“Something like that,” she muttered, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them.
“You don’t know me very well, then.”
“I don’t know you at all.” She thunked her head back against the wall with a groan.
“You know I like it when you lick my—”
She elbowed him before he could finish his sexy-toned description of how much she liked licking his—well, his everything. “Shut up. How the hell can you joke around at a time like this?”
“When we’re sitting in our birthday suits on a cold floor?”
She rolled her head toward him and looked down her nose. “You, at least, have got boxer shorts on to protect your dignity.”
“Your dignity’s fine,” he said. “You look beautiful.”
“You’re full of it. And for God’s sake, stop smiling at me like that.”
“Like what? Like I’m happy to hear you’re carrying my baby?”
“You’re happy? How can you be happy? We barely know each other, our families hate each other, we’re not in a relationship, I’m thirty-one fricking years old and—” She whooped in a breath, huffed it out, and couldn’t seem to catch it again.
“Guessing you’re not over the moon about this.”
“You think?”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“I wouldn’t say I’m happy,” he said. “But I’m not unhappy. I just need a little time to process this, to work out a plan.”
“A plan? How can you plan after an accident has happened?” She dropped her head into her cupped palms. “If you make a list or draw a bloody flowchart, I’m going to scream.”
She heard a rustle as he shifted on the floor and the soft weight of his hand stroked down her arm, then rested on her head. “I don’t know what the right thing is to say in this situation. I own half the responsibility for this pregnancy, but it’s your right to tell me to back off and let you decide what you want to do.”
“I don’t know what I want to do.” She sat up and faced him. “But I’m old-fashioned enough to believe the father should have a say. As long as you understand the final decision is mine to make.”
“Yeah, of course.”
She licked parched lips and winced at the sour taste coating them. Her bare butt was stuck to the floorboards. Ugh. “Maybe we can talk about this more when we’re fully clothed.”
He grinned at her and rose smoothly to his feet, offering a hand to pull her up. She took his hand and gained her feet slowly, waiting to see if the roil of nausea would return. Fortunately, this time it didn’t.
“I make a mean scrambled eggs on toast. Why don’t you shower and change while I cook?”
“That’s a plan I can get behind,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, Tui sat across the table from Kyle with a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, and some sautéed mushrooms he must’ve found in her fridge.
“You feeling okay now?” he asked as she picked up her fork and tested the eggs’ firmness.
“Yup. Not used to having someone cook me breakfast, though. I usually just snatch up a piece of fruit before I tackle the day’s work.”
“Uh-huh.” He pointed his fork at her. “Eat up before it goes cold.”
“Yes, Dad” popped out of her mouth before she could censor it. Good Lord, would she turn into one of those women who, when they had a baby, started calling their men Dad or Daddy?
I’m having a baby.
Maybe.
She swallowed hard and stuffed a forkful of eggs into her mouth. They were good, but then they could’ve tasted like scrambled sawdust and she still would’ve eaten them just so that she could put this conversation off a little longer. What she needed was some deflection.
“How old was your wife when she fell pregnant?” she asked.
“Twenty-seven.” He glanced up from his plate, lowering his fork in expectation.
“I’m thirty-one. Not quite a geriatric mother, but not far off it either.”
Kyle set his fork gently down. “You haven’t considered having a family before?” He grimaced, rubbing his thumb over the crease between his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m walking on bloody eggshells, trying not to sound like an insensitive ass.”
“How about we bypass the eggshells and be frank? I’ll tell you straight up if I think you’re being an insensitive ass.”
“Okay.”
“To answer your question”—she paused, trying to be both honest with herself and with him—“I’ve never met a man that I wanted to start a family with. But then, ‘Would he make a good father?’ was never a question I asked myself in any of the short-term relationships I’ve had. I never asked that question because I’d decided in my teens that I didn’t want to have kids.”
“That’s a pretty strong decision to make as a teenager. Can I ask why?”
