Two Passionate Proposals

by Serenity Woods

  Megan’s brother—and Dion’s best mate when they were young—hasn’t told her Dion’s coming. It’s not clear who’s the most shocked when they finally meet. Megan isn’t expecting to see the father of her new baby quite so soon, and Dion certainly wasn’t expecting such a big Christmas present. Angry that his life seems out of his control and that she didn’t tell him she was pregnant, Dion refuses to acknowledge the baby. It’s only when he finds out that his father wanted him to put love above business, and after he reconnects with Megan on Christmas night, that he finally comes to term with having a son and realises that it’s Megan he’s wanted all along.

  An excerpt follows.

  Chapter One

  Christmas Present

  It was the nineteenth of December and eighty degrees in the shade.

  After years of living through cold northern hemisphere Christmases, Dion’s brain struggled to compute the bizarreness of his new surroundings. The tarmac on the road shimmered in the hot sunshine, and Sean had switched on the car’s air con to combat the high humidity. In December! It just didn’t make sense.

  Also, while flying from one side of the world to the other, Dion had crossed the International Date Line and somehow lost an entire day. How the hell had that happened? Had he actually travelled back in time?

  Sean signalled and took the road to the town centre before glancing across at him. “My mother would say ‘if the wind changes, your face will stay like that.’”

  Dion continued to frown as he stared out of the side window at the lush, sub-tropical landscape of the Northland of New Zealand. “It looks so alien,” he murmured, studying the arching palms and large, vibrant flowers. How odd that it appeared so unfamiliar considering he’d lived there from the ages of eight to eighteen. He remembered collapsing in bed late on Christmas Eve as a teenager, listening to the sound of cicadas outside his window, his skin hot and crisp from a day spent in the sun and surf. “I thought it would feel like coming home. But it doesn’t. It feels weird.”

  “You’ve been gone nearly a decade,” Sean observed. “It’s not surprising it seems strange. And you’re not a Kiwi anymore. You’ve lost your accent and sound all flash now.”

  Dion smiled wryly. His father had taken great pains to teach him how to speak ‘properly’ before he went to Cambridge. He’d thought his Kiwi lilt still replaced the upper class twang when he left the office, but obviously not as much as he’d assumed.

  He fixed his gaze on the shops lining the new one-way road system. The streets were wide and the cafés spilled tables and chairs onto the pavements. People lazed under big umbrellas that shaded them from the hot sun, drinking coffee while a busker entertained them with folksy jazz on a guitar.

  It could have been the Mediterranean—the south of France or Greece. Everyone looked as if they were on holiday, tanned and wearing shorts and T-shirts, Sean included. Dion felt overdressed in his shirt and chinos, hot in the thick material, his shirt damp against his back. Perhaps he should have worn something more casual. Did he have anything more casual in his suitcase? He’d forgotten how laid back the Kiwis were.

  “What’s Christmas like in England?” Sean asked. “Is it all deep and crisp and even?”

  “More mild and damp,” Dion said. “I’ve only seen snow on Christmas Day once. It usually rains. And it’s more commercialised than here. Adverts on the TV start in August. And the shop windows are full of fake snow with cheesy songs piped on a loop.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “You get used to it.” Even though he’d criticised it, he couldn’t stop the defensiveness creeping into his voice. He didn’t particularly love the festive season in the UK, but he’d made a life for himself there, and he wasn’t going to let Sean insinuate that his move to England had been a mistake.

  He glanced across at his old friend. They’d kept in touch occasionally over the nine years since he moved away, on Facebook and via the odd email, but they’d mainly talked bloke talk, about rugby and politics and movies. He hadn’t been able to get any real sense of how Sean had changed since their teenage years.

  He’d been relieved to still recognise his once-best mate. He’d spotted him immediately across the tarmac at the small Kerikeri airport. Sean had been leaning on the gate, waiting, and Dion had spotted his stocky frame, albeit layered with a few more pounds. His short blond hair had thinned on top, but it still stuck up in the same familiar way at the front.

