“Ah,” he said. “It wasn’t just the bloke, then.”
“No. It was both. You’re a model, though. You modeled underwear. Famously. The face of Wallaby underwear, or maybe ‘face’ is the wrong word. Otherwise known as ‘The Body.’ That is such awesome news.” Switching tracks like the coyote in the cartoon, exactly as fast as I could.
He gave me a hard look that made me want to laugh. “I modeled heaps of things.”
“And yet,” I said, feeling about a hundred times better, “it’s the underwear ads that are sticking with me. Not just underwear. Special double-pocket pouch underwear, ‘Because your boys deserve to breathe.’ Except that so clearly isn’t the point, because there was also, ‘Show them what you’re made of.’ You saying, ‘Show them what you’re made of’ with all that dangerous smolder has pretty much made my day. And—oh, the lifting and supporting. The presentation. The enhancement. Oh, what a crushing disappointment for a woman later on.”
I was just about hanging over the chair, I was laughing so hard, and I thought he was having a hard time not laughing himself. “Stop it,” he said. “I didn’t write the slogans, and that wasn’t my voiceover, either. Just wore the things, eh. It was a long time ago.”
I was dying to ask him how they got the look that smooth in the commercials. Whether that was some sort of foam, or what, and how much of it they’d used. Maybe to tease him, and maybe more than that. I wasn’t ready for revenge sex, but my battered ego could use some flirting. Also, I was curious, all right? Let’s just say that the ad campaigns had been up-close and personal, and the combination of being the sexy-and-single scion of a rich-list family in tiny, three-degrees-of-separation New Zealand, and the saxophone-lick-soundtracked, slow-mo videos of his seriously substantial assets in very clingy red boxer briefs had inspired some pretty furious sharing on both sides of the Ditch. The presentation, the lifting and supporting, had worked out just fine for him—if it was all him—and he also had about the best butt I’d ever seen. Just saying. I knew that part hadn’t been padding, because I’d seen it during yesterday’s run, since I’d never managed to pass him. I’d had to click through fast just now to make sure he wouldn’t catch me looking, though. How creepy was it to want to look some more?
“And you’re still famous,” I said. “Modeling for the New Zealand Defence Force, too.”
“I used to have a pretty face,” he said. “The modeling was useful to both parties. They could put my name to it, and I was a feel-good Service to Country story, which made it more effective than filming some random good-looking bloke attempting to navigate an obstacle course whilst holding a nonfunctional weapon, generally looking bloody awkward and making you want to reach through the screen and slap him.”
“So it was a public service.”
“It’s a good career, or a good start to one. Being in the services, that is, not modeling. Modeling wasn’t that bad, either, once you separate out my own stupidity from the mix. Bought a house with it, and put a bit away. Not the apartment here. That belongs to the family.”
“Able to buy me eggs benedict with smoked salmon, anyway,” I said as the server brought out the plates. “And a cream donut. You are a tempting man.”
“Good to know.”
He didn’t flirt like most guys, like he was either trying to score pick-up artist points or poised to backtrack and pretend it had all been a joke. What did you call serious flirting?
Hot, that was what.
We needed to plan the trip, and I needed to tell him what I wanted to see and do in order to report back to Hemi. That was why I was here. Too bad that the only thing I wanted to ask was how they’d got the look so smooth on the underwear.
It would be such a bad idea. I was in no kind of emotional shape for a fling, he’d just said he wasn’t interested in being my revenge sex, and Josh wouldn’t have cared anyway. Besides, it wasn’t what you had, it was what you could do with it. See “size not mattering,” et cetera. I’d written what I had in that meeting to get back a tiny bit at Josh, that was all. Better than burning his entire stupid mostly-black wardrobe in our pellet stove. That had occurred to me, once I’d gone back to our so-called home and started flinging clothes into suitcases. That would have polluted the whole neighborhood, though, especially the polyester. And possibly started a fire, which would have been unfair to everybody else.
