Heartbreak Hero

by Frances Housden

  “We meet again.” The shirred band of Kel’s bomber jacket lifted as the last swipe of his hand added a few extra damp spots to its shoulders. Ngaire’s eyes were caught by a glimpse of a slim brown belt that emphasized the narrowness of his waist and hips. Today, instead of the loose floating shirt that had hidden this very masculine trait yesterday, he wore a tan polo shirt tucked into his khakis.

  As she lifted her chin, and with it the level of her gaze, she saw his eyebrows quirk as if he expected some comment about seeing him again so soon after making an idiot of herself. She could still feel tenderness in her throat from trying to swallow her muesli without choking.

  Kel’s smile cut the thread of her thoughts.

  Darn the man. He had the cheek of the devil and he knew it. Plus he fitted every criteria of her wildest fantasies—tall, dark and devastating—making her wonder if Te Ruahiki had conjured him up just for her.

  A gurgle of suppressed laughter left her mouth as a gasp. Her far-fetched fantasies had as much chance of coming true as a snowball had of lasting in hell.

  Though if that little bundle of ice and slush should take its time melting, maybe that was the best reason in the world to reach out, hang on and let fate take her for a ride.

  The code her grandfather had lived by and had drummed into her at the worst moments of her life had been Never Give Up. She’d lost the most important people in her life, including George Two Feathers, whose words had been his legacy. But since her time in the hospital, when she’d won her last battle with life, Ngaire had never backed down from a challenge.

  She wasn’t about to change now, while the latest battle still had five weeks, six days until New Year’s Eve. “Are you following me?”

  His features froze for about a second before he answered. “Sorry, but I can see where you’d get that impression. Guess we have to chalk this one up to fate.”

  There it was again. Fate. And Kel felt it, too.

  How long was it since the last time she’d gone into a match blind, with no knowledge of her opponent or his moves? How long since she’d pitted her skills and enjoyed a contest where the balance of throws could go either way?

  Too long, according to her best friend Leena Kowolski, who’d urged her to indulge in a holiday fling, who’d been so insistent that Ngaire had had to laugh and say she’d think about it, but only if the guy was the kind dreams were made of. And he was.

  A small prickle of conscience stabbed as she arched her eyebrows in feigned disbelief and a darker slash broached the tanned skin covering his cheekbones. He leaned closer, resting one arm on the back of the seat her day pack still guarded, and swiped his other hand over his chest in a cross. “Honest.”

  His voice was low, husky, intimate. She fell into it, into his eyes, her heart skipping at the dark, liquid intensity in their expression, begging to be believed.

  “Returning your pink shades was deliberate on my part, but that’s all. Unless it was fate that made you drop them. Though if I’d known…”

  “I didn’t think men believed in fate.”

  His dark eyebrows knitted. “What else could it be?”

  What else? Let’s face it, she was a sucker for those eyes. She gave him a melting look, putting her own to good use. Leena said they were her best feature, canceling out the nose she’d inherited from her Modoc ancestors. “I owe you an apology. Blame it on the world today. It’s hard to know who to trust.”

  His smile drew her eyes down to the indent in the center of his chin and the square, no-nonsense line of his jaw, tempting her to trace the shape and see if it was as firm as it looked.

  “Face it,” he said. “We’ve been thrown together by a common language. The only thing to do is grin and bear it.”

  “And since the bus is almost full.” Out of the corner of her eye, Ngaire saw the tour guide wave some tailenders onboard.

  It was then she felt the engrossed stares and turned to see two Chinese women in the seats behind them. Her next words froze in her throat as they smiled and nodded. She crossed her fingers mentally that the guide had been correct about Kel and her being the only English speakers. The body language she couldn’t do anything about.

  She tried to tip him the wink about their audience with her eyes, but he had his own agenda. “If there’s something about me that rubs you the wrong way, tell me and I’ll do my best to help you get over it. Meanwhile, I’m blocking the aisle and there are people heading this way.”

