“Your mother?”
He nodded. “Olivia Henare. The only thing she ever gave me was a name but she did that so I’d never forget how I was conceived.”
“Did you know who your father was?” she asked.
“That day on the beach he told her his name was Shane, not Sean. No last name, just Shane. She had no idea where he lived, which university he attended. She knew nothing at all about him so she couldn’t tell her parents who’d ruined her. She couldn’t get in touch with him. She was literally screwed.”
“So you weren’t Syn McGregor back then.”
“No, Syn Henare,” he replied. “I didn’t find out about Sean until I was nineteen and he came to visit me in prison.”
The things he was telling her broke her heart.
The abuse at the hands of his mother. The neglect. Growing up among prostitutes and drug addicts and thieves. Fearing the beatings. Fearing the drunken men who shoved himself aside or hit him.
Hot gorge rose in her throat when he told her he had begun turning tricks when he was not much older than his mother had been when she gave birth to him. Becoming a male whore had been the only way he had to pay the madam back for his room and board.
His words came back to taunt her: “Who I am. What I am. What I was.”
She could not look at him as he told of her how the madam of the brothel had been his first. Of how she and the other women taught him a trade—albeit it an illegal and immoral one—and how he had made more money from servicing the madam’s female clients than the women made at the hands of the johns.
“I was a very popular tourist attraction at Rose’s Emporium,” he said bitterly.
“Did you… Were all your clients…” She didn’t know how to ask him such an embarrassing question.
“They were all women,” he said. “I’d have done my damnedest to emasculate any man who tried to put his hands on me in that way.”
She shivered but it wasn’t from the cold wind that had suddenly picked up but rather from the thought of him doing violence in that particular way.
“It’s getting cold out here,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car.”
He took her hand as they walked—saying nothing, his shoulders hunched defensively in the lightweight denim jacket he’d taken from the backseat of the car when they left the fish place.
She kept his silence until they were seated in the car and he laid his head along the back of his seat. She realized he had closed his eyes.
“I think you’ve told me enough for one night,” she said softly.
“No,” he said, opening his eyes to stare at the headliner. “If I don’t tell you all of it now, I might never will.”
“There is an old country music song about a teenage boy who is taken in by a woman who runs a brothel,” he said. “I sorta thought of that as my theme song.” He swiveled his head on the headrest to look at her. “Even the woman’s name in the song was the same as the woman who taught me how to be a man.”
She was turned in the seat facing him and he wished she’d reach over to take his hand where it lay on his thigh but she didn’t. She was giving him time, distance, and whatever else she thought he might need.
“I went to school during the day and was schooled at night,” he laughed. “What more could a teenage boy with raging hormones want?”
“You didn’t mind…ah…servicing those women?” she asked.
“Repeat,” he said. “Teenage boy with raging hormones. I never had to pull my own… You know.”
“Gotcha,” she said with a little smile.
He looked away from her beautiful face to stare out the windscreen. “It wasn’t bad. Rose let me have some time to myself to hang out with Jono and Craigie. They were my best mates. I’ve known them all my life. Jono’s mother was Rose’s maid and Craigie’s father was one of her best clients.”
“So they knew what you did at night,” she said.
“They knew and they thought it was cool.”
“But you didn’t,” she said softly.
“I knew it was wrong,” he said. “I felt dirty. Especially so because I enjoyed the hell out of it.”
He wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and pulled a couple of times, gathering his thoughts and the courage to tell her the rest. He took a deep breath, held it, and then slowly let it out.
“My mother never spoke to me. If she passed me in the hall or on the stairs, she never looked at me. As far as she was concerned I didn’t exist. All that changed the morning Rose had a massive heart attack and died on the floor of her office. She left the business to my mother who took it over with an iron hand.” He glanced at her. “The other women disliked Olivia. Some of them left right after Rose’s funeral. I guess those who stayed felt they had nowhere else to go and were willing to put up with Olivia’s shit.”
“Things got worse for you,” she stated.
“That’s an understatement,” he said. “The morning after the funeral she had one of the women come get me. I was on my way to school and was annoyed because I was already running late. It didn’t matter. Olivia told me from that day forward I wouldn’t be going to school anymore. She said she had booked two clients for me for that morning.”
He was quiet so long after that admission that it obviously concerned her. She held her hand out to him and he took it.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I went up to my room, packed a bag and thought I’d go live with Jono,” he said. “At the funeral his mother had offered to let me stay with them if things got bad. I guess she and the other women knew they would.” He shrugged. “And they did.”
She knew he was about to tell her something horrific for he had begun to tremble. As much as she wanted to beg him to stop, not to reveal whatever awfulness had happened, she knew he needed to tell her. She knew he’d never told another living soul what he was about to tell her. She tucked her bottom lip between her teeth and held onto his hand as he laid his past bare to her.
