Hayden waited.
“I want . . .” she said, and forced herself to go on. “I want . . . I haven’t worn a bikini in years. Summer’s almost gone, and yet I just thought that anyway. I want to wear a bikini again, and not to care what anybody thinks about it. I want to start unbuttoning my shirt for a man, and to have him take over, because he can’t wait. I want to lie down on the bed, have him come down over me, and know that he wants what he sees, and he can’t believe he’s getting it. I want to be thrilled. I want to lose my mind. And I can’t believe I’m telling you this. But it’s here.” She clutched at her chest with one hand. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m screaming with it.”
“You want to get laid,” Hayden said. “So why not go out and do it? Why not go dancing, give in to temptation for once, and get your freak on? Why not take a chance, and make a mistake?”
“Because,” she said, “what I want most of all? I want to be in love. For real.”
“Ah,” he said. “Harder.”
“Yeh.” Now that it was here, it wouldn’t stop. “I want my breath to catch. I want my heart to stop beating because he looked at me. I want his to do the same thing. I want to believe it. And I don’t think I’m ever going to get it.”
They were off the bridge now and nearly to Grey Lynn and Hayden’s apartment. His life couldn’t be more different from hers, and yet, as he looked at her, she thought he understood.
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” he said. “Saying it’s the first step to getting it.”
The tears were there, right behind her eyes. “You think?”
“Yeh,” he said. “I do. It could be just around the corner. And if it comes? Maybe you’ll see it. Maybe you’ll open the door.”
She turned into his street and pulled over, and he reached into the back seat, ruffled Isaiah’s hair, and said, “See ya, mate.”
Isaiah said—too loudly, because he was still wearing his headphones—“Bye. I had a very good time.”
Hayden’s smile was crooked, and he reached across the van, gave Zora a cuddle, and said, “Buy a bikini. Don’t worry that summer’s nearly over. Don’t think that it costs too much. Buy it anyway. And don’t listen to me. Listen to your heart instead. Walk around the corner. Open the door.”
She was in her flower shed, three days later, when her phone rang. Of course, she was hand-tying an arrangement at the time, a thanks-for-your-business gift for her most profitable client. It was the most inconvenient moment to be interrupted. She glanced at the screen.
Rhys
She should let voicemail pick up. She wasn’t in a good place to talk to him, seeing as her unresolved sexual tension appeared to be an explosive force that could detonate at any time, and it had only got worse since Sunday.
She hadn’t seen that coming. Or, more accurately, she hadn’t seen it coming back, whatever she’d told Hayden. Maybe that was due to saying “yes” to Alistair and contemplating the daunting prospect of a man actually, possibly, kissing her on the lips, except it wasn’t. She could contemplate that without any flutters at all. Alistair wasn’t the problem.
And the fact that Rhys had clearly noticed was . . . what was the word?
Oh, yeh. “Humiliating.” Or, possibly, “disastrous,” if you looked at the issue on a continuing basis, since she was, as usual, about as mysterious and inscrutable as a puddle. If she saw him again, she was going to give it away, but how could she avoid seeing him again?
All of that went through her mind even as she set down the bouquet and picked up the phone. She’d be casual, that was all. Friendly. Sisterly.
“Hi,” she said, focusing on making it easy-breezy. It came out as more of a shout. Whoops.
“Hi,” Rhys said, sounding, as always, like he was talking while frowning, or after having chewed a bag of nails. “Can I come talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Uh . . . of course. Tonight, you mean?” Her heart needed to stop it. Right now. Stop it, she commanded. You are a mother. A businesswoman. A solo entity. He’s your husband’s brother. She was as successful as usual, too. Meaning, not at all.
“No,” he said. “I was thinking about this afternoon, if you can. I could use some advice.”
Oh. It was his new house after all, whatever Hayden had thought. He had said he needed advice, even though Rhys had never seemed like the type to ask anybody for advice about anything except, perhaps, his tackling technique. He was, as Dylan had complained enough times, a “bloody perfectionist” about rugby, a man who’d never heard of “good enough.” She’d never thought he’d fuss about interior decoration, but it could be something else. Where to shop. Needing a plumber. His love life.