She shrugged, but she couldn’t avoid the sinking pit in her stomach. Total honesty would reveal a vulnerable side of her she was reluctant to share with anyone, let alone this man who already was working his way under his skin.
“You know what it’s like when you’re young, and you have big dreams, and you think you can conquer the world. I wanted to travel, backpack on my shoulder, going wherever the wind blew me. I’d build houses for the poor in Mexico, wander over the footbridges of Venice, race camels in Egypt.” She sent him a wry smile. “In today’s terms, I would be that girl on social media wearing dusty hiking boots and cut-off jeans, taking a selfie in front of the Taj Mahal and blogging about the awesomeness of a single woman tackling the world head on.”
“And did you?” His eyes crinkled with humor. “I can just see you with a red bandanna tied around your crazy hair, bouncing along on a scowling camel.”
“Never got to ride a camel, but yeah, I traveled some. Got a taste for it in my last year of school when I babysat my ass off to pay to go on a class trip to India for ten days. I was hooked. One year of being a checkout girl during the day and scut work as a kitchen hand in the evening, and I had enough saved to pack my bags and head to Europe.”
“The great Kiwi OE. It’s a classic.”
“Nothing like a little overseas experience to open a teenager’s eyes. The baby of the Ngata family grew up real fast on the dirty streets of Rome. And FYI, it was a pink bandanna, not red.” She took another bite of eggs, chewed, and felt a flutter in her stomach from his chuckle, which made her pause and then swallow harshly.
Attraction butterflies now, but in a few weeks—months?—there’d be a different kind of fluttering sensation inside her. A thought she imagined more maternal women would relish, but for her it conjured up an uncomfortable scene from the movie Alien.
“And when you came back to New Zealand, you weren’t ready to settle down?”
When are you going to grow up, Tui? When are you going to settle down? When are you going to accept the pigeonholed role you were born into? The last one wasn’t an actual memory of her parents’ boiled-over frustration, but it might as well have been.
“What’s your definition of settling down?” Her fork clanked loudly onto the china plate. “A nine-to-five job, six days a week? A nice house in a nice suburb with a nice significant other, a nice dog, and two-point-five nice kids?”
Kyle’s eyebrows shot up and he opened his mouth to speak, but Tui got in first.
“Or perhaps that only describes the pākehā version of settling down. Perhaps the stereotyped expectation for young Māori women is more accurate—pregnant young, no job, trying to make ends meet on a benefit, rented tiny apartment in the bad part of town, the boyfriend who knocked her up long gone. She isn’t settled, she’s trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and hopelessness.”
Heat punched into her face, spreading upward until she expected her hair to catch fire. Her right hand, still holding a knife, gripped the bone handle until her knuckles whitened. “Of her own making, of course.”
She snapped her mouth shut at the bewildered expression on Kyle’s
face. He looked like a man who’d opened a cookie jar and found a squirming nest of vipers inside—and in New Zealand where there were no snakes.
Crap. Her tongue had gone AWOL and revealed things she hadn’t planned to reveal. She held up a hand and added a self-depreciating chuckle. “Sorry, sorry. I’m jumping off my soapbox now. Ignore my ranting. Must be the hormones.”
“You don’t have to apologize.” But his gaze held a world of curiosity, and she slid her eyes from his.
“Anyway.” She took a bracing sip of the orange juice Kyle had poured her earlier. “I’ve done nothing but hurt my brain trying to figure out what my options are these past few days.”
He seemed to accept her subject change without argument and continued to eat his breakfast. “Let’s hear them,” he said.
Her stomach tensed, probably curdling the eggs swimming around in it. “Option A is choosing not to have the baby.” She watched as his jaw flexed and stilled before she continued. “But that’s my least preferred option.” She angled her chin. “So don’t ask me to—”
“I wouldn’t. Ever,” he said tightly.
When she nodded, he added, “And option B?”
“Have the baby.”
