Faith cast a glance at the skirt. She didn’t miss that Talia hadn’t answered her other question. “Can I ask? Do you roll up the waistband once you’re out of the house? I always heard about girls doing that.”
“Maybe,” Talia admitted, peeping at Faith from under long dark lashes that Faith would have killed for. “Because it’s so long, isn’t it.”
“I think they choose the most unflattering length possible,” Faith agreed, “so girls won’t look pretty. Too dangerous. They might forget themselves, or the boys might, as if they wouldn’t anyway.”
She got a little smile for that. “So girls don’t have to wear uniforms in the States?” Talia asked. “Can you wear whatever you like?”
“You can. Of course, that’s got a downside, too. It seems to me, if everybody wears the same uniform, it’s less about who has how much money. If you’re a girl who doesn’t have the right clothes, a uniform could just be the answer to your prayers.”
“I never thought of it like that. Just thought it was ugly, and wished we could wear mufti. I can’t wait to get out of school.” Talia’s tone was almost savage as she poked at the eggs she had broken into a pan on the stove with a spatula. “Go to Uni and get out. Like Mals.”
Faith started to ask a question, then thought better of it. “Hmm,” she said instead, focusing on buttering slices of toast as if it required all her concentration. “Maybe it’s easier to be a boy.”
She thought Talia was going to say something. But instead, like Hope in the conference room, she seemed to catch herself. She turned away, pulled plates out of the cupboard, and slid eggs onto them. Faith added the toast, and they pulled stools up to the kitchen counter and began to eat.
“So what is there to do after school around here?” Faith ventured after a minute. Talia hadn’t been around the previous afternoon, she hadn’t missed that. “Seems like it might be a little easier to get together with your friends than where I grew up.”
“Where’s that? Vegas? I always wanted to go there. Sounds so glamorous. Not boring like here.”
Faith laughed. “And here I’ve been thinking how beautiful New Zealand is. How much there is to do. The ocean, the lake, the mountains? It seems like paradise to me.”
That was met with a look of incredulity. “Ha. Dead bore. Everybody I know wants to emigrate to Aussie, or the UK, or even,” Talia said with a sigh, “the States. When I told them you were from Vegas, all my friends were jealous as.”
Jealous as what? Faith wondered. “Well, I guess everything looks different from the outside, because it’s not glamorous at all. I work in a casino. I practically grew up in one, so I ought to know. It’s people losing their money, and outside of that? It’s suburbia, and your friends from school live miles away, and you don’t have a car. I’d think it might be better here. What do you do after school?”
“Huh,” Talia said. “We usually go down by the lake. You know, hang out. Have a chat.”
“I haven’t seen the lake yet.” Faith concentrated on her toast. “I wonder—” She stopped. “No, probably not. I know, I’m kind of old. Never mind.”
“What?” Talia asked. “You’re not old. You’re pretty cool, actually.”
“Really? Well…do you think—would you be willing to show me the lake, maybe? Show me around a bit? Because I’ll bet Will’s going to go to the gym this afternoon again, and your grandmother said something about yoga again, so…please.”
Talia laughed, for real this time, her perfect smooth oval of a face lighting up with it, her dark eyes showing a light Faith hadn’t seen in them, and Faith laughed back.
“Yeah,” Faith admitted, “I’m begging here. Please. Hide me.”
***
She did end up seeing the lake before the afternoon, though. She saw it on the way to her Canopy Tour with Will.
His mother had come into the kitchen while Faith and Talia were finishing up, and Talia’s face had gone shuttered, their conversation at an end. Faith had sat at the breakfast table with the others once Talia had taken herself off, had offered to do the dishes, and had had her offer accepted, to her relief.
“You can do them with me,” Miriama said. “Emere is off to work today.”
“Oh, do you work?” Faith asked, and then could have kicked herself, because the woman had raised five children.
“Yeh,” Will’s mother said. “At the i-Site—the tourist information site—a few days a week. Keeps me busy. How do you stay busy, Faith?”
