Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand Book 10)

by Rosalind James

  She and Zavy followed him into the kitchen, where Noelle was poking disconsolately at something that looked like it was capable of rising out of the glass baking dish and attacking them, and Holly was tossing a salad. An enormous salad.

  Kevin sighed. He was hungry, too. As always.

  “Hi, Chloe,” Holly said. “Here’s the situation. Kevin said we should try harder, because you and Zavy were coming to dinner and he wanted to make a good impression. Noelle said she’d do it, because she’s better than me. She said. But ...” She gestured at her twin. “Alas.”

  “I’m sure it’s delicious,” Chloe said. “Whatever it is.”

  “No,” Noelle said glumly. “It’s not. I tasted it to make sure it wasn’t just one of those things that looked rubbish but was actually lovely when you closed your eyes. No fear. It was meant to be lasagna. Low-calorie lasagna, with spinach and courgettes instead of noodles. I used low-fat cheeses, too, because I thought it’d be even better—better for you, you know—but it’s not. It’s just, ah ...”

  “A dog’s breakfast,” Kevin said. “Some things are meant to be low-fat, and some aren’t. Lasagna isn’t. Never mind. Lesson learned.”

  “Noelle trying to have her cake and eat it, too,” Holly said. “Except not.”

  Noelle took a sharp, audible breath, and Kevin said, “What?”

  Holly shrugged. “You know it’s true. I’m just saying it. She’s trying to eat slimming foods, but as she doesn’t like slimming foods, she tries to make them into foods she likes, and then she eats the non-slimming foods anyway.”

  “Well, don’t say it,” Kevin said. “If you can’t say anything nicer than that, don’t say anything at all.”

  “Fine,” Holly said. “I won’t be honest, and we can all tiptoe around it instead.”

  “I know I made a hash of it,” Noelle told her sister. Her color was up, but at least she didn’t look like she was going to cry. “You don’t need to tell me. It was an experiment, and it didn’t turn out.”

  Wonderful. This was meant to be easy-breezy family time. Instead, he had his sisters sniping and no dinner at all, unless you counted salad. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop. We’ll order something instead. He told Chloe, “Looks like we’ll need that mad money.”

  She said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” sounding absolutely calm and just that firm. “Do you have eggs? Kumara? A few veggies? Bit of milk?”

  “Uh ... of course,” Kevin said.

  Chloe nodded, her elf-face full of decision. “Holly, maybe you wouldn’t mind looking after Zavy for a few minutes. There’s a book by the door. Busy, Busy World. It’ll be the one with animals in overalls on the cover. Heaps of stories to choose from. In fifteen minutes, Noelle and I will have dinner ready.”

  “You don’t have to cook,” Kevin said. “I don’t invite women for dinner and make them cook. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to think that says ‘I care.’”

  “I’m not cooking,” Chloe said. “I’m helping Noelle cook. You can watch, you can help, or you can go away.”

  He was grinning like a fool. “Help, then.”

  “Lay the table,” she said. “That’s a start.” She already had her head in the fridge and was issuing instructions to Noelle. And fifteen minutes later, they were sitting down to a dinner of salad, two pans of cheese omelet with capsicum and spring onions, and a heaping bowl holding crispy-roasted chunks of kumara. Zavy was sitting on both the white and yellow pages, and Kevin wasn’t going to starve after all. At least not tonight.

  “This was brilliant, Chloe,” Noelle said.

  “No,” Chloe said. “The world of a dancer, that’s all. How to fuel up fast and easy.”

  “You must diet all the time, though, to stay that thin,” Holly said.

  “Mm,” Chloe said. “How much does your brother eat while he’s in training?”

  “Well, look at him,” Holly said. “See for yourself. The plate is about to crack under the weight.”

  Kevin said, “Now, I call that rude. Just because I could eat all of you put together under the table. Wednesday’s my hardest training day.”

  “Same thing here,” Chloe said. “I took an hour and a half of class today, and then I taught and danced for four hours. I’m not eating like a working dancer, but I’m eating enough. The trick isn’t starving yourself, it’s making sure everything that goes into you is high-quality fuel, so it gives you the energy you need. And preferably—” She forked up a crispy-gold piece of kumara. “Preferably fast, easy, and tasty enough that you want to eat it. Life’s too short to eat bad food.”

