“Where’s Kyle?”
No point beating around the bush when her voice still sounded as if someone had attacked her vocal cords with a wire brush. She’d been advised to keep her talking to a minimum, so she was saving all her words for when Kyle arrived.
Sam’s gaze sidled away from her. “He’s been flat-tack all day. Busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” Her brother chuckled—a fake chuckle—no doubt to cover up the ridiculous cliché that she’d never, ever heard him utter before.
“Doing?” she demanded.
If Sam hadn’t had the good sense to keep his distance from the bed, she would’ve grabbed him by the ear the way Ma sometimes still did.
“This and that.” His gaze zipped back to her, probably drawn there by the small growl of frustration slipping out between her clenched teeth. “Dealing with police formalities. Finding a lawyer. Taking care of his mum and brothers,” he added pointedly, knowing she wouldn’t be able to object about him looking after his family.
But all that it said to her was Kyle wasn’t coming anytime soon. He was avoiding her.
“Get him,” she said.
Sam’s eyebrows flew up. “What? After he dragged you out of a burning building, you want me to get him?”
“No, idiot,” she rasped. Was he deliberately being obtuse? “Go and get him. Bring him here.”
“Oh.” Her brother looked less than thrilled at the prospect.
“Please.” She didn’t want to beg, but she would. Since she wouldn’t get far from this hospital bed on her own steam. She pasted on her most charming, winsome smile. “Don’t make me yank this needle out of my hand and stab you with it, brother dearest.”
He snorted. “Good to see you’re feeling better. Yeah, yeah, I’ll go find him. Knock him out and drag him here if needs be.”
“That’s why I love you, Sammy,” she said to his retreating back.
He didn’t turn but cheerfully flipped her the bird. Ah, at least some things were comfortably predictable.
She pressed the bell to summon the minion Neil. After ratting her out, he at least owed her the decency to rustle up a comb and a fresh pair of pajamas to ensure she was looking her best when Kyle arrived.
Kyle strode into the hospital, refusing to glance back at Sam’s truck idling in the drop-off zone as if ensuring that Kyle actually made it into the hospital and didn’t bolt like a startled rabbit. He grimaced, setting his jaw against the spasm of pain as he bent slightly to hit the elevator button. He’d pulled or strained something either before, during, or after getting Tui to safety, and the gash on his leg ached with every step—eleven stitches were a constant reminder. A good reminder, he told himself as the elevator dinged and the doors opened. A good reminder with a good outcome. Tui was safe. Their baby was safe.
No thanks to his brother.
God, he felt sick. The kind of sweaty, feverish sick that convinced you death was only minutes away. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t been able to even think of anything other than grief and anger and the overwhelming jagged rock in his throat at the thought of how close he’d come to losing everything he loved.
He stabbed the button for the second floor and the elevator doors clanked shut. Like dungeon doors slamming, locking away the anger, confusion, and grief of Dave’s betrayal. He couldn’t do what he had to do thinking about his younger brother. He’d been wrestling with himself all morning, torn between his need to wrap Tui in his arms and his marrow-deep guilt and grief over what had happened. Then Sam tracked him down and all but manhandled him into his ute, putting an end to his soul-searching.
“She needs you,” Sam’d said. “You owe her that much.”
He owed her more than just a paltry bedside visit with a limp bouquet of flowers he’d picked up at a convenience store. He tugged his button-down shirt collar away from his throat, feeling it constrict tighter and tighter as the elevator rose upward. Hell, had budget cuts caused the hospital to kill their air conditioners? Beads of sweat prickled along his hairline.
The elevator doors peeled open to a blank wall with the helpful numeral 2 painted on it. He stepped out, turned right with almost military precision, and froze. The corridor leading to the ward Tui was in stretched out like something in a fun house, and his feet rebelled against his brain’s orders to start walking down it.
He couldn’t do this.
He had to do this.
“You must be the mysterious Kyle.”
A male voice came closer from his left. He slanted a glance at the scrub-wearing, harried-looking nurse approaching him.