No reason to ask anyway, because it didn’t matter. I was a mature, capable, professional woman, here to do a professional job. Every bit of this would become part of Hemi’s negotiation, and whatever I’d said, I literally owed Hemi my life.
Fine. I wasn’t asking. That was a No.
Jax
At nine o’clock two mornings later, after a bit of a rough night, I was crouched in the driveway of a modest house on a hillside above Katikati, sorting out gear, when Karen asked me, “When you’re modeling underwear, Jax, how do they get the front to look that smooth?”
I shifted my weight to my right leg, did some careful balancing in order to stand up, and did not wince at the stab of pain from my stump. Beside Karen, a very old Maori man leaned on his cane, blinked tortoise eyes, and studied me with a calm certainty I recognized, the sort that came from seeing a lot of life. Beside him, a young woman named Vanessa said, “I always wanted to know that, too.”
Her husband, who was holding their curly-haired baby, grinned at her. Yes, he was here as well, like we required an audience to pack the car, or possibly, as in my own family, that every activity was better if it were done together, and God forbid a person wouldn’t want to share every single experience. The woman said, “You look all the time, Nikau. Why shouldn’t I look, too? Heaps of gorgeous fish in the sea.”
“Just remember that you’ve caught your limit,” her husband said. “You’re done.”
“Anyway,” Karen said, “Jax hasn’t answered my question. We probably should be taking my car, by the way, except that I wanted to leave it for Vanessa. I’ve seen bigger trunks on golf carts. Also, it’s pretty, but it’s a Lexus. That’s disappointing, and not entirely surprising. My sister drives a Lexus.”
“Got something against your sister?” I asked, beginning to arrange luggage in the impractical boot like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and ignoring the way Karen would start forward, then pull herself back, like a Border Collie waiting to get in amongst the sheep.
“She’s cautious,” she said. “Lexus is a cautious car. It’s the ultimate cautious car. Their tagline should be, ‘When you can afford the very best, and you think, “Lexus is the most reliable! Also extremely safe! I’ll get that one!”’ When you told me we’d take yours, because the rental company wouldn’t like me driving on some of those roads, and sports cars are more fun anyway, I got all excited.” She sighed. “And now you’re packing. It’s four days, and right now, we’re driving a couple hours. We don’t have to pack. Throw the stuff in the back seat and let’s go. We’ll be taking it out when we get there anyway.”
“Oh, come on,” Nikau said. “It’s a sweet car.” Karen had introduced him as “my cousin, more or less.” Now, he put a hand on the swooping, black-stainless-colored bonnet of the Lexus LC500, which was, in fact, a pretty sweet car with some very sexy lines, possibly reminiscent of the way a tall, slim woman would look lying across your bed, and asked, “What kind of horsepower?”
“Four seventy-one,” I said.
He whistled through his teeth. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen one before. Your family’s in the luxury auto business, eh. That’d be how you landed this, I reckon.”
“Amongst a few other things, yeh, they are. This is a loaner.” My family connections weren’t something I much wanted to discuss at the moment, and they weren’t doing me any favors with Karen, either. Neither was the modeling idea, for that matter, other than as a source of amusement. You could call that unusual. I’d swear she’d liked me better when I was some bloke who’d been in the Army. And if I liked that about her? I needed to balance that against the fragility I’d seen, wh
ich I was pretty sure was the source of the teasing, and the brittleness, too. She was nervous about all of this, but trying to pretend she was fine. I might know something about that.
Plus—business negotiation. Family. Et cetera.
“I bet it gets lousy gas mileage,” Karen said, handing me a duffel, then shoving another one at me impatiently while I was still wedging the first into place, like the Border Collie was on the paddock at last and quivering to go about its business.
She didn’t have a suitcase. She had two duffels, plus a bag of avocadoes and mandarins that she now decided needed to go into the back seat, which was why she was on a knee and a palm in there. She was wearing the black shorts again today, with a whisper-thin blue T-shirt that dipped into a low vee in front, letting you take in the multiple skinny black bra straps crisscrossing over her chest. Straps that weren’t strictly necessary, because the bra had regular straps as well, although not as much coverage as you might have expected.