  Grabbing her day pack off the empty seat, she made room for him. He slid his beige jacket from his shoulders swiftly, bundling it to toss into the overhead rack. Actions that were easier than folding his length, all six foot three of it, into an amount of space more suitable for her own five foot four.

  It took her a moment to notice the last passengers were familiar. Kel had no such problem. “I suppose you’re going to think they’re following you, as well?”

  A smile softened his words, turning it into a joke.

  “I’m not really that paranoid,” she protested, though the coincidences seemed to be piling up thick and fast. First Kel, and now here was the German couple who’d sat behind her on the shuttle from the ferry.

  As the bus eased its way through the city traffic Ngaire stared out the window. The streets went by in a blur of raindrops. Her mind was elsewhere, negotiating the twists and turns of an awareness she hadn’t expected to find. She’d been looking for something in New Zealand, but it wasn’t an affair.

  Her heart had called for something much more familial and an answer to the dread that had haunted her since they’d added her grandmother’s history to her mother’s and come up with an answer that had scared her spitless.

  First there were the similarities in the manner of their deaths, both the same age almost to the minute and both killed by a car that had gone out of control. Then there was the fact that both deaths had been foreshadowed by changes in the mere. But were they coincidence or curse?

  She couldn’t afford not to believe it was more than coincidence; the risks were too great.

  Then she’d come up with a solution to possibly guarantee her a future.

  Te Ruahiki was tapu, sacred, and returning the mere to his tribe might break the curse on the females of her line.

  With all that was going on in her mind, she still found it impossible to ignore Kel or the source of heat as his thigh brushed her own. In an attempt to escape what she saw as a growing problem of too much too soon, she offered, “I don’t mind taking turns at sitting by the window. I wouldn’t want to take advantage by arriving here first.”

  “Later. There’s no rush, or anything I haven’t seen before.”

  So, no relief there, for a while. In some other place or time, being pressed against the wall with nowhere to go without crawling all over him might have been fun. But they weren’t alone. They had an audience, and she’d no ambition to become their main source of entertainment.

  Better just to suck it up and get on with the tour.

  Easier said than done.

  Beneath the light fabric of her capri pants, her skin burned with an energy that raced to all the salient points of her body. Kel was all solid muscle, thigh, hip, arm. Large, lean, hard. No use reminding herself she’d handled heavier men with ease.

  Beside him she felt puny, susceptible, and all female.

  She could have told him her problem didn’t stem from him brushing her the wrong way. From her angle it felt too right.

  The rain had lessened but not stopped by the time they reached their destination. It made some matrons twitter like sparrows as their husbands helped them into their rain gear.

  Kel stood in the gangway, leaving Ngaire room to maneuver a snarl of sleeves and arms. As she started juggling her day pack and raincoat he stretched out a hand to take the one she wasn’t struggling into. “Let me grab that for you?”

  For a heartbeat her eyes flashed a warning with all the force of a push in the chest. Back to square one?

  “No need, I�
��m used to managing,” she answered lightly. Had he imagined the back-off signal? He wondered as she hatched into a canary in her bright coat, instead of another brown sparrow.

  He blamed it on Chaly. The man had given him leave to do whatever necessary and unleashed the rampant attraction he’d felt the moment he’d laid eyes on her.

  Sleep with her if necessary.

  Lies were all part of being undercover. Maybe it was being back home that made him feel Grandma Glamuzina’s finger and thumb twist his ear with every falsehood falling from his lips.

  Look what almost an hour of having her scent tease his nose had brought him. With every breath, he’d calculated the risk factors in this operation, not to his health, to his libido.

  He was here to watch, not to touch. Yet every time they were thrown together by the movement of the bus driving down Muriwai’s winding lanes, he remembered the lines of separation were only two thin lengths of cotton. Though she’d edged away from the contact, while he’d wrapped a white-knuckled fist around a handle to prevent him chasing her across the blue upholstery, he’d known he was in trouble. Big trouble.

