Drawing Me In: A New Zealand Secret Baby Second Chance Romance (Due South Series Book 7)

by Tracey Alvarez

  “I’m tired of living in Australia,” Christine said.

  Bree’s heart triple somersaulted. Oh. Dear. God.

  “You’re moving back to Oban?”

  Christine pressed a hand between her breasts and barked out a laugh. “Here? To the boondocks, where the locals wouldn’t know real art if it sprang up under their noses and belted out the ‘Halleluiah Chorus’? I think not.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m moving to Christchurch to be closer to Amy and my grandson.”

  Christchurch was a one-hour ferry trip across the Foveaux Strait and then a seven-hour drive away. Bree’s shoulders sagged. The news could’ve been a lot worse. She could’ve been acquiring a roommate to squeeze into the tiny, two-bedroom apartment upstairs.

  “Your father dragged me down here in the first place with the promise of this”—she flicked a hand at the gallery walls lined with watercolors and acrylics and a couple of oils done by local artists—“and because I was savvy enough to get him to sign the building over to me, I have an asset worth something.”

  Worth something? The chilled prickles spreading over her scalp froze when her mother’s gaze landed on Bree again.

  “I plan to open my own little boutique gallery in Christchurch,” Christine said. “But in order to do that, I have to sell this place.”

  Blood thumped wildly in Bree’s eardrums. “Sell the gallery? But you gave the gallery to me.”

  Her mother’s almost perfectly smooth forehead creased. “No, I gave the gallery into your care when you needed a place to run home to. I never signed the building over. It’s the only asset I own. I have to think about my future.” She shrugged a shoulder under the floaty folds of her top. “I’m not ready for a retirement home, but I’m not getting any younger either.”

  What about my future? What about my home? Bree wanted to wail, but instead, she kept her mouth shut. Appealing to Christine’s maternal instincts had always been an exercise in futility.

  Something in Bree’s expression must have pierced her mother’s little bubble of self-absorption, because Christine gave a little chuckle. “Oh, come on now, Bee-bee. It’s not as if there’s anything holding you in Oban now. With your father in Nelson and Amy and me in Christchurch, you can move up with us—start another little photography business or apply to one of the high schools as an art teacher.”

  Bree’s jaw felt wired together by the time her mother had finished her spiel. “You’ve got it all planned out, haven’t you?”

  Christine flicked a dismissive hand and returned her phone to her handbag. “Christchurch is a lovely city. It’s a haven for the arts.”

  As opposed to Oban, where the arts took the form of the local book club. Or Ford, Harley’s brother, playing his guitar at the pub. Or the amateur theatre group, which put on an annual production at the community centre. The monthly group of poets and wanna-be authors who met in the Great Flat White Café over coffee, often to listen to Mrs. Randal’s musings on the royal family. The children’s art program Bree ran during the year at Oban’s primary school. The small group of local artists, from whom Bree took only the minimum cut for selling their work in the gallery. Maybe Oban wasn’t an art haven, but what it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in authenticity and passion.

  “I don’t want to move. My home and my friends are here.” The last word gave Bree a painful little twinge near her heart. Even though her family had moved to the Island nearly twenty years ago, she still sometimes felt like the skinny nine-year-old who’d tried too hard to carve out friendships among the local kids.

  “None of those women are really your friends, you know.” Christine’s nose crinkled. “Besides, there’s not much chance of finding yourself another Scott with the beer swilling, jeans-wearing scruffs around here. You’ll be thirty soon enough, Bee-bee. Tick-tock.”

  Scott-the-dickhead-ex was one of many subjects Bree refused to discuss with her mother. Instead, she focused on taking three deep and hopefully calming breaths. Channelled her hurt and frustration into the river of emotion she’d learned to wall off beneath a cool exterior. “What are you hoping to get for the gallery?”

  Her mother rattled off a figure at least one and a half times what the property was worth. She threw in some wild statements about the gallery’s reputation and goodwill—all of which was due to Bree’s hard work in the last four years, not that Christine would acknowledge it—and finished with another frown. “You’re not considering buying the gallery?”

