by Jude Knight
They sat in peaceful silence, sipping their wine and nibbling on cake, enjoying the peace at day’s end. Ethan was the first to speak into the quiet. “Do I really have to drink Santa’s milk?” he asked, plaintively. Claudia laughed. He’d argued for beer in the small snack left by the window, since the studio didn’t have a chimney. Abbie insisted that Santa could not drink and drive, so milk it was. And cheese with crackers as a healthy snack, and grass for the reindeer.
She set her glass to one side. “Time to fill her stocking.” It was hanging from the back of a chair by the window, another legacy from grandma, lovingly quilted. She fetched the box from under her bed, and Ethan brought a few more bags and packages out of the saddle bags he’d hung by his jacket.
He’d overdone it again, and she hadn’t the heart to quarrel with him about it. She sipped her wine, laughing at him as he packed and repacked, trying to fit everything in. “We’ll take the chair into her room,” she suggested at last. “Stack the books on the chair. The game, too, and put the fruit and drink next to them. Everything else should go in then.”
In Abbie’s room, Boss looked up from her place in Edward’s box. Edward slept on. After an initial difference of opinion, the cat and the rabbit were fast friends, and the cat had doubled her circle of humans-who-may-touch-me to include Abbie. She even tolerated Claudia, when she was in the mood.
Ethan finished arranging the chair so it would be the first thing Abbie saw when she woke, and spoke to Boss. “You and I had better be on our way, girl. We’ll be making an early start tomorrow.” He cast one longing glance at the child sprawled on the bed, then moved to pick up the cat.
“Stay.” Claudia spoke before she thought, then amended the words as hope and desire blossomed in his eyes. “On the couch. It’s too early for...” Abbie stirred, and Claudia put a finger to her mouth and gestured for Ethan to follow her.
In the next room, she reaffirmed her invitation. “Stay the night, Ethan, so you’re here when Abbie wakes up in the morning.”
He examined her face carefully, as if afraid the treat would be snatched away. “I’ll shoot home and get some clothes and stuff. Are you sure it’s okay? No funny business, I promise.”
That was a disappointment. Or it would be if Claudia didn’t believe he’d welcome the chance to rescind that last promise. Not that she planned to let him into her bed, but he hadn’t even tried to kiss her, and it was time he did. She could see from his eyes, a dozen times a day, that he thought of it.
In the fifteen minutes he was gone, she made up a bed on the couch. It was a bit short, but he’d manage. “That’ll be perfect,” he said, when he came back in the door. He’d showered and changed, and smelt deliciously of herb-scented soap.
Not quite perfect. But how did she get him to kiss her? Did she just walk up and take charge? And if she did, would he assume she was offering more than she was ready for?
“Ethan...” she began, just as he said, “Claudia...”
She waved for him to go first, and he took a small package from his pocket. “I didn’t mean to give this to you yet, but...” He handed it over; a jewellers’ ring box. “There’s a chain you can wear it on if you don’t want to... or you could wear it on your right hand. It’s a gift, Abbie, not a claim. And I’m not asking the question that goes with it. Not yet. Not till you have a chance to know you can trust me. Slow and steady wins the race.”
The ring was beautiful; a cluster of tiny diamonds in the shape a love heart, set on an incised gold band. Ethan was still talking — babbling, even, as he did when he was nervous. “If you don’t like it, we can change it. I wanted to buy the most expensive one in the shop but I was afraid you wouldn’t take it. You will take it, won’t you? No strings attached?” His brows drew together over anxious eyes as he used a thumb to wipe away the tear that escaped from one of her eyes.
She had to swallow twice before she could speak, but she smiled and nodded to reassure him while he waited for her answer. “I will wear it,” she said, suiting words to action and — after a moment’s hesitation — putting it on her right ring finger. Or attempting to. It stuck on the knuckle. “It’s a plot,” she joked.
“We can have it resized.”