Please, not his love life.
“I’m arranging flowers at the moment,” she said. “I could pop by tonight, though. With Isaiah,” she hastened to add. “Aren’t you at training, though?”
“If you can arrange and talk at the same time,” he said, “I’ll come there.”
“Now? Oh. All right.” He hadn’t even answered the question about training. Why was that? It was Wednesday. Wednesday was the toughest training day, when you set the foundations for the game ahead. Why wouldn’t he be there?
She knew coaches could get sacked, but before their first game, their first season? Surely not. That couldn’t be performance. It would have to be something else. She hadn’t seen even a rumor, though. Wouldn’t it have come out?
If that was what it was, how much of a blow would it be to a man that proud? He’d come all the way from France to take this job, and had bought a house, presumably. Besides, nobody had ever sacked Rhys Fletcher from anything. They’d probably be afraid to. It had taken broken bones even to sideline him, back in his playing days, and his bones hadn’t broken easily. Come to think of it, it had taken major broken bones. She could swear there’d been a rib or two in there that he’d ignored, and probably a finger taped to its neighbor, too.
“I need to leave at two in order to make my deliveries,” she said, because it was the one thing she could grab hold of. “When were you thinking?”
“Right now.”
She was wearing the following: a singlet, short shorts, a white chef’s apron stained with dirt and plant juices, and jandals. It would be a reasonable enough look to make her deliveries to a few spas on a casual New Zealand summer day, once she got rid of the apron, pulled on an oversized cream cotton jacket, added some earrings, and fixed her hair. At the moment, that was piled on top of her head with a clip, she was sweating, and she was wearing zero makeup. In ten minutes, though, she could be presentable. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be in my shed.”
“See you.” He rang off, and she stuck her flowers back into water as hastily as she could without damage and headed for the door.
She opened it, and there he was, his shoulders blocking out the light and the usual look on his face, like whatever he was doing next, he was already roaring his way toward it.
She stepped back and said, “Oh. You meant now now.”
“Yeh. We were outside. Too soon?” He was still frowning, and he was holding somebody’s hand. A girl of five or six, her curly dark hair wild around her face, her brows straight and dark, and her gaze intense.
A gaze that came from black-lashed hazel eyes.
It was hard to breathe. Zora’s body had frozen up, and her mind couldn’t put the pieces together.
“Hi,” she said when she got her breath back. “I’m Zora. What’s your name?” The girl was clutching a fashion-sized doll close to her body, and was wearing a pair of jeans that were a bit too short and surely warm for the day, and a black T-shirt that was too big, featuring a roaring dinosaur. Zora would have thought she was a boy, except that she so clearly wasn’t.
“Casey Moana Hawk,” the girl said.
“My daughter,” Rhys said, absolutely unnecessarily.
“Come in. I was just fixing my flowers. Or go on into the house and make a cup of tea,” Zora told Rhys, “and get something to eat as well, if you like.
The door’s open. I’d offer to help, but . . .” She cast a hand out at the arrangements on the work table. “It’s my spa day.”
Get it together. Focus. This isn’t about you.
“I thought that generally involved nail varnish and a massage,” Rhys said, with a hint of a smile, as if he had no idea what kind of blow he’d just dealt her. “Nah, we’re good. We just had lunch.”
“It was a sandwich,” Casey said. “But I couldn’t have a cookie, even though they had lots of cookies.”
Zora wasn’t sure how to answer that. She looked at Rhys, who told the girl, “You had two cookies yesterday, and a chocolate tart on the plane as well.”
“That was yesterday, though,” she said.
“Also,” he said, “you didn’t even finish your sandwich. You said you were full.”
“That was my regular stomach,” she said. “I still had room in my dessert stomach.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but he said gravely, “You’ve got me there. We’d better tell Zora about our day, and ask her our questions, because she looks busy.”