Her glance held not-so-veiled hostility, but Will just laughed. “You’re offside there, Mum. Faith has three jobs.” Well, four, but who was counting? “She’s been working already since she’s been down here, haven’t you noticed? She doesn’t spend her time trolling the casinos for hot rugby boys with big bikkies, whatever you may be imagining.”
“Big…” Faith uttered faintly. What had he just said?
“With money,” he said. “Why, what did you think? Got to stop looking at those naughty pictures, eh. They’re giving you a dirty mind.”
Faith choked back a laugh, because Will’s mother didn’t look amused, and Miriama’s sharp eyes were on the two of them again.
“Hoping to tear you away today, though,” Will said. “I thought we could do a bit of sightseeing. In fact, I already booked, so no choice. As Kuia pointed out to me, here you are in En Zed, and I’m duty-bound to give you an adrenaline rush, aren’t I.”
His face was nothing but innocent, but Faith knew better. She looked right back at him and said, “An adrenaline rush? You think you could?”
This time, he was the one choking, to her satisfaction. He recovered himself fast, though, and said, “Well, maybe somebody else could. And I could watch.”
She started to smile, caught the look on his mother’s face, and got up hastily and began to collect plates instead. “I’ll just start this, then. I’d like to help more instead of just falling asleep on you, since you all are being kind enough to let me visit.” Yes, it might have been a blatant attempt to win a little favor with his mother, but she wasn’t used to being hated, and it was wearing on her.
Will got up with her. “We’ll do it together. And then go for my outing.”
“Don’t do that,” she hissed at him under cover of the running water when she was scraping plates and filling the dishwasher.
“Who, me? Did I start that?”
“Your grandmother knows,” she muttered. “I’m sure she does. And, what? Now I’m not just a gold-digging tramp, I’m a gold-digging exhibitionist tramp?”
His laugh rang out, and she had to laugh too. “Because you’re bad,” he said, the smile reaching all the way to his eyes as he looked down at her. “I’ve always known it. It’s all a front, that good-girl thing you do. See, there you are turning red again, bang on cue. Nothing better than a good girl succumbing to her dark side. Nothing sexier than thinking about helping her do it.”
“Stop,” she warned. “Stop right now. That’s our deal.”
He sighed. “Right. Washing-up, sightseeing, showing my innocent American girlfriend the beauties of my native land. The program as scheduled.”
***
It didn’t turn out to be sightseeing. It turned out to be a heart-stopping journey through the treetops with two guides and five other guests, none of whom had recognized Will, because none of them had been Kiwis. The guides had known who he was, but they hadn’t made a big deal of it. But then, Kiwis didn’t make a big deal out of much, Faith was figuring that out. Well, nothing except rugby.
It all began frighteningly enough, with following their guide—or, in her case, following Will’s absolutely fantastic rear view, in a pair of shorts again—up an endless ladder set against a tree trunk that was a good six feet in diameter.
Higher and higher into the air she climbed, wanting to stop, wanting to climb down, but that wasn’t an option, because there was somebody else behind her. Finally, she came gratefully to rest on a platform set high in the treetops, a canopy of green and bird
song all around her. She felt a little better when her feet were on solid wood again, despite the fact that the platform was completely open, and that there were nine people crowded around it, including one of them who would rather have been hugging the trunk. That would be Faith.
“Please tell me it’s not possible to fall,” a middle-aged woman, sharing the adventure with her husband and already looking dubious, said to some nervous laughter from the rest of the group.
“Haven’t lost one yet. That’s what the harness is for, eh,” Roman, their male guide, said, exchanging a laughing glance with Will. “Want to show them what happens if they let go?”
Will grinned at the young man, and before Faith realized what he was doing, he had leaned back from the edge of the platform and stepped off, was dangling in midair from the chest, twisting a little in the wind.