  “Can I ask a question?” Noelle asked.

  “Of course,” Chloe said.

  “Why aren’t you still a dancer? I looked you up online,” she went on, “and it’s true. You were a star, and then all the stories stopped. And I wondered ...” She trailed off.

  “Awkward,” Holly said. “Why would you even ask that, Noelle? Sometimes I wonder what you can be thinking. Hello, social skills?”

  Something was odd between these two, Chloe thought. For twins, something was especially odd.

  At least she thought so. She didn’t have siblings. How would she know, really?

  She could see Kevin about to jump in again. It was perfectly obvious that he was the provider in his family, and the fixer, too. And if that was attractive ... well, it was attractive. Any woman would think so.

  He didn’t need to fix this. “It’s no secret,” she told Noelle, ignoring Holly. Always best to ignore the instigator and focus on the victim. Give the power where it was needed. “There’s nothing wrong with asking. The answer is—the first answer—I got injured, it took me a year to recover, and then some other life happened.”

  “What was the injury?” Noelle asked.

  “I found out I had stress fractures in my leg. Unfortunately, I’d already danced on them for a month, which didn’t do them any good. But it was Swan Lake, you see. Odette and Odile. My favorite role ever. The role that ended my career, but at least I got to dance it.”

  “How could you do that?” Holly asked. “Dance on a broken leg? That’s not possible.”

  Chloe looked at Kevin. “The first time I met you,” she said, “your foot was broken, and you were on crutches. Hugh told me—I was out with Hugh Latimer,” she explained to Noelle and Holly, “on our one and only date, the one where we both found out that he was meant to be with Josie—well, anyway, he told me that Kevin had played a match on a cracked bone in his foot. That he needed that surgery because by the end of the game, he’d pounded that cracked bone until it was broken, and he’d scored a try on it. I’ll bet that bone has a pin in it now.”

  “It does,” Kevin said. “But then, I’m made up of sticking plaster and number eight wire by now. And as for that match—there’s no anesthetic like adrenaline, eh.”

  Chloe nodded. “Exactly. Dancers have to have a high pain threshold, too, because ballet is pain. There were seven fractures in that leg. When I do a job, I do it right, I guess. I set off all the metal detectors in airports now, because I’ve got a rod straight down the middle of the bone, but I healed, and I worked my way back. It took a year, but I was still only twenty-six. Heaps of dancing left in me.”

  “And then what?” Noelle asked.

  “Ah.” Chloe smiled. “I got pregnant. Thought it was—well.” She put a hand on Zavy’s fine dark hair and smoothed it back. “Another tough break. It wasn’t. Just another change.”

  It wasn’t true, of course, and the memory of that day was still vivid. The same day she’d seen her name next to the role on the notice board.

  The Firebird >>> Chloe Donaldson

  I’m back, she’d thought, her heart leaping. Soaring. I’m back. I’ve made it.

  Back to dancing ten hours a day, to bleeding feet and aching muscles, to running costume changes and fifteen minutes afterwards just to wipe off all the makeup before you went home, only to come back the next morning and do it all again. Back to using your body to its absolute l
imit and pushing it for more, for better, for perfection. Back to real life, the life she’d been training for, planning for, longing for since she’d been seven years old.

  That evening, at home after the first, wondrous choreography session that had started her on the way to her very own personalized interpretation of the classic role, she’d held the plastic stick in her hand and prayed. One line. One line. Please. It’s that I haven’t been eating enough, that’s all, and working too hard to get back, and my periods have stopped. It’s got to be that. Please.

  At first, the second line was so faint, she told herself it wasn’t there. She blinked, then actually rubbed her eyes. It was dread, that was all, making her see things. She took a breath all the way from her diaphragm, opened her eyes again, and looked.

  Two lines.

  She walked out of the bathroom, placing her feet so carefully, so precisely, as if that would help. Step. Step. Step. Step.

