Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand Book 10)

by Rosalind James

  “Yes,” she said. “I found that out.” She lowered herself down until she was kissing him. His hand was on the curve of that tight little arse now, the one he’d shoved out of a tunnel on North Head. The one he got to hold now, and to stroke, just to see if he could make her tingle and shiver. Which he could.

  He didn’t smile. Well, maybe a bit. “You know what they say about nice guys,” he told her.

  “Mm.” She kissed him again. “What’s that?”

  “Nice guys finish last. Which means you’ll always finish first. And second.” He rolled her over and held himself on his elbows over her, and then he kissed her, slow and sweet, before he said, “You need it strong and intense and hard? That works for me, no worries. And next time? We’re going for more. We’re going for third.”

  Kevin woke slowly, his body sore, but feeling good. Satisfied to his bones.

  A win.

  No. Or yes, but that wasn't the source of the hum in his body.

  Chloe. Chloe’s apartment. Chloe's bed. Chloe’s firm little breast under his hand, her body tucked up tight against his.

  She was sleeping. Worn out, and no wonder. From the light streaming into the windows, it was still afternoon, but they’d made the most of it.

  After they’d made love, she’d gone into the bathroom, saying, “Shower. I can’t believe you didn’t mind, but you aren’t going to have to mind anymore.”

  He'd let her go, had thought, Give the girl some privacy, mate, and had even managed to do it for ... well, five minutes, anyway. Maybe ten. Then he’d gone to join her, and that had been good, too. Kissing and touching, soap and water and eager bodies, then tumbling back onto cool white sheets. The first urgency over, able to take their time, to explore each other, her hands and mouth as avid as his, and then more so.

  You could say she’d paid him back in every single way. You could also say she’d blown his mind, and that making love with a woman as intensely physical as himself was a pure revelation.

  Now, she stirred under his hand, rolled over, opened her brown eyes at him, and smiled, slow and knowing and satisfied.

  “Hi, you,” she said.

  He stroked a slow hand down her back, feeling all the tautness of her, and all the delicious response, too. “I could stay in bed with you all day, except I’m hungry. How about you?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes.” Then another smile. “I made soup with your sister.”

  “Mm. I heard. Good of you.” He kissed her sweet mouth. “It won’t be enough, but it’ll do for a start. We’ll go downstairs and eat mine, how’s that? Rather than use up all yours. That way, I can have a sammie as well and won’t waste away.”

  “What time is it?” She sat up, looked at the clock, and answered her own question. “Already after two? I need to collect Zavy around five. Noelle said she’d watch him tonight, if you still want to go to dinner.”

  He could feel her drawing back, slipping away, and it was as frustrating as ever. Or more, now that he’d had her so close. “Why wouldn’t I want to go to dinner?”

  She was sliding out of bed, going to her closet and hunting out clothes, as unself-conscious as he was with nudity. Normally, he’d have enjoyed watching that, and it wasn’t that he didn’t, but he was getting narky, too.

  She shrugged, wriggling into a pair of pale-blue undies that were very nice indeed. “Because you don’t need to do any more courting, maybe? Don’t need the flowers and the wine and the candles and the white tablecloth after all?” Her tone was casual. The idea behind it wasn’t.

  He got out of bed and began to pull on his own clothes. “Who says I don’t?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder, her tousled hair falling over an eye. Sexy as hell, distant as the moon. “You’re telling me you’re romantic.”

  Redhead hot. Redhead steam. He never gave in to those things, except he was doing it. Again. “Hell, yeh, I’m romantic. And anybody who dances the way you do is romantic too. Why are you trying to hide it from me? What would be the point? And what, all I cared about was having sex with you, and now I’m done? I’ve got a surprise for you. I can have sex. I could’ve had it last night, easy as. I was in a bar, as it happens. You may not care anything about rugby, but trust me—some girls do, and they aren’t shy about letting you know it.”

  She’d stepped back a pace. “Whoa. Wait.”

  He didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Come here.”

  She was dressed in a bra now to match the undies. A scrap of a thing, and she was all long, fine-muscled limbs and delicate bones, as fragile-looking and hesitant as a butterfly. But she came.

