Bending The Rules: Stewart Island Book 10

by Tracey Alvarez

  As he hit accept, he glanced out over the mirror-smooth waters of Halfmoon Bay and the Stewart Island ferry getting ready to head back to the mainland.

  He cleared his throat and adopted the same professional calm voice he used when answering the station phone. “I’m busy. Haven’t you got anything better to do than bug me?”

  The rattle of Carson’s fingers flying over a keyboard came down the line along with a chuckle. “I bet you’re busy. Got your hands full being Tilly’s sex slave?”

  Yeah. He hadn’t told anyone he’d left Auckland two days ago. Two days of skulking around his house, which wasn’t really his house but the officer in charge’s house, currently being shared with Constable Webster who snored like a chainsaw. Since Webster intended to stay for his full temporary assignment, Noah planned to finish up his coffee and then take advantage of knowing where Tilly hid Southern Seas’ spare key. The mood he was in, he’d much rather room with the sharks than suffer another evening listening to Webster saw logs in his room while he tossed and turned on the couch.

  “Something like that.” He deliberately blocked any accompanying images of Tilly naked beneath him, on top of him, wrapped around him, moaning his name. It was getting harder and harder to do. He stood and crossed to the wharf edge, narrowing his eyes at the horizon.

  There was a soft murmur of a feminine voice in Carson’s background and he wondered briefly if Carson had broken his dry spell and taken a woman back to his lair, as he liked to call the penthouse suite of his central Wellington apartment building. Then he heard the woman say, “Is that Noah?” and he recognized Carson’s PA, Ria. Definitely not a woman interested in sleeping with her boss, not when she knew exactly how screwed up his love life was. Noah wrinkled his nose. Pot meet kettle.

  “Yup,” his mate said. “You want to take over busting his balls?”

  Noah heard Ria laugh. “Would that work for you, sweet cheeks?” She raised her voice so he knew the comment was directed at him.

  “Any time, honeybunch,” he replied. “But be a doll and fetch your boss one of those wussy soy latte things he drinks first.”

  “Oh—and one of those blueberry scones. They’re my favorite,” Carson added.

  “Sod off, the both of you. Meeting starts in ten minutes, Carson. Don’t be late. Kisses, Noah. Later.”

  Carson had known Ria since they were seniors in high school, where she, like him, had been part of the unpopular crowd, which had bonded them for life.

  “Again,” Noah said, “what do you want?”

  Before Carson could answer, the ferry let out two short horn blasts. There were a couple of beats of silence, then a long sigh rasped into Noah’s ear. “You’re back in Oban?”

  “You missed your calling as a detective,” Noah said. “Yeah. I’m back in Oban.”

  “And Tilly?”

  “Auckland.”

  Another sigh. A wow, my mate is thick sigh. “Let me get this straight. The woman you love is recuperating in Auckland, and you’re not there with her, spooning her to sleep every night?”

  “Spooning is too painful when you’ve got a shoulder injury.”

  “God’s sake, Noah. Be serious for a moment. I saw how you two were at your dad’s retirement party. What the hell happened?”

  Noah pushed away from the wharf railing and strode back toward the main road. An icy wind ruffled a seagull’s feathers as it launched awkwardly into the sky. “She got shot. I wasn’t there.”

  The same burning terror ripped through him as it did every time he remembered that night. And he relived that night over and over. The night he’d finally realized what it felt like to be helpless while the one you loved more than your next breath could’ve been taken away from you. Forever.

  “You were there afterward, and her being shot is not on you. You know that. She must be real important to you, because heaven forbid you ever take time off from the job to actually have a life. So why aren’t you still in Auckland?”

  “She told me to go home.”

  Carson snorted. “And like a good little doggy, you tucked your tail between your legs and went?”

  “She wanted me to go,” he repeated, as if explaining a simple concept to a toddler. “I’m not going to stay with a woman who doesn’t want me.”