“I am,” Zora said. “But glad to have company.” She wasn’t.
Not Rhys, too. She’d always thought he was solid. That when he said something, it was true, and when he stood by somebody, it was real. He hadn’t let Dylan down, ever. But a woman was different? A woman didn’t count?
If this girl was—what? Five? Six? He’d have been engaged to Victoria, or married to her, when she was born. He’d asked Victoria to marry him, had told her he loved her, and Victoria had known—she’d known, Zora was as sure of that as she’d ever been sure of anything—that his word was good. And then he’d gone on tour and thrown all that trust away.
Dylan had said it didn’t mean anything, that everybody did it. She hadn’t believed it was true, but here the truth was, literally staring her in the face. She said, hearing her voice shake and unable to prevent it, “Would you like to get up on the stool and watch, Casey?”
“Yes, please,” the girl said, and Zora dragged it over, then got herself back into territory she knew something about. Flowers. She began with her bucket of hydrangeas, cutting them far up the stems and arranging them at the base of three round vases, letting the touch of the blossoms, the sweet-clove scent of the stock, the need to pay attention, distract her and soothe her, the same way they had at the very beginning. Which had been so much worse a time than this, however bad this felt, and she’d got through that, hadn’t she? “My son used to use this when he helped me,” she told Casey. “But he’s got so tall now, he doesn’t really need it. Isaiah’s eight. How old are you? You’d be cousins, I guess. And to Maori, that’s a big thing.” She was talking too much, when really, all she had were a thousand questions, sitting like a leaden lump in her belly. Or maybe a fiery lump, because there was something else in there, too.
Face it. It was rage.
“I’m six,” Casey said. “I’m in first grade, but they don’t have it here. They say it’s Year Two, but that would be second grade, because two and second are the same. But you have to do more things in second grade. It’s really hard. I have a friend who’s in second grade, and she says you have to read long words. I only know short words. My new school is a bad word, too.”
“Titirangi Primary,” Rhys said.
Zora had to smile, even through the rage. Her head was so confused. That accent was American. What? She said, “Isaiah’s a pupil there as well. Never mind, you’ll get used to saying it. It’s Maori, that’s all, and the bad words aren’t the same in Maori. Titirangi means ‘Fringe of heaven.’ Really, it means ‘Fringes of cloud in the sky,’ but heaven sounds better. A new school could make you feel a bit nervous, but I’m guessing that after a few days, you’ll find a spot where you fit. Most of the kids are pretty nice, I’ve found, and Isaiah will look out for you, too.”
Whatever Rhys had done, it wasn’t this little girl’s fault. There were dark shadows under her eyes, her hair needed major taming, and all the same, she stood on her stool like she’d been planted here, and here was where she was staying.
“I wouldn’t be nervous if I had rabbits,” Casey said. “You can pet rabbits if you’re sad, and they’re very soft.”
Something was wrong. Everything Zora said was fine. It was just the look in her eyes, like the shutters had come down. That could be, though, because she’d caught the look in his.
When she’d opened the door, he’d thought at first, for one heart-stopping moment, that she wasn’t wearing anything but the apron. Then she’d turned around, he’d seen the ribbed white singlet, the delicate blue ribbons of her bra straps beneath it, the tiny flowered shorts with their ruffled edges, the soft skin of her inner thighs and the slimness of her ankles, and he’d had another difficult moment. She wasn’t any athletic hardbody, and there was no doubt she was little. But so nicely made.
This was about Casey, though. He’d tried to think who to ask, and Zora was the first person he’d thought of, possibly because she was the best mum he’d ever seen.
He still remembered how she’d looked when he’d come to see his nephew for the first time. She’d held the baby against her shoulder, her hand cradling his head with so much tenderness, it had made his heart twist. He’d seen the softness in her eyes and had wanted, with a pain that stabbed him right in the chest, for that to be his. Except that, of course, it wasn’t. She was somebody’s mum now. Somebody’s wife.
His brother’s.