Faith gasped, cried out, and in the next two seconds, she had reached for him, grabbed him around the waist, and pulled him back in, and everyone was laughing. Everyone but Will. His arms had come around her instantly, and he was holding her tight.
“Sorry, baby,” he said. “No worries. It’s all good. Nobody’s falling today.”
“Apologies for the moment of heart failure,” Roman said cheerfully as Faith disengaged herself from Will, tried to calm her racing heart and pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. “But, yeh, the harnesses are there for a reason. You’re safe as houses, and we’ve just experimented with our million-dollar man to prove it to you.”
That was it. Will’s cover was blown, because all the guests were looking curious now.
“You’ll hear,” Caroline, the other guide, was piping up on the other side of the platform, “that nothing matters more to Kiwis than the All Blacks. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that our rugby team is our most famous export. If we’re willing to dangle our starting first-five from his harness thirty meters above the ground ten days before he’s due to lead New Zealand to another hard-won victory against England? You know it’s safe.”
“Maybe we should drop him, then. I’ve got twenty pounds on that match,” the British lady’s husband said, and the group laughed again. Everybody but Faith. She was still too embarrassed.
“We’ll start with something easy,” Roman said. “Across the swing bridge you go. One at a time, please. Start us out again, Will.”
“Nah,” he said, his arm still around Faith. “We’ll let somebody else go first, give Faith a minute.”
“I’m all right,” she hastened to say.
“Then why don’t you lead us off?” Roman asked her, and if he wasn’t a sadist, Faith didn’t know who was.
“You don’t have to,” Will was murmuring. “Just say no. You know how to do that. I’ve heard you.”
That did the trick. Faith took a breath and said, “Sure.” Her new life was about taking chances, after all, about putting herself out there, not taking the easy route.
This wasn’t the easy route, no matter what Roman had said. It was just walking, true. But it was walking across two narrow planks set on cables, with two more waist-high cables at either side to hold onto, desperately in her case, until she’d crossed to another platform, the whole thing swaying dizzyingly with every step and sending her heart galloping along with it. Finally, though, she came to rest on solid wood again, and this time, she really did have to force herself not to reach out and hug the tree trunk.
“What you’re standing around is a totara,” Caroline said when the group had reassembled. “One of our most beloved native trees. This one is about four hundred years old.”
Faith’s eyes flew to Will’s again. That had been the tree in the Maori saying, she remembered, the one about his grandfather. He looked back at her, not smiling for once, and she knew he remembered, too.
After a while, when the message got through to her stiffened limbs that she really wasn’t going to fall, she relaxed a little and began to enjoy her adventure. Moving from one platform to the next, surrounded by the murmuring canopy of green, with monstrous ferns sprouting directly from the bark and fern trees swaying in the breeze with all the grace of palms and none of the wicked sharp edges. The melodious song of tui and bellbird filled the air around them, and she was so high, so remote, it was as if she were a bird herself.
She relaxed, that is, until she had to fly, feeling exactly like a baby bird being pushed out of the nest. When she stepped off her first platform into thin air, clutching the handles of the zipline with desperate urgency, the canopy flashing past her with dizzying speed, she thought her heart would stop.
At least she hadn’t been the first to do this one. Will had already done it, had bounced off a far-distant tree and landed on the platform with ease, so she knew it was possible. But it was all so…high. So fast. So scary. And, in the end, so exhilarating.
By the fifteenth or sixteenth time, she was grabbing the handles with eagerness, her blood rushing in her veins, her heart pounding with joyous adrenaline. When she took her final ride, the longest and most thrilling yet, she was laughing out loud, whooping with the fun of it, lifting her feet to bounce off the tree at the other end and releasing the handles of the zipline, moving to re-clip her line so the next person could go, as if this were something she did every day. As if she actually were an adventurous traveler instead of Faith Goodwin, conservative stay-at-home worker bee.
Will’s arm had gone around her to cushion her landing as she bounced, and she laughed up at him, the adrenaline still surging. “Still think you need to hold me? I’m all brave now, see?”
“Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse,” he said. “But you’re right. You are. Awesome, eh.”
She was here, sharing the moment with him, and she also knew that she had to go back and write Hemi and Hope doing this. She had to let Hemi share this adventure with Hope. He had to be able to show Hope his other side, even if—especially if—he showed it to nobody else. Because a man who would do that for you, a man who wanted to have fun with you without making fun of you, who enjoyed making you smile, and laugh, and live? He was a keeper.
“Thanks,” she told Will when they were safely at the bottom again, had bade their fellow adventurers goodbye. “I’m a little wobbly still,” she admitted. “Glad to be on solid ground again. But that was super fun. Thank you.”
“Thought it might be.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the car key. “Want to have another adventure, drive home on the left? We should get you practicing.”
“You’d trust me with your car?”
He shrugged. “Why not? I’ve got insurance in case you have a smash. And how are you going to be the perfect houseguest, endear my mum to you with your helpful journeys to the supermarket, if you can’t drive?”
She groaned. “Was it that obvious?”
“Well, yeh. Good try, but I think it’s going to take more than that, if you keep tempting her baby boy. So…drive?”
She was about to say no, but the challenging light in his eyes, the keys dangling from his hand, made her change her mind. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
“Why not. Famous last words, eh. I remember saying them myself a few months ago.”
“If I start posing for naked pictures,” she said, punching the key fob for the door and then promptly going around to the wrong side, “stop me. I think I’m all right with driving.”
“They weren’t naked.” He waited until she’d gotten out of the way, then slid in on the passenger side. “As somebody told me over and over again, they were just suggestive. Very tasteful. Hardly even sexy, come to that.”
“Yes.” She shoved the key into the ignition and told herself that she could do this, that she knew how to drive. “But then, I was trying to talk you into it.”
She peeped across at him, and he was smiling. “Think I know that,” he said. “Why d’you imagine I did it?”
“Well, not because of me.”
“No? Maybe not. And maybe so. But today…I had fun today, suspension o
r no, because that’s what you are. Fun. I’d forgotten how much I liked being with you. And, Faith…” He sighed. “You’re so bloody pretty.”
Surely there wasn’t enough air in this car, not with him looking at her like that. “I’ve been jumping around in trees for three hours,” she managed to say. Her heart had begun to knock against the wall of her chest as if it were trying to escape, because her heart was smarter than she was. It knew how much danger it was in. “I don’t have any…any makeup on. I thought…” She swallowed. “It would smear.” She was turning red now, she could tell, and she was babbling like a fool, and she needed to shut up.
“Yeh. You don’t. And you’re still pretty.” His hand had come out to caress her cheek, his thumb brushing lightly over the mole above her lip that had been the bane of her teenaged existence. “Thanks for caring that I might fall,” he said softly. “Thanks for pulling me back.”
His thumb was tracing the curve of her upper lip now, her lips were parting under his touch in spite of herself, and in about ten seconds, he was going to be kissing her. She knew it, and she knew she should care.
“Want to change our deal?” he murmured. “Say the word.”
She wanted to. She wanted to so badly. “I can’t,” she forced herself to say instead. Because she liked him too much. She wanted him too much, and if she had him, she’d want to keep him.
His smiled a little crookedly, and his hand caressed her cheek one last time, then fell. “Right.” He shifted in his seat. “You can’t. Got it.”
He was back to his cheerful, teasing self again after that, as if the tender moment hadn’t happened. He coached her as she drove around the lake and into town, somehow managing not to hit anything, and only once starting to turn into oncoming traffic, until a sharp word from Will and his quick hand on the wheel swung them out of danger.
“Sorry,” she said shakily, her heart pounding for an entirely different reason now.
“No worries. Everybody does it once, usually just when they’ve started to relax a bit, have stopped paying quite so much attention. Same for me when I drive in the States. Pull over and park here, and I’ll take you to lunch.”
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