He sat on the edge of the bed, his expression amused, and said, “And here I thought I’d established that I get to look at you naked while I’m all cool and dressed, and that I get to mess you up in the genital area, too. Thought I’d made that point pretty clearly, in fact. Can’t remember what the other thing was. You’re distracting me. Have I mentioned that I plan to fuck the hell out of your pretty body?”
I stopped in the midst of pulling the bra on. Which, yes, was another slightly awkward position, what with my hands being over my head and all. He stood up, got his fingers on my nipple, and did a little pinching, and I swear, my legs shook. I was also kind of speechless. Finally, I said, “You’ve always been so . . . gentlemanly, though.” Breathlessly.
“Yeh?” He was backing me up against the dresser. That was before he sent his other hand down, straight under the edge of my bikinis, and did some exploring, which may have had me leaning back and moaning. “Think you’ll find that’s about to change.” After that, he spun me around, gave me a hard slap on the butt, said, “Get dressed, or we’ll be late,” and walked out.
Oh, boy.
He wasn’t one bit like that ten minutes later, which was hardly disconcerting at all. Instead, he asked me, when I came out of the bathroom, hastily dressed in the first shorts and top I’d pulled out of the bag, and with two minutes’ worth of makeup on, “Did you take your medicine and drink some water?” The same way he’d reminded me last night, when I’d been about sixty seconds from falling asleep. He’d gone into the bathroom to get the pill for me, in fact, despite the fact that he hadn’t been wearing his leg, and had stood over me, and said, “Drink all your water. You need to stay hydrated,” in a way that could have felt like fussing but had felt more like bossing, in a way I could handle. If a man could be said to bring you your antibiotic in a hot way, Jax had done it.
I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Good. Ready to go, then?”
“Wait.” I put my hand against the door so he couldn’t open it. “I need to ask . . . which guy is you? All right, you asked how I was doing, but aren’t you going to talk about all those embarrassing details I shared last night? Say something reassuring? I’m seriously confused.”
He was smiling, and then he was laughing. Leaning against the door, too, and saying, “You make it so bloody difficult to dominate you.”
“Oh.” I considered that. “Well, that’s disappointing, if it’s a paint-by-numbers thing.” I was laughing too, even though I was trying not to.
He was still smiling when he pulled me in, kissed me softly on the mouth, and said, “It’s not a paint-by-numbers thing. It seems to be a contradictory thing. It’s that I want to take care of you, and I want to take care of you. You could say that means, ‘Take care that I’ve got you where I want you,’ and that I don’t need any help at all to be that fella. You could call that first one new territory for me, though. Also, there’s the leg.”
“The leg?” I looked down at it. “What, it’s hurting?”
“No. Yeh. Never mind. Say that it’s not as easy to be that fella you want when you’re massaging my leg.”
“You don’t like fussing,” I guessed.
“No. I don’t.” No laughing, now.
I kissed him back and said, “Well, good, because neither do I. Except that I like it a tiny bit when you do it. Maybe because of that contradiction you mentioned. Maybe because I know you’re just waiting to be that other guy. Maybe you could think, when I’m massaging your leg . . . that I want to do it for you.” Was I going to say this? It seemed I was. “That I want to . . . serve you.”
He went still, and he also went hard. He was close enough that I knew that for sure. I rubbed my cheek against his scruff-roughened one, felt like the kitten I absolutely wasn’t, and sighed. “So . . . want to buy me a cream donut before you dominate me?”
Jax
I was rocked off my pins already. Or off my pin, more like. And then there was breakfast.
Five kids, three of them needing their food cut up. One pair of very shrewd and speculative eyes, which would be Hemi’s, noticing the faint love bite I’d somehow left on the side of Karen’s neck, because she loved having her neck sucked so much, and she’d tightened up so gorgeously around me when I’d been doing it, while I’d been fucking her hard from behind, that I’d got a little carried away. He was noticing the way I held her hand under the table, too. I was doing that because I had the feeling that she felt a bit less-than with her sister and Hemi and the kids, despite all her achievements.