I’d seen sports bras. I’d taken off sports bras, for that matter. That was the only kind they issued in the New Zealand Defence Force. I’d never taken off one like that.
For a sporty woman, Karen had a surprisingly heart-pounding wardrobe. The shorts weren’t any bigger than they had been the first time around, and I wasn’t looking at those or the bra straps. Not in front of her grandfather. I may have been sweating a bit with the effort not to look. The woman had seriously good legs.
“You don’t drive a car like this for the gas mileage.” Nikau said. He wasn’t any “more or less” cousin. He was a real one, or he felt like it. No other man could have looked at Karen from behind in that pose and talked about gas mileage.
Karen backed out of the car and said, “So explain about the smooth look on the undies, please, Jax. Vanessa says you were a big deal.”
“Oh, bugger,” Vanessa said. She was laughing, though. “Don’t tell him what I said. And not that you aren’t now, Jax. Just . . .”
Yeh. I didn’t really need to hear how I’d changed, or to be Karen’s amusement. When I’d washed my face this morning, my left non-foot still burning like it was on fire, I’d run a finger down the line beside my nose, which, like the thicker, messier one down the side of my face, had healed dark blue due to too many blood vessels in the area. I’d taken in the mess of pink scar tissue that was the left side of my chest and thought, It’s all good, mate. You didn’t want to use your looks anymore anyway. This isn’t the part that matters. The phantom pain had answered with another lick of flame, the nerves refusing to get the message that there was no leg down there anymore, and I’d done my best not to think about my appointment with the Limb Centre next week, or the report they’d be sending in.
Technically, I was on leave. Being paid for nothing, and with nothing to do. At the rehab center, they’d showed all sorts of cheery videos and said all sorts of cheery things about “finding your new normal” and the advances in prostheses, but they hadn’t answered the one question that burned above all others. “What do I do, now that I can’t do my job?”
“Bread,” I said.
“Pardon?” Vanessa asked. She had a tendency to turn red when she looked at me. A phantom sensation of her own, maybe, from the past. Her brain hadn’t got the message yet that there was nothing to get excited about.
“They give you a slice of bread,” I said, because I wasn’t going to get away without an explanation, and it beat thinking about the future. “Bread’s malleable. Lends itself to being mashed around and forming an . . . ah . . . screen of sorts. And you can do it yourself. There’s a stylist fixing your hair and oiling you down and that, but nobody’s actually putting her hand down the front of your kit, so it has to be something you can do yourself.”
Karen was laughing, of course. “All those sexy videos, and you had bread down your shorts?”
“Whatever the job takes.” I shoved one last bag into the boot, and we were done.
“I wonder what you were like before,” she said. “Like—what was your rugby position, in school days? Don’t tell me you didn’t play, because I won’t believe it.”
“Surely you’ve already deduced it.”
“A wing.”
I bowed my head, keeping it cool. But bloody hell, how had she known that? I’d looked her up last night as well. I hadn’t found much, but what little I had found didn’t jibe a bit with the woman I saw. A biochemist who’d come up with a sort of mystery meat blend that actually tasted good, and a passionate believer in biodiversity, sustainability, animal welfare, and various other noble ideals. I knew that because she’d written the odd column and featured in the odd interview. Mostly, though, she’d stayed in the background, letting the CEO take the lead in the company’s public life.
The CEO was named Josh something, which possibly explained the J-names objection, as well as the fragility under the toughness. She’d been engaged to him, and had lost her job and her engagement? I was guessing that was it, because he’d sold the company to a conglomerate in a buyout rumored to be very profitable, meaning tens of millions of U.S. dollars, and she’d left it on the same day, in a move that had surprised everybody, and missed out on the payout. That sounded messy, and like the kind of betrayal that could make a strong woman cry.