“About time,” the man said. “We were about to wheel your lady out around the streets of Bounty Bay looking for you.”
“Oh.” Kyle couldn’t think of a witty response, so he pressed his lips together.
“This way.” The man angled his head expectantly toward the ward. “Room seven. She’s waiting for you.”
Since he’d look like a complete moron if he made a break for the emergency stairs, Kyle had no choice but to trail after the nurse, who paused outside the marked room. He clapped Kyle on the shoulder, murmured, “Best of luck, buddy,” and continued on to the nurses’ station.
Hell. He’d need all the luck coming his way to get through the next few minutes. Kyle sucked in a lungful of antiseptic-smelling hospital air, swiped the back of his hand across his sweaty forehead, and opened the door.
Late afternoon sunshine speared through the room’s big windows, making the white hospital linen a bright contrast to the spill of Tui’s dark hair spread over the pillow. In an anticlimactic moment, he saw that she was asleep. Curled on her side away from the window, one hand tucked under her cheek, the other drawn around her stomach.
He walked as lightly as he could to the bed, glancing at the florist shop array of flowers already filling the room, a clear indication of the many visitors she must’ve had today. Good. She was well loved, would be well supported. He tossed the flowers he’d brought onto the wheeled bedside tray and eased himself down into the chair beside the bed.
His sea witch. So damned beautiful, so much of everything he’d ever wanted. Someone he could laugh with, fight with, make love with, make a life with.
Once, anyway. Not anymore.
“Tui.” He leaned forward, stroking the back of his fingers down the soft skin of her forearm. The movement shifted his bandaged thigh against the hard chair, sending a hot, stinging zap radiating outward from his wound.
Remember why you’re here.
Dark lashes fluttered, slitted open, then widened a fraction once recognition began to sink in. Before she’d even fully woken, a huge smile appeared on her lush mouth. “Hey.”
Her voice conjured up images of a pack-a-day blues singer, but not in a sexy way. In a dying-of-emphysema way. It hurt him on a cellular level that the buck stopped with him. He’d put a target on her back.
“Hey, yourself,” he said. Stupidly.
She wriggled upright, the sheet falling away to reveal one of the tank tops she often wore as pajamas, the top gaping open to a perfect view of her perfect cleavage. He lurched out of the chair and spun around to the nightstand where a jug of water and a glass sat.
“Water?”
She nodded.
He poured a glass, hoping that the tremor in his hands wouldn’t make him drop the damn thing. After passing it to her, he sat, surreptitiously pushing the chair back a few inches so he wasn’t close enough to touch her. If he touched her, it was game over.
She sipped then set the unfinished glass onto the bed tray. “My voice won’t last long,” she said, “so I’ll just say what I need to say.” She pinned him with a stare that brooked no argument. She’d obviously had time today to think through what she wanted to get off her chest. Damn, but a part of him hoped she’d let him off easy by telling him and his whole screwed-up family to go to hell.
“When I was trying to get out of the room, I got lost. Disorientated and turned around by the smoke and the dark,
I ended up by the closet instead of the door. I nearly gave up.” She encircled a wrist with her other hand, twisting it as if remembering how she was bound.
His leg throbbed in time to his heartbeat. “I’m glad you didn’t,” he managed to say.
She gifted him with a glimmer of a smile. “I’m no quitter.” The smile vanished as soon as it reached the corner of her mouth. “But I would’ve died if you hadn’t found me when you did. Thanks for that, by the way.”
“You’re welcome.” He kept his voice light, even as darkness blacker than the smoke that had choked Tui’s old bedroom seeped into his soul.
“I kept going,” she continued, her dark eyes fixed on his, “because I realized it wasn’t about me anymore. I wasn’t all about me anymore, which probably doesn’t make much sense. There’s a we now. You and our baby”—her palm, unconsciously or otherwise went back to her stomach—“everything I never knew I wanted or needed so deeply.”
Her description, so close to his own thoughts earlier, pierced like poison-tipped arrows. “Tui—”
She shook her head. “Let me finish.”
