Just Not Mine (Escape to New Zealand)

by Rosalind James

  He’d been right, because she was wearing an ivory bra underneath. Low-cut, the swell of her upper breasts showing above, so tantalizingly close to revealing the treasures beneath.

  “Aw, Josie,” he groaned, his fingers lightly tracing those scallops. “You’re beautiful.”

  He felt her shiver as he touched her, as he reached down and yanked that tie loose from around her waist, and the bronze fabric parted completely, revealing the tiny undies that matched the bra, more ivory scallops decorating their top edge.

  He took another step back to appreciate the picture she made, ran his fingertips delicately across the edge where lace met firm brown flesh, so far beneath her slit of navel with its winking diamond, and he could actually see her flesh quiver.

  “I’m going to kiss you everywhere,” he warned her, his voice hoarse in his ears. “I’m going to do it now.”

  “Huhhhh.” It was a sigh, or a groan, and her eyes were closed.

  “Open your eyes,” he told her gently. “Know who I am?”

  He watched the lashes flutter, saw the delicately carved lids opening to reveal dilated pupils, the flush that had risen on her cheeks.

  “Hugh,” she sighed. “Hugh.”

  “That’s right,” he said, his fingers continuing to trace their slow path, then, just for a moment, sliding down, touching her through the silk, one fingertip gliding lightly over her, finding the spot. He felt the moisture that had soaked through the fabric, the spasm as she jerked against him, and he smiled. Oh, yeh. This was going to be so good. He was going to make her feel so good.

  Knock knock knock.

  The rapping at the door was so sudden, they both jumped.

  “Josie?” the feminine voice came through, muffled by the wood. “Excuse me.”

  Hugh expelled his breath in a curse, and Josie hastily pulled her robe together and tied it shut with hands that he saw were shaking. Then she shook her hair back, stood tall, and walked to the door to open it, and Hugh turned toward her dressing table and tried to pretend a fascination for her cosmetics he definitely wasn’t feeling.

  “Sorry,” he heard the assistant saying. “The other fellas are leaving, thought I should let you know. I think they wanted to say goodbye.”

  Hugh would bet they did. Especially Will. Well, goodbye was all right. Goodbye was perfect.

  “All right,” Josie said. “Tell them I’ll be right out, and Hugh will be too.”

  “Will do,” the voice said, the door clicked shut, and Hugh turned around again to see Josie shedding the dressing gown with nothing but efficiency this time, pulling the little yellow skirt on over the undies, the white T-shirt over the bra before adding her high-heeled brown ankle boots and zipping them up with a couple quick motions, the whole thing taking her about thirty seconds.

  “Ready?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Nowhere close to ready, because we’re nowhere close to done.”

  “My recovery period’s over, you think?” she asked, a faint smile curving the lips he wanted to be kissing again. The ones he would be kissing again.

  “I think,” he told her, “your recovery period just came to a crashing end.”

  Stamping On It

  She walked back out into the makeup room, so aware of Hugh walking behind her, and used every bit of her training not to show how shaken she still felt.

  “Thanks,” she told Will and Koti, shaking hands all around. “You did awesome,” she said to Will. “Good job acting terrified.”

  She gave him a smile and a wink, and he laughed back at her and asked, “Who says I was acting?”

  “You’ll have picked up a few new fans, anyway,” she said, “this side of the Ditch. I predict a good turnout for your first appearance at Eden Park.”

  She dropped his hand, turned to Hugh, standing there staring at Will, and if that wasn’t a warning-off glare, she’d never seen one. “See you, then,” she told him.

  He shifted his frowning attention back to her. “You’re not coming?”

  “Nah, got a few more things going on here, now we’re done filming.”

  “Right,” he said, and she held out a hand to him, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he took her by the shoulders, leaned down, and brushed his lips over hers.

  “Be good,” he murmured in her ear, just loud enough for the others to hear, then turned and walked away.

  “Uh, Josie?” Clive asked from his spot at the table with Valerie when the others had left. “Something you want to share with the group? Thought you were still getting over Derek. You done getting over?”