She slid it onto the ring finger of the other hand, where it fit perfectly, and held it out to admire it before warning him. “Just for tonight. I’ll wear it on the chain when we go out tomorrow.”
“You give me hope, Claudia. Is that what you intend?”
She ducked her head, the mingled longing and need in his eyes setting her cheeks aflame as her own body responded to his. Perhaps a kiss would not be a good idea, after all.
“I’m sorry. I’ve pushed too hard, haven’t I?” Ethan sighed, then tried to lighten the mood. “I keep trying to be the tortoise but the hare breaks through.” He turned away to hide his expression, running a contemplative finger along one of the branches of the Jesse Tree.
The joke made a nonsense of her doubts. This was the Ethan she’d fallen in love with, but grown and matured into a better man than she had known enough to want. He wouldn’t press her, so she needed to be brave; to reach out for what she wanted.
“Abbie has her Christmas wish, Ethan. But I have a wish, too, and you’re the only one who can give it to me.”
“Anything,” he replied, the words a vow, his back stiffening as if he expected a blow.
“Kiss me, Ethan. I have missed your kisses.”
She had one moment to see his face, ablaze with love and joy, and then he was on her, and the kiss was everything she remembered and more. Her last rational thought was that she’d wasted her time making up the bed on the couch. Ethan was home, and so was she.
* * *
THE END
Part V
Beached
The truth will wash away her coastal paradise…
Grieving for the grandparents who raised her and still bruised from betrayals in New York City, Nikki Watson returns to her childhood home in Valentine Bay.
Zee Henderson has built a new life in New Zealand: friends, a job he enjoys and respect he earned for himself, without the family name and money he left behind.
The attraction between Nikki and Zee flames into passion, until Zee’s past arrives on their doorstep and washes away their coastal paradise.
1
The road home wound through the hills until the sudden last corner before the coast. Nikki had known the way by heart since she was a small girl, returning from a shopping expedition or a sports event.
In recent years, the little fishing settlement had been discovered by weekenders. Land Transport New Zealand had been hard at work during Nikki’s decade overseas, widening and straightening, cutting through slopes and filling hollows. The first time she’d driven out here a few months ago, the alterations made it unfamiliar.
But she’d been twice more, checking on the beach house for Gran and Poppa, and the landmarks beyond the road remained the same. A clump of native bush still screened Murphy’s Pond, a favourite summer swimming hole. They’d built a lookout with a picnic spot over Pleasant Valley, but the view of farmland, bush, river, and hills remained as beautiful as ever, and the hill known as Two Heads was still as impressive, even if an aesthetically-challenged cretin had somehow obtained permission to quarry on one side.
The road dropped down again from the hillside into the river flats. This time, the long row of massive willows at the river’s edge signalled the difference, growing steadily smaller as they approached the tidal reaches. No more hills, and in a moment, she would have her first glimpse of the sea.
“There, Nikki,” Poppa used to say as they rounded that last corner, “the sea. Nothing else between us and South America.”
The numbness lifted for a moment, pierced by a shaft of pure joy. The wall between Nikki and her feelings had helped when the second funeral followed only a week after the first, and through all the aftermath of sorting the estate. She would not need it where she was going. She could mourn Gran and P
oppa properly in the lands of her childhood: not the diminished frail pair she had nursed and cared for these past few months, but the vigorous couple of twenty and thirty years ago; the only parents she had known or needed.
The car, Poppa’s little hybrid, seemed as eager as she to eat up the last five miles, gaining speed on the curves around the little coves and over the small promontories between her and Valentine Bay. Gran and Poppa had left most of their estate to be split between their three grandchildren—her and the half-siblings she barely knew. But the beach house at Valentine Bay was left to her alone, and the decision to keep it had never needed to be made. She had been born there; had spent her early years in that community; had left only for high school in Barnsley, the regional hub the locals called ‘Town’, and later for university in the United States. The beach house was home.