  “I am,” Bree said. “Maybe you own the building, but the gallery is mine. The artists who show here, the kids who come during the school holidays, the portrait side of my photography business, which has gotten a lot more interest since the Harlands introduced their overnight romance tours on Ben’s boat…”

  Her mother’s lip curled at that one.

  “I want to buy the gallery from you,” Bree said. “Please, Christine.” She softened her tone. “It means a lot to me.”

  That was the closest she could come to the truth. The gallery was everything. Having lost everything before, not once but three times—the bad things come in threes again—she couldn’t bear a fourth loss.

  Christine cocked her head. “I’m not like your father, the old softie. I won’t buy your affection the way he bought mine when I agreed to move with you and your sister down here. I raised you girls to be strong, independent women.”

  Bree struggled to keep her eyes pointed front and centre instead of rolling toward the ceiling. Bree and Amy—who was six years Bree’s senior—had practically raised themselves, while their mother had locked herself away in her studio. Guess Bree could attribute some of her strengths to learning to run a household with a father who was often off-island for business and a distracted-to-the-point-of-obsessed mother.

  “And as such,” her mother continued, “if you want this place, I’ll sell it to you for the market-evaluated price.”

  Warmth seeped into Bree’s bones. “That’s fair. Thank you.”

  Forcing her feet forward, Bree crossed to her mother and wrapped her arms around her. Christine tolerated Bree’s embrace for a couple of seconds and then patted her shoulder briskly and pulled away.

  “Well, then. You’ll have work to do getting your affairs in order. I’m staying at Due South tonight and then flying up to Christchurch to Amy’s tomorrow.”

  “Oh, only one night?” Hypocrisy burned her butt, but she’d at least make an effort to not sound relieved. “How about I spring for dinner tonight. Del Westlake is the head chef at Due South now.”

  “Wasn’t he in that Ward on Fire reality cooking show?”

  “Yes. And he’s engaged to Shaye Harland now.”

  Christine’s lips parted in a genuine smile. “Ah. A man who can cook is worth his weight in gold. But a man who cooks for you and heats things up between the sheets every night, he”—Christine pointed a finger at Bree—“is a man worth keeping around.”

  “Great. Shall we say seven?” Bree returned her mother’s smile through a mouth frozen like a carnival clown.

  “Perfect. Get one of those strapping big men out there to bring my suitcase over, will you? I’ll go check myself in.” Christine swept over to the gallery’s front door. “Remember what I said, Bee-Bee. Scott was quite the whiz in the kitchen.”

  And a cheating, lying bastard elsewhere. Being able to whip up a four course meal with complimentary wines to impress his snobby peers at a dinner party didn’t make up for being an asshole.

  Bree turned away from the now-empty gallery and slid back into her office chair. Stared at the jumble of numbers on her spreadsheet while a memory, bittersweet and perfect, projected into her mind. Harley, aged twenty. All sexy, attitude-drenched, naked inch of him, standing at the stove in his cramped student flat in Christchurch, cooking them scrambled eggs. He’d glanced over his shoulder as she’d entered the tiny kitchen, cracks of sunlight slanting across his back from a nearby window. Tiger stripes, she’d thought.
His smile as he’d scanned Bree standing there in only his discarded shirt had confirmed her suspicions. She’d tangled with a man wild enough, dangerous enough to leave permanent bloody stripes across her heart. And like a wild animal, when Harley had exhausted his supply of easy prey he’d moved on to greener pastures. He’d left her and her silly, girlish dreams razed in the wreckage.

  Bree exited the spreadsheet and powered down her laptop, dropping her face into her shaky hands. Right now, she had more to worry about than old scars that had never completely healed.

  Right now, she was the only one she could count on to pull her dreams from the wreckage.

  ***

  Two days later, Bree saw her mother off at Oban’s tiny airport and then took the ferry headed to the mainland, where she had an appointment with her bank manager.

  Hours later, she stood at the ferry’s railing with Oban wharf growing closer and closer. Her stomach lurched in time to the slap of the waves, the rise and fall of the boat plowing through the chilly waters of Halfmoon Bay Harbor.