  “Could be,” she said. “Or I’m going to be.”

  “With a bit of help, I take it.”

  “Well, yeh,” she said. “Maybe. Working on it. Or he is. Or …” She sighed. “Something.”

  “Uh-huh,” Clive said with satisfaction. “Looks to me like he’s ready to start working hard. Remember our little talk about weeing round the boundaries? That, my darling, was a champion exhibition. That’s our boy Hugh saying he’s won, and letting everybody know it.”

  “He’s won?” Josie sat down with them, grabbed Val’s cup of tea and took a swallow, trying to laugh it off. “Because he kissed me goodbye?”

  “Because he put his stamp on you,” Clive said, “in front of Will Tawera, and anybody here who needed to know it, too. That was the point.”

  “His stamp,” Josie said. “That is disgusting.”

  “Then my work here is done,” Clive said. “Men are disgusting. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “And here I was,” Val complained, “letting myself get excited to see him in his undies this morning. Thought you didn’t care, when you didn’t look. You could’ve warned me so I wouldn’t have wasted my energy flirting. Though Will’s more than all right too. Pity I didn’t get a chance to check out what was in his undies.”

  “You didn’t check out what was in Hugh’s,” Josie protested.

  “Well, not check,” Val said. “But I got the chance to take a pretty good guess. And my guess is, it’ll do.”

  “Maybe women are disgusting too,” Clive said. “Or maybe that’s just you, Val.”

  “Oh, you know you love it.” She stuck out her little pink tongue at him, and he laughed.

  Mike walked in, all efficiency, and cut to the chase, as usual. “Ready for you, Josie,” he said.

  “Break a leg,” Clive said, his voice low, and Josie saw Val lose the smile and give her a meaningful look that she knew meant the same thing, and she forgot about Hugh.

  “You’ve got maybe ten minutes,” Mike said as they walked. “Make them good.”

  She longed to ask him what they’d thought of her idea, to attempt to get some last-minute reassurance, but it sounded needy, so she didn’t. She took a breath, put her shoulders back, and channeled Dr. Eva as she stepped into the writers’ room ahead of Mike.

  “Mike says you have an idea,” Victor, the head writer, said without preamble once she’d sat down, and his expression in the heavy black glasses didn’t look welcoming. He shoved his stocky frame back from the conference table, gestured with a meaty hand to the other three writers, and added, “Actors telling me how to write my characters aren’t my favorite thing, but he asked us to hear you out, so we’re all ears.”

  Josie gave him a cool smile, then made eye contact with each of the four others at the table. “I do have an idea,” she told them, “thank you. We’ve had Dr. Eva being Dr. Evil for three years now. I thought it might be interesting to show a different facet to her character.”

  “Such as?” Victor asked, his unkempt beard bristling pugnaciously.

  “Nobody’s ever suggested she’s anything but a good surgeon,” Josie said, keeping her tone level, impersonal. “In fact, I’ve always thought a lot of her confidence comes from knowing she’s a great surgeon. If she’s arrogant, well, surgeons are. It’s just that most of them are men, and arrogance in men is called ‘confidence,’ isn’t it?”

  She sa
w the nod from Samantha, the youngest writer on the team, and went on. “She’s sexually aggressive, she’s arrogant, she’s cold, and she’s unpopular. But she also does right by her patients, at least in the operating room. Even if it comes from her pride in her skill rather than her humanitarian instincts, she does care. So what if somebody else wasn’t providing that level of care? How would she feel about that? I think she’d hate it.”

  “Go on,” Victor said, his expression giving nothing away.

  “What if there were a surgeon who was stuffing up,” Josie asked, leaning in, looking around again, ramping it up a little bit, impressing her personality, her own confidence in her idea on all of them, “and Dr. Eva was the only one who saw it? What if he was a man who’d refused her, and everyone knew it? Say he had a drug problem, or an alcohol problem. You all would know what would work best, could give him a tortured past. Make him complex, a tragic figure. Nobody better at that.” Buttering them up couldn’t hurt. “Say Dr. Eva brought it to the chief medical officer’s attention, and he brushed it off, because of her reputation. Thought she was trying to get revenge because he—the other surgeon—had turned her down. Say patients started dying, and some of the hospital staff were covering up. And she couldn’t get anyone to care, and didn’t have any allies to call on.”