  He pulled her into his lap, stroked a hand over her hair, and said, “What am I going to do with you if you keep pushing my buttons like this, eh? I don’t lose my temper.”

  “Hmm.” She was smiling her witch-smile now, kissing his jaw, her hand in his hair. “I’d say you do.”

  “And if you just want me for sex,” he went on, “I’ll ...” He stopped. “Can’t exactly finish that one, because I’d probably take it. But it’s not what I want, and I’m not interested in settling.”

  She pulled back a bit, though she was still in his lap. “What do you want?” She wasn’t smiling now.

  “I want everything.” He could feel her retreating from that, so he said, “but I’ll start with dinner. But I have to say,” he went on, throwing caution to the winds, “that when life tosses exactly what I want into my lap the way it’s doing at this moment, I don’t tend to spend heaps of time figuring out how to chuck it away. I spend my time and energy figuring out how to hold onto it.”

  “Pity that doesn’t always work out.” It was general, but it wasn’t general at all, and he was burning again.

  “If that happens,” he said, “I’ll know it wasn’t because I didn’t try hard enough. But come on, Chloe. Be honest. Ballet isn’t easy, and neither is being a single mum. You know all about commitment. You know all about dedication. Why are you running?”

  This time, she did get up, and he didn’t try to stop her. “I’m not running from anything.”

  “Not Zavy, you aren’t. Ballet—I don’t know. I can’t say, though I’ve wondered. But me? Too right you’re running from me. Or trying to.”

  She was yanking on leggings, her movements not quite as graceful as usual. “For an easygoing fella, you’re pretty demanding, aren’t you?”

  “Who said I was an easygoing fella?”

  She paused with her hands on her waistband. “That’s the first thing I’d have said about you.”

  “Maybe I don’t have to get my way in everything. Maybe I pick my battles. Could be I save my energies for when it really matters. But when it matters?” He was looking into her eyes now, and he could swear that her breath was coming hard. “I’m not one bit easygoing. Fair warning.”

  “Right.” She reached into her closet and pulled out another stretchy top. “So ... want some soup?” And since he did, he dropped it.

  He could have picked an easier woman. He could have, except that it hadn’t felt like a choice. It still didn’t.

  Stupid, Chloe was telling herself, even as she tucked a leg under her as she sat out on Kevin’s veranda, listened to the water music as the nymph poured an endless stream of water into his fountain, and ate West African kumara-peanut soup beside Kevin. Why was she pulling away? She couldn’t even have said.

  Kevin looked at her from over his sandwich. “All right?”

  “Mm. Yes.” Definitely stupid.

  He put a hand on her thigh, and she was glad to have it there. “How’s my little mate, then? If he’s at your mum and dad’s after all that with Zavy’s dad ... I can’t believe you didn’t have serious words.”

  “We did. Have serious words, I mean.” She sipped at her tea and looked at the nymph. So serene, with one and only one job to do. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  No. It would be boring. “I told her,” she said to Kevin, “that she had to tell me everything that was happening with Z
avy from now on, that it was my choice, and she agreed. And Zavy’s three, you know. He’s very verbal, too. He could tell me if Rich came by after all.”

  “Sometimes people ask kids to keep secrets,” Kevin said quietly.

  Her heart skipped a beat. She picked up her soup spoon, then set it back in the bowl.

  Kevin’s hand was on hers, covering it, squeezing it. “What would you do about that?”

  “I’ll make sure Zavy knows. To tell me. I’ll make it clear.”

  “And you wouldn’t let him be with your parents if you didn’t think it was best,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you doubt yourself. You know you care enough to make the right choice. You have to know that.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a minute. “I do need to go get him, though. Before we can go to dinner. Normally, I would’ve left him with them tonight, but it’s what you said. I wanted to be careful.”

  “Would company help?”

  She let go of a long breath. “Yes. I think it would. I should say no, but ... it would.”

  “Good,” he said, and she heard all the satisfaction of it.

  Maybe it was wrong to want his help, to want to count on it. But it didn’t feel like it.

