“New Zealand,” Will murmured. “Aotearoa.”
“Thank you,” Faith said to his grandmother.
“And my mum,” Will said hastily. “Emere Tawera.”
His mother, to his non-surprise, didn’t kiss Faith. She held out a hand, shook Faith’s briefly and released it, and said, without a smile, “Will’s brother and sister. Malachai and Talia.”
And that was it. Photo opportunity taken, family introduced. “Time to go,” Will said. “Breakfast, and a walk round the Domain, I thought. Sound all right?” he belatedly thought to ask Faith. “Did you sleep on the flight?”
“Uh…sure,” she said. “Whatever the Domain is. And yes, some.”
“Drop me at the Uni,” Mals said. “I’ve got a lecture this afternoon. And I don’t want breakfast.”
Will fixed him with a stare. “You want breakfast. In your state? Breakfast.”
Close Quarters
Five hours later, Faith was drooping with fatigue. Of course, it hadn’t helped that she’d barely slept on the flight over, however comfortable a seat—or bed, rather—Will’s Business Select ticket had bought her. She’d been too nervous. But when he’d seen her, stopped, and stared, she’d felt a little better. The time spent fixing her hair and doing her makeup in the cramped toilet cubicle that morning had definitely been worth it. And when he’d kissed her, she’d really felt better, because, oh, could he kiss. And, oh, had his body felt good against hers, big and hard and strong. His arms wrapping her up, pulling her into him, his mouth moving over hers…
Oh, dear. She was in so much trouble. And that had been before she’d met his family.
They’d brought two cars, so at least Faith hadn’t had to ride with Will’s mother, although there’d been a little skirmish about who was going with whom all the same.
“Kuia and I should ride with Faith,” Malachai had piped up when they’d been standing beside Will’s car, which was, no surprise, red and sporty, exactly as Faith would have imagined.
Will had favored his brother with another dark frown. “No,” he’d said flatly.
Could he actually have been jealous that Faith would have been sharing the cramped back seat with his brother? That had been a cheering thought. But no, he probably just hadn’t wanted her to notice the alcoholic fumes that were coming off Malachai. Too late. That was hard to miss, if you’d ever worked in a casino.
They’d taken Will’s sister, in the end, who had sat in the back and said nothing, but had been an effective deterrent to conversation all the same. The three of them had ridden into the City in constrained near-silence, Will asking her about her mother and her flight as if they were strangers. He’d pointed out the communities they were passing, the green hills that were actually the remnants of volcanoes, until they had reached the Domain, which turned out to be a big park situated in another volcanic crater. They’d eaten breakfast sitting on the patio of a little café, watching ducks paddling peacefully in a pond straight out of a fairy tale, lined by trees and ferns so lush, she’d half-expected to see magical creatures peeping out from beneath the greenery. Will’s grandmother had been chatty, Will had looked relaxed and hadn’t been, and nobody else had even pretended. And then they had piled into the cars again minus Malachai, who had headed off after breakfast to walk back to the University, and driven across a harbor that was so picturesque it hurt.
Ferryboats passing busily to and fro against a backdrop of a long peninsula, green hills dotted with houses, and behind them, when Faith turned in her seat, the bridge sweeping across the water to the skyline of the central city, with the spire of the Sky Tower taking center stage, as iconic as a postcard. Clouds scudded across a crystal-blue sky, and the sun shone, then was blotted out by a sudden downpour that passed as quickly as it had arrived. Then it was sunny again, and Will had taken a turn, and they were driving down a street lined with palms and majestic leafy trees, with big houses on either side. Some of her fatigue was lifting, because beyond the houses—that was the ocean she was seeing, those flashes of blue. Will pulled into a driveway on the ocean side, then into the garage of a white house that was all modern lines and glass. Which had, it turned out when Will had led her upstairs, only three bedrooms.
“Oh, no,” she said when she was standing next to a king-sized bed that looked out over a wide balcony, past green lawn edged by palms, and straight out to the beach. Her dream location, but not her dream situation. “Absolutely not. Not part of the deal.”