Right. Focusing. He watched her shove pink and lavender blooms into the mound of white flowers she’d arranged in the vases—straight into the midst of the other flowers’ multiple tiny blossoms, which wouldn’t have been how he’d have thought you’d do it, but looked good anyway—and said, “Casey’s moved here with me from Chicago, as her mum’s died, which means our lives have undergone a . . . shift, you could call it. We’re both having a new start. We went to enroll her in school today, and came up against a couple obstacles. And I told you,” he said to Casey, “that we’re working into the rabbits. We need to make sure they have a home first. We need to make sure we have a home first. The rabbits are coming.”
Casey sighed in a martyred sort of way, like the drama queen she was. “I get to wear a uniform at school,” she told Zora. “It’s green, and you have to wear the same thing every day, because that’s the rules, but you can wear a skirt or you can wear shorts. And you have to wear a special hat every day outside, because the sun is very strong, and it’s the summer, but you still have to go to school. I never heard of going to school in the summer. What are you making?”
“My weekly floral arrangements for a chain of day spas,” Zora said. “My Wednesday job. It has to be very special, because a spa is where you go to feel more beautiful. I’ve got the calla lilies and eucalyptus done for the front desks, in those vases at the back, which are more elegant, but I thought, this time, I’d do something more special for the lounges. This is hydrangeas, lisianthus, and orchids, with snowberries and blackberries, and some stock so it smells lovely.”
“It’s very pretty,” Casey said.
“It is, isn’t it? It’s not sleek and modern, not like calla lilies, but I thought we’d try it anyway. One of the buildings used to be a bank, and it always looks like a palace to me. The table and the benchtops are made of limestone, and there are these gorgeous marble columns that are sort of cream and brown. They make me think about a throne room, or someplace else very beautiful. The couches are white, and the chandeliers are gold. I thought I’d go with something purely romantic, so you’re lounging in your dressing gown, waiting for your facial or relaxing after your massage, sipping water with slices of cucumber in it and feeling like a princess.”
“Like Cinderella,” Casey said.
“Or something even better. A Russian princess, in the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg, wearing gold and rubies in her hair. And here.” She picked up a cream-colored flower, cut it off short, threaded it through with a pin, and fastened it to Casey’s b
lack T-shirt. “Now you can pretend, too. This is lisianthus. So pretty.”
“A bit like I always thought you looked,” Rhys said. “A Russian princess.”
Zora glanced at him, clearly startled, then laughed. “You did not.”
Well, this was awkward. “Your eyes, I reckon,” he muttered.
“So you’re enrolled in school, and you have a uniform,” Zora said to Casey, ignoring him. She was arranging stems of greenery like she knew exactly where they should go. Not stuck around the edge like he’d have assumed, but more haphazardly. “Sounds like you’re well on your way. When did you get here?”
“This morning,” Rhys said.
She set down her clippers. “This morning? As in, you flew here this morning? From the States?”
“From Chicago. That’s where Casey was living with her mum.”
“Did you even stop at your house?” Zora asked.
“Yeh, of course. We had to, didn’t we, to drop off the bags.”
Zora was all but rolling her eyes. Why? What should he have done instead? Casey needed to go to school, and he needed to go to work. Which reminded him. “But we have a wee problem,” he said.
“You don’t say. I can’t imagine.”
“School doesn’t start until nine,” he said, “and it ends at three. There are no spots open right now in after-school care, let alone what you do in the morning. Casey’s on the waiting list, but meanwhile . . .”
“Because it’s not the right time,” Casey said. “All the kids have already started in Year Two, and I’m only halfway in first grade.”
“I thought you might have some suggestions,” Rhys said. “Know of someplace decent I could take her. I can’t just bung her in anywhere. That’s no good. Besides, I’ve realized that I’m going to need to get somebody to stay at the house, for when I’m off with the team, so I probably shouldn’t make any commitments, day-care-wise.”
Casey looked up at him, and he realized that he should have said something about that. What, though? By the way, I realize I’m the only parent you now have, and you don’t know me, but I’ll only be around half the time?
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