I’d never thought much about kids. Or, rather, I’d thought pretty hard about taking care I didn’t make any. Somehow, though, when I’d been lying beside Karen last night, my arm and good leg over hers like I could hold her there with me and never let her go, I’d found myself wondering about the whole subject. About how both of us were in the middle of some fairly serious transition, I hadn’t had sex without a condom in ten years, and I wanted to have it that way with her anyway. I’d wondered if she’d trust me enough to let me do that. I’d also wondered if I’d trust her enough to make sure she was safe from pregnancy, and had realized I didn’t care. More than that. I’d realized I’d rather she wasn’t safe.
Whoa. I tried to tell myself, “Brakes on, mate,” once again, and couldn’t do it. Sexy possessiveness might be a game I enjoyed playing, but that was all it had been. When she’d told me everything she had the night before, though, it had been what I’d said. I’d wanted to wrap her up and hold her safe. I’d wanted to tell her she didn’t have to feel alone anymore, and she didn’t have to feel scared.
I’d never in my life believed the thing you heard from time to time, that some fella had looked across a room at a girl and thought, That one. That’s mine, and had it work out for a lifetime. Sexual attraction, I’d thought, and that was all. Karen would have said that you only heard about the stories that ended up being true love and soulmates, which were probably about one percent of the total, and not the ninety-nine percent that burnt up and fizzled out, or that never got started in the first place. Or, of course, the ones that were just some rando stalking a woman he thought was his destiny. Karen was as logical as I was, or more so. Maddeningly so.
And yet—it felt true.
I knew I was off-balance now, for the obvious reason that I was . . . well, literally off-balance. One of the things they’d told me at the rehab center was not to make any major life decisions for at least six months after the loss, and I still had more than a month to go.
“The grieving process is a complex one,” the therapist had said. “Give yourself time to process the emotions, and remember that every choice you make during this time will be influenced by the loss of your limb, and may not resemble the choices you’ll make once you’ve worked through it.”
Which all sounded reasonable enough. There’d be a reason behind what I was feeling now, too. That the recognition of my own mortality had made me want to leave biological descendants behind, to get that seed planted fast in the most fertile soil I could find, and to watch it grow there, preferably under my eye and hand, the most primitive impulse that had ever held a man in its grip. That on a perhaps more elevated level, I needed to know I’d have somebody’s photo in the pocket over my heart next time I was bleeding into the dirt, and that I wanted to think I’d know for sure, in that moment, that I was living, and maybe dying, for something beyond my mates and my country and my duty. Possibly to know there was somebody who needed me more than life, so I’d bloody well better live. Even though I was probably never going to be in that position again, so the desire made no sense.
All of that was true, and yet there was this as well. That I’d woken about three times during the night and had to touch Karen to make sure she was still all right before I’d been able to fall asleep again. That I’d pinned her washing onto the rack this morning with mine, thought about her easy-breezy confidence, and had thought, too, about her being fifteen, trying to study through sickness and pain so she wouldn’t lose
her scholarship. I’d realized how tough she’d been, and that she still didn’t know how rare that kind of toughness was. I’d clipped her pretty little dress to the line and heard Hope saying, “Maybe she can let her guard down with you, because you get it.” Right now, I was watching her sister’s eyes going to her again and again, like a mother cat stretching out a paw to pat her kitten, making sure it was there and getting everything it needed, and was feeling a bit humbled, if I were honest. I’d always thought I was a pretty good brother. I hadn’t known anything about it.
Poppy asked, “What are you two doing next? Still going to the South Island? I shouldn’t say it, as here we all are together, but I do want to sell this business, and having you show the places to Karen would be helpful. It wasn’t all Dad’s idea. I should tell you to take care you’re impressing her, in case she has influence over Hemi.”
“If Hemi weren’t such a good businessman,” I said, “he’d be doing a face-palm right now. I’m no kind of negotiator, and even I know that you just gave away your position.”
“Nah,” Poppy said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to ask a good price for it. He knows I want to sell it, and that I don’t want to sell it to just anybody. That’s been established. I want it to be a Kiwi, and somebody who cares about the land.”
