“Coming in?” she shouted. “The water’s lovely.”
“Liar,” he called back, and her laughter skimmed across the lake like a bird gliding on the wind currents.
“Refreshing, then.”
She trod water in place, watching with a cocked head, issuing a silent challenge. The molecules of hydrogen and oxygen sizzled between them, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to see steam rising from the water like one of New Zealand’s famous thermal pools.
“What are you waiting for?” She toyed with a strand of hair that’d caught on her lip. “Are you designing a bridge to reach me?”
“Something like that.” Beams and arches and cantilevers were the last things on his mind, but he did want to reach her—both literally and metaphorically. If he could reach her, reach past the barriers that kept a large part of her guarded, maybe this chemistry could be something more.
“Rise and shine, sunshine—oh, wait”—her eyes crinkled in amusement—“you’ve already risen.”
He slanted a crooked smile her way and unzipped his shorts, taking care not to catch his, uh, morning glory in the metal teeth. He muttered, “Not for much longer.”
Stepping out of the shorts, he strode ankle deep into the water, which was, as expected, at a testicle-retreating temperature.
“This is insane.” He waded deeper, resisting the urge to protectively cup his junk—not that it would help much once the water—holy crap! A ripple licked at his balls and he gritted his teeth. “Why are you making me do this again?”
She glided toward him but remained far enough away that he’d no choice but to swim if he wanted to reach her. “I’m not making you do anything.”
True. But at the same time, not true. She was making him do and feel things he hadn’t done or felt in a long time. And by make, he meant that he didn’t want to take ownership of those feelings, so it suited him to blame her.
It’s your fault, Tui Ngata, that I’m falling in love with you.
Damn. Talk about ripping the scab off a wound or being smacked in the face with a two-by-four.
The admission slammed into him, weakening his leg muscles so that he crumpled more than dove into the lake. The rush of icy bubbles assassinating every nook and cranny of his body should’ve snapped him out of it. Should’ve cleared his head as he pulled himself through the clear water toward Tui’s long limbs, pale in the ghostly morning light, swaying as she lazily kicked. Should’ve crystallized his resolve to convince her to keep the baby growing inside her instead of shattering it with the knowledge that now it wasn’t just about her pregnancy. Now it was about wanting to keep her.
He surfaced, breathed in a gulp of air, but still felt as if he were drowning. He opened his eyes to her white crescent smile, followed by a plume of water splattering across his face. He swiped water from his cheeks, only to receive another faceful of lake water.
“You’re in so much trouble,” he said.
And oh God, so am I.
Kyle dove and grabbed an ankle, tugging her under. Slippery as an eel, she escaped from his grasp. While he might not be as comfortable in the water as she, he had determination and, okay, a little bit of horniness on his side. He latched an arm around her waist, pulling her tight against him as they rose spluttering to the surface.
“Not fair!”
He towed her backward until he found his feet on the sandy bottom. “Life isn’t fair.”
Neither was wanting to wrap her up in his arms and pretend it was. If life was fair, the abyss that threatened to divide them wouldn’t be an issue. If life was fair, she’d be falling in love with him, too.
She twisted, then sleek limbs twined around him—arms locked around his neck, legs around his hips, daring him with her fierce gaze to make the first move. One thing marriage had taught him: in a standoff, somebody had to tackle the hard stuff.
“Hey,” he said, running his hands up her sleek skin. His fingers fisted around a hank of dark hair and he gently tugged her head back, exposing her throat.
He kissed the throbbing pulse at the base of her neck, her skin, cool as marble, trembling against his lips. Tracking kisses up to her jaw, he breathed her in. Felt the grip of her thighs tighten around his hips, felt himself concede defeat.
“Tui, I…” Whispered words pressed to the shell of her ear.
The shuddery gasps she’d been taking abruptly halted and she froze, as still and silent as the lake stretching out around them. He swallowed hard, once, twice—a battle between heart and brain taking place inside him to find the right way to express himself without laying all his cards on the table.
