by Jude Knight
“Serves you right,” her friend scolded. “You’re as bad as the kids.”
Come to think of it, the house was surprisingly quiet. “Where are the kids?”
“Jill has them,” Beks explained. “She’s going to pick Stace up from school, too, so I have until dinner time to finish.”
Nikki took a deep breath to better enjoy the luscious smell, before taking a tentative nibble, cautious of the heat. Yum. Chocolate dough with lumps of chocolate, and undoubtedly Beks intended to ice them with chocolate icing. “You’ve baked enough for an army,” she said between bites.
“Big Dig this weekend, to raise money for the school and the kindergarten,” Beks reminded her. She stacked the empty oven tray onto several others that waited next to the sink, and picked up a piping bag with a large cookie head on it. “Have you forgotten? You promised to be on the ticket booth.” She began piping rosettes of mixture onto another oven tray. They were going to be vanilla kisses from the look of it—melting moments, Gran used to call them.
“Shall I team you with the Sexy Redhead?” Beks asked.
“Beks!” Nikki laughed. “You’re a married woman.”
Beks winked. “Looking isn’t a sin, sweetie. I’m just admiring God’s handiwork.”
“I’m just admiring Beks’ handiwork,” Nikki told her. “I was promised cake. It isn’t all for the Big Dig afternoon tea tent is it?”
“In this house? There’d be a revolt, led by my dear husband. Here.” Beks whipped a cloth off a large chocolate cake, cut two slices, and carried them across to the kitchen dining nook, where mugs and a plunger of coffee waited.
She poured them a mug each, and said, “You have cake. Now give. What do you think of our Zee? Truth, Niks. BFF, remember?”
Nikki surrendered to the inevitable. “He’s smart, funny, talented and good-looking. What’s not to like? Not my type though. Ginger? And with a beard? Besides, I’m not in the market, Beks. Recently burnt, remember?”
“Not that recently,” her friend pointed out. “It’s been nearly eighteen months since Russo the Rat! Time to get back on the dating horse, girl.”
Nikki didn’t think so. She had been within weeks of marrying a man who was lying to her; who would cheat on her and expect her to forgive him because ‘it was for the job, Nicola. It didn’t mean anything’, as if having sex with the wife of a member of the opposing legal team didn’t make the whole betrayal worse. “I have had one or two other things on my mind.”
Beks softened immediately. “Of course, you have, and I am a beast to tease. I worry about my friends.”
“And you want everyone to have what you and Dave have,” Beks agreed, understanding what motivated her friend, but Beks shook her head.”
“Well, no, because that would be impossible. Because Dave is special.” Her smug grin faded and she leant forward to emphasise her point. “But I want my friends to be happy. Zee is lonely, you are lonely, and you are both nice people. It couldn’t hurt to keep an open mind.” She took a sip of her coffee. “And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.”
Yeah, right. “I’ll believe that when it happens, Beks. I know you.” The woman had more tenacity than a bull dog.
“Yes,” Beks admitted, “but you love me anyway. More cake?”
On Big Dig day, Zee was up with Dave’s team at the crack of dawn, marking out a numbered grid on the North Beach sand with tape and flags, and burying numbered tokens—a guaranteed four tokens per square. People would purchase one or more squares at the ticket booth and claim the prizes associated with the tokens they dug from their temporary territory. By 10am, half an hour before start time, the queue of hopeful diggers stretched from the temporary barrier around the Big Dig site all the way back to the car park behind the fishing port.
When Zee reported for duty at the ticket booth, he found himself paired with Nikki Watson, one of four teams appointed to cope with the rush when the booth opened. They watched a brief demonstration of their job: one to handle payments and the other to hand over the ticket and map, and explain the rules of the Dig.
“Money or explanation?” Nikki asked. She was dressed for the weather, in cropped shorts that hugged her buttocks and hips and a loose cotton shirt, tied at her tiny waist. Her outfit displayed long gorgeous legs that had Zee jerking his imagination back from a salacious fantasy, and a vee of skin at the neckline that hinted at, but did not show, the breasts he’d spent over-hot nights trying not to visualise. Not a sexual object, he growled at his baser self. But certainly, a work of art, and easy on the eyes.