  Rich was already in bed, and for once, he wasn’t reading. He gave her a slow, knowing smile. “My beautiful ballerina. She’s made it back, and she’s going to dance Firebird. I think we need to celebrate. Come here, and I’ll help you do it.”

  She held up the plastic stick. She couldn’t feel her face, or her feet. “I think,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers, “that I’m going to have to make a choice about that.”

  It had been the beginning of the end. Of her and Rich. Of her wonderful, beautiful, impossible career. And the beginning of a new life she hadn’t been able to imagine. Or two new lives. Hers and Zavy’s.

  Noelle said, “You had a baby.”

  Kevin didn’t say anything. He sat and looked at her. Eyebrows. Eyes. She couldn’t tell what that meant, and it didn’t matter. A week ago, she may have thought that all this was her past, but today, her past had come roaring into her present with a vengeance. She said, “Yes. I had Zavy.”

  “Me,” Zavy said.

  “You, love. But the dance world has come a long way since Balanchine fired his dancers when they got pregnant. It would have been less than a year away from performing. I could have come back from that, too, but it didn’t happen that way. By the time it happened”—she never knew how much Zavy was taking in, as verbal as he was, so she tried to be careful—“I was on my own, and dance is too demanding for that, at least if you think it’s important for your baby to have a wee bit of a parent’s attention. It’s not eight hours a day. It’s class, and rehearsals, and performance, and touring. I couldn’t talk myself around to that being all right, not by myself, so I changed my plan. I had Zavy, opened my school, and here I am. Because there’s always another way,” she said to Noelle. “Whether it’s a ruined lasagna or something else. A change of plan.”

  “Mummy,” Zavy said. “I’m done. Want down.”

  “May I be excused?” she prompted.

  “May I be ’scused,” he echoed. “I want down. I want that girl to read me Busy Busy.”

  “Aw,” Holly said. “That’s sweet.”

  “Do you mind if I take him into the bathroom to wash his face and hands?” Chloe asked Kevin.

  “Of course,” he said. That was all, though. He was processing, she guessed. She and her complications were almost certainly more than he’d bargained for. Well, they were more than Rich had bargained for, and he was Zavy’s father.

  When she came back from the bathroom with Zavy, the table was cleared. She said, “I should put him to bed.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” Zavy said. “I want that girl to read to me.”

  “I’ll read to you, love,” Chloe said.

  “I don’t mind,” Holly said.

  “Nighttime stories are in bed,” Chloe told Zavy. “You know that. And we’re late tonight, so it’s one story, and then lights out.”

  “But I want her,” Zavy said piteously. “I just want her very much, Mummy.”

  Holly said, “Maybe I could come upstairs with you and do it.” A sucker for big brown eyes and three-year-old charm, it seemed.

  “Of course you can,” Chloe said. “If you like. Thank you.”

  “Can I ask—” Noelle said, then stopped. “I don’t know if this is all right,” she finally went on when Chloe didn’t say anything. “Maybe it’s like—I don’t know, asking your doctor to dinner and then telling him your symptoms, you know?”

  “You have a ballet question?” Chloe asked. “From your lessons? I don’t mind.” That was her comfort zone, and going back to it, back to no-nonsense, to teaching and briskness and being in charge, would only be good.

  “I think I’d need to show you, though,” Noelle said. “Maybe tomorrow evening, if you have time. Just a few minutes.”

  “I tell you what,” Chloe decided. “You and Holly come upstairs with me. Holly can read Zavy his story, we’ll put him to bed, and then I can help you for a few minutes. How’s that?”

  “Brilliant,” Noelle said. “Except that we just totally munted Kevin’s evening.”

  “I think I already did that,” Chloe said.

  “Oh?” he asked. “Why would you think that?”

  She looked at him, but she didn’t get any answers. She was doing that careful placement again, step, step, step, when she said, “If you’d like to come upstairs with your sisters and have your first viewing of your property, that would be all right. You should really see it, shouldn’t you?”

  She didn’t get an answer for a moment, and she thought back over what she’d said, then tried to smile and said, “I could have done that better. Please come up for a few minutes with your sisters. That would be nice. I could give you a cup of tea.”