Beks, her dearest friend from school and a faithful correspondent in all the years away, had promised to air the place and make up a bed with fresh sheets. She would undoubtedly stock the cupboards, too, though she’d insisted that Nikki join her and her family for a meal tonight. Nikki found she was looking forward to it. Beks had married her high-school sweetheart, and she and Dave had both known Gran and Poppa.
She began to hum the song Gran always sang as they finished this last stretch of the coast. “Our house, is a very, very, very fine house…”
Soon. Soon she would be home.
“Casual? Or super casual?” Zee asked, lifting up the open-front cotton-weave shirt in one hand and the tee in the other. Oliver waved his tail hesitantly, looking from one garment to the other and then into his master’s eyes before deciding no game was in the offing and slumping back down on his rug.
“Super casual,” Zee decided. Tee and jeans. Becky, his landlady and wife to Dave, his employer, had told him to treat it like any family meal, and that’s what he usually wore when he joined the Mastertons for dinner.
“I won’t be going to any fuss,” Becky had assured him, which was demonstrably untrue, since she had been buzzing like a bee on steroids for the past week. The other guest tonight would be Becky’s oldest friend, back in Valentine Bay after years on the other side of the world. Becky was over at the friend’s house now, having left detailed written instructions for Dave on what needed to happen with the dinner.
“You don’t have to invite me. You’ll want to spend time with your friend,” Zee had protested, and Dave had grinned. “Too right, Zee, and that’s why I want you there. Be a mate and give me someone to talk to when the Niks and Beks gossip train leaves the station. Those girls chat every day on FB, but you won’t know it when they get together.”
So instead of taking Oliver for his evening walk, Zee had showered and changed into clean jeans and a t-shirt with a slogan that said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
Trainers? Flip-flops? It was well after five, but the day was still hot and humid. Zee compromised on sandals to dress the jeans up a bit, and sat on the edge of the bed to put them on. Oliver sat up, his tongue lolling from one corner of a doggy smile, his tail thumping the polished floor beyond the edge of his mat.
“Sorry, fellow,” Zee told him. “Not tonight. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow.”
He closed the door on the disappointed animal, and descended from his studio apartment in the loft over the garage.
In the kitchen of the main house, Dave was stirring something on the stove, his arm at full stretch so he could peer round at the game show on the television in the family room.
“Ah, Zee,” he said. “Great. Here, stir this, will you?”
Zee took over the spoon. Some sort of stew? He took the fragrant air deeply into his nostrils: onions, bay leaf, something he couldn’t quite identify. Dave removed a tray of herbed roast vegetables from the oven, and replaced it with a casserole dish from the fridge. “Apple crumble,” he explained. “And custard. And probably ice cream, too, if I know Becky.” He turned off the gas to Zee’s hob. “We can turn that pot off now. Becky said to make sure the gravy didn’t catch. Can you put the veg into this dish while I start the clean up?”
Zee picked up the bowl Dave indicated. “Sure. Where are the kids?”
“Being quiet?” Dave suggested.
“Yeah, right,” said in a voice heavily laden with scorn, was as much a Kiwi-ism as an Americanism.
Dave laughed. “Mum has them. She’s keeping them overnight, too, in case Becky wants to sit up late. At least, that’s Mum’s excuse.” He finished stacking the cooking pots and began to run water into the kitchen sink.
Zee grinned back. He’d been the Mastertons’ tenant for a year, after all. “They’re off to Thailand for their river cruise in a week,” he commented. Dave’s parents, Jill and Bruce, had built another house on the large Masterton property and surrendered the main house to Bev and Dave when their youngest left for university. They adored stealing the grandchildren—and never more than when they were about to indulge the wanderlust they’d repressed while raising their own large family.
“There.” Dave turned off the tap, and dropped a handful of dirty implements into the soapy water. “I’ll boil a kettle to give the silver beet a head start when the girls arrive. A river cruise could suit you, Zee. No waves.”