Tui’s chin dipped down and she pulled back, arms unwrapping from his neck to brace against his chest. He saw it then, in her wary gaze—the gleam of fight or flight flaring in her eyes. Like the bird she was named after, she was bold enough to charm you from a distance with her siren song, but get too close, too fast, and self-protection would force her wings into action. The small bird with the big heart didn’t have a strong beak or sharp talons to defend itself, so it would flee.
Tui, he suspected, was more like her namesake than she’d care to admit.
So he slid his emotions back into a vault and smiled an easy smile at her. “I want to spend more time with you. Like this.”
The forearms braced on his chest slid to either side, replaced by the press of her body. She relaxed in increments, her breasts mushing up against his pecs, nipples like tiny darts jutting into his skin.
“Naked in a freezing cold lake?”
The flight urge was draining out of her gaze, so he mentally congratulated himself on his good judgment. Yeah, he was falling for Tui, but he wouldn’t risk scaring her away before they were solidly on the same page.
He cupped the back of her neck and drew her even closer. “I was meaning us getting to know each other a bit better. But I can do naked and freezing my nuts off if that’s what it takes.”
She snorted, narrowing her eyes. “You want to get to know me better? Like what my favorite color is or why I smacked Oliver Cross upside the head in kindergarten?”
“All of it.” He darted in and stole a kiss. “The good, the bad, the current address of Oliver Cross so I can teach him a lesson about not trying to kiss my woman.”
That surprised a laugh out of her. “How did you know he tried to kiss me?”
“Because any male within a six-foot radius of you wants to kiss you.”
He went to kiss her again but she was faster, clapping a palm over his mouth. With their gazes locked, heat pooling between them, she slid her hand away and touched her lips to his.
“What if we don’t like what we find out?” she whispered against his mouth.
“What if we do?” he countered. “What if we like it a lot?”
A sharp inhale. A shuddery sigh.
“Kyle.”
The way his name fell from her lips coiled around his gut and yanked tight. He took her mouth in a savage kiss that threatened to pull him down into the abyss. If he fell, would she follow him? Or would she cling to the abyss edge, convincing herself that what they had was fleeting, superficial?
Her fingernails dug into the tense muscles spanning his shoulder blades and a moan slipped from her mouth into his with a flick of her tongue. She kissed him back with a ferocity that made him ache, made him hope, then made him taste the bitter reality that liking might not be enough glue to hold them together. That their red-hot chemistry in bed and the trust slowly spanning their differences might not be enough.
But even with this doubt burning like acid inside him, he couldn’t resist making love to her again. Settling her more firmly into his arms, Kyle strode out of the lake.
Reality intruded over breakfast in bed. Kyle’s phone buzzed from the nightstand, and he looked at Tui as if to ask permission to break the fragile bubble woven around themselves that morning. The thing with bubbles was that they never lasted. That was what made them so special.
She licked a smear of butter off
her fingertips from the toast he’d made them and tilted her head. “Early caller. Must be important.”
He glanced at the screen. And his forehead creased. “It’s Matt.”
“So take the call.”
He did, with a rough, “What’s up?”
A one-sided conversation took place in the space of less than a minute.
“What do you mean he’s not there?…Did you check the closet in my room? He thinks no one can see him coiled up like a rattlesnake behind my boots…What the hell? No, I didn’t leave the damn bathroom window open…Now you’re being ridiculous…He’ll come back when he’s hungry…Okay, okay, I’ll be there in an hour.”
Kyle tapped his finger on the screen and tossed the phone onto the nightstand. He flopped back onto the bed, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes with a groan.
“Beaker got out?”
It was crazy, but her heart gave a little lurch at the thought of the fat ginger cat lost in the miles of dense bush around the Griffins’ land.
“Yeah. I asked Matt to go up yesterday and this morning to feed him. Sometime between then and now, Beaker made his escape.”
“Bathroom window?”