He’d been wool gathering, and Nikki called him on it. “Zee? Money or explanation?”
“Money,” Zee decided. In his family, rich kids worked for their spending money, and several of his summer jobs during college had involved handling card and cash payments. “If that suits you, Nikki.”
She shot him a grin, as the barrier came down and the eager treasure hunters flooded onto the sand. “No worries, partner.”
For half an hour, they were flat out, each team dealing with a long queue as expeditiously as possible. The mobile EFT-POS machines hiccupped as they competed for bandwidth so the four money-handlers had to co-ordinate rather than collide with one another, but most of the patrons waited cheerfully enough. Zee and Nikki soon developed a patter, Nikki talking to the kids about what they hoped to find and Zee focusing on the adults, leading with asking them where they’d come from that day. Most were weekenders or holiday visitors, but quite a few had driven out from Barnsley just for the day after seeing the adverts online and in the community papers.
“Not many locals,” he said in an aside to Nikki as the rush slowed.
“That’s because Beks has roped most of them into the work crew,” she replied. “Volunteers with kids get their tickets in an envelope when they arrive. She uses a randomiser to pick the numbers, so the only advantage they get is not having to line up, but they seem to like it.”
People continued to trickle in as the day wore on, but an hour after the Big Dig opened the beach was crowded, most squares in the grid occupied by eager children with spades, sieves, and buckets.
Beks and Dave were everywhere, keeping an eye on all the activity and moving volunteers to make sure that the whole day ran smoothly. “Everything okay here?” Beks asked, at the ticket tent.
“We’re getting quiet,” she was told, and Zee and Nikki found themselves reassigned to the marquee where successful diggers were exchanging numbered tokens for prizes, donated by businesses in Valentine Bay, Barnsley and even further afield. Everything from beach toys and wooden blocks to bikes and kick boards crowded the marquee, which was enclosed on three sides by plastic mesh to ensure that no child pre-empted the process by helping themselves. On the open side, winners were channelled into queues, each bringing their token to a volunteer who would call out the number so another volunteer could fetch the associated prize.
“Hurrah,” the woman running the show responded, when Nikki said that Beks had sent them. “Take a quick look around to figure out what’s where, and then start finding prizes for the callers.”
In the close confines between the rows of prizes, the fetchers couldn’t help but bump into one another—a sweet torture for Zee when Nikki squeezed past him with an armful of plush bunnies, or when he had to lean over her to fetch a board game from a high shelf. If you let her get close, you’ll have to tell her who you are, and that’ll be the end of that, he warned himself. But his body didn’t care.
A few kids were disappointed with what their tokens got them, and joined the group in the next tent over, negotiating exchanges under the supervision of several adults. For the most part, though, the thrill of winning and the fun of the day prevailed, and the occasional major prize was greeted with cheers and goodwill.
So, the loud argument that erupted as the crowd thinned came as a surprise.
“You stole it from my square,” a shrill voice proclaimed.
“Did not, did I, Dad?”
Two children faced off, each with fists clenched; one a skinny girl of around nine or ten, and the other a stocky boy of a similar age. An adult stood behind each child, both glaring: Pokey and a woman Zee didn’t know.
The girl turned to her mother, “I saw him, Mum. It was in my bucket when I tipped out the sand, and he grabbed it before I did. He stole it.”
“My son is no thief,” roared Pokey, jutting out his chin.
The woman was not impressed. “My daughter is not a liar,” she shouted back.
“I’ll get the maps,” Zee whispered to Nikki. “You stop them from killing each other.”
In moments, he was back, with Dave as backup. They’d brought the book into which they’d drawn the grid, taking up 10 pages from north to south along the beach. Each square had its ticket number written in red and its token numbers in blue.