By now her voice had turned into a hoarse whisper, and it must’ve hurt like a bastard. But the look on her face told him she was determined to have her say, and she’d tackle him if he tried to leave the room without hearing it.
So he’d hear it. It’d be his punishment.
“Go on, then,” he said.
“I’ve lived my life wanting to have no regrets at the end of it. Try anything once, that’s me. Except falling in love so deeply that it would change everything I believed about myself and shine an unflinching light on who I’d allowed myself to become. That kind of love was too damn risky. I was too cowardly to tell you I loved you, too, and that would’ve been my biggest regret if you hadn’t pulled me out of the fire.”
She held up a wait-a-sec finger and took another long sip of water. Kyle’s heart slammed so hard and fast in his chest he expected the room’s softly beeping monitors to go haywire at the disturbance. With what he could only describe as a shy smile, Tui slanted him a glance under her lashes and set the glass down again.
“I never wanted a family,” she continued, “because I was certain I’d turn into that poor, pitied woman that’s trapped a man via fatherhood when he’s already got one foot out the door. You’ve shown me over and over that you’re not that guy. That you’re not going to run. That you love me. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me because, God, I am so head-over-heels in love with you, too.” Her smile slipped a little when he didn’t respond, and she tilted her head. “Ah, that’s not the drugs talking, you know. I mean it.”
He gathered himself for a beat, pressing his injured leg down on the hard chair, needing the physical pain to focus on rather than the speech he’d tried unsuccessfully to organize into coherency on the way there. “I’m going back to Auckland in a few days.”
“Oh. Of course. You’d have neglected your work all these weeks.” Her tone said she had no idea where he was going with this.
He had neglected his work but found he didn’t give much of a crap about it at the moment. “I’m going alone.”
A cute duo of lines appeared between her eyebrows.
“I’m not coming back to Bounty Bay for a while—”
“I can drive down. It’s only five hours, six if I’m towing my bike.” The frown lines deepened. “Wait a minute. Crap. Guess the bike’s gone as well as everything else in Dad’s garage.” She sighed.
It was. He’d been out to the Ngatas’ property this morning, surveying the damage and talking to Pete. Apologizing profusely on Dave’s behalf.
“No, you’re not driving down.”
Something in his voice made her sit straighter against the pillows, her chin jutting out. “You want me to fly?” The flash of hurt in her gaze told him she knew that wasn’t what he meant but that she wasn’t ready to accept it.
“No.” He gripped the chair arm until his knuckles turned white. His stomach roiled and the fleeting thought that this was akin to what Tui suffered with morning sickness made him want to rip the chair arm off. “I don’t want you to come to Auckland at all. I’ll support you and our child financially, but you’re right, we won’t work. Not after all my family has done to yours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“David,” he said, his brother’s name bitter on his tongue. “He’s confessed to everything, including the spate of unexplained arsons over the past seventeen years.” He swallowed past a dust-dry lump in his throat. “And he admitted that when he was sixteen he started the fire that killed our uncle.”
“He started it? Why?”
“Compulsion, obsession, grief and anger over Dad’s death, I don’t know.” Kyle scraped a hand over his face, shuddering as he recalled Dave’s ranting recollection of all his grievances against the world when he’d been allowed a short conversation with him earlier.
Her hands flew to cover her mouth for a moment. “Oh, Kyle. I’m so sorry…”
The immediate appearance of Tui’s wonderful empathetic heart even though she was confused and hurt nearly undid his resolve. But giving in to the overwhelming love he felt for her would be selfish. To put her and their child in the crosshairs of vicious small-town gossip every time the three of them were seen in public—he just couldn’t do it.
His presence in their lives would be a constant reminder of what Dave had done to her family and their community, and he’d seen firsthand how the fallout of years of gossipy speculation could ruin lives. That was not a legacy he wanted for his child or the woman he loved. She deserved better.
“I’m sorry I’m not the man you thought I was, and I can’t be the man you deserve.” His voice came out clipped and brittle, like the jagged shards of glass that had sliced through his flesh.
Only this hurt way more than the cuts to his hands and leg.