  “Are you really buying into your own bullshit?” The cease of keyboard tapping emphasized his mate’s frustration. “Let me guess what really went down,” Carson continued. “You refused to tell her what a hot mess you were at the thought of losing her, and she probably assumed you followed her to Auckland out of guilt, and you let her think that rather than tell her you’re madly in love with her. Then you chickened out and ran back to your little hidey-hole in the deep south.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re a bloody know-it-all?” Somehow Noah managed to keep his tone at a casual two guys ragging on each other level as he left the wharf behind him and, in a split-second decision, turned toward Russells’ grocery store to pick up a couple of six-packs. Since he was off duty, the day’s plan now included getting off-his-face drunk so he didn’t have to face the reality that he’d probably lost Tilly for good.

  “Am I right?” Smugness coated Carson’s voice.

  “I did tell her I loved her.” Even though Carson was his oldest friend, it was hard even admitting it to him. Falling in love with Tilly had made him the most vulnerable he’d ever been.

  And she hadn’t felt the same, pushing him away with gentle but insistent force.

  “What? As in, out loud? In actual words?”

  “Yes, in actual words.”

  The tapping started again. “To clarify: You, Noah Daniels, actually said I love you to Tilly while she was conscious and at a volume that the human ear can pick up?”

  Noah’s gut gave a sickening little lurch. He drained the last of his coffee in an attempt to settle it, and tossed the cup into a trash can. He’d told her he loved her, hadn’t he? “Close enough. She said we’d only known each other for a short time. I didn’t hang around to listen to the we’re moving too fast, let’s slow this down speech.”

  “Wait a minute. Back it up. When did you tell her you loved her?” Carson asked suspiciously.

  Damn. “The first time I saw her after she got out of surgery. Listen, love guru, you’re much better at discussing your feelings with a woman.” Not that it helped Carson much. “I’m not comfortable discussing this with you.”

  “Or with Tilly either, it would seem.” Carson clicked his tongue. “And are you going to leave it at that? Won’t she have to come back to Stewart Island to finish up at her aunt’s place?”

  He arrived at Russells’ but didn’t go inside, choosing to lean against the outside wall and watch the ferry chug away from the wharf.

  “At some stage. She’s still got a lot of her stuff there and she’ll have to make a final decision what to do with the property. I guess she’ll sell it.” He shut his eyes against the icy wind, thankful Carson couldn’t see his expression. Some part of him had been hanging onto the hope of seeing her again. Of figuring out some way, of some reality where Tilly would fall in love with him.

  “Would you consider moving to Auckland? Maybe apply for one of the more rural positions up there, like in Pukekohe? That’s only a forty-five-minute commute to the city.”

  The idea was one he’d already considered while he had time to kill in Tilly’s little apartment. “I don’t think location is our number one problem. I would move just about any damn where to be with her.”

  “Mate,” Carson said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Then you’d better work on loosening that stick up your butt and figure out how to tell her this before she walks out of your life permanently. You’ve got to fight for her. Women love that.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “If you don’t,” Carson said, “I will be forced to sic Ria on your case. And nobody wants that particular pit bull latched onto your junk. Hear me?”

  “I hear you. Now piss off and go make an
other million dollars sticking your nose in other people’s business.”

  Carson chuckled and Noah disconnected. He shoved the phone into his jacket and decided to skip the beer. A morning hangover wasn’t going to help him figure out how to win the fight to get Tilly back.

  Chapter 22

  Tilly sat at the conference table and watched Jonas’s mouth open and shut.

  He must still be using his super expensive lip balm, and she suspected he’d had his teeth whitened since she was last at work. His droning voice sandpapered her nerves, and she shifted on her chair, wincing at the ache in her shoulder. Her mum was right; it was too soon for her to return to work.

  But after Noah had walked out, after enough hokey pokey ice cream to put herself into a diabetic coma, after crying so hard she’d started to choke on her own snot—nice image, right?—she needed the distraction. Even if the only distraction was Jonas’s blah, blah, blah.

