“Well, that was the idea,” Faith said, closing her laptop again and doing her best to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “I guess it worked. It’s good to be stunning, too, I suppose. Did your agent leak those pictures?”
“Yeh. He will have done. And you are stunning, although I’m not nearly as much of a heartthrob as they’re making out, or as much of a player, either. Let alone a playboy. Makes me sound like I’ve got silk sheets on the bed. But then, I make it a point never to believe my press.” He stood up. “And meanwhile, here in the real world, I’m off for a run. Want to join me? Keep you fit, since you don’t have that boot camp anymore? I could give you some physical training myself, come to think of it. If you gave me a bit of time to think about it, that is.”
His slow smile was pure sin, all teasing heat and wicked implications, and she was responding despite every better intention. The tingles she was feeling weren’t coming from reason, because her body answered to a more ancient call.
But if she liked him, even if she just liked looking at him, well, that just made this easy money, didn’t it? As long as she kept her head and enjoyed it for what it was. Flirting with a sweet, sexy man who made her laugh, and being in New Zealand. What could be bad about that? So she picked up her laptop, stood up, and said, “Sure. Let me put this away and go get my shorts on. I’m not fast, though, I warn you.”
“No worries. I like to go nice and slow, too. Long as I’ve got company.”
She put a hand on her hip and gave him her best glare, feeling a little better. “If you’re going to make everything you say a cheesy innuendo, this deal’s off right now.”
He laughed. “Can’t help it. Too easy. Go put on another pair of tiny little shorts, and we’ll see if I can help it then. I’m guessing not, but here’s hoping, eh.”
Change of Plan
When he’d switched on the light that morning and seen her bent over his dresser in those tiny pink shorts, Will’s heart had just about stopped, and every moment after that had made it worse. Or better, depending on how you looked at it.
Worse, it turned out, because it had taken him almost as long to fall asleep again as it had the night before, after he’d tugged the duvet up a bit higher over Faith, and she’d murmured in her sleep and snuggled down a little deeper in the bed. She’d looked so soft and sweet, with her hair falling over her cheek. And when he’d climbed into bed beside her, separated by those bloody pillows, and thought about living with her…
At least they wouldn’t be sharing a bed anymore, which was good, because surely this much sexual frustration wasn’t healthy. He was going to rupture something. Ever since Faith had arrived, his agent’s clever plan hadn’t looked so clever after all.
Now, he was running down the hard-packed sand of Narrow Neck Beach behind her in the pink-tinged dawn light, and she was wearing shorts again, and he was beginning to doubt his aerobic conditioning, because he was having serious heart trouble.
She turned around to smile at him, and he jogged up to join her.
“Told you I was slow,” she said.
“And I told you that I like slow.” Slow and easy, or fast and hard. Either way. Both ways. All ways.
She laughed, spun in a circle, then faced forward again. “It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it? How far can we go?”
“Far as you like. The tide’s out. You won’t see much, heaps of sand and sea, some trees and houses. About like the view from my deck.”
“Mmm. And some ships.” She eyed the behemoth that was making its ponderous way up the shipping channel towards the Hauraki Gulf. “What’s that?”
“Car carrier. They come in almost every day. Everything has to be shipped to En Zed, remember. We’re a long, long way from anywhere, down here at the bottom of the world.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, pointing at the immense low cone that dominated the horizon to seaward. “The mountain, or island, or whatever?”
“Ah. That would be Rangitoto.”
“Let me guess. It’s a volcano.”
“Got it in one. Fifty volcanoes in Auckland. But just about that many beaches, too.”
“You know what’s funny?” she asked after a minute.
“No, what?”
“The day I met you, I was having a…well, a bad morning. And having this daydream of running on the beach. In a bikini.”
He pivoted in an instant, and she turned with him. “What?” she asked in alarm.
“Dreams come true. Going back for it.”
She pulled at his arm, tugged him around with her, and he came with her, and she was laughing again. “Too uncomfortable. I need a little more support, here in the real world.”
“You had to burst my bubble, didn’t you?”
“Better than bursting mine.”
This time, he was the one laughing. “Well, yeh. When you put it like that—we’d better take care of yours, eh. Can’t have my girlfriend suffering. So what else happened in this fantasy? Anything I can help with?”
She was smiling again. “Now, did I say it was a fantasy?”
“Well, I’m hoping.”
“Too embarrassing,” she decided.
“And now you have to tell me. What happened?”
“I guess, since you’re my boyfriend…” He could tell that she was loving being able to tease him, and he was more than willing to keep her loving it. “The short story is, I sort of got…tackled by a guy.”
He sighed happily. “I knew I could help.”
“What, you’re volunteering to tackle me? I thought you didn’t hurt women.”
“Don’t have to hurt you to tackle you. I’m a highly skilled athlete. Or I could tackle you onto the bed, maybe, if you were worried about it. Yeh, that’d work. Just a venue shift.”
“Remember you telling me that you didn’t have to do everything you thought about? Anyway, you tackle? I thought you kicked.”
He stared at her. “You really don’t know anything about rugby, do you?”
“Nope. Not a thing. Except it’s sort of like football.”