  “That’d mean a new character,” Mike pointed out.

  “Yeh, and one people could change their minds about, gradually,” Josie said. “Just like they could change their minds a bit about Dr. Eva. It’d get the viewers talking. Get them thinking. I got the idea from a headline about a surgeon like that, big news at the time. You may have seen it yourselves, because it’s a horror story everyone can relate to, isn’t it? Dad going in for a heart op, your partner going in for a Cesarean, dying because the doctor was drunk. The baby dying, too. Pure drama. Cue the tears.”

  She stopped, because it was time to listen, looked around the room, and saw them considering. Well, considering was good.

  And then Victor ruined it. “So you want your character to be more sympathetic,” he said. “All the work we’ve put in to make her not be, and you want to take out the villain of the piece?”

  “I put in a bit of that work myself,” she said, “and I’m not saying to take out the villain. I’m just saying, add a bit of nuance. A spin.”

  “I like the spin,” Samantha said, which was brave of her as the newest writer on the team, and Josie shot her a smile of gratitude, got a smile back. “I think Josie’s right, it’d get people talking. How many men is Dr. Eva going to be able to work through? She’s shagged half the cast already. Unless she starts in on the women as well, there’s only so far we can take that storyline.”

  “An alcoholic surgeon’s not a bad idea,” Ian, the other junior writer, said with a judicious air. “But I’m not so sure about the other. You’re meant to hate Dr. Eva, full stop. And nuance? This isn’t a BBC costume drama. It’s a soap.”

  Victor looked at the fourth writer, Rose, an older woman and the second-most senior member of the team, but she only shrugged. “Sounds good to me, but I’m not fussed either way,” she said.

  “But would you want to watch that?” Josie pressed a bit, because she could feel the tone of the meeting shifting away from her.

  “I don’t want to watch any of it,” Rose said. “I just write it.”

  “And I don’t like the idea much at all,” Victor said. “Turning your villain sympathetic isn’t a recipe for ratings. Mike?”

  “It’s your call,” Mike said. “I could do something with it, yeh. I think it’s good. But I’m not going to shove it down your throats if you don’t want to do it.”

  “We’ll think about it,” Victor said. He looked at Josie. “And let you know.”

  She nodded, stood up with a smile. Never let them see you sweat. “Good. I’ll look forward to hearing more,” she said, and left the room with her head high.

  Mike followed her out. “Sorry that didn’t go better,” he said when they were walking down the passage again.

  She tried not to let the exasperation show. He hadn’t exactly stuck his neck out for her. “Thanks for getting me the meeting,” she said. “If it doesn’t fly, well, there’s always next time. And who knows, maybe Victor will change his mind.”

  “Yeh. Maybe.” Mike sounded about as convinced as she felt.

  Clive and Valerie looked up inquiringly as she entered the makeup room again. They’d stayed, she knew, just to see how her meeting had gone, and she felt a rush of gratitude.

  “No joy,” she told them, not sitting down with them again.

  “Ah,” Clive said. “Hard luck.”

  “Yeh. Win some, lose some,” she said. “Thanks for hanging around. But it’s late. See you both tomorrow.”

  Her thoughts on the drive home in the thinning post-six-o-clock traffic caromed between the disappointing meeting, her optimism taking a hit as she contemplated the dashing of an idea on which she’d pinned too much hope … between that, and Hugh. Down, and then, oh yeh, up again.

  It was such a good diversion to think about Hugh making those slow turns in nothing but his black boxer briefs. No matter what Val had thought, Josie had looked, and it didn’t seem to matter that she’d seen him in his togs just a few days earlier. He was what she wanted, and she couldn’t get enough.