“Tangata whenua,” Karen said.
Somebody Maori, she meant. A person of the land. Poppy said, “Or somebody who feels that same way about it, anyway. Somebody who gets why I bought each parcel, how special it is, and why I set it up the sites up the way I did. I want the buyer to feel the heart beating there the same way I do.”
Hope said, “That’s beautiful.” Hemi, of course, said nothing. He was probably rubbing his hands together in glee inside, though.
“I don’t want to have to keep track of all of it,” Poppy said, “not with the new baby coming and my books doing well, but I can if I have to. If I don’t find the right person, if I’m not convinced. I’ve done it so far, after all.”
She’d had a partner, in the beginning, when she’d bought the first couple slices of paradise on some of the money she’d received in trust from our grandfather at the ripe old age of twenty-one. A few years later, she’d bought another two properties, bought out the partner, hired some people to help run things, and been off to the races. “Three kids feels like heaps,” she said to Hope. “Is it?”
Hope said, “It feels like more, definitely. You’re outnumbered, with three. That’s surprisingly important.”
“I’m outnumbered with two,” Poppy said, and I wondered a couple things for the first time. First—why wasn’t Max taking care of this sale? He was in the import/export trade, and from what he said, he was doing bloody well at it. Surely he could handle a real-estate negotiation for his wife while she was this sick. Poppy had had to make a dash for the toilets twice already this morning, and she wasn’t doing any better at eating her breakfast than Hope was. Hope had Hemi sitting beside her, though, cutting his youngest daughter’s pancakes and issuing the odd quiet command, whereas Poppy was doing it herself and looking green. Second—why were they having another kid, when Poppy already seemed so stretched? She’d always made me laugh. She made everybody laugh. Maybe she wasn’t always laughing inside, though.
“You should come visit at our house, Uncle Jax,” my nephew, Hamish, said. “You could bring the dog to live with us when you come. You could bring him on the airplane, if you packed him in a suitcase. Livvy and me want to have a dog. In Mummy’s stories, kids always have dogs. Or they have cats, sometimes, but I think dogs are better. You can throw a ball for a dog. You can’t throw a ball for a cat. Or we could have a snake.”
“You can throw it,” Poppy said. “The cat just won’t care. And Daddy’s allergic, remember? We’ve talked about this. Also—no snakes. Absolutely not. I draw the line at snakes.”
“Daddy doesn’t live at our house all the time, though,” Hamish said. “So the dog could live at our house when Daddy isn’t home, and Uncle Jax could live there too and be our company and throw the ball for the dog with me. And then the dog could go live with Uncle Jax when Daddy comes home.”
“He travels,” Poppy told Hope. “Excuse me. Jax, could you—” She didn’t finish the sentence. She was off to the toilets again. Hope’s eyes followed her, and she exchanged a look with Hemi.
Poppy was never what you’d call meaty, but now, she looked positively fragile. From what I’d seen of Hemi, that was a better weapon than any brilliant negotiating. Maybe Poppy hadn’t put herself at such a disadvantage after all.
In another minute, I was sure of it, because Olivia announced, “More juice,” Hemi asked, “What’s the magic word?” and when Olivia answered by saying “More juice” again with a determined look on her face that made me want to laugh, he waited with his Inscrutable Negotiation Face until she gave an exasperated toddler sigh and said, “More juice pease,” upon which he smiled and poured a bit into her glass. Soft spot uncovered, if I hadn’t already seen it.
When Poppy came back, I said, “To answer your question—yeh, Karen and I will go check out one or two of those places, as long as she’s still keen. We’re going to my house first, though.”
“Dad knows you’re coming, of course,” Poppy said. “He’s tracking your movements. Possibly on his wall board. He texted me this morning and said he hasn’t heard from you. He says you’ve got an appointment tomorrow at the Limb Centre, and you should come for dinner afterwards. I’m supposed to remind you to answer him.”