  When Kevin drove over the Harbour Bridge with Chloe, the sun was shining, the wind gusting, sending puffs of white cloud scudding across the sky. Autumn, but the kind of autumn you’d feel on a ship at sea. Chloe was quiet beside him, and he couldn’t quite tell what was happening under that composed exterior. As usual.

  No temper, he told himself. Not with her parents, and not with her. You’re there to make it better.

  Pity that challenges didn’t only come on the rugby field.

  When they were ascending the lift, he said, “I’m either in the world’s biggest fridge or the kind of bar I like least. Can’t decide which.”

  She smiled, though she still looked tense, and said, “Wait until you see the flat. It’s all that and then some.” The doors opened, they stepped out, and she asked, “Going to tell me what’s in your carrier bag?”

  “No. It’s a surprise for Zavy. And maybe for you as well.”

  He walked behind Chloe down a passage carpeted in severe gray, then waited while she knocked on a just-trendy-enough-but-not-over-the-top bright-blue door, and thought how impossible it would be that he’d ever knock at his parents’ front door, and how different families were. Then the door swung open, and he was face-to-face—well, behind Chloe, but as he was a head taller than her, it may as well have been face-to-face—with her mum.

  Not what he’d expected, maybe, or at least nothing like his own mum. An effortlessly chic figure, as slim and elegant as Chloe, dressed in black trousers and a gray top. Who wasn’t looking at him as if he were her birthday treat, or like surprises were good.

  “Heavens,” she said. “Come in, darling, and introduce me to your friend.”

  She stood aside, and not a moment too soon, because Zavy came running and launched himself at Chloe’s legs. “Mum!” he said, laughing up at her in his excitement. “We went to the museum, and we saw big trucks! Twenty and a hundred!”

  Chloe dropped to her knees and kissed him, holding his face between her palms, smoothing his hair back with so much tenderness. “That’s lovely, darling. Weren’t Nana and Granddad good to take you?”

  “Hi, Kevin!” Zavy said. “I got two trucks, ’cause there’s a store at the vee-cle museum, and one is a train. A locomotive. ’Cept I didn’t get a new ’ment mixer, and they didn’t have any ’ment mixers, ’cause Granddad says they’re too big to fit in the building, but there was a fire engine and you could push a button and it made a siren!”

  Kevin followed all of that, just, and then he paid attention to Chloe again, because she was saying, “Mum, this is Kevin McNicholl. He’s bought my house, which makes him my landlord, at least for a few more weeks.”

  Her mother put out a hand as cool as the rest of her, casting an eye over the jeans and T-shirt he hadn’t bothered to change yet. “Goodness,” she said with a little laugh. “I wasn’t expecting that to be somebody quite so ... young. Pleased to meet you, Kevin.”

  “How ya goin’,” he said, keeping it deadpan. “Nah, lucky to get it, I know, a flash place like that.” And all right, he may have been laying it on a bit thick, but geez. It was like he still had manure on his boots.

  An older man came into the room. Chloe’s dad. Who, as far as Kevin was concerned, hadn’t done nearly as well as he ought to have at protecting his daughter. He looked like he wanted to do it now, though, and Kevin sent back the stare he got with interest. Too late now, mate, he told him with that gaze. I’ve already got her. Anyway, I’m not the one you should be worrying about.

  “My mum,” Chloe said, “Fiona, and my dad, Frank. Dad, this is my landlord. My landlord for now, that is. Kevin McNicholl.”

  “The rugby player,” Frank said, shaking hands. “Obviously.” Not looking happy, but not making a contest of the handshake, either, though Kevin wondered if that was because he knew he’d have lost.

  “That’s right,” Kevin said, keeping it neutral, reserving judgment himself.

  “Oh,” Fiona said, and it didn’t sound like, “Oh, how lovely.” More like, “Oh, my, what’s that smell?”

  Zavy, meanwhile, had been tugging at Kevin’s hand. “Come see my fire truck, Kevin,” he said. “It’s a ’normous fire truck, ’cause it has to have a ladder so the firemen can go up very, very high.”

  Kevin let himself be led into a bedroom, where Zavy’s things were laid out on a neatly made twin bed, one of two covered by a green duvet. No concession to the fact that a child stayed here except a small collection of toys neatly arranged on a low bookshelf. Just now, the bed held a backpack, a small duffel, and a good-sized model fire engine, satisfactorily bright red.