“Apparently.” Kyle’s nose crinkled. “But I swear the place was locked up tight. Matt reckons it’s Griff’s ghost who let him out.”
“Right.” Tui stretched out next to him, setting a palm on his flat stomach. “Because your grandfather had an aversion to cats?”
He chuckled. “No. Just some odd things that have happened over the last few weeks.”
“Odd things?”
“Finding the fridge switched off and everything in the freezer defrosted. Notes I’d jotted down for a client disappearing from the kitchen table. The creepy feeling of being watched on a couple of occasions.” He dropped his hands from his face and draped one across her pillow to stroke her hair. “But that was likely the possum who’s taken to sitting on the back porch and eyeballing Beaker through the glass.”
“It sounds more like absentmindedness than a ghost in residence.” She rose up on an elbow, dropped a quick tormenting kiss on his mouth, and sat up, wriggling across the mussed sheets when he reached for her.
He shot her a come back here, baby smile and crooked a finger. She felt the pull deep inside her and nearly capitulated. Then she remembered the genuine concern in Kyle’s voice as he spoke to his brother.
“Nuh-uh. This is not the time to get distracted. You’ve got to be a good cat daddy and go find Beaker.”
“I am not a cat daddy.” He grumbled but sat up and swung his legs off the bed.
The muscular expanse of his back was a temptation she couldn’t resist. She scooted back across the sheet and, on her knees, draped herself over him, pressing her lips against the scruff on his jaw.
“If Beaker isn’t gouging a hole in your wall to get back inside the house when we get back, I’ll help you look for him.”
His chin jerked toward her. “You’re going to traipse around the bush with me looking for a bad-tempered cat?”
“I am. Because unlike me, Beaker doesn’t appreciate your manly charms.” She caught his chin in her hand and lightly nipped his earlobe. “To be continued.”
Kyle made a strained sound, reaching behind him to squeeze her butt. “Maybe Beaker isn’t as bad a wingman as I first thought.”
Two hours later, covered in sweat and scratches and mosquito bites, Kyle wasn’t speaking so highly of his runaway feline.
Neither was she.
Surrounded by dense bush, Tui’s voice had grown hoarse from shouting Beaker’s name. She took another sip of water, at the same time murdering a mosquito who landed on her arm. A short distance from her, resting against the trunk of a mature kauri tree, Kyle did the same. Neither of them wanted to admit that it really was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
“Do you even know where we are?” she asked. “Didn’t we skirt around that patch of lawyer vine before?” She pulled a face at the narrow branches tipped with tiny sharp barbs.
“I know exactly where we are.” Kyle tucked his water bottle back into the knapsack he carried and sauntered over to collect hers. He shot her a wry smile as he zipped up the knapsack. “Give or take a tree or two.”
She tapped a finger on his forehead. “Three-D map imaging in there, right?”
“That’s the one. We’ll head over this ridge and circle back around. We’ve covered a lot of ground this afternoon, but I don’t think he would have gone farther than this.”
Personally, Tui wondered how the plump animal could’ve made it this far. But she could see the tension in Kyle’s jaw wire tighter the more distance they covered without finding the cat.
“Sure. But this time I go in front. I’m sick of getting hit in the face with low-hanging branches.”
Kyle rolled his eyes and grinned. “One time,” he said. “I let a branch go one time, and you never let me hear the end of it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She sauntered past him, patting him on the cheek. His butt cheek, that was.
At his smoky bark of laughter, a warm fuzzy of relief swept through her. She hated that he was hurting, even a little bit, even over a damn cat.
They set off again, with her in the lead even though she had little of Kyle’s sense of direction. She wasn’t concerned, because she had faith that he wouldn’t allow her to stray into any danger. Thigh muscles complaining, Tui reached the top of the ridge.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted Beaker’s name.
A faint cry came from the valley below. It could’ve been one of the many bird species that called the thick native bush home, or it could’ve been a small, frightened meow. Without waiting for Kyle to catch up, Tui plunged down the steep ridge. Holding onto whatever branches and exposed roots she could find, she stumble-jumped down the steepest bits until the land evened out. Behind her from Kyle came frustrated panted orders to slow the hell down.