The clients his mother had booked for him had been men. Two burly stevedores who had shown up in the doorway of his room to block his leaving. Terrified by the look in the men’s eyes, horrified by what he knew they had come there to do to him, he had turned and sprinted across the room, plunging headfirst through the screen of his window and plummeting ten feet to the ground below.
“I dislocated my shoulder,” he said. “Knocked myself out in the bargain. When I came to, I was lying on the dining room table with Doc Merrill about to pull my arm back into place.”
“They didn’t take you to the hospital?” she asked.
“Hell no. I had some scrapes and cuts on my face and hands but other than the shoulder, he thought I was fine,” he said. “Doc took care of the women when they got STDs or slipped up and got one up the duff.” His lips twisted. “Got pregnant. He’d lost his license to practice but he was still a good doc.”
“You could have had a concussion.”
“I probably did but I guess they figured I had a hard enough head that it didn’t matter.”
Anger bubbled up inside her. “So he just pulled your arm back into place.”
He nodded. “Those same two men were standing there. One held my legs and the other kept my chest and good arm pinned to the tabletop as Doc yanked on it. I screamed loud enough to wake the dead.” A muscle flared in his cheek. “I remember hearing Olivia laughing and saying if I thought that pain was bad I hadn’t felt anything yet.”
“She turned you over to those men,” she said, feeling tears prickling behind her eyes.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t what she meant. While they held me down, she unzipped my pants, pulled them down then grabbed hold of my balls. She pushed them back up into my abdomen and held them there until I passed out. That was her way of punishing me for having tried to run away.”
Once more something he’d said flitted through her mind: “You wouldn’t be the first woman to do that to me. Been there, endured that. Hurt like a motherfuck
er.”
“Oh, Kiwi,” she whispered.
“She locked me in the basement without food and water for two days. She wanted me weak and at the mercy of those bastards when they came back. She was…” He drew finger quotes in the air. “Teaching me a lesson. Jono’s mother helped me to escape. I went to Jono’s house. Craigie was there. We waited until later that night then came back with cans of petrol. Jono and Craigie poured it around the outside of the house while I took a can into her office, poured the contents around the room.”
“Oh my God!” she gasped. “You set fire to the house?”
“Burned it to the fucking ground,” he said with satisfaction.
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“No,” he said. “Jono threw a match on the gas at the back of the house then we started yelling fire. I made sure they all got out safely before I broke the window of her office and tossed in a match. It went up quickly after that.”
He told her how they’d been arrested down at the docks trying to sneak aboard a freighter bound for America. How his mother had pressed charges and they’d all been sentenced to ten years in prison for arson.
“I was two years into my sentence when my father showed up with a high-priced lawyer in tow.”
“He knew about you?”
“He’d known about me from the beginning,” he said. “Apparently he’d seen my mother somewhere when she was pregnant and thought it might be his. He kept tabs on her and when I was arrested, he made sure there were DNA samples taken.”
“Why did he wait so long to contact you then?”
“He wanted to see what I would do in there. Would I become like the rest of the inmates or would I try to be my own man. I finished school, got my diploma. It took me two years to graduate. I think that’s what he had been waiting for plus there was another reason he decided to help me.”
She was almost afraid to ask. “Which was?”
“He had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS—and they’d given him three to five years.”
“I know that’s also called Lou Gehrig’s disease but I don’t really know what it is,” she told him.
“They don’t know what causes it,” he said. “It is a progressive neuromuscular disease that affects and weakens motor neurons. Down Under we call it Motor Neurone Disease. People diagnosed with it lose the ability to move their limbs and the muscles needed to move, eat, speak and breathe.”
“So he wanted to get to know you before he died,” she suggested.
“It was a bit more complicated than that. He’d never married—had never wanted to—and I was his only heir,” he told her. “His parents were dead and he’d been an only child so there was no one to leave MI to. He’d worked too hard to have the vultures pick it apart when he carked it. He offered it to me on one condition.”
She was looking at him in a way that said she was waiting for the next god-awful thing to come out of his mouth.
“He said he would get my sentence vacated and pay my way through university in the States if I would swear not to go back to my criminal ways.” He snorted. “Like I’d had a choice in how I’d been raised.”
“Obviously you agreed,” she said.
He nodded. “He said he would pay all my expenses if I got my MBA and graduated with good marks, he would hand the company over to me—strictly overseen by the board of directors. It didn’t take me long to agree but I had four conditions of my own.”
“You wanted Jonny and Craig released too,” she said.
He smiled at her. “I knew that would be your first thought.”
“They are your best friends,” she said. “You feel responsible for them.”
“I do and I was adamant about it. At first he refused but when he realized I would rather stay in prison than leave Jono and Craigie there, he capitulated. I even think he admired me just a little bit for my loyalty to my mates.”
“I’m sure it was more than just a little bit, Kiwi,” she said, smiling.
“So he agreed and we were released. I expect a lot of money changed hands but I didn’t care. We were out and on our way to the States in less than two weeks.”