I could believe it, though, because Josh looked like a wanker. Dark and too good-looking, which, yes, was rich coming from me. It was the smolder, though. I’d done that smolder because it was my job. He did it because he was a wanker. Opinion of himself too high, actual life skills too low, because he’d think he could pay for anything he wanted. One of those rich blokes who came to New Zealand and couldn’t figure out that you had to push the button to send power to the outlet, and that the button marked “Oven” was the one you pushed in order to turn on—yes, the oven.
Snap judgment on my part? Yeh, it was. Too bad. My family was in the luxury-accommodation business. I knew all about those blokes. They might run companies, but put them outside their bubble, and they’d barely survive.
Josh-whoever was pictured all over the shop, as I’d have expected, but there were very few photos of Karen online, and she appeared to have no social media presence at all. You pictured somebody earnest and blonde, wearing clogs and cargo pants with the bottoms rolled up. Possibly with dreadlocks, especially when you saw the other hits that came up under her name, listing her as a member of a team competing in rowing races, an obscure hobby if there ever was one.
Nobody had said anything about a personality as big as the New Zealand sky, or a competitive fire that pushed her every minute of the day. Nothing at all about a brain that never stopped working, eyes shining with intelligence, a wide mouth that always seemed to be talking or laughing, or an intimidation factor that would have most men running far and fast.
“Let’s hear how you know he’s a wing, Karen,” Nikau said. “Always entertaining to have around the place,” he told me. “Get up every time you fall down, they say, and nobody falls down more or bobs up again quicker than Karen. Famous for it, you could say.”
This time, Karen was the one who—not flushed, because she didn’t. But whose chin went up, and whose eyes narrowed with the effort not to let that bother her.
“Why am I a wing?” I asked her, to turn the conversation.
“Fast,” she said. “Flashy. And that’s a winger car all the way.”
“Except that it’s a Lexus, and I’m just borrowing it,” I said, and saw her grandfather smile.
“A Kiwi winger,” she said. “Fast and powerful, yet polite and unassuming.”
“Go on, then, you two,” her grandfather said. “Take the winger off with you, Karen, but bring him back, eh. Bring him for the hangi.”
I finally got the chance to ask. “What hangi?”
We were in the car, headed down the hill. I downshifted, and the engine emitted a satisfactorily deep growl, which was juvenile but fun all the same.
She said, “For my birthday. Maybe we should have stuck around for another six hours or
so while you packed the car with order and method, and everybody could have explained it to you. I thought we were never leaving.”
“It was less than thirty minutes.”
“It was an hour. Easy.”
“I got there at nine o’clock. It is now nine thirty-one. We pulled out of the driveway at nine-twenty-nine.”
She groaned and banged her head against the leather dashboard, then did it again. “Make the hurting stop.”
I laughed, and she said, “Also, I’m going to need a coffee eventually. I’m telling you that in case you’re one of those guys who thinks that once the car is in motion, it must remain in motion, and what do I mean, I don’t know how to pee in a bottle?”
“Thought you were in a hurry.”
“To leave. Five more minutes, and Nikau would’ve been reciting the Greatest Hits of my teenaged life. You were some kind of international sex god, and I was a science geek and the youngest person in my class, with the least developed chest, and a few other things, too. It’s humbling, all right?”
“So it’s a special birthday?” I asked, turning onto the highway.
“Thirtieth. Are you happy, now that I’ve admitted it?”
“Mm. You could’ve said it was twenty-nine, of course. Or not have answered at all.”
“What, I’m going to lie? I’m not going to lie. I’d know the truth, so what would be the point? But, yes, I’m turning thirty. And since everybody thinks I’m going to be depressed, though they don’t say so, they’re doing a hangi and making a big thing of it. It’s depressing because they think I’ll be depressed, which means I’ll have to slap a smile on my face all afternoon so they don’t think so, which will make me depressed.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Huh,” she said. “I’ll bet you actually do. You probably get that a lot.”
“You could say so. People kept offering me tissues, at the beginning. Subtly.”
She sat up straight in the car. “Yes! Exactly! With their calming voices. Asking if you have any questions, and if you’d like to ‘talk to somebody.’”
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 9