  They’d clasped hands and then bear-hugged, and for a brief moment emotion had swept over Dion. They’d been close when they were younger, and he would be forever grateful for the fact that Sean’s parents had taken him in for six months after his mother died, before he left for the UK.

  But then Sean pulled away to help him with his luggage, and the moment passed. And perhaps he was imagining it, but after his initial pleasure at seeing his friend, Sean now seemed more reserved, cool even. Why would that be?

  “So, how’s married life treating you?” Dion hoped to warm up the atmosphere by encouraging his mate to tell tales of family life. Married guys always seemed to want to extol the virtues of their partners, and he’d learned that it helped to get men to talk.

  He’d seen the pictures of the wedding on Facebook four or five years ago. He didn’t know Sean’s wife, Gaby, but she’d looked stunning in her wedding dress. They’d sent him an invite, but it had coincided with an important meeting in Germany. Plus he wasn’t sure at the time that he wanted to revisit his old life, so he’d politely declined. He’d thought they’d be relieved to save some money on a place setting. Had they been upset instead?

  “Great.” Sean’s face relaxed into a smile. He glanced across at Dion, looking a tad mischievous. “You should try it someday.”

  Dion ignored the taunt. He was adept at steering conversation away from talk of settling down. “And two kids, eh? No hanging around then.” They were both only twenty-seven. To Dion it seemed a young age to already have your family done and dusted—unless…were they thinking about having more than two kids? Jeez, some folks were a glutton for punishment.

  Sean shrugged, signalled left and took a new road Dion didn’t remember. It appeared to skirt the old Stone Store. He’d heard that the bridge across the inlet had become choked with debris and burst its banks during heavy rain, so they must have removed the bridge and diverted traffic away. Shame—he’d liked the old road past the historic buildings. They’d all had some good times in the river. He remembered the day Sean had pushed Megan in, and how outraged she’d been. She’d stood there with her hands on her hips and yelled at her brother, beautiful in spite of looking like a drowned rat.

  “No point in waiting,” Sean said. “It’s good to have kids while you’ve still got the energy. I find it exhausting, even though Gaby does most of it.”

  “I guess.” Dion knew nothing about having children. One of his half-brothers in the UK had a couple, but he’d never got involved with them. He tended to hold babies in front of him like a rugby ball, and when people saw how uncomfortable it made him, they stopped giving them to him. He wasn’t one of those jolly uncles who took the kids to the zoo and bought them sweets. The children steered clear of him now when his brother came to visit, and he was quite happy with that. “Are the kids at home with Gaby?”

  “Nah, one of Gaby’s friends has them for a few hours,” Sean said. “They take turns to give each other a break.”

  That didn’t surprise Dion. New Zealanders had always had the ‘number eight wire’ approach to life. When the first European immigrants arrived, thirteen thousand miles away from their homeland, they quickly learned to invent things they couldn’t easily obtain, and the number eight gauge of fencing wire was soon adapted for countless other uses in New Zealand farms, factories and homes. The phrase came to represent a Kiwi who could turn their hand to anything, and they were a people who reacted to problems by pulling together to help each other out.

  The houses thinned, and as Sean took the road leading to Opito Bay, th
e countryside spread away from them, rising and falling in a series of emerald hills until it met the glittering sea on either side. The finger of land formed part of the sub-tropical paradise of the Bay of Islands.

  Dion blew out a breath. “That’s quite a view.”

  Sean smiled. “Yeah. I can think of worse scenery to look at on the way to work.”

  Dion thought of the narrow, dirty streets of London, the crowded Underground, the smell and taste of the city, metallic and dusty. Like an old but revered actress, London was beautiful in its own way, and of course its history knocked New Zealand’s into a cocked hat, as the Cockneys would have said. But he’d forgotten the beauty of Aotearoa. How vast and high and blue the sky seemed.