  She’d looked at broad thighs defined by heavy muscle, at the wide shoulders and deep chest with its light furring of dark hair, all of it narrowing so satisfactorily to his trim waist and hips, at the arms he held out from his sides, so much of them it seemed like it would need some strength just to hold them up like that. At everything she’d been looking at for weeks now, so tantalizingly close to being fully revealed. When he’d pulled his jersey over his head again afterwards, tugging it into place down his torso, she’d wanted to take it off again. To stroke her hands up his sides, over his chest in its wake, listening to him groan out her name, her real name. Not because he was acting, but because it was real.

  She’d had a quick image of doing just that, of him in her bed, every beautiful naked bit of him sprawled there while she worked on him, while she drove him wild. And then he’d kissed her in her dressing room, and it had been exactly the other way around, and she’d been lost.

  What was she meant to do now, though, turn up at his door tonight and ask him to finish the job? She’d got reckless today, but he was still her neighbor, and this was, suddenly, going much too fast. All the arguments that had made sense yesterday still did. It was just that their voice was being drowned out by something else. By the sound of his voice, low in her ear.

  Be good.

  She didn’t have a clue, so she went to the gym, did her workout and took a quick shower, and picked up a takeaway salad at the café afterwards.

  “Thirteen-fifty?” the girl behind the registered prompted.

  “Hmm?” Josie looked up, startled, from her mobile.

  “Thirteen-fifty,” the girl said again with a sigh, and Josie swiped her card, punched in her PIN, took her salad out to the car, and sat and looked at the text again.

  Still going to do it.

  Five words on a screen, and her body had gone on Full Alert. The problem of her professional future had been shelved, because she wasn’t thinking about it anymore. But then she drove home, saw his car in the driveway, the lights on in the house, knew he was with his brother and sister, doing the washing-up, probably. And again … now what?

  She let herself into her own dark little villa, switched the lights on, sat at the kitchen table and ate her Thai chicken salad, for once not noticing the hunger that remained afterwards, the yearning for one of her mum’s roast meals, kumara and potatoes and lamb that stuck to your ribs. Which was why she didn’t eat it, because she didn’t need anything sticking to her ribs.

  And by then, it was after eight-thirty, and it was time to get ready for bed, because no matter how many sexy rugby players she kissed in her dressing room, the alarm was still going to ring at five o’c
lock the next morning. And Hugh was with his family.

  She went into her bedroom, raised the blind all the same and looked across at what she knew was Hugh’s window. Dark. Of course it was, because he didn’t have to be asleep by nine.

  They could go out, she thought, switching on the bedside light and switching off the overhead one. He could ask her to dinner. She could start dating again. She could start with Hugh. As long as they kept it … friendly, what was the harm, after all? He was decent, she was sure of it. And as for her, she never lost her head, and she wasn’t going to start now. If it didn’t work out, it didn’t, and they could move on.

  She walked across to the closet, pulled the T-shirt over her head and tossed it into the hamper, undid the side zip on her skirt and clipped it onto its hanger. Unfastened the back clasp on her bra, wriggled out of the undies, and couldn’t help feeling his fingers sliding over the lacy scallops with a deliberation, a delicacy she’d never have imagined, leaving a trail of tingling nerves in their wake.

  When she was naked, she pulled her dressing gown off its hanger and shrugged it on, then walked across the room to sit at her dressing table, where she pulled the pins out of her hair one by one, dropping them into the green pottery bowl with its koru design that she’d made in primary school, and began to brush her hair.

  She didn’t really need to, but she liked to. She loved the long, rhythmic strokes, the sensuous grace of it, liked to watch herself in the mirror while she did it. The one time she allowed herself to look in the mirror and not worry that that was a wrinkle developing beside an eye, a spot forming on her chin.

  At night, she gave herself a pass. So she sat and did her hair, taking it slowly, then set the brush down and massaged lotion into her face, her neck, her chest, focused on the touch of her fingers, the silkiness of the cream dissolving into her skin. And the memory of Hugh’s mouth on her neck, of his hand whispering up her thighs, over the tops of her breasts.