  He was the hunter and she was his prey. Now her spoor was firmly fixed in his head along with a picture of her naked. A lethal combination meant to keep him clinging to the edge of his seat for the duration of the trip.

  For once, he felt torn between duty and desire.

  A park ranger awaited them all outside the bus. Ngaire dawdled at the back. Kel kept close, not wanting to force the situation and mindful of her look. His grandma had had one that could strip paint off walls, and Ngaire’s had run a close second.

  Grouped with the other passengers in the car park, he’d no problem seeing over their heads as he listened to the ranger. He and the German guy were the tallest, with a couple of Taiwanese runners-up.

  Maori Bay was small compared to the other beaches nearby and sheltered by the arms of land stretching on either side. But in this kind of weather with the wind from the southwest, every now and then a gust whipped the ranger’s voice away. “So easy to get the feeling of being dominated by Muriwai…” he shouted, standing against a backdrop of sand-churning waves as gray as the sky, the black silhouette of a lone surfer balanced on top like a bolt holding the two together.

  “Powerful elements…wind and sea formed, dominate…this wildlife park.” Ngaire appeared intent on the ranger’s spiel as she clutched the straps of her day pack, arms crossed. Just then a crack of sunlight broke through the clouds, caught her for a second, disappearing as if her black hair had swallowed it.

  “Imagine the lifeblood…earth, lava, spilling here from a massive undersea volcano. Where you…stand was born of fire from that eruption.” Every time the ranger paused, the tour guide filled in with translations, and while the cameras whirred and clicked gannets and terns performed a ballet over rocks of greenish black like a licorice stick newly bitten in two.

  “This fire still rages beneath the surface.” A ripple of in-drawn breaths punctuated the translation. Their guide spoke so swiftly, she had to know the spiel by heart.

  “Imagine its rhythm beating a pulse…echoing its heartbeat.”

  Finished, the ranger turned, leading them up the path to the summit, their heels on the gravel sounding like crunching toffee.

  Two paces ahead of him, Ngaire’s dark braid bumped against a bed of yellow, begging to be tugged. He caught up to whisper, “That guy’s a shoo-in for the lead in The Tempest.”

  She forgot herself long enough to give him a glimpse of her smile. Gaining her trust was like pushing sludge uphill, one step forward, two steps back. And though he’d gone ahead, he was aware of her every move. As they crested the path, a squeal made him turn. “You okay? What happened, did you turn your ankle?”

  For a microsecond she took her eyes off the view beyond the rail. “No.” She gestured with a hand flung out to encompass the horizon. “I saw all of that.”

  He guessed it might take your breath away if you’d never seen Muriwai beach before, its black sands fringed with gray-and-white surf, curving for more than sixty kilometers into the distance. Too far to see on a day like today when it resembled a monochrome photograph.

  “What makes the sand black?”

  “Nothing romantic. Just plain old iron,” he said, but she’d stopped listening and was focusing her camera instead.

  To reach the viewing platform they walked across a wooden boardwalk, which wound through a tunnel of pohutukawas. It was one of the only native trees that didn’t mind salty air, but it was too early yet for the red tassled flowers that heralded Christmas. There was still beauty to be found in the twisted shapes from its no-holds-barred tussles with the wind.

  All too soon, they stepped out of the green-washed light onto wooden treads that softened their footfalls and led to a cliff top spiked with flax plants.

  There had been pohutukawas on the cliff his father had gone over. Drago, his eldest brother, had taken them all to look and say goodbye. That was before all the rumors surfaced. He and Kurt had stood on the edge and watched Jo throw flowers onto the rocks and Franc, younger by about two years, had stood back arms crossed as if to hold himself together. Intuition had told him all their lives had changed irrevocably, but Kurt had only been interested in how easy it would be to climb down to the rough cliff to his father’s wreck.

  Kel hung back with his memories, letting the real tourists take in the sight of hundreds of gold-capped gannets on the rocky platform below them, one side of a gap carved by umpteen billion waves and millions of years. The cantilevered deck hung out over the abyss, opposite more birds nested on a hundred-foot pillar of dark weathered rock.