This sliced all the way to the bone.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispered. “You can’t.”
“I’ll set up a bank account for you and the baby, and another separate one for his or her education. But if you need anything else…”
A small, abrupt huff came from her nose as she wrapped her arms around herself. “Other than you, obviously.”
“Yes. Other than me. Trust me, it’s better this way.” He took a step backward, bracing for her to unleash her righteous fury.
Instead she dismissed him with a flat stare. “I did trust you.”
Her gaze flicked down to the rapidly wilting bouquet on the table, then she turned her head toward the windows.
“Thanks for the flowers. Could you ask the nurse to bring in a vase on your way out? They’re dying.”
As was he.
“Sure,” he said and walked out of her room, the image of the single tear sliding down her cheek forever branding itself on his heart.
Chapter 23
Tui played with her food, pretending to eat, while everyone pretended not to notice.
She, along with her parents and her brothers and their families, gathered at Isaac and Nat’s house for the first family dinner since Tui was discharged from the hospital two days ago. Conversation flowed around her, skipping from Pete and Ariana’s imminent move into the cottage while rebuilding of the main house took place, to Vee and Nat’s new summer collection of beachwear hitting the shelves of Bountiful, to an update on the pool of the day and time Vee and Sam’s baby would arrive.
She let it wash over her, while making a monumental effort to keep her interested smile locked in place as everyone carefully avoided mentioning Kyle’s name. Tui surreptitiously checked her watch, calculating how much time remained before making an excuse to go back to Allison’s spare room would be acceptable. Her mother had packed up her stuff—after a long argument, with Tui insisting her parents move into the cottage—and her brothers had dropped it off, along with orders, apparently, for Allison to treat her friend with kid gloves.
The buzz of the doorbell interru
pted Sam’s fascinating recount of the previous weekend of Idiots Who Swam Outside the Surf-Lifesaver Flags and Nearly Drowned.
“I’ll get it.” Tui’s chair screeched on the hardwood floor as she quickly stood. Any excuse to get away from the frequent pitying glances slanted in her direction.
She opened Isaac’s front door to Netta Griffin, with Matt and Eric slouched a few steps behind her. Tui flinched backward a fraction, her heart giving one hard wallop against her ribs. Kyle’s mother looked as if she’d aged a decade since Tui had seen her last. She seemed to have shrunk in size, as if her body was devouring itself from the inside out. Dark puffy bags had appeared under her bloodshot eyes, and the lines framing her downturned mouth could be mistaken for shallow canyons.
“I hope you’re feeling better.” Netta thrust out her arms and Tui saw she’d brought a huge plastic container of cookies. “I did some baking.”
“Ah, thanks.” Tui took the container, briefly wondering if they were laced with an untraceable poison.
“Chocolate chunks with oats and raisins,” Netta continued. “I used two kinds of chocolate because I wasn’t sure if you preferred white or dark, and the trick to making them so chewy is to add—”
“Mum!” Eric said from behind her. “She doesn’t care about what’s in your damn cookies.” His gaze snapped up to hers, but for once there was no animosity in his eyes. “We’ve come to speak to your family, if they’ll spare us a few minutes.”
“Oh. I, ah—” She glanced over her shoulder, her stomach suddenly in knots.
“We’re not here to make more problems for you, Tui.” Matt, who’d been staring intently at his folded arms since she’d opened the door, finally looked up. “Please,” he said, and the look he sent over his mother’s shoulder told Tui what it was costing the three of them to come here.
Into the jaws of the dragon, so to speak.
So she nodded and stepped aside. “Come in, then.”
They followed her back along the hallway to the living room, the conversation faltering then dying completely once each member of Tui’s family recognized their uninvited guests. But both her ma and dad rose to their feet and offered Netta a seat on the three-seater couch. Ma, unable to stop being a hostess even with people she didn’t like, offered them a glass of wine or beer. Both Matt and Eric politely declined, but Netta’s fists clenched in her lap as she met Ariana’s gaze.
Tame Your Heart: A Small Town Romance (Bounty Bay Book 6) Page 30