The implications of that coursed through her, making her light-headed for a few seconds. Get a grip, she ordered herself. “Then that option splits off into three more. Have the baby but give it up for closed adoption. Have the baby and whāngai it with someone in my extended family to raise. Or have the baby and raise it myself, hopefully without screwing him or her up too badly.” Her mouth twisted.
“There’s a fourth and fifth option,” he said. “We have the baby and find a way to co-parent him or her. Or we have the baby and raise him together.”
“Together, together? As in, you want to play happy families?”
“Who said anything about playing? We could be a family.”
“You’re delusional. We’re not two naïve teenagers who think marriage is a good solution for an accidental pregnancy.”
“I’m not suggesting we get married.”
“Great. Because as a proposal that sucked.” She held out a stop-sign palm. “And I’m not implying you should take another shot—I’m not marrying you.”
She received a deadpan stare.
“Noted,” he said. “But we’re two rational adults who could surely figure out a way for us to cohabit and raise a child.”
“Wow. I never would’ve guessed you had a diehard romantic trapped inside of you.” The roll of her eyes hopefully didn’t betray the prickly hurt curling around her heart. “Roommates who parent; sounds like a tacky reality TV show.”
His eyes narrowed and she squirmed a little bit on her chair, wondering if he could see beneath the snark.
“If I flat out asked you to move in with me,” he said, “to care for you during this pregnancy and be with you during and after the baby’s birth, to try and make it work as a family, I think we both know what your response would be.”
You’d run as far and as fast as you could in the opposite direction. His unspoken words fell to the table between them.
He wasn’t altogether wrong. She was a relationship flight risk, but this wasn’t a relationship. Was it?
Care for you. Be with you. Try and make it work.
It was too much. He was too much. But a sliver of her soul yearned for that kind of care, that kind of solidarity…just a little too much.
She met his gaze as steadily as she could. “I don’t want this baby.”
There. She’d said it. And the heavens didn’t split open and strike her with a lightning bolt.
Instead of looking shocked, Kyle gave her a small smile. “I know. Eat your breakfast.”
She picked up her knife and fork again, telling herself that she wasn’t doing it because he’d told her to—she’d recovered some of her appetite—and sliced a bacon rasher in half. Before she could slip the salty goodness into her mouth, the distant sound of a rumbling engine reached her ears. Isaac driving down from his place on the way to work.
Her heart zigzagged around her chest. God—what if her big brother decided to check in on her and saw Kyle’s truck parked outside? She froze, straining her ears to follow the sound of Isaac’s SUV. The rumble grew fainter, not louder, and she relaxed.
“Kyle?”
He looked up from his plate with a raised eyebrow.
“You can’t tell anyone yet,” she said.
“You haven’t told your family?”
She shook her head, guilt washing through her in the form of heated cheeks. “I can’t. Not until I figure out what I’m going to do, and anyway…” She’d been about to add a comment about it being safer to waiting to announce a pregnancy until after the twelfth week when miscarriage was less likely—then remembered.
Appetite gone again.
“And anyway?” he prompted.
“I don’t want my brothers going after you with a baseball bat.”
He chuckled. “I’m a long-distance runner. Think I can keep out of reach long enough to reason with them.”
Reason with a pissed-off Ngata male? Or worse, a determined-to-be-a-multi-mokopuna Ngata grandma? Her mother’s expectations came crashing down on her.
“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” she said, simply for something to say.
“Coffee?” he offered, stacking his empty juice glass on his cleared plate.
“Please.”
“I’ll make you a decaf.” Kyle rose and walked behind her, tugging playfully on a curl of her hair before busying himself in the kitchen. It was painfully domestic, painfully sweet, and painfully unsustainable. Kyle sharing her bed couldn’t happen again.
She stared down at her congealing breakfast, saw her family’s reaction to her pregnancy, and more devastating, their reaction when they found out the father was a Griffin.
