in the house with Vanessa, playing with little Ari. Isobel was sleeping on a blanket at my feet. Karen was sitting and talking to Koro under the avocado tree, and Jax was helping Nikau do something to his car.

  And me? I was around the side of the house beside the vegetable garden, sitting under an apple tree with a trunk so thick and gnarled, it must be at least half the age of the man who’d planted it, and drawing. Not my story about Hazel and her sleepover
, because my blue hippo, or maybe my inner child, remained stubbornly elusive. No, I was drawing a lioness who was being drawn into adventure despite her best intentions, and a black jaguar, muscular and powerful.

  That first tentative meeting, with the lioness’s tribe in the distance, stalking a gazelle over the grasslands. The lioness falling behind, because she’d seen a pawprint in the mud. A big one, and different, something she’d never seen before. Following those pawprints, then the bruised grasses underfoot, into the bush, panting a little in excitement and fear at straying from the pride, from the clear views of the savanna into a mysterious world where lions didn’t go. Pushing between hanging vines, deeper and deeper into the shadows. Seeing the huge, gleaming, golden eyes, focused on her, and the suggestion of bunched black muscle behind them.

  The lioness stopping. Hesitating, poised to run. Her head up, sniffing the air.

  And the dark jaguar stalking slowly out to meet her as she shrank back, ears flattened, teeth bared. The jaguar walking a slow circle around her, and the lioness twisting, turning to watch him. Wary, and fascinated.

  Two other young lionesses appearing at the edge of the clearing, and the jaguar melting away into the shadows again.

  A tribunal, then. An enormous male lion, his mane magnificent, perched on the high ground, the females ranged around him with their cubs, and my lioness standing defiantly to face that semicircle, head high, defending her indiscretion.