Will heaved her suitcase onto a low dresser and sighed. “Tell me you’re not going to be passing out in three hours max. Believe it or not, I very rarely make moves on unconscious girls. Besides, it’s just for tonight. And there’s no way my family is going to believe that my girlfriend, the woman I’m madly in love with, is making me sleep on the couch the first night.”
As she continued to stare at him, her hands on her hips, he sighed again. “Right,” he said, then moved to the bed, threw the comforter back, and took the pillows out. “Barrier.” He laid three of them lengthwise down the middle of the bed. “You have your side, I have mine, and never the twain shall meet. Even though you’re beautiful.”
Really? She almost said it, but caught herself. Instead, she just looked at him and said, “Good.”
Her mother had been so right. “The better you look over there, the stronger you’ll feel,” she’d promised. “Take it from somebody who worked mostly-naked and faked a smile for almost twenty years. Knowing you look good is about a woman’s best ammunition.”
“I like to think that’s my mind,” Faith had said.
“And your mind’s just wonderful,” her mother had assured her. “But your mind doesn’t always help if a camera’s on you, or when you’re trying to remember that you’ve got the upper hand over a good-looking man.”
Especially a man who had had his picture taken all day long, nodded politely at calls of, “Oi! Will!” from people he clearly didn’t know, stopped to sign autographs for a couple of kids on the way out of the airport, and signed them again over breakfast.
“I mean,” her resident star was saying hastily now, “not that you weren’t beautiful before. Just that you’re more beautiful, or I’m noticing it more, because you’re dressed differently, or maybe it’s your hair, or…” He stopped. “I’m stuffing up,” he said helplessly as Faith started to laugh, and he was the Will she remembered again, not the polite stranger she’d spent the day with.
“Yes,” she said, “you are. But it’s pretty cute. This is boot camp you’re looking at.”
“What? You joined the army? Then…why are you here?” He looked totally confused, and she had to laugh again.
“Of course I didn’t join the army. Boot camp is fitness classes. I decided it was time to change some things in my life, and this was part of it. Six o’clock every morning, for six long weeks. So if I look better? Well, thanks. Boot camp, hair, makeup, and some new clothes, that’s all.” Which she’d had the money to buy because of everything else she’d changed about her life, but he definitely didn’t need to know that. “And the same me underneath,” she added. “A me who thinks it would be a great idea if you explained why your mother hates me before I go downstairs and she tries to kill me with her withering glare again.”
He sat down on the end of the bed, so she sat down, too, the pillow-wall between them, and waited for his answer. “Same reason your mum hates me. You’re chocolate cheesecake. Well,” he amended, “you’re vanilla cheesecake. And, yes, you are. Although I’ll just say, I love cheesecake.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Off the point,” he muttered. “Yeh. My mum. You’re the brazen hussy who lured her innocent boy into a life of pornography. And the more beautiful you look, the more she’s going to think so, so I’m afraid you’re stuck.”
“Wow. Me?” She actually felt pretty happy about that. “I tempted the player, huh? With my wicked ways?”
He smiled at her, and her heart did a funny little flip.
“You did,” he said
, “and you know it.”
Tempting the Player
Faith woke to blackness. She pulled her phone off the bedside table and blinked at it. Four o’clock. She set the phone down, rolled onto her side, and tried to fall asleep again.
It wasn’t working. She could hear Will’s breathing in the quiet, could sense his warmth across their pillow-barrier, and that was way too distracting.
He’d fixed her a sandwich the day before after she’d taken a shower and somehow managed to unpack, and then she’d gone upstairs to take a nap at four o’clock and hadn’t woken again, just as he’d predicted. She hadn’t even known when he’d gotten into bed beside her, which was kind of a disappointment. She’d slept with Will Tawera, and she hadn’t even remembered it. And now it was a whole twelve hours later, she was awake, and she couldn’t sleep any longer.