  He stood to one side, off the deck, eyeing it warily, remembering a disaster where sightseers had plunged to their deaths off a viewing platform on the South Island.

  The ranger was giving them the full ten-cent tour, expounding on the mating habits of the birds. Kel listened with one ear, his mind on Ngaire, drawn again to her unusual beauty, knowing the only mating that interested him was man on woman. Kel on Ngaire. The sooner he forgot Chaly’s suggestion and got back to considering her forbidden fruit, and let go of the image of doing the nasty with her, the better.

  The sun broke through, steaming the water off the path. As if he hadn’t gotten hot enough from visions of Ngaire’s slim legs wrapped round his waist. He yanked at the tab to unzip his jacket, then changed his mind. The older ladies had enough to gasp at without him giving them a look at the erection trying to batter its way out of his pants.

  He was leaning back, his butt resting on the guardrail, taking charge of his libido, when the ranger pushed through the crush, calling “Follow me, everyone” as he marched past Kel on his way to the next port of call.

  Ngaire and a few others who hadn’t been able to get near the front crowded the barrier for a better sight of the nesting birds. Kel stayed where he was, letting the sun beat down through his hair into his skull.

  Raincoats were being discarded with waves of right and left arms. Ngaire stepped off the platform, stopping barely a yard away at the side of the track and looking right at him. “That was great. I never thought we’d get so close to the birds. Too bad there weren’t any chicks in the nests.”

  “You’d have to come back in December. It’s a lot noisier then, too,” he told her, remembering the first time his father had brought them all up here.

  He pushed the thought aside. His father had been in his thoughts too often today. He should never have rung Jo. Yeah, right. Being back in Auckland had made him hungry to hear just one familiar voice. Losing Gordie had made him remember how truly alone he was. For the last few years his buddy had been the only kind of family he’d had to count on.

  He watched Ngaire take off the day pack. As the others listened to the ranger, he’d decided she was carrying the formula in the bag, not on her person, a much-needed reminder to be more vigilant in case she passed it on during their visit here, or at the vineyard that was their next st
op.

  Holding said day pack one-handed, she slid her arm out of the opposite sleeve. In his peripheral vision Kel caught a blur of enthusiastic hand movements from some of the men. Talking about the view, he presumed.

  His head swung round as the drink bottle that one man held dropped. It fell past the front corner of the barrier, landing on top of a nesting pair who’d chosen a small ledge near the top, away from the crush of birds.

  Quick as a bullet, one bird shot in the air. Squawking its annoyance, it almost took the nose off the owner of the plastic bottle. He reared back, setting a domino effect in motion with Ngaire the last one in the row.

  Kel could see what would happen, but his intuition was faster than his feet. Unaware of the wave of bodies heading her way, Ngaire was head down, with one hand on the strap of her day pack as she stuffed a roll of yellow raincoat inside. She took the full brunt of the last guy’s shoulder.

  Kel heard her squeal even as he shouted “Look out, Ngaire!” and threw himself at the rail as she did a back flip over the barrier and began to fall.

  Chapter 4

  S he’d had dreams of falling but had always been able to waken herself before she hit bottom. This time Ngaire’s eyes were wide open as the earth spun away from her in a Catherine wheel of gray, brown and black sparks, as if her past flashed through her mind.

  Her training, as much part of her as breathing, was the trigger for tucking her head in as she rolled, the mechanics behind her action bringing her arm down into a break fall. Easier said than done, with the death grip she had on her day pack.

  It spun in a wide arc as her arm came round. One strap lassoed a small bush with a hold on the cliff as fragile as her own. Yet, this spindly plant, clawing for existence in an impossible environment, reminded her that even on these wind-gouged cliffs, survival was possible.

  She tucked her chin into her neck and spent a giddy moment inspecting a nine-inch rock ledge, too small for birds to nest on, which had saved her. The smell of guano—suddenly a metaphor staining her whole life—was stronger at this height as the wind buffeting the coast carried it from the nesting site.