  It was during his suggestion that they have one of the supporting cast involved in a robbery gone wrong that Tilly realized she didn’t care half as much about these fictional characters as she did about the real characters on Stewart Island.

  She missed her chats with Mrs. Taylor. She missed Piper, Kezia and the girls, and old Smitty, who always made her laugh with his tall tales. She missed surly-at-times Ben, Ford, who had the singing voice of an angel, and sarcastic Del, who had given her the recipe for a melt-in-your-mouth beef stroganoff. She missed Erin’s muffins, Holly’s to-die-for scalp massages, and even Pete Reynolds’s gruff but humble gratitude when she stopped by to help out.

  But most of all, she missed Noah with an ache that was beyond any of the pain she’d experienced from her injury. Yes, it was a cliché, but it felt as if she was missing a limb. One that she didn’t necessarily need in order to survive, but a part of herself that made her happy and whole.

  “Tilly? You’ve been very quiet this morning. Is your shoulder bothering you?” Jonas asked.

  Everything was bothering her. She was bothered beyond belief.

  She’d thought this past week away from Noah should’ve given her the headspace to center herself and come up with a solution. The only solution, or rather decision, she’d made in the past few days suddenly became under-her-nose obvious.

  In a gesture Jonas frequently made at her, Tilly held up a wait for it finger, then hit send on the email she’d composed earlier. “Actually, Jonas, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking during this meeting.”

  Across the table, Jonas’s phone pinged with an incoming notification. Her resignation that she’d CC’d him on the email sent to Christophe.

  His lip twitched up in a sneer, exposing one blindingly white incisor. “Let me guess, you’re going to protest about my idea of an armed robbery because it triggers you?”

  She aimed the sweetest screw you smile at him she could muster, which was pretty lackluster because she honestly didn’t care anymore. “If my life is inspirational to you, if you need me to replace your own creativity, knock yourself out.” She stood, shut her laptop screen, and slid it into her satchel.

  “What are you doing?” Jonas rose out of his cocky, I am the boss slouch to sit bolt upright. “You can’t just walk out of this meeting.”

  “Watch me.” Tilly zipped up her satchel and swung the strap over her good shoulder. “Oh, and you might want to check the email that’s just landed in your in-box.”

  While she turned to pick up her handbag, which Marjorie sitting next to her passed to her with a smile, Jonas scrolled through his messages.

  His perfectly plucked eyebrows shot up. “You can’t resign.”

  “I can do whatever the hell I like. An unexpected bonus of being shot is that it knocked a good deal of sense into me.”

  “Tilly,” he said in the patronizing, cajoling tone that once used to drive her fricking insane. “You’re not thinking clearly. Resigning is a terrible decision.”

  Walking away from this job, this leaking ship of a job that would drown her muse if she stayed any longer, was the right decision. The only decision. A decision her father would’ve wholeheartedly approved of.

  “It’s my decision to make.” She stepped out from the conference table and met each of her colleagues’ gazes individually. “Best of luck, you guys.”

  And then to Jonas, because she refused to give in to her baser instincts and flip him the bird, she said, “See you later, alligator,” knowing that particular adage, which he used to claim was childish, would piss him off more.

  As she left the conference room, Tilly liked to believe she could hear Jonas’s perfect white teeth grinding together.

  A thirty-minute cab ride later, Tilly arrived at her mother’s house. Might as well get all the drama-llama parade over in one fell swoop. Her mum opened the door with a confused but affectionate smile.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” she asked, but stepped aside so Tilly could enter.

  “I finished early.”

  She followed her mum into the living room, which had become a kind of a shrine to her dad with the covers of his most famous novels blown up to poster size and framed on the wall.

  Tilly kicked off her heels and curled up in her father’s favorite armchair. Her mum took the couch, a slight frown on her face. “I would offer to make you lunch, darling, but I’m going out with the girls soon.”

  “I won’t stay long.” That her mum had since renewed and strengthened all her former friendships that had fallen by the wayside in the past few years gave Tilly some sense of relief. “I just wanted to tell you, before you heard it anywhere else, that I resigned today.”

