Crowded beach by New Zealand standards, because it was January and the school holidays, it was Saturday, it was Mount Maunganui, and it was a warm afternoon by temperate New Zealand standards. On the beach in front of me, a dad was playing cricket with his kids above the high-tide mark. In the sea behind me, kids called to each other and dove under the waves in the familiar rhythm of home, fourteen thousand kilometers from the harsh, barren Afghan hills and even farther away in spirit. A few meters to my right, a mum came up from the sea, holding hands with a toddler in pink togs and water wings.
“All right?” she asked, catching my eye.
“All good,” I said. “Cheers.” Not quite true, but not the worst thing that had ever happened to me, either. There would be an answer. It would turn up any minute.
Ah. There you were. A group of teenaged boys well over to my left, aged maybe seventeen, running in a pack and cocky with it. One of them was trying out my crutches, and all of them were laughing.
First time, worst time. I was contemplating which would be worse—hopping, or walking on my knees over there, and deciding they were both fairly horrible—when I noticed the girl, and something happened in my gut, and in my lungs.
She was looking at me. Standing still. Her build was on the decidedly thin side, her black-and-gray camo bikini top and tiny black shorts were on the resolutely functional side, and her hair was on the absolutely short side, but that thing happened anyway.
Very long legs. Very nice waist. Very direct gaze. Very good . . . stance. The only problem was that two seconds after I’d registered all of that, she was flinging her bag onto the sand and heading over to the kids in a near-run like the goddess of vengeance, and you didn’t need to be a mind reader to sort out why.
What. The. Hell. I didn’t need a protector, and I needed a good-looking woman who felt sorry for me less than that. I started hopping, gritting my teeth at the effort of staying balanced on the sloping sand. Hopping had been surprisingly difficult at first. Good for the core strength, though, like swimming without part of your leg.
Focus on the strength, not the weakness.
I was still ten meters away when the girl started talking.
De-escalation was a skill. It was one I had. One she’d never heard of, apparently, because she led with, “Give those back, you little jerk,” almost before she’d stopped moving. I could hear it, because she’d shouted it.
The kid, who was ginger-haired and swinging himself awkwardly along on my jet-black, custom-made titanium forearm crutches, glanced at his mates, then decided to say, “Piss off. They’re not yours. Anyway, we’re just borrowing them.”
I breathed in and out, reminded myself, De-escalation, and hopped a few steps closer.
The girl—woman, because she was older than she’d looked at first—hadn’t got the memo, because now, she grabbed a crutch, fast as a striking snake, and yanked the kid off-balance. He swung out with the other crutch, maybe reflexively, and in a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it move, she shot a palm straight out in front of her—without pulling her elbow back and giving him warning, which said she was trained—caught him on the bridge of the nose, and sent him backward, then down to the sand. The other kids stood there looking gobsmacked, but she was over the ginger in an instant, wrenching the crutches off his forearms and standing up in a whirl of bikini straps and creamy skin, turning a circle, all but baring her teeth, and asking the rest of the kids, “Do you want some? Do you? Anybody?”
The answer was apparently “No,” because they were backing off. Which was when I finally got there. I held out a hand and said, as calmly as I could possibly manage, “Thanks. I’ll have those.”
She blinked at me out of dark-lashed, whiskey-brown eyes, with the kind of returning-to-my-senses shift I recognized from my own less-controlled past, said, “Oh. Right,” and handed them over.
The kid on the ground was moaning. He had a hand over his nose, the red blood dripping between his fingers, down his chin, and into the sand as he said, his voice muffled, “I think you broke it.” The other three boys looked like they wanted to run, but also didn’t want to, because it would be too embarrassing. Another emotion familiar from my past. That was why teenagers could be so annoying. They reminded you of all the dumb things you’d done yourself, and how you’d alternated between smug and hopelessly unsure, which you’d covered up by being even more of an arsehole. At least, that was the way I remembered it.
“Stand up,” I told the kid with the nose, in the tone of voice that said, No arguments. “Let’s have a look.” I told the other kids, “Hang on.”
