Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  Surely this was God, and surely, it was good. She let the strength and the purpose come, stretched her arms out to receive it, and felt her heart open like opening a door.

  The dawn was hers, and so were the rainbows and the dolphins and the birds, the clouds overhead, and the diamond sparkle of sun on the waves. All she had to do was let them in. She might lose some of her money. She might even lose most of it. She didn’t have to lose her hope, though, did she? Nobody was in charge of that but her.

  If she was going to wait for everything to work out right, how long was she going to stand around waiting? Money or not, success or not, she still had everything she’d started with. Her drive, her skill, and the strength to keep going. She’d kept going through everything life had thrown at her so far. She was going to ride that fear like she was riding this wave, and then she was going to leave it behind. Let it chase her.

  And, yes, it could be she’d have to remind herself of that four times a day, but you did what you had to do.

  The light and the truth had been there all along, and they’d wanted to come. It had been that thing Brett had said last night, in the dark. His voice had been calm and sure, but she knew now that he hadn’t always felt that way. That strength had been built on the solid rock that was his character, and it had been built one painful layer at a time, exactly as she’d once imagined.

  “Every morning of my life since I was twelve years old,” he’d said quietly, the way he said most things, “I’ve said the same two things to myself. The things the minister who married my parents and buried my father told me to say, when he was standing beside my dad’s grave with his hand on my shoulder. It felt like the only thing holding me there, because I’d let go of my dad’s hand.”

  He fell silent. “Tell me,” she said. “I’d love to hear.” And held still, so he’d do it.

  “Right.” He exhaled the word on a breath. “He said, ‘You think this is it for you. You think everything good is gone, and nothing will ever feel safe like that again, the way it feels to fall asleep in the back seat in the dark in your pajamas with the radio on and your sisters on either side of you, knowing your mom and dad are up there driving the car, and you don’t have to worry about anything. But that isn’t where safety comes from, not when you’re not a kid anymore. Not when you’re growing up to be a man. Safety doesn’t come from somebody else, and it’s not something you can hang onto. It’s not getting what you want, either, then squatting down and hanging onto it tight like a dog with a bone. It comes from having faith that even after the longest, darkest night, the sun will rise again, and you’ll keep going. I want you to wake up tomorrow and say two things to yourself. Start again. Start from here. You might go to bed feeling defeated, and that night might be a hard one to get through. That doesn’t make you a loser. It doesn’t have to make you miserable, because everybody who’s ever lived in this world has had dark nights and dark thoughts. As long as you get out of bed again in the morning, you’ve got another shot. I want you to promise me to wake up tomorrow morning and say to yourself, ‘Start again. Start from here.’ Saying it is the first step to doing it. I should know. I’ve been saying it for nearly fifty years.’”

  Once again with Brett, she’d been struck dumb. She’d held him tight, had thought, Whatever happens, remember this, and had been engulfed by a wave of tenderness that had bowled her over. And a wave of sadness, too, that she finally knew what love was, and she’d found it with a man who was going away.

  There was gratitude there, too, though. There had to be. How could she have given up knowing him? There would be pain in the future, but there was always pain in the future. That didn’t mean you needed to feel it now. Right here and now, she wasn’t powerless, and she wasn’t alone.

  Time to stop hiding, then. Time to push back. Time to start again.

  The ride home was harder, as always, the day already getting warm, the crowds beginning to pour onto the pavements, going in search of breakfast.

  Porridge with rhubarb for breakfast, Willow thought, standing on her pedals for the last uphill bit, thankful for a body that did everything she asked of it.

  When she let herself into the flat, she heard nothing. Azra was still asleep, then. Just as she thought it, she heard the scrape of a drawer closing, went to Azra’s room, and popped her head around the door. When she stuck her head through the door, though, she came face to face with an exquisitely groomed older woman in a pair of deep-gray wide-legged trousers and a cream blouse that were both so glossy and perfectly cut, they had to be silk and from a designer, and black satin shoes whose delicate heels and pointed toes were narrow enough to tell the wearer that her comfort was not their concern. Willow was pretty sure the shoes alone had cost more than everything in her closet put together. Including her surfboard.

  At her entrance, the woman turned from the closet in surprise with a load of dresses over her arm. As for Azra, she was standing by the bed, the tearstains on her cheeks telling their own story.

  “Good morning,” Willow said. “I’m just back from surfing. Sabaḥul khayr, Azra. Would the two of you like breakfast?”

  The woman, who was tall, fine-boned, and slim, with smooth, honey-colored skin, black hair drawn back in a chignon, and black-winged brows, looks that made Willow wonder exactly how short and fat Azra’s father was, asked Azra in Arabic, “Is this why you’re so insistent on staying here to design? In order that women like this can go out on the street in their underclothes like prostitutes?”

  “No, madam,” Willow said in the same language, “it is so we can go to the beach in our swimming costumes like surfers. Personally, I don’t dress like a prostitute until night. That would be my second job.”

  Azra gave a little squeak, then stood up straighter and said, still in Arabic, “Mother, this is my flatmate, Willow Sanderson. Willow, my mother, Jamila Amal.”

  “I am honored to meet you, Ostaaza Jamila Amal,” Willow said. She was damned if she would let this woman make her feel small in her house.

  Azra’s mother’s face had flushed. Now, she gave a nod and said stiffly, “I beg your pardon. I didn’t remember you spoke our language so well. I shouldn’t have said that in any case.” She shifted the hangers to one arm and extended a regal hand, like a woman who was equal to any manners contest.

  It was on, then, but Willow had been raised in the home of a diplomat. A slightly deeper nod of her own, the lightest press of the other’s hand, and she let it go again.