Zee used the dish mop he’d just picked up to flick some soap suds at Dave. He’d never live down the condition in which he’d landed in Valentine Bay, but the teasing from his workmates was good natured.
At the sink, he had a good view of the big turning zone outside the triple garage. He glanced up idly when the Masterton people mover drew up, then froze, his hands hovering above the hot water. Nicola Watson? What was Global Earth Watch’s gun attorney doing in Valentine Bay? He’d last seen her on television, leaving the courtroom in which she had just lost her case against O’Neal Hotel Corporation. A loss aimed at destroying GEW’s credibility and that had been orchestrated in a plot between Miss Watson’s colleague and fiancé and Zee’s brother, Patrick O’Neal.
Discovering the machinations had been the final straw that precipitated Zee’s flight from his career, his family, his trust fund, his name, and the United States.
“She’s a stunner, isn’t she?” Dave said, and Zee accepted the excuse for looking as if he’d been bashed across the side of the head. Though he’d known the lovely Miss Watson was a New Zealander, he’d not known she was here in her home country. He had certainly not known that her family owned a house in the fishing village where he’d come ashore.
“She sure is. A lawyer, I think you said?” He finished scrubbing the brush across the base of the pot and put it on the rack for Dave to dry. Would she know who he was? They’d never met, and he didn’t court the camera the way his father and half-brothers did. Nor did he look like the other O’Neals, red hair to their black, finer boned, with his mother’s grey eyes. Any family resemblance needed another O’Neal for comparison.
If she realized who he was, he would tell her he was not an O’Neal anymore, if he ever really had been. One of his last acts in repudiating the family had been to legally change his surname back to the one on his birth certificate; his mother’s name. And if Ms Watson didn’t know who he was, he wouldn’t say anything that would sour the evening for Becky and Dave.
He’d made his decision just in time, as the two women came into the kitchen from the mud room—back porch, the New Zealanders would say.
Becky went straight into her husband’s arms for the kiss with which they always greeted one another, turning her head to make the introductions from that safe harbour.
“Niks, this is our lodger, Zee Henderson. He lives above the garage.”
Ms Watson showed none of the hostility she owed an O’Neal, offering instead a friendly smile and a hand to shake. “Pleased to meet you, Mr Henderson.”
“Zee, please,” Zee begged. “If anyone calls me Mr Henderson, I look around for my grand-dad.”
Nikki crossed the room to greet Dave with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, Becky having left her
husband to check on the status of the dinner. “You’re an American,” she observed to Zee.
“Guilty, as charged.”
“Niks works in New York,” Becky observed. She touched the kettle, decided it was hot enough, and poured some water into the waiting pot. “Or, at least, she used to. Have you ever been there, Zee?”
“I sailed from New York.” Zee grimaced. “Turned out to be a bad idea.”
Nikki looked from Zee to Becky. “Why? What happened?”
“He gets sea sick,” Dave explained. “By the time the boat berthed in Valentine Bay, he’d been sea sick for six months. He staggered off onto the wharf, took hold of a bollard, and swore he was never leaving land again.”
Becky took up the story. “So, Dave brought him home, and the New Zealand Immigration Service gave him a new name, and a year later here he is.”
Nikki raised one elegant brow. Close up and in person, she was even more gorgeous than on television, her face devoid of makeup and not needing it, her long hair caught back casually with a couple of hair slides and a clip. “Gave you a new name?”
“My name is Zachary Henderson, ma’am. Only the immigration officer thought I said Thackeray. When I told him ‘zee’ for ‘Zulu’, Dave thought it was hilarious.” New Zealanders called the last letter of the alphabet ‘Zed’. “Around here, they’ve been calling me ‘Zee’ ever since.”
“Except when we call him Drift,” Dave corrected.
Nikki’s eyes sparkled. “Short for driftwood?”
“Right,” Zee agreed, as he let the water go and wiped out the sink. There. Becky liked to start a meal with a clean kitchen, and Dave liked her to be happy. “I’m beached, and that’s the way I plan to stay.”