  “It has hoses,” Zavy informed him, “so it can squirt all the water. And they look real, but you can’t squirt with them, not really. Nana says that would be ridikolous, ‘cause it would be very, very messy. But a real fire engine really has water to squirt over and over.”

  Chloe was in the room, too, saying, “Time to go, love,” as if she wanted to get out of there. Which Kevin already knew from the tension in her shoulders. She picked up the backpack and the duffel, headed out of the bedroom with the others behind her, Zavy still clutching his fire engine, and told Zavy—and perhaps her mother, too—“Mummy’s going out for a special dinner tonight, darling, so we have to go home and let me get pretty.”

  “Oh?” Fiona asked, her gaze going between Kevin and Chloe as if she were solving an equation. And as if it wasn’t adding up to her satisfaction.

  “Just a minute, baby,” Kevin said, and if that made Fiona’s chin jerk up? That was what he’d meant to do. “I’ve got this wee surprise for Zavy, remember? Something for the car, eh.” He crouched down and indicated the plastic carrier bag he held.

  “Is it a ’ment mixer?” Zavy asked hopefully.

  “Nah, mate,” Kevin said. “Haven’t had a chance to find another of those, but I will, no worries. It’s something that jumped into my bag over in Aussie before I could turn around, and when I told it to go away ... well, it wouldn’t. Seems it wanted to come across the ditch to En Zed. Said it had a boy to go to named Zavy, who wanted it.”

  “Is it Walter?” Zavy asked.

  “Hmm.” Kevin peered inside the bag and pulled out a ragged little bear. “Yeh, Walter is in here. What d’you reckon? Some of the boys wanted him to stay with the team—a bit of a lucky charm, you could call him, as he was in the sheds every day with us, helping us do our best—but I said, nah, Walter’s got somebody he belongs to already. A boy who wants him back.”

  Zavy dropped the fire engine just like that and held Walter close, and Kevin said, “He had a good adventure, but he’s glad to be with you again, I can tell. Says we talk too loud.”

  “Walter doesn’t like shouting,” Zavy said. “Specially if it’s angry.”

&nb
sp; “Wise bear, then.” Kevin peered into the bag again. “And what d’you reckon, this is who jumped in. This girl. Surprised me, but she said she wanted to come too, and I said OK.” He pulled out the little blue plush figure that he’d already removed from its packaging, guessing that immediate action might be required.

  Zavy was speechless, his mouth forming a perfect O. Kevin smiled, reached into the bag again, said, “I almost forgot this,” and handed over the last thing. A tiny blue plastic comb.

  Zavy plumped himself down on the floor just like that, held the pony in one hand, and dragged the comb through its mane with the other. “She’s got pretty hair,” he said. “She’s got rainbow hair, just like ’Reesa’s pony, ’cause she’s Rainbow Dash.”

  “Too right, mate,” Kevin said. “She’s the real thing. And she wanted to come home to you, the same as Walter did. She says she’s yours.”

  “You don’t want that, Xavier.” It was Fiona. Of course it was. “That’s a girl’s toy.” She told Chloe, her voice low, but not low enough, “I’m not one bit sure about that babysitter of yours, darling. What’s going to happen next year when he goes to kindy? They’ll laugh at him.”

  “He’s three, Mum,” Chloe said, looking tense. “What are you worried about?”

  Zavy spoke up. “It’s not only for girls, Nana, ’cause Kevin likes ponies too. He said.”

  “I do, mate,” Kevin said. He stared straight at Fiona and said it again. “I like rainbow ponies best of all.”

  “Do you have something to say to Kevin, love?” Chloe asked.

  “Thank you for bringing me Rainbow Dash,” Zavy said. “She has wings, ’cause she can fly. ’Cause she’s magic.”

  Chloe crouched beside her son and looked at Kevin over Zavy’s head. He wasn’t looking at her mother, and he wasn’t looking at Zavy. He was looking back at her.

  When it matters, he’d said, I’m not one bit easygoing. There were all sorts of ways of holding your own, starting with the way a good man did what he thought was right. Even if that was only giving a boy a pony.