“Not that much like it. Everybody kicks in rugby, though I kick the most. Everybody passes. Everybody runs. And everybody tackles. So you see, I’m clearly the man for the job.”
She was still running. Not asking to be tackled one bit. “And again. Daydream. Not real.”
And all that was fun, and sexy, and sweet, until it wasn’t.
A couple hours later, he was eating breakfast along with his family and Faith, who was looking proper and demure in her purple dress and black leggings, and not in the least like a man-eater, no matter what his mum thought. Unfortunately. And his grandmother was making him an offer he was most definitely going to refuse.
“No. Sorry. Can’t,” he told her.
“And why can’t you?” Kuia asked, her head on an angle, the feathers of gray hair framing the sculpted bones of her face. A hard face to say no to. “You’re stood down anyway.”
“Yeh, thanks. I remember.”
“What’s stood down?” Faith asked, taking a bite of toast.
“Suspended for a week,” he said, the wrench in his gut exactly the same one he’d felt when Callum had told him.
The All Blacks’ head coach had been blunt about it. “Do the crime, do the time,” he’d said, and Will hadn’t argued. He would pay the penalty, would go back to work afterwards and put his head down, fight to get his starting position back for the final game of the June test matches, and it would be behind him.
“Oh.” Faith looked stricken, as if she really were the wicked temptress who’d lured him into this mess. “I read that, didn’t I? I’m sorry, Will. I didn’t realize…”
She needed to stop talking, because Kuia was looking curious again. Faith should have known that already. If she really had been his girlfriend.
“He’ll get over it,” Kuia said. “He’s got over worse. Nothing but a tempest in a teapot anyway. He hasn’t hurt anybody, hasn’t done anybody over outside a pub o
r beat his partner or cheated on his girlfriend. Hasn’t done anything at all but given a few women something to dream about when their own partners don’t measure up, and what could be wrong with that? God gave you that body for a reason,” she told her grandson.
“If He did,” Will’s mum said, “it wasn’t to give randy girls something to dream about.”
“How do you know?” Kuia asked. “Have God on a private line, do you? Who do you think gave women imaginations? And why? To get them through the bad times, that’s why. Or the boring times. If our Will’s helped them out a bit, well, maybe that’s part of His plan, too. Got to be a reason Will did that.”
“I’d love to think the reason was God whispering in my ear.” Will couldn’t help it, he was laughing at the idea. He caught Faith’s eye, and she put her napkin hastily to her lips and succumbed to what she was trying to pass off as a coughing fit. “I’m afraid that wasn’t an angel on my shoulder that day, though.”
“Well,” Faith said, the smile escaping despite all her efforts, “not the way I saw it, no.”
“Except that mostly, I did it for Faith,” he remembered to say, and realized that it wasn’t actually so far from the truth. He thought of her dropping the muffins, of following her from the anteroom into the studio and looking at the back of her jeans. “And she’s pretty much an angel, so—”
“Oh, really? An angel’s what you want? Huh,” she said, and his grandmother was watching the two of them, her brown eyes alight.
“But then,” Will said, “sometimes that little devil on your shoulder is exactly what you need.” He watched the color rise into her cheeks, regular as clockwork, and smiled at her. “We all have dreams,” he said softly. “Even if they’re just daydreams. Making them come true—that can’t always happen. But we can try.” And the color rose some more.
“Anyway, you’re stood down,” Kuia said briskly. “Which means you can’t train with the team anyway. So why can’t you bring Faith down to Rotorua with us, work out at the gym there like you normally do? Haven’t been home at all, have you, since the season started. And what were you planning to do with her next week once you’re off with the All Blacks again? Leave her here all alone?”
“I’m fine,” Faith put in hastily with a glance at Will’s stone-faced mum. “I have a lot of work to do, and doing it in a house at the beach is pretty much my best dream come true.”
“See,” Will said, “she’s fine. Besides, could be we want some privacy. We haven’t seen each other for more than four months, and I only have this one week to spend with her.”
“You have a bedroom in Rotorua,” his grandmother said. “A bathroom, too. Those should do you pretty well.”
“Mum!” Will’s mother exploded. “Talia’s right here.”
“Either Talia doesn’t understand, or she does,” Kuia said. “Either way, we’re all good.”
“Talia understands.” It was almost the first time Will’s sister had spoken this morning. “Talia’s sitting right here. Talia is fifteen, and she isn’t an idiot.”
“Talia needs to remember who she’s talking to,” Will’s mum said. “And we need to get back, because she’s missed two days of school already.”
“Which wasn’t my idea,” she muttered.
“Wasn’t mine either,” Will said. “Much as I appreciated all of you turning up to welcome Faith,” he added with only a bit of sardonic intent.
“No,” Kuia said calmly. “It was mine, and it’s my idea that you drive down today with Faith. You can have all the privacy you want in the car, show her a bit of the country as well. She’s flown all this way, and she’s only going to see Auckland? That’s not New Zealand.”
“Privacy in the car isn’t exactly what I was talking about,” Will said.
“It was when I was young,” Kuia said, and his mother was spluttering again, and he was laughing again, and that was just about that.