  The tower flat at the top of the house, Kevin discovered, was small but charming. Which was why, of course, his brother Connor had immediately suggested that he and Brenna would be happy to rent it if Kevin bought the house. They were crammed into a tiny place in Three Kings now with the baby and a view of their neighbor’s washing line, and the housing market was tight enough for a couple without the complication of a baby.

  “It’s not that anybody says, ‘No kids,’” Brenna had explained. “It’s just that they always choose somebody else, especially for the best places, the ones we want. We’re at twenty-four applications now, and twenty-four rejections, too. By the time we get a place of our own, we won’t have to worry that we’re still bathing Timothy in the kitchen sink. He’ll be big enough to take his own shower.”

  “Probably be shaving,” Connor had added morosely.

  When this house had come up, offering the two-bedroom apartment with its own entrance, sea view, and private courtyard as part of the deal, and that much more help with the mortgage? It had seemed perfect on all counts.

  Except Chloe’s, of course. For Chloe, it spelled havoc.

  Now, Kevin was sitting on her couch with Holly and a cup of tea that he’d fixed in her minuscule kitchen tucked into a corner of the lounge, while outside, the sky offered a red-streaked sunset view over the Gulf and a tui sang in somebody’s pohutukawa. And Noelle stood holding onto the back of a chair while Chloe stood opposite her, holding onto nothing, and demonstrated to the tune of tinkling piano music that played softly from a little speaker.

  “... And demi-plié, stretch, and demi-plié, stretch, and grand plié down, and come up, and stretch,” Chloe was saying. “And your feet press into the floor as you come up. And again.” Leggings, bare feet, plum-colored sweater. Pure grace, dancing all the way to her fingertips.

  “You’re sticking your bum out, Noelle,” Holly said.

  Chloe brought her arm down, turned her head with the precision with which she did everything, and told Holly, “Something to learn about ballet. Only the teacher talks. If there’s a correction to be made, the teacher makes it.”

  “Sorry,” Holly said. “I was just—”

  Chloe beckoned to her. “Get a chair. Bring it over. You can both do it. You too, Kevin.”

  His mouth opened. “Uh ... me?”

  “No spectators,” she said. “Anot
her ballet rule, and I’ve just decided to enforce it.”

  Holly shot a mutinous look at him, so there was absolutely no choice. He got up, brought over two chairs and faced them backwards, stood in front of his, and said, “Right. Go.”

  Chloe said, “Legs in first position. Like this. Knees over the toes. Heels stay on the floor as you bend your knees. Halfway down, back straight, and your arm is moving with your legs. Always, the arm moves with the legs. From second position, then down to low fifth as you str-e-e-tch up ...”

  On she went. Looking so perfectly balanced herself, even when she was on the tips of her toes, her knees deeply bent to either side, one arm curving over her head, and holding onto nothing. Kevin took his own hand off the chair to see if he could do it, and found that he could. Just.

  Chloe said, “Keep your hand on the chair, please, Kevin,” and Holly laughed behind him. “And again from the beginning, in second position, and ...” Chloe kept talking, her voice providing a rhythmic beat of continuous instruction, but she was walking over to Noelle, putting a hand on her tummy and another on her lower back. “And demi-plié and stretch. Back straight up and down like a piece of toast in the toaster. Pull your tummy button into your back and lift up, tailbone down long.” Noelle went down, then came up, and Chloe said, “And grand plié, and down,” then moved on to Holly and did the same thing.

  Kevin thought, No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t enough that he felt like a prat, trying to be graceful? Trying to do ballet? That if his teammates caught wind of this, he’d never hear the end of it? That wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, though. It wasn’t the worst thing at all.

  The worst thing happened. Chloe was standing so close that she was nearly brushing against him. He could see straight down the gentle valley in that soft little singlet, and surely nobody else’s breasts were as pretty as that. She put one hand flat on his abdomen and the other low on his back, her fingers splayed, stretching much too close in both cases. Far too close. Disastrously close. “Demi-plié,” she said, “and stretch.”