Not enough decaffeinated coffee in the world for that.
Three days after he’d found out fatherhood was once again in his future, Kyle took the bull by the horns—so to speak—and rode out to meet Tui’s oldest brother. He’d contacted Isaac two days ago to arrange another trial run of the horse trek, and Isaac had freed up his morning in order to go. They planned to bring a couple of guinea pigs—guests—each, to mimic an actual tour experience.
Matt rode beside him on Red, while Matt’s volunteer firefighter mate, Jonno, bookended Kyle on the other side with a borrowed horse, Toby. Jonno was the perfect guinea pig for the trek since he’d never ridden before and looked about as comfortable on horseback as an actual guinea pig would. Fortunately, Toby was a sweet-natured, patient animal, brilliant with nervous beginners.
Kyle had organized to meet Isaac in front of a small fenced-off field near the bridge that spanned the slow-moving stream winding down to the bay. The field still had a For Lease sign staked beside the gate, which would disappear if the tour idea got off the ground. They’d need a neutral place for the tour participants to go through a basic safety briefing before they mounted the corralled horses, and the beach was only a short ride from there. The field was big enough for up to six horses to graze comfortably and already had a lockable corrugated iron shed close to the gate where equipment could be stored. Matt had put out subtle feelers about leasing a small group of animals and saddlery from another trekking company operating in the next town over, since working horses—like the ones his family and the Ngatas owned—were not well suited to inexperienced riders.
Things were starting to fall into place, assuming everything went to plan.
And how is getting the Ngatas’ only daughter in the family way going to help with that plan?
Kyle ignored the snide little voice in his head and nudged Ranger into a trot as they approached the field where five riders waited by the gate. Five. Three he didn’t recognize, Isaac’s bulk, which he did, and next to him—Tui. He swore and sat bolt upright, causing Ranger to slow to a walk. What the hell was she doing here on horseback? Heat crawled up his throat and made his face fee
l volcanic, concern erupting into irritation when Tui turned her sunglasses-covered eyes his way. Jaw set and jutting, she arched an eyebrow as he reined in Ranger and stopped in front of them.
“I didn’t realize your sister was joining us.” He directed the comment to Isaac but didn’t miss the curl of Tui’s lip.
Isaac lifted a ham hock of a shoulder. “She’s part of this, and she wanted to come. Deal with it.”
Obviously he’d translated Kyle’s clipped tone as annoyance that Tui was there, rather than annoyance that Tui was riding a horse in her condition. And, man, did it make him feel like an overprotective douche even thinking it.
But the existence of a baby—their baby—had flicked a switch on inside him, one he couldn’t easily turn off. Now that the initial shock had had time to settle into a kind of wondrous and terrified hopefulness, he wanted to cocoon Tui in cotton wool.
One glance at Tui’s glare—yeah, he could feel it stripping a layer off his skin even from behind her sunglasses—told him Tui wouldn’t stomach any sort of cocooning. His casual how’re you doing? texts to her bounced back to him with equally casual responses.
So he’d given her space. But that space had left him confused, frustrated, and more than a little ticked off at her, but mostly himself. Because he just couldn’t stop thinking about her. Not just the baby, but her.
“Not a problem.” Kyle angled his head toward his brother. “This is my brother, Matt”—then in the other direction—“and Matt’s mate, Jonno.”
He caught a side-eye full of the older man’s hero-worshiping gaze locked on Isaac, his mouth slack with admiration.
“Gidday,” Jonno managed then turned beet red to the roots of his clipped gray hair.
The guy almost as big as a rugby forward next to Isaac chuckled, sharing an amused glance with the former All Black.
“This is my wife, Natalie,” Isaac said with a nod toward the woman beside him. “The big guy on my dad’s horse is Henry,” Isaac said, “and the skinny white one pouting on Queenie is Glen Cooper.”
Tame Your Heart: A Small Town Romance (Bounty Bay Book 6) Page 17