“We’ll be able to sort it out,” Nikki was saying to the two children, as Zee and Dave arrived. Two of the other volunteers had separated the adults and were talking earnestly to them, but Pokey brushed them aside as soon as he saw Dave. “Masterton. Good. Sort this out, will you? This woman and her daughter are trying to take my son’s prize.”
The girl burst into tears; her fist clenched as she stamped a foot in frustration. “It’s my prize!” she yelled, and her mother came charging into the conversation with a description of Pokey that Zee privately thought accurate, though inappropriate in front of children.
“Everyone calm down, and give Mr Masterton an opportunity to check his records,” Nikki ordered, managing to project so much authority that the watching crowd stopped muttering and the main combatants shut their mouths and turned expectant attention on Dave.
Dave squatted so he wasn’t looming over the two children. “Can you show me your tickets and the tokens you found?” he asked.
A few minutes later, the girl was the proud owner of a new bicycle, as well as a lunch-box, a kit of acrylic paints, and a soft toy. Pokey’s son was still grumbling about losing out on the bike, and refused to touch the prizes he had won—a school backpack, a kick board, a voucher for a computer game, and a bucket of biscuits.
“I wanted a bike,” he whined, just as Pokey’s father arrived, one eye on the journalist from the local paper who was taking a photograph of the happy girl.
“Smile nicely and congratulate that girl, and I’ll buy you a bike.” Zee only caught the district councillor’s words because he had come close to scoop up the biscuits, which Pokey had dropped. Snoopy Kenworth was smiling broadly at the crowd, waving and nodding to people he knew, the hand on his grandson’s shoulder tensing in a squeeze.
“A bike and tickets for the movies,” the boy bargained, then manufactured a warm smile when his grandfather nodded. “Look what I dug up, Granddad,” he said loudly, and began to take his prizes one by one from his father’s arms.
“A chip off the old block,” Nikki observed, as three generations of Kenworth males plastered on identical false smiles and crossed to congratulate the wary bike winner. “I didn’t even know Pokey was married.”
“He isn’t,” Dave said. “But that never stopped biology from doing what biology does. The mother lives on the Gold Coast, in Australia, but the kid comes over a couple of times a year in the holidays.”
“Huh,” Nikki commented. “I thought the man was gifted with the perfect contraceptive.”
Zee remembered the old joke. “His personality?” That won him a quick smile from Nikki and a short laugh from Dave, who said, “No accounting for taste. Well, I’d better get back on patrol. We close in another half hour, and by now most kids know which numbers get the big prizes. We might have a few more border incidents.”
They didn’t, though, perhaps because word quickly spread about the records that prevented cheating. People continued to arrive to collect their prizes, then move on to the drink and food stands.
Soon enough, the dig was over and the clean-up began; taking down the barriers around the dig site, rolling up the tape that marked the squares, raking the sand, passing out the last of the prizes to those who could show their ticket number but had not found all of their tokens.
“Right,” Dave announced to the volunteers, as the last of the tents was rolled and loaded onto the back of a pickup truck—a ute, they called it here in New Zealand—barbecue at my place.”
Nikki came up beside Zee. “And I happen to know that Beks kept a lot of baking back for dessert.”
“Sounds good,” Zee agreed. “That girl can cook!”
Perhaps the memory of that comment led Nikki to invite Zee for lunch on Wednesday, when he phoned to say he had the estimate and wanted to come by to discuss it. Nothing complex, she decided. Grilled salmon and a salad of mixed greens, with a side of kumara chips and a lime and mustard dressing. Maybe summer berries to follow. She had a tub of ice cream from one of the boutique manufacturers she’d missed while she was overseas; vanilla and pistachio, which would complement the mix of berries nicely.
Keeping in mind his delight at the view, she set the wrought iron table on the back veranda. It really needed a new glass top to give a good surface for dishes and glasses, but she made do by covering it with a tablecloth.
Was he interested, or wasn’t he? Beks thought he was, citing the way he watched her as evidence. Certainly, she had caught his gaze several times, and felt her own heat rise in response to the inferno she sensed in him.