  Seasickness, no. Wrenching devastation after walking away from her bank, yes.

  Bree adjusted the celebrity-style sunglasses on her nose and forced her lips into a straight line to prevent them trembling. Though she’d been up half the night before, planning and practicing her loan pitch, organizing and scheming and recalculating her finances, it’d been for nothing. The hound-faced manager had apologized profusely but said the odds of her securing a mortgage were slim to none. She kept her It’s fine, I’m fine smile locked in place the whole walk from his office to Queens Park, where she’d sat on a secluded bench and allowed herself a ten-minute weep-fest.

  She’d figure out something. She always did.

  Bree stepped onto Oban’s wharf, keeping her head tucked down and her satchel of waste-of-time financial papers hugged close to her chest. One breath and then another. Don’t think any further than one minute ahead. All she wanted to do was slip home, tell Jean Brailsford, the woman who worked part time in Bree’s gallery, that she had a migraine, and crawl upstairs to bed. With a bottle of wine. And her gel pens and coloring book for grown-ups, which was as soothing as an hour spent meditating. Screw anyone who criticized, and yeah, she took pride in coloring within the lines.

  “Bree!”

  Bree looked up at the curly haired brunette waving to her from the nearby Great Flat White Café outside tables. Kezia. And next to Kezia, her husband Ben, and across from him, Piper.

  Brain machine-gun firing a string of curses she’d never utter aloud, Bree raised a hand in greeting and headed over, pride dictating she at least make polite chit-chat for a moment. To do otherwise would raise suspicions that something was wrong. Her gut clenched as the cold knot in her stomach twisted. Above all else, smile…even while shit rained down. She should get a tee shirt printed.

  “Nice for those who can afford to take the afternoon off and drink coffee.” Bree came alongside Piper and applied her best snarky smile.

  “Hah,” Piper said. “Nice for those who can still stand the taste of it. Which isn’t me, by the way.” She nudged a chair leg with one of her purple combat boots. “Pull up a pew. We were just discussing the new safety diver who’s taking over for me this summer. You can imagine the logistics of trying to cram my post-baby-bulge into a wetsuit.”

  “Like junior’s daddy would allow you anywhere near a shark cage while you’re lactating—and don’t ask me who gave me that brain-worm of a word.” Ben scanned Bree shrewdly from beneath the peak of his baseball cap. “What’s put that lemon-sucking expression on your face? Other than your mother’s flying visit.”

  “Nothing.” The snarky smile slipped into a lip tremor—and she couldn’t seem to will it to stop.

  “Sit down,” Kezia said, her dark eyes full of knowing sympathy. “You look tense enough to shatter, cara.”

  A couple of years ago, Bree would’ve brushed aside the invitation, claiming the ability to deal with the raining-down-of-shit alone. That arrogance had been worn down by the persistence of her small circle of friends—Piper, Shaye, Holly, and Erin…women she’d known since childhood—and also by newcomers to Oban, like Kezia, one of the Island’s schoolteachers and Ben’s new wife. While the occasional coffee-date or shopping trip might pass for friendship in the city, on Stewart Island, cut off from the mainland by the turbulent and wild stretch of ocean known as Foveaux Strait, a once-a-month, casual get-together didn’t cut it. On Stewart Island, friendships were serious investments, and resistance to investing in each other’s lives was futile.

  So Bree sat.

  Piper clicked her fingers at the café’s barista, who’d come out to deliver another table’s order. “Yo, Simon. One of those chai latte things here, please.” She switched her narrow-eyed gaze to Bree. “You definitely don’t need a shot of caffeine. Kez is right. Your cracks are showing. So what did Christine do this time? Another attempt to convince you to take that weasel Scott back so you can have lots of little WASP babies before your eggs dry up?”

  “You always did have a way with words, Piper.”

  “You always did have an iron rod jammed up your bum, Bree,” Piper shot back with a grin. “But, as Ben said, something’s happened to put that look on your face.”