“Beaker,” she hollered.
This time she was a hundred percent certain she heard a pitiful meow coming from somewhere to her left. She didn’t hesitate, plowing through scrub and whipping branches to burst into a large clearing.
“Beaker?” Her gaze skimmed over the tangle of spindly young mānuka trees all vying for the sun and the ever-present gorse, which was an introduced species of a thorny, fast-growing bush almost impossible to eradicate.
A flash of movement high in the branches of a cabbage tree caught her attention. There he was.
“Found him,” she called over her shoulder and navigated a path through the scrub to the base of the tree.
Two wide green eyes stared down at her between the spike-leaved branches, followed by another pitiful howl. Relief, hot and sharp, swept through her at the sight of the ginger cat crouched on a high branch.
“You got yourself up there, sweetie. Pretty sure you’re savvy enough to figure out a way down.”
She heard the rustle of shrubs being shoved aside and Kyle’s heavier footfalls as he came to stand beside her. She shot a glance at him, expecting to see an ear-to-ear grin on his face now that they’d finally located the cat. Instead his features looked chipped from granite, his mouth a hard slash, his lips narrow.
“Don’t be mad at him,” she said. “At least he’s safe.”
“I’m not mad.” Each word fell like stone chips from his mouth, as if he’d been cracking boulders between his teeth.
“What’s wrong?”
For a moment he said nothing, and the only sounds around them were the buzz of insects, the wind shaking millions of leaves, and Beaker’s high-pitched demands for rescue.
“It’s this place.”
Tui slid a side-eye around the clearing, which to her understanding was the same as every other clearing they’d come across while hiking. Overgrown in patches, other parts trampled by roaming cattle. It was new growth bush, though, missing the massive old kauri, rimu, and tōtara trees that hadn’t avoided destruction from the wildfire.
&n
bsp; A kernel of unease unfurled in her gut. “What about this place?”
Kyle’s flat gaze met hers for a moment, then he glanced away. “Over here.”
He walked a short distance away from the cabbage tree, paused, scanned the bush line, and then headed back the way they’d come, veering off a little to the left. He broke off a length of a dead branch and used it to poke aside a thorny clump of gorse, revealing a stone marker embedded in the ground.
Ross Watersford was engraved on the cross-shaped marker. Oh God. This was the spot where Kyle’s uncle was caught unaware by the fire? Goose bumps pebbled painfully over her arms, and she wrapped them around herself, trying to prevent her whole body from shuddering. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t block out the imagined images from that night.
The roar of flames devouring tinder-dry trees, the crack of branches falling, the dense smoke, the unimaginable searing heat. Had Ross known the fire was bearing down on him? Had he woken confused and alone and choking for fresh air? Did he struggle out of a sleeping bag in a makeshift shelter, try to escape the smoke and flames, but become trapped with thousands of dollars’ worth of weed growing in a camouflaged wire cage? Had he cried out for help?
These kinds of thoughts had given her nightmares for weeks after the fire, even though she’d never met Kyle’s uncle. He’d been a blurry photo in a newspaper article, a once-removed tragedy that soon faded with the never-ending distractions of school and her social life.
But to Kyle…
Tui laced her fingers with his and leaned into him. “I’m sorry.”
He dropped the stick, the thorny branches swinging back into place, once again covering the marker. “He was kind to us, in his own way, after my dad died.” His mouth twisted. “Though Mum didn’t see it as a kindness when she once caught her brother offering Dave and I some of his weed to take the edge off.”
“Ah,” she said with a quiet chuckle. “He was that kind of uncle. I’ve got one of those, too.”
Kyle tugged her away from the marker and led her back toward Beaker, who glared at them both from his position of superiority.
Tame Your Heart: A Small Town Romance (Bounty Bay Book 6) Page 23