  “This is good,” Jamila Amal said, clearly determined to make a fresh start. A formidable woman. “I’m glad you’re here, Willow. I can give you money for Azra’s last month of rent.” She reached for a quilted red-leather purse with a chain strap and interlocking C’s on the flap, which Willow was pretty sure stood for ‘Chanel,’ withdrew a neat packet of Australian bills secured with a clip, and said, “You’ll have to sort out your rental agreement, of course, but Azra has told me how capable and independent you are, so I’m sure that won’t be a problem.”

  Azra wasn’t looking at her mother, and she definitely wasn’t looking at Willow. Instead, she was folding a pair of trousers on the bed with her usual neatness and even more than her usual care. When Willow didn’t say anything, she looked up and said, “My father says now or never.”

  Willow asked, “Have you considered ‘never’?” She didn’t take the money, either. Damned if she was going to be part of this.

  Azra’s mother drew in a breath and said, “This is Azra’s family. This is not your concern.”

  “It is my concern, though.” Willow gave a good hard kick to the “perfect politeness” route. She’d been raised by a diplomat, yes. There was a reason, though, that she wasn’t one. “Azra has a perfectly good route ahead of her, and a job waiting. Why shouldn’t she take it?”

  “To have a life like yours?” The woman’s gaze swept around the admittedly none-too-posh room. “Two single women, getting older every day, surviving by their wits?”

  “Luckily,
” Willow said, “we have them. Wits, that is. Anyway, that’s what everybody does, isn’t it? And who says we’ll be alone forever?”

  “I’m not sure why you would be the one to determine how Azra is to be happy,” her mother said. “Or how you would know. Are the two of you waiting for a great love match to some . . .” She waved a hand. “Surfer? Somebody who owns only T-shirts, and makes his living cooking hamburgers for tourists?”

  No, Willow thought. I’m not, actually. I tried that. It didn’t work out. It wasn’t exactly something she wanted to admit at this moment.

  Azra’s mother went on, “I looked around well yesterday, when I arrived. If there are other kinds of men here, I haven’t seen them. At home, she’ll have the pick of the best. Executives. Barristers. Harley Street doctors. Every one of them vetted, and his family known. She doesn’t have to choose anybody she doesn’t want, though I expect, of course, that she’ll be reasonable.”

  “Because she’s old, short, fat, and dark,” Willow said, and saw Azra flinch. “Personally, I’m even older, skinny, and a redhead. Fortunately, men aren’t all the same. Somebody for everyone, they say.”

  A deep breath from perfectly cut nostrils, but no surrender. Willow had to admire it. She had a feeling Jamila Amal had as hot a temper as she did herself, but she’d corralled it. Must be nice. “Is your way so much better, then?” the woman asked. “Trying men on for size, and having them try you, then throw you back and try somebody else, like a fish they hooked, weighed in their dirty hands, and found they didn’t want after all?”

  It didn’t sound that good when you put it like that, but it was better than marrying some dentist you didn’t even know. At least you did get to try them out first. “As to whether she continues her work,” Jamila Amal went on, “that will be for her and her husband to say, not for you or me.”

  “I don’t know whether my way is better,” Willow said, half because she was too stubborn to quit, and half because no matter what her mother said, surely Azra knew her own heart best. Her own mind. “I think it is, but what’s the truth? I don’t know. I just know that my way is mine to follow, for better or worse, and that I’m a chef. Not cooking and creating new dishes would make me feel that half of myself had died.”

  “Too dramatic, surely,” Azra’s mother said. “A woman can always cook, and sew clothes, too, if that’s what she wants. Who said Azra wouldn’t be able to pursue her career? London is full of brilliant, successful Arab women who are not cleaning or cooking, I assure you. Many of them are my friends. My married friends.”

  This was going nowhere. Willow said to Azra, “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you do still have a choice. You’ve been crying about this nonstop since your father first said it. If it isn’t what you want, say so. You’re a grown woman, and London’s thousands of kilometers away. Your mother can’t kidnap you.”

  An outraged near-snort greeted that, the exhalation from a thoroughbred racehorse. “I’m not a barbarian, nor a criminal. I’m a mother who wants a good life for her only daughter, and I’m here to help her find it. If Azra wants to cut herself off from her family, I can’t stop her. But she should know that it will break my heart.” The faintest wobble in the cultured voice. “How can I live so far away from her, and with bad blood between us? How could either of us survive that, living with half a heart?”

  Azra gave a choked little cry and stood like she’d been rooted to the floor. Her mother gave a deep sigh, laid the banknotes on the bed, and told Willow, “This is, of course, your home, and I have argued with you in it long enough. My manners are lacking. I’m returning to the hotel for breakfast and a massage. I’ll come back in two hours, Azra. You can talk it over, do your crying, and say your goodbyes.” Her tone softened. “I’ve loved you with all my heart from the moment I first held you in my arms. Trust me enough to know that I will love you always, and that I only want what’s best for you. Trust me enough to let me help you get it.”

  Willow had never done much crying. She’d done her share of holding girlfriends while they did, though, and just now, she was holding Azra. She needed to get to her suppliers, and then she needed to get into Nourish, but sometimes, you had to take a detour first.

  “What do I do?” Azra asked half an hour later, still in her red dressing gown, spooning up the slow-cooked, milk-soaked steel-cut oats, comfort food all the way. She broke off a crunchy bit of caramelized sugar with her spoon, added a delicate dollop of whipped cream—it had seemed like a good time to pull out all the stops, calorically speaking, as well as the browning torch and immersion blender—and said, “Well, what do I do except eat heavy cream and grow a dress size, possibly, so none of the executives, barristers, and doctors will want me? Why doesn’t that sound good?