  Bree hissed out a sigh and crossed her legs. “Christine is going to sell the gallery.”

  A fresh gust of sea air swooped along the wharf, taking Kezia’s and Piper’s gasps along with it. The breeze ruffled the feathers of a seagull waddling hopefully toward their table, and it let out an indignant squawk.

  Ben leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. “And you plan to buy it?”

  Bree’s mouth twisted. “That was the plan. Until the bank turned me down for a mortgage this morning.”

  “How can she sell it?” Piper leaned forward until her baby belly bumped the table. “You’re the owner.”

  Bree rolled a shoulder forward. “Technically, I’m not. When I came back from Christchurch, my parents’ divorce was being finalized. Christine told me over the phone she wanted nothing more to do with Oban, and since I was the only other artist in the family, I could have the gallery if I wanted to revive it. I didn’t think to engage a lawyer and make it official.”

  “She hasn’t shown any interest in the gallery since she left, and you pay her rent, so why would you?” Ben asked.

  Bree just hugged the satchel of papers tighter.

  “I can’t believe your mother would do this to your home—your passion,” said Kezia. “How can she be so cruel? So thoughtless?”

  Bree briefly met Piper’s and Ben’s eyes before turning to Kezia. The Harland siblings had known her mother back when her parents and her sister were a family—and she used that term lightly.

  “I don’t believe it’s cruelty, Kez.” Though why Bree was once again defending her mother, she had no clue. “She’s probably gone through the last of the divorce settlement money, and in her head, selling the gallery in order to move back to New Zealand is totally justified. She wouldn’t have thought about her actions affecting other people.”

  “It’s all about her, in other words.” Piper’s lip curled. “What about your dad, then? Have you hit him up?”

  “Yeah, but…” Bree shook her head. As much as it had made her cringe into a ball of shame, she’d called her father after the bank’s rejection to ask him for a loan. But following an ear-bashing rant about her selfish mother, Bryan had confessed he was going through a financial rough patch himself. Bree had told him not to worry; she’d find some other way to acquire the gallery. Her dad had murmured something positive and non-committal and changed the subject.

  Ben pulled an exaggerated frown. “So, ask money-bags Komeke. He’d give you a loan.”

  But Ford doesn’t have any money. The words popped into her brain mere seconds before her stomach plummeted into the soles of her professional-height black pumps.

  Harley. He means Harley. The one person in the world she couldn’t accept a loan from. She
had enough barbed-wire cords tying her to the man as it was. Like hell would she bind herself to him financially.

  Kezia’s mouth spread into a wide smile. “Perfetto. A fellow artist would be sympathetic and he’s a very generous man, isn’t he?” She beamed at her husband, who gave her a gooey-eyed glance in return, then they stared at Bree expectantly.

  Bree held up a hand, willing the shakiness spreading throughout her whole body not to show. “There’s some bad blood between Harley and my mother.” Not to mention her and Harley, but they wouldn’t go there. “Christine once called him a pretentious hack, and that was one of her kinder insults.”

  “Until he became the poster boy for Maori artist makes it big. Then she would’ve started ass-kissing.” Piper snorted and stole a chunk of Ben’s muffin, stuffing it into her mouth.

  Kezia’s brow wrinkled. “Surely the two of you could come to an agreement—he wouldn’t hold a grudge against you for something your mother said?”

  No. Not for her mother’s snooty criticism of his art. But for other reasons? And if Harley ever found out those other reasons? A shudder rippled down her spine.

  Simon appeared at Bree’s side, lowering a steaming glass of chai latte in front of her. She thanked him and forced a smile across the table at Kezia and Ben. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. I’ll consider asking him.” Bree gave her latte a brisk stir. “Enough about me, tell me about this new safety diver you’re considering.”

  Ben launched into a running monologue about the man’s qualifications. Bree nodded in the appropriate places and slanted a glance at Piper, who’d gone strangely quiet. Her once nemesis and now friend stared back with big hazel eyes, her steady gaze calling bullshit. Part of the reason for the friction between them as kids was neither would sacrifice pride for anything.