She stole quietly out of bed and felt her way across the room in the dark towards the closet. She’d just reach in there and grab her robe.
Instead, she let out a squeak of surprise and pain as she stubbed her toe, then lost her balance and fell forward, her hands coming out to catch herself against something low and hard.
“Faith?” The voice came from behind her. The light went on, and she shoved off what turned out to be Will’s dresser. She hadn’t even been close to the closet. She turned to find him sitting up in bed, a white T-shirt stretching across his chest, his jaw dark with stubble. His hair wasn’t even mussed. It was cut too short and sharp to be mussed. In fact, he looked absolutely terrific, and she probably looked…
His gaze flew hastily back to her face, and she realized he’d been staring, too. “Nice jammies,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to be sharing my bed,” she managed, “or I’d have worn a muumuu.” She’d thought the pinstriped pink shirt and shorts with their black piping were cute, and that they’d be lightweight for packing. But the V-necked collar plunged deep into her cleavage, the shorts were short, and they were riding low, she realized with a hasty glance downward, sitting inches below her navel, their black ribbon untied and dangling down her thighs. She grabbed for it and tied it hastily into a bow, and he watched her do it.
“Did I mention,” he said a little huskily, “that you looked good?”
“Go back to sleep. It’s four.”
He lay back against the pillows, crossed his arms behind his head—which was just way too much bicep for her peace of mind—and grinned at her. “I’m used to odd hours. And I need to keep the light on if you’re going to get out of here without bodily injury. But if you’re going to be changing, I’ll close my eyes. How’s that?”
“Humph. I don’t trust you.”
He sighed. “Wounding. But probably wise. I’d want to be virtuous, don’t get me wrong, but it would be so bloody tempting to peek just a wee bit.” He sighed again. “I’m weak. I’d probably succumb.”
She opened the closet door, grabbed her clothes from their hangers, then got her underwear, bra, and tights out of their drawer, trying to be inconspicuous about it. And then, of course, dropped her underwear and had to bend to pick them up.
“Your undies have a hole in them,” he said.
“Will you stop looking at my underwear?” she said crossly.
“Another of those weakness things. Seems I just can’t help it. Come on. Show me. Give me something to think about, if I’m going to have to lie here the rest of the night without you.”
“Not part of the deal.” She could feel herself beginning to blush. “Giving you something to think about.”
“But how am I going to hold your hand and kiss your cheek when I take you out today, otherwise, so we can get our photo snapped?” he complained. “I need to get in the mood.”
“You? You were born in the mood.”
He laughed, strong white teeth flashing, and she couldn’t help smiling. “Too true,” he said. “You going to show me or not?”
She heaved a sigh. The better you look, the stronger you’ll feel, she reminded herself. She would put herself in the power seat, that was all. She sat on her side of the bed, crossed her bare legs, dumped her clothes into her lap, and held her pale purple lace underwear up, draped over one finger.
“Bow in the back,” she told him, then slowly reached for them with the other hand, held them up, and showed him. “With this little diamond-shaped cutout underneath it. It’s supposed to be sexy.”
She could see his Adam’s apple moving in the muscular column of his throat as he swallowed. “It works, too. Work even better on, eh. You want to really inspire me…”
“Ha.” She uncrossed her legs, scooted off the bed, scooped up her clothes, and wiggled just a little bit extra as she flounced—yes, flounced—towards the bathroom. “You’re going to have to work with what you have,” she tossed back at him over her shoulder, “because that’s all you’re getting.”
After that, and after she’d come out of the bathroom again to find him still awake, still watching her, it wasn’t very hard at all to write her next chapter.
She’d stolen downstairs and curled up on one of the black leather couches that stood before the fireplace in the soaring space of the living room—the lounge, she remembered. And had begun to work. If you could call it that.
I sat up and stretched, satisfaction running like warm liquid through my veins. I’d never been as aware of my body as I’d become these past few months, or as happy in it. I felt Hemi’s hands and mouth on me even when he wasn’t touching me, and all he had to do was look at me to set me quivering.