“Yeah,” my would-be rescuer said, bouncing on her toes a little more. “Try going anywhere, and I’ll break your noses.” That was an American accent, maybe.
“Thanks,” I told her, “but I’ve got it now.” She didn’t appear to be what you’d call a good listener.
The ginger kid stood up, probably because he felt stupid lying on the ground, and I pried his bloody hand away and felt his nose between finger and thumb, which made him yelp. “Not broken,” I told him, wiping my now-bloody hand on my togs. “It’ll be sore, that’s all. Put some ice on it when you get home.”
“I was going to give them back,” the kid muttered, not meeting my eyes. “Just having a laugh.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Not all that funny, was it, mate?” I had my forearms in the crutches now, and I felt about two hundred percent better, if that were mathematically possible. Nearly whole instead of nearly helpless, which gave me an idea. “Not that easy to use,” I said, “are they?”
“You must be joking,” one of the other kids said. “Dead easy.” He was a tall, fit bloke with dark hair, king of the world. The ringleader.
The woman didn’t say anything. She clearly still wanted to hit somebody, though. It was like she had a thought-bubble over her head, saying, Let me punch him. One time. Come on. One little punch. Two, max. The head was balanced on a very pretty neck, long and slim as the rest of her. You could see all of it, because her hair was so short, cut in a purely pixie sort of way, with a ragged fringe over her forehead. I’d never thought about the benefits of that. That neck would be so easy to kiss, and it needed kissing.
Whoa. Where had that come from? I hadn’t had a sexual thought in quite a while. It had been alarming, in fact, in the rehab center, like I’d lost more than my leg and my career. One of the therapists had been very pretty indeed, she’d known who I was and had liked the idea, she may have used the words “hero” and even “warrior,” and still . . . nothing. Maybe because she’d used the word “hero.” It didn’t take any heroism to get yourself blown up. It wasn’t like I’d meant to do it. If you were an explosives expert, it was pretty much the opposite.
I was having one or two of those thoughts now, though. The girl had the kind of pretty, just-a-handful breasts that had you thinking about her not needing a bra, long muscle beneath the smooth skin, a line of three piercings in each earlobe and another line of four delicate little sparklers above and below her navel like flares along a landing strip, and fire all but coming out of her almond-shaped eyes.
She’d be a challenge, that was sure. A man would have to be on his toes, and he’d have to stay there. I wondered if she knew how to wrestle. Of course, you could always teach her. That was a happy little thought.
“Tell you what,” I told the kids. “Meet me back here in—call it half an hour—and we’ll have a friendly wee race. Running and swimming. Me against whoever’s best at each of those. Losers shout the winner tea over at the Coffee Club. You’ll notice I’m saying ‘losers,’ because that’ll be you. Fair warning.”
“We’re not going to race a cripple,” the good-looking kid said. “That’s lame as.” He laughed. “Good one, eh.” He had a fairly enormous greenstone toki pendant hanging around his neck, like he was advertising the size of his axe. Full of bluster, and the least ashamed of the group.
The girl was about to do something. Possibly knee the kid in the groin. I turned my gaze
on him and said, “Right, then. You’re one of the racers. Thirty minutes.” I paused a second, then added, “Unless you’re a pussy. In that case, go home instead. Your choice.”
That would probably work.
Karen
The sea god jerked his chin at me in a way that made my mouth open, and not from breathless wonder, then turned around and took off on the crutches without even checking for my reaction.
I’d thought I knew all about male arrogance, but that took the cake. He hadn’t even thanked me. Now, I was mad at him and the kids. All I’d done was help.
If I followed him, it was just to give him a much-needed reality check. I hadn’t even gone in the water yet, and that had been the whole point of coming here. For the time being, I went and grabbed my bag, but when I turned around, my heart pounding in a way that showed you the kind of shape I was in right now, he was standing off at a distance, clearly waiting for me, seeming oblivious to the stares he was garnering.