  “How’s the business going?” he asked. He knew Sean had joined his father’s building trade.

  Sean gave him a strange look, but said, “Yeah, good. Things are picking up a bit after the recession. Lots of new houses being built.”

  “Cool.” He tipped his head back on the headrest as a wave of tiredness hit him. Jet lag, no doubt. It couldn’t be the pace of life in the Northland. Even the staff at the tiny airport had been laid back, shrugging off the plane’s late arrival with typical Kiwi indifference. And Sean hardly seemed stressed, driving along happily at fifty in a hundred kph zone. What was that—about thirty miles an hour? Jeez. And there weren’t even any speed cameras to worry about.

  What would it be like to get up every morning and know your day involved driving to a field somewhere and hammering nails into planks of wood until home time? No airports, taxis, extended lunches, long business meetings in boardrooms, laptops, iPhones, annual reports. No air conditioning, stewed coffee, dry sandwiches, or the cloying smell of beeswax from the polished oak tables. No talking, talking, talking all day until he thought he’d used every word in his vocabulary and would never be able to utter anything ever again.

  Actually, it sounded quite attractive now he thought about it.

  Then he sighed. You’d soon get bored, he scolded himself. He was disillusioned and tired, stressed after the events of the past few months, maybe a bit burned out, and he needed a break. But he wasn’t due a mid-life crisis yet.

  Sean glanced at him again.

  Dion raised an eyebrow, sensing a question hovering in the wings. “What?”

  Sean’s brow furrowed. “Are you really not going to ask after Megan?”

  Dion blinked. He hadn’t asked about any of Sean’s family yet—there had hardly been time for that sort of conversation. He stared, surprised at Sean’s glare. And then realisation sank in.

  Sean knew. Shit. It had only been the one night. They’d both agreed to keep it quiet. Why had she told her brother?

  Guilt filtered through him, and he had to force himself not to squirm in his seat. He and Megan had had a fiery relationship from the first moment he met her when he was twelve and she was nine. Irritation and exasperation had eventually matured into a simmering sexual attraction throughout their teenage years, and even though he’d tried his hardest to remind himself that she was Sean’s little sister, he hadn’t been completely shocked—and he suspected she hadn’t either—that when they bumped into each other the previous Christmas, they’d ended up in bed.

  Her passion and apparently genuine desire for him had both shocked and thrilled him. He liked to think himself fairly experienced in bed, but he could safely say that night had been the hottest, most erotic night of his life. They’d practically set the bed alight, and he suspected that if they’d lived in the same half of the world, it would have changed their relationship forever, an irreversible chemical reaction, like baking eggs and flour to make a cake. A hot, sexy, chocolate-covered and caramel-filled sumptuous delight of a cake, but changed nevertheless.

  Still, they did live on opposite sides of the world, and it had only been a fling—they’d both accepted that.

  He cleared his throat. “Of course I was going to ask. I was just…building up to it. How is she?”

  “Good.” Sean slowed at a T-junction, but they hadn’t met a single vehicle on the way, so he didn’t bother stopping and turned the car onto the main road to the bay. “Her paintings are really taking off. She sells heaps of local landscapes at the galleries in town, and she’s getting commissions now.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah. She’s really good, Dion. People are starting to take notice, you know? She’s been interviewed on national radio, and she held art classes in Auckland during the winter.”

  “That’s so cool.” He was pleased, but not surprised. Megan had been painting the first time he saw her. He’d met Sean in their first year at high school, and Sean had invited him home for tea. She’d been sitting on the deck, trying to capture their Boxer dog on paper, and she’d scolded it when it dashed off to greet them.

  With a typical twelve-year-old boy’s tact, he’d laughed at the brown smudges she’d made on the paper, and she’d threatened to shove her paintbrush where the sun didn’t shine, earning her a telling off from her mother. The memory still made him smile. Her feistiness seemed even more prominent because it stood out against the disorder she’d had to fight against her whole life, like a black cloud hovering in a bright blue sky.