“We?” she questioned.
“My second condition was he had to pay for Jono and Craigie’s education too. They are both a few years older than me so they’d already graduated before all the shit hit the fan. Jono went for his degree in business same as me. He’s my director of marketing at MI.”
“I suspected he was more than a chauffeur for you,” she said with a laugh.
“And Craigie—who’d always wanted to be a doctor but would never have had the chance had it not been for my old man—began taking classes to get his M.D.”
“Jake?”
“Astute woman.” He shrugged. “Once I took over after graduation I paid his full ride knowing one of the three of us was most likely gonna need his services one day.”
“What was the third and fourth condition you gave him?”
“That he had to provide us—rent and utility free—a place of our own to live. Living in a dorm would have been almost like prison and being three Kiwis in a white-bread world would have been culture shock. The fourth was that he find us jobs where we could make some spending money.”
“Did he?”
“No. He said if he was going to be paying for our education he wanted us to concentrate on our studies and not have to worry about working. He gave us a small weekly allowance and bought our groceries and meal cards for us.”
“Wow,” she exclaimed.
“He did right by us,” he said. “I’ll give him that.”
“Was he pleased when you graduated?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “He died my junior year so he never knew I graduated with honors.”
“At the top of your class,” she said.
He shrugged again. “If you’re gonna go for it, you might as well go for the full Monty.” He reached down to turn on the car.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Back to your place,” he said, his eyes steady on hers. “Where I intend to spend the night.”
She blinked. “But I’m still on my—”
“To hold you in my arms while I sleep,” he said. “Nothing more.” He grinned. “Unless you want to do something to me.”
Her slow smile made his cock leap. “You never know,” she said.
He asked to use her shower and she agreed. She sat on the bed and watched as he dragged the T-shirt over his head. For the first time she saw the large blue-inked tribal tattoo that covered his left shoulder, dipped a third of the way down his upper arm with one curve that resembled a wave stretching onto his collar bone and another like a wing along his left shoulder blade.
“How long have you had your tat?” she asked.
“In prison. It’s a rite of passage in there and especially if you have Máori blood.”
“What does it mean?”
He didn’t want to tell her so pretended he hadn’t heard her and continued with his story.
“I hope you have more than girlie body wash in there,” he mumbled.
She was tempted to sneak in to take a peak but the look he had given her as he closed the door had been a warning not to.
“There will be plenty of time to share the shower after Friday,” he’d said in that husky voice that did wicked things to her libido.
After Friday, she thought, and prayed her period would go no longer. She’d never wanted anything as much as that.
Well, she thought, other than to have him…
“You have terrible water pressure,” he said as he came out of her bathroom. He was toweling his hair but she barely noticed for he was completely nude.
“Kiwi!” she exclaimed, averting her head.
“Huh?”
“My God! You’re naked!”
“As the day I was born,” he said and she heard laughter in his voice. “What of it?”
“I don’t want to see you…”
> “Yes, you do,” he said and walked over to the bed, tossing the towel he’d been drying his hair with onto her chair. “Turn around.”
“No,” she said, resolutely facing the wall.
“Woman, turn around,” he said and she could feel his bare knee pressed against her.
“Absolutely…”
He reached down to cup her chin and brought her head around. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Melina,” he said with a sigh, “by the end of the month, there won’t be an inch of me you haven’t seen. Might as well start tonight.” He tugged on her chin. “Melina, open your eyes and look at my cock.”
“No,” and the word sounded petulant even to her.
“He’s not aroused.”
“No.”
“But I can put my hand on him and get him that way very quickly if you don’t open your eyes and say hello to him.”
She scrunched up her face but pried one eye open. He was right before her but all she could see was the deep indention of his navel and the sweet line of hair that dipped from between his pecs to the vee of his groin hair. The tiger line was wet and branched outward like a tree at his navel. She had the wild impulse to lean forward and drag her tongue over a pebble of water glistening on his taut belly.
“Look at him, Lina,” he ordered. “He’s not going to flip up and bite you.” He chuckled. “Yet.”
She raised her eyes to his and pursed her lips at the humor she saw sparkling there. “You are incorrigible.”
“I’ll be engorgible if you don’t look at him,” he stated, removing his hand from her face.
“That’s not even a word,” she said with a sniff but lowered her eyes slowly to his groin. She jerked her eyes back up to his.
“Yeah, I know and he’s all yours,” he said with a touch of pride in his voice.
“Sweet Jesus,” she whispered, swallowing hard as she stared at his mouth.
“Touch him,” he said then his voice went low and deep. “I dare you.” He shifted his legs apart, braced his hands on his hips and arched his left eyebrow. “As you Southerners say, I double dog dare you.”
Very, very slowly she lowered her eyes to his cock. The moment her gaze fell upon it, it stirred and she knew he’d deliberately flexed it to make her uncomfortable. All right, she thought, if that was how he wanted to play it…
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