Well, I’d already figured out that he was tough in body and mind. That was why I was heading off to join him, somehow, despite the chin-jerking. That, and that I was the definition of “at loose ends,” and maybe I was hoping that some of his toughness would rub off on me, since I was about a quart low.
When I caught up with him, I said, “You jerked your chin at me. Like you were summoning me. What was that about? Hello? Real world calling. Women don’t go much for that. Also, don’t say ‘pussy.’ That’s a crappy insult, especially in front of me. You can do better.” That was my compromise solution. Following him, but objecting.
He smiled. Unfortunately, he had a killer smile, slow, sweet, and crooked. It crinkled his eyes and his scar, and it was so unstudied. He said, with no lessening of calm in his voice, “You’re probably right about the ‘pussy.’ Could be I’ve heard it too much and not thought about it enough. And I could’ve done that summoning thing, yeh. Could be you’re being insensitive, too. I couldn’t exactly crook my finger at you, could I? My hands were occupied.”
I always think of men as having beer voices. I know that sounds weird, but I’m a food person. The beach kids were cheap pilsners. Too light and fizzy, without enough depth to them. My brother-in-law, Hemi Te Mana, was a stout, dark and deep, its sweetness all but buried. His grandfather, my Koro, was a porter, as comforting as a warm fire on a freezing winter day. Josh had been an IPA, fruit-forward and on trend. I’d forgotten until too late that I didn’t actually like IPAs. This guy? He was a winter ale, layered, smooth, and deceptively potent, with an alcohol content that you should have checked first, because halfway through the first glass, you were already in trouble.
Too bad I liked trouble. And that matching wits was one of my favorite hobbies. “Good thing,” I told him. “If you’d crooked your finger at me, I might have bitten it off. What are you, Henry the Eighth? I’m not even addressing the other part. You are not sensitive. And I was helping.”
“You wound me,” he said. “In the emotional sense. And maybe I didn’t need your help.”
“Which would mean I didn’t wound you at all.” I was supposed to be wounded, in the emotional sense. Why did I want to laugh instead? Hysteria, probably. I asked him, “You aren’t really going to do that, are you?”
“Do what?”
“Race. Why would you? And how could you think you’d win?” Up close, he had more scars than I’d realized, and they didn’t look all that long-healed, which meant he must have lost his leg recently. The scars there were still pink. The facial ones, on the other hand, were dark blue, like somebody had drawn them with marker. One thin line down the center of his forehead and along the side of his nose, and another one, longer and messier, that sliced all the way down at the edge of his hairline, skimmed the outer corner of his eye in a way that made you wonder how he hadn’t lost it, and only ended down near his earlobe. He could have grown his hair longer to hide some of it, but he hadn’t, which was interesting. He had another one, pink again, just peeking out of the neckline of his T-shirt, or rather, a group of them, looking like the ends of a web woven by a very large, very drunk spider. I was guessing that one extended a ways.
Another man would have had a tattoo inked over that, tribal or not. Of course, he might just not have had time to have it done yet. He wasn’t the god of the sea, he wasn’t a merman, and he wasn’t my hero.
“Why not race?” he said. “I don’t have anything else on today, and win or lose, I’ll make them think. I could also feel the need to regain my manhood, after having somebody else charge in and fight my battles for me. Somebody, I’ll just say, that I wouldn’t have chosen to do that. I need to go get my leg. Come along, if you like.”
“Oh. You’re kidding.” I laughed. “That is what you meant. I hurt your ego, because you don’t need help from a woman. Also, what does it matter whether they think or not? That’s not your problem, surely.”
He smiled. Slowly, like I’d drawn it out of him. Another good smile. It could be making me a little breathless, possibly. Now that I was up close, I realized that he had gray eyes behind the black-rimmed glasses. Not gray-blue. Actually gray, with a darker rim around the iris. He was quite a few wonderful inches taller than I was, too, which didn’t happen often, and he’d put his shirt on like a man who didn’t need to show off the breadth of his chest or the narrowness of his waist. Like a man with nothing to prove.