New Challenges
“What’s going on with your sister?” Faith asked later that day, shifting in her seat to look at Will. He drove absolutely competently, no surprise there, but not fast, which was a surprise. But then, the roads here weren’t wide, and they did some fairly serious winding. They’d even had to stop once for a herd of sheep being moved down the highway by a man on an ATV and a couple of very agile dogs, which Faith had already chalked up as one of the highlights of her life, and this was only her second day in New Zealand.
“Who? Talia?”
“No, I mean some other sister that I haven’t met yet.”
“Bit testy, aren’t you?”
“Jet lag,” she admitted. “I guess you fly a lot, huh?”
“You could say that. Or you could say that it’s only every other week, and only about a quarter of those journeys are halfway across the world, so, nah. Not so much.”
“So talk to me.” She tucked one foot up under the other leg and wriggled around to get comfortable in the leather seat. “Because I am jet-lagged, and I’m nervous about hanging out with your family. Besides, I don’t want to fall asleep and be up at four again tomorrow.”
“Nah, we don’t want that. Having to watch you drop things and bend over to pick them up? Bloody nightmare. Just imagine, tomorrow I get to watch you get up at seven. In the light. Unless you want to stay in bed, of course. I’d be good with that, too.”
“I’m not happy,” she warned him. “You said one night, and it’s going to be, what? Seven? You’d better have enough pillows, because that wall stays up.”
He shot a look across the car at her. “You’re not happy? You’re not the one who had somebody holding up her lacy undies at him this morning. I wore a T-shirt and shorts to bed. I had some consideration.”
“Aren’t you making a pretty big assumption? That I’d find your naked self irresistible?”
“What, you wouldn’t? Here I thought I was God’s gift and all.”
“To your grandmother.”
He laughed. “And the knife goes straight in again. Cut to the bone, aren’t I.”
She smiled with satisfaction. Yes, he was doing a pretty good job of keeping her awake and entertained, which was necessary, because the landscape spooling by outside the car was too pretty, too pastoral, and too storybook to do more than lull her to sleep. Rolling emerald-green hills dotted with sheep as white and fluffy as the clouds that floated serenely overhead, with the occasional teardrop of a serene blue lake to add its grace note, and a higher ridge fading to blue beyond.
“Your sister,” she remembered. “Talia. What’s the story?”
He shrugged. “She’s a teenager.”
“Really? Because it seems like more than that to me. She’s the only one still at home?”
“Yeh. Two sisters in Aussie, and Mals at Uni, doing an engineering course.”
“Engineering. Huh.” He hadn’t exactly looked like a serious student to her, but then, Will knew him and she didn’t, and she didn’t need to be butting into Will’s family life. She was here for two weeks, and then she was leaving.
“So when you talk to her,” she pressed anyway, “what does she say?”
“Talia? You’re assuming she talks to me. I’m not that interesting to her, am I.”
“Really? A celebrity like you?”
“Not a celebrity to her. Just her brother, who she barely knows, because I left home when she was six, and I’ve been playing rugby ever since, gone all the time. Four years of that in Aussie as well, remember.”
“Why’s that? Why’d you go to Australia? Seems like you like New Zealand, from what you’ve said, and your family’s here. So why?”
“Money.”
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t, and something in the set of his jaw made her decide not to pursue it. She wanted to ask about the tension she’d sensed in his mother and Talia. She wanted to ask about his grandfather, and why his grandmother, who had lost her husband only six months earlier, was the only person in the family besides Will who seemed remotely happy, but maybe today wa
sn’t the time.
It wasn’t her business anyway, because it wasn’t her family, and she wasn’t really his girlfriend. She was just pretending. So she lapsed into silence, looked out the window at grass and hills and sheep, and went somewhere else.
“So…” I asked tentatively. “You don’t see much of your dad?”
I trembled a little as I waited for his answer. I knew he had a soft side hidden beneath the disciplined exterior. As fierce and demanding as he was when we made love—when he was holding me afterwards, I could feel all the emotion he had so much trouble expressing. The gentle touch of his hand stroking down my back. A kiss on my forehead when he thought I was asleep.
I knew his feelings ran deep, but when we’d met his cousin the night before, and Tane had mentioned Hemi’s father, it was as if a steel curtain had come down. Hemi’s face had been so forbidding, even Tane had dropped the subject.
“No,” Hemi said tersely now, his knuckles showing white on the leather-wrapped steering wheel of the big sedan.
“Was your father not around, then? Like mine?”
“Hope,” he warned, his lips barely moving, his face carved from teak. “This isn’t a subject I discuss.”
“You’ve helped me so much, though. With Karen, especially. Couldn’t we…”
“No.” His voice was so harsh, it sliced straight through me. “You couldn’t.”
It was the smell that brought her out of it. Sulphur, strong as a gas leak.
“What is that?” she asked.
“That,” Will said, “is the smell of home. That’s Rotorua.”
The rolling fields of green had turned to higher, more rugged hills. They came around a corner, and there was the lake, a huge expanse of blue bordered by forested slopes stretching away on both sides.
“I thought it was a city,” she said.
Just in Time (Escape to New Zealand Book 8) Page 14