  “Good. About time.” Her mum folded her hands primly on her lap. “They never did treat you very well. And as for Jonas”—she gave an eye roll worthy of a big screen actress—“I always thought you were too good for that douchebag.”

  “Mum!” A snort of laughter burst out of Tilly and she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Language.”

  “That became one of your Aunt Mary’s favorite expressions in later years. Though we didn’t always see eye to eye, Mary wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade.” Her eyes slitted in consideration. “I suspect you’ve also come to tell me you’re considering a career change to a B&B owner.”

  Tilly’s stomach flip-flopped. “And what would you think about that? I’d planned to sell the property so that you could afford to move into Greenhaven Retirement Village if you wanted to.”

  Her mum poked out her tongue. “No retirement villages for me in the near future, thank you very much. I’m far too busy to sit around in a dusty corner growing moldy with a bunch of geriatrics. I’m not that old, my girl.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy to even consider it?”

  “I think your father and I have raised a daughter strong enough to take the necessary measures in order to have a happy and fulfilled life no matter where she is in the world or what she chooses to do.”

  “I’m not moving for a man,” Tilly said. Well, not just any man.

  “Noah’s the cherry on top, isn’t he? Now, your cop—him I approve of.”

  “I might have blown it with him, and I still don’t know…” Tilly’s flip-flopping stomach plummeted to the soles of her shoes. “I’m scared.”

  “Of rejection? Oh, angel, that man loves you.”

  She still wasn’t convinced about that. “Not of rejection.” Not only of rejection would be more accurate. “I’m scared of losing him.” A tremor ran through her and her eyes stung, tears forming in the corners. “Like we lost Daddy. Like you lost him, the love of your life.”

  “Mortality is an unbearable thought,” her mum said with a sad smile.

  “Noah’s been hurt on his job before.” Tilly’s throat clogged and she dug her nails into the seat cushion of her dad’s chair. “He doesn’t think anything bad could happen to him because of the intensive training he’s been through. But all it takes is someone with a gun or a knife and everything changes. Look at what happened to me.”

&
nbsp; Her mum leaned forward, pinning Tilly to the armchair with the sharp conviction in her gaze. “Yes, let’s look at what happened to you. Your fear of losing Noah has nothing to do with his job. It’s a completely normal fear, but if you love him you’re going to have to find a way to live with that fear.”

  “I don’t know if I can—”

  “From what I know of your young man, it isn’t his job that puts him at risk, it’s who he is. He’s the type of person who will always protect those in harm’s way. And do you know what?” Her mum tapped a pointed finger in Tilly’s direction. “You’re that type of person, too. With no thought to your own safety, you protected that little girl in the convenience store from a gunman’s bullet.”

  “That’s different. It was a one-time thing, a freak reflex.”

  Her mum chuckled. “Don’t you remember the times we were called into your school because you were fighting with the bigger kids? Only you weren’t fighting, you were putting yourself between little schoolyard thugs and the kids they picked on. When you got older, it became less physical fights and more psychological warfare against catty teenagers. I bet, even now, you wouldn’t stand by while someone vulnerable got hurt.”

  “Um.” She didn’t know quite how to respond to that. “Okay. Maybe I do have a touch of the superhero psyche, but it doesn’t change how each of us reacts to the situation. I was distraught when Noah ended up with a black eye—”

  “You think he didn’t react when you were shot?” her mother interrupted. “Goodness, girl. I have never seen a man look more upset, unless I count your father when we were told I needed an emergency C-section. The man was a hot mess, as you young people would say. He was beside himself, bugging the hospital staff for updates, wearing a groove in the waiting room linoleum, all but wringing his hands.”

  “He was?”

  The image of a panicked Noah didn’t seem to fit with his reactions afterward. She crumpled up her face, trying to recall the glimmer of a memory of him when she’d first woken. Rigid muscles wired under control in his arms as he’d bent over her, as if he were struggling not to wrap his arms around her and squeeze her tight.