If the leg and the scars had happened in a motorcycle accident, I didn’t want to know. I’d just make up a happy fantasy instead. Firefighter. Special Forces soldier. Man who dangled out of rescue helicopters and pulled people from cars balanced halfway down mountainsides, just before they teetered and fell. Hey, I saw it in a movie. It’s a job.
Any of those would be good, and fantasizing generally made for a better outcome. Reality could be so disappointing.
If only I hadn’t spent half my life feeling gigantic, I’d have walked away right then and kept things in fantasyland. Or maybe if he hadn’t had that smile. But there you were. I’d been taller than my nine-years-older sister by the time I was twelve, which doesn’t make you feel awkward much. At well over five-ten by the time I’d finally finished sprouting at eighteen, I was taller than every woman I’d ever known. I’d gone through most of my adolescence feeling like a hulking-but-skinny Jolly Green Giant, in the back row for every class picture. Then there was puking and being nearly bald, which were also extremely attractive. I wasn’t feeling like that girl now, and it was heady stuff.
“Could be,” he said. “That you hurt my ego, that is. I seem to have recovered, though. And, yeh, it matters that they think, or next time, they’ll be picking on somebody weaker. If I can stop them doing that, I’m going to.”
You see. A winter ale all the way. “I’ve never heard that one before,” I said, possibly to cover my sudden lack of balance. “‘Come with me to get my leg.’ It’s got novelty going for it, anyway.”
“I could’ve asked you for a coffee instead,” he agreed. “Or gone really mad and invited you for a drink. You could wonder why I didn’t. Maybe I’m thinking I’ll be more impressive this way.”
“Well, if you win.”
The lines around his eyes crinkled up some more. “Pardon me for saying it, but you seem a bit obsessed with winning. We’ll have to see, I reckon.” After that, he was swinging across the zebra crossing with a distracting amount of flex in his arm muscles, and no look at all behind him to see whether I was following.
I was. What else did I have to do? We were at the end of Marine Parade, where the enormous green mound of Mauao reared up from the flat land around it like a sentinel, forever looking out to sea. My favorite part of this beach, a reminder that you could only slap so much European veneer on the place. The ancient essence of it would still be lying there, just under the surface, pulsing like a heartbeat.
The guy must be staying at the holiday park, because the only other possibilities at the screaming end of the town were the two matching ultramodern buildings that looked like somethi
ng out of a movie set in the future, and I had a pretty good idea of how much staying there would cost. No hard edges to them, just swooping lines of cream-colored multistoried goodness. Even the balconies were curved, and my merman didn’t look like a high roller.
He stopped on the pavement outside the building closest to Mauao, though—the most exclusive of the exclusive—pulled a keycard from his board shorts, and swiped it, which forced me to look at the general torso area of his body in all its slim, muscular goodness. The shorts and the faded khaki T-shirt were the only things he was wearing, like he was too tough even to need protection on the soles of his feet. Foot.
“Huh,” I said. “Well, this wasn’t the accommodation I was expecting.”
“Interesting,” he said. “And possibly good to know.”
“Some men,” I told him in the lobby, after another few seconds went by with no more chat than that, “would do a whole lot more flirting than this. I’m just saying. If they were interested, of course, and not shy.”
“Mm,” he said. “So which do you think I am? Not interested, or shy? I’ll give you a hint. I’m not shy. And there was the chin-jerking, after all.”
Was he actually that self-assured? I couldn’t tell. He was so . . . wounded. Shouldn’t that make more difference? He pushed the button for the elevator, and I said, “I’m working it out. I’m really looking at two alternatives here. If you weren’t actually crazy in challenging a whole group of teenagers to a race—a foot race—I’m going into an extremely strong man’s apartment with him on zero acquaintance.”
“What’s the other alternative?” he asked. “I quite like the sound of that one. That I’m not crazy, and that I’m extremely strong.” The lift doors opened with a smooth whoosh that said, “No expense spared,” and he stepped inside and pushed the button for 2. The third floor, by U.S. measure.
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 3