He wasn’t looking at me now, though. He was lying on his back, the white sheet pushed all the way down to his waist, one muscular arm flung over his head, still sound asleep.
I loved to look at him, at the powerful sculpture that was his body, the fierce, proud lines of his warrior’s face. And now, for once, I could look my fill, because he was sleeping. Because he was helpless.
The happiness rose in me like bubbles in a glass of champagne, and I got out of bed, stole around to his side of it, and picked up the silk ties he’d used the night before. I’d been moaning then, straining against them, begging him to finish, to put me out of the delicious misery he’d kept me in for what had felt like hours, until every nerve in my body had been stimulated to its aching maximum, until I’d been shaking with need, panting with frustrated desire.
But that had been last night, and this was a whole new day, the first morning of the rest of my life, and I was a strong woman who needed to see just how far she could push a strong man.
I paused all the same when I’d laid the tie gently over his outflung wrist. Could I really do this? Could I take the consequences?
Yes. I could. I could take anything he gave me.
“Working already?”
Faith jumped a full two inches and slammed the laptop shut. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” She twisted on the couch to see Will coming down the spare open treads of the staircase, light-stained planks against stark white walls broken by one tall rectangular window, glowing pink now with sunrise.
He looked so athletic loping down the stairs in navy-blue shorts and a gray T-shirt. He looked like Hemi, but he wasn’t. He was Will, and he was grinning at her. Her life was so confusing.
“What?” he asked. “Writing down all your naughty thoughts?” And she very nearly jumped again.
“Just doing a little work.” It was the truth. It was just that some of her work, these days, was downright…pleasurable. If you couldn’t do it, you could at least think about it, and she was spending a lot of time thinking about it. And writing about it.
“Operation Restore Will’s off to a flying start, by the way,” he said, “if you haven’t checked it out yet.”
“Huh?”
“We made the papers, if you want to see.”
He sat beside her, and at his direction, she found the article, complete with a picture of Will kissing her at the airport. Her head back, his arms wrapped around her, her hand clutching his flowers in th
eir pink-tissue cone, looking so incongruous against his broad shoulders.
She looked like a woman abandoning restraint, a woman being passionately kissed by somebody who knew how. Which was exactly how it had felt. For those few treacherous moments, she’d forgotten why he was doing it, why she was there, and had wanted nothing more than to keep kissing him, to keep feeling that hard mouth on her, those big hands exploring her. Until she’d remembered.
“We pretended pretty well there,” she managed to say. “That looks real, doesn’t it?”
“Yeh. Good job.”
She read the headline, then. The Player Meets his Match. If she’d needed a reminder, here it was.
Rugby heartthrob Will Tawera has always been a player—in both senses of the word. It’s no secret that the star No. 10 has left a trail of broken hearts on either side of the Tasman for nearly a decade. The hottie playboy’s latest antics, though, looked like having serious consequences after he was found to have posed for some very naughty photos during his recent holiday break in the States.
Another picture, this time from the site. Gretchen on her hands and knees in bra and low, tight jeans, with a shirtless Will on his knees behind her, one big hand on the back of her neck.
“Whoa,” Faith said. “Family newspaper?”
“Yeh. Surprised they put it in there, but hard to resist, I guess. That won’t have helped.”
Turns out, though, she read on, that there was a reason behind our Will’s apparent fit of Stateside madness. A curvy brunette reason named Faith Goodwin, to be exact, the femme fatale for whose sake, agent Ian Foster says, Will did his spot of erotic modeling. Faith was spotted yesterday arriving at Auckland Airport to keep her man company during his one-week suspension from the All Blacks’ June tests against England. The stunning photographer’s assistant looks like enough to make any rugby boy lose his head. It seems that Will’s enforced holiday is off to a smashing start. Could the legendary player have finally met his match?
Just in Time (Escape to New Zealand Book 8) Page 13