  “How’s she coping?” he asked. “With the agoraphobia, I mean.”

  “She’s good,” Sean said.

  “I’m glad.” Dion had become aware of the condition when she was eleven. They’d walked into town with a group of friends. Crowds from the annual summer fair choked the town. They queued up to buy a burger, and the unfamiliarity of the situation and the crush of bodies triggered an attack.

  He hadn’t known about her phobia at the time, and the last thing he expected the spirited, lively girl to have was panic attacks. Alarm shot through him when she turned white and started shaking, her eyes widening with fear. But when Sean reacted not by making fun of her but by announcing he’d take her home, Dion realised the seriousness of the situation. He walked with them without asking, and they both held her hand the whole way.

  When she got home, she thanked him and cried, and he hugged her. Her hair had smelled of strawberries, and his lips had lingered as he kissed the top of her head for a few seconds longer than he should have.

  Was that when his obsession about her had started? All those years ago?

  “It got bad for a while,” Sean added, “around the time she broke up with Cody. She told you about that in Prague, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  So Sean definitely knew they’d met up the Christmas before. For the first time in his life Dion thought he might be blushing. Not banging your best mate’s sister was rule number one. No wonder Sean had been cool when he got in the car.

  “But she’s worked at it,” Sean continued. “She has counselling, and they’ve taught her breathing techniques, that sort of thing. She copes.”

  “That’s good to know. I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

  That was the understatement of the year. Their coming together in Prague had been brief but momentous—like a once-in-a-thousand-years alignment of two planets. He’d tried not to dwell on her too much after they parted, but he’d spent more nights than he cared to remember lying awake thinking about that night before Christmas. He couldn’t deny to himself that he’d chosen to recuperate in New Zealand with the hope of seeing her again.

  “She’s at the house,” Sean said. “We’re nearly there.”

  Dion’s heart rate sped up at the thought of seeing her again. For the first time since he left the UK, real pleasure surged through him that he’d made the decision to go away. All the worries and stress of the past few months faded. He had two whole weeks here to unwind, to catch up with his mates and rediscover the friendships he hadn’t realised he’d missed until he needed them. Two whole weeks to spend with Megan, maybe to explore that relationship a little more.

  Sean signalled at the turnoff for the marina, drove about ten yards and then turned left into a tiny drive. Th
e road led steeply upward, and then the car crested the top of the rise.

  Dion gasped. The long wooden house below them lay at the top of a small bay. The hills surrounding the bay were encrusted with palms, manuka trees and bush. A pair of brightly coloured rosella parrots flew in front of the car, and when Sean pulled up outside and Dion got out, he heard the tuis up high in the trees, their distinctive call sounding as if they were saying George! George!

  “Wow.” He stared at the house. “You built this?”

  “Yep.” Sean practically burst with pride. “You like?”

  “It’s fantastic.” He hadn’t realised the building business paid so well. “How much land do you have?”

  “A couple of hectares. Not much.”

  Not much? Dion tried not to exclaim out loud. He considered himself fairly well off, but he’d only been able to afford a small apartment in London. Although situated in Islington, one of the newly transformed parts of the city, it had only a few rooms and no view to speak of. It didn’t come close to what Sean had.

  The front door opened and out came the dark-haired woman he’d seen with Sean on Facebook. She looked less glamorous than in her wedding photos, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face free of makeup, but she was a pretty girl, with eyes creased into laughter lines.

  “You must be Gaby,” he said. Used to years of meeting and greeting through the business, he smiled, walked up and extended his hand. “I’m Dion.”

  “Hey, Dion! I’m so glad you came.” She ignored his hand and gave him a hug. Taken by surprise—how English had he become?— he stood there awkwardly for a moment before putting his arms around her and giving her a quick hug back. “It’s lovely to have you here,” she continued. “Sean’s been so looking forward to it, and he’s told me so much about you.”