He hadn’t made a move, though. Perhaps because they’d only met in the company of others. Perhaps because he wasn’t interested, which would serve her right for denying her own interest to Beks.
They wouldn’t be in the company of others today.
The bell at the front door rang. He was here, his broad chest once again setting off a slogan. ‘Nothing is impossible with the right attitude and a hammer’, the t-shirt read.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
How embarrassing. She had been gawping at his chest instead of inviting him inside. Best carry it off with a laugh. “Nice tee,” she said, stepping out of the way and waving him through.
“I’ve got a collection. I do the slogans on my laptop and a lady in the village prints them on transfers and irons them on for me.”
Nikki raised her brows as she showed him through to the back veranda. “Multitalented! I like that Take a seat, Zee, and I’ll bring out the food.”
He put his briefcase down by the leg of the table. “Can I help?”
“No. I have it all ready.” She left him pulling out his chair and went to set the salad and salmon on the waiting tray. An oven cloth to pull the bowl of chips from the oven. Anything else? No, that was it.
On the veranda, Zee moved the salt and pepper mills to make more room for the tray, and nodded with satisfaction at the contents. “That looks great.”
“Serve yourself, Zee. Don’t stand on ceremony. Water?” It had been chilled, and she’d added slices of lemon and sprigs of mint to the jug.
“Please. The view doesn’t lose its impact, does it?”
She looked out across North Beach. “No, it doesn’t. I hate to think of the bush being cut down and the place being made off limits to the locals. Oh, they say it won’t happen, and we’ll fight it if it does, but I don’t trust Kenworth. At all.”
Zee nodded. “For three generations. Did you know he had a son? I didn’t. A girl he shacked up with in Sydney, apparently. His big overseas experience; a couple of years with a property development company across the Tasman.”
Yes, Beks had told her the story. Pokey told his drinking mates that the girl was just someone he flatted with, and the boy had been conceived on a night of lousy television when the pair were looking for other entertainment. He had been indignant at her refusal to have an abortion, but—now that his son was older—seemed to enjoy having him to visit. “I didn’t until we had the pleasure of meeting the little darling last weekend. Three of them. The mind boggles.”
“I can’t figure out how Snoopy keeps getting re-elected,” Zee comp
lained. “And what kind of a grown man puts ‘Snoopy’ on his campaign ads?”
“He thinks it refers to the dog,” Nikki guessed, “Not his habit of poking his nose in where it isn’t wanted.”
They continued to talk easily, moving on to discuss the Big Dig, the housing market and job prospects in Valentine Bay, and the nearby vineyards and other attractions. Nikki took the remains of the first course out to the kitchen and came back with the berries and ice-cream, which Zee accepted with an appreciative hum. Did he make that sound when indulging other pleasures, she wondered, then admonished her mind to keep it clean.
Enough of this. He was here to talk about building, not for her salivate over. “Coffee, Zee? Or tea? Or a cold drink?”
“Another lemonade, if you have it. Shall I help you clear the table? And then I can spread my plans out on it.”
Nikki waved Zee off when he would have helped with the dishes. “I’ll do them later,” she said. “And I hope you have a dishwasher on your list, Zee.”
“Sure do.” He stacked the papers he’d brought into a preplanned order and put the tablet on top. Nikki returned with a lemonade each, sitting in the chair he’d pulled around so they were on the same side of the table.
“What’s first?”
“I thought we’d start in the middle.” He handed her the estimate. “This is the plan that does the essential structural work and adds the extra rooms, but leaves off the deck extensions and uses middle of the road appliances and finishes. Not rubbish, but not top of the line, either.”
He’d intended to spend fifteen minutes showing her the plans and explaining the calculations, but it expanded into an hour as she asked incisive questions and made notes of her own. In the end, after he’d been through all three scenarios, she furrowed her brow over her own tablet. Heck, she was stunning when she was thinking. Zee had always been a sucker for a clever woman, and this one was as smart as they came.