There were so many undercurrents at this table, the place was practically underwater. I said, “Thanks, but I’ve got it,” then asked Karen, “Did you want to go see your grandfather before we go? I need to see to the dog anyway.” Whatever the old man had said, I wasn’t dumping Poppy’s impulsive good deed on him. He’d been given an unexpected duck already. He didn’t need two new pets in one week.
“Yes, please,” Karen said. “I need to return the rental car to the airport, so if you want to take me, that’d be good. You probably wouldn’t want me to drive your fancy Lexus anyway.”
“I don’t care if you drive it,” I said. “First, because I suspect you’re a good driver, though you probably speed, and second, because it’s not mine. A bit like the apartment.”
Hemi murmured something like, “Too right, mate,” and Karen ignored him. “So what kind of car do you have, then?” she asked. Saucily, of course. “I’m torn between the battered ute and the top-of-the-line Jaguar. Oh, wait. It’ll be something much more reliable, with excellent resale value. BMW, maybe. Which you bought used, because you have no need for ego, being so tough and all. I can’t decide on your house, either. Sophisticated urban bachelor? Full-on Kiwi bloke, complete with shed, and your gumboots by the back door? Don’t tell me,” she said to Poppy. “It’s more fun to guess. Whichever it is, it’ll be extremely well maintained. I feel confident in that assertion.”
Poppy said, “Sounds like she’s got your number, Jax.” She was laughing, which made the first time today. “You’ve even distracted me from being sick,” she told Karen. “Cheers for that.”
“I’m thinking,” Karen decided to share, “that he might not care anymore whether he impresses the girls or not. He could be that confident now. It’s possible. Something to do with all that military toughness, maybe.” She took a final sip of her mocha. Feeling good, apparently, because she’d eaten every bit of her eggs benny. With smoked salmon.
Feeling good was very good news for me, because I knew exactly what she was doing. Teasing me where I couldn’t respond well enough, in front of both of our sisters, too many kids, and Hemi Te Mana. Seeing if she could get a reaction. I smiled and said, “Could be you’ll have to wait and see on all of that.”
“Oh? Not going to tell me?” Karen tilted her head at me and managed to look saucy and asking-for-it as hell, despite being dressed in a pair of shorts sadly longer than the black ones, her blue T-shirt, and the plain purple cotton sports bra we both knew she had on
under there. “I’ll just be excited to find out, then.”
Karen
I’d kissed Hope and the kids goodbye, Jax and I were walking across the street again, and my body started to hum, right on cue. Or rather—the hum that had been happening all morning increased in frequency. Something about how calmly Jax had looked at me, especially at the end there.
Well, to be honest, probably more the way he’d looked at me earlier. When I’d been naked, and he’d backed me against the dresser like he was two seconds away from putting me up there, pulling my hips to the edge, and doing it right there and then. You know. That.
He held the door for me into the lobby, and I said, “I like your sister.”
“So do I,” he said. “And that isn’t what you want to talk about.” We were in the elevator, but he was pushing the button for the garage.
“Wait,” I said. “Are we going to visit Koro now?”
He was doing that remote look again. “Why? What did you want to do?”
I waved an arm. “Oh, nothing. It’s not like you promised or anything.”
He smiled, we stepped out of the elevator, and he put an arm around me, dropped a kiss on my mouth, and said, “I did promise. And I keep my promises. You’ll see.”
“So I’m just supposed to wait for it?”
The smile grew some. “That’s the idea.” Then he opened the car door for me. Back to being a gentleman.
I told him, when we were driving over the bridge into Tauranga, “I’m not a patient person.”
This time, he laughed out loud. “I think I’ve grasped that.”
He turned off the highway, though, barely fifteen minutes from home, and I asked, “Why are we stopping?”
“We’re going to have to do something about this tendency you have to take control,” he said, as he took a left on Wharf Street, the fronds of the palms by the shore rustling in the breeze, the winding footpath beside the water already busy with runners and bicyclists. He found a parking space up a side street, and slid the car neatly into it. “I have an errand to run first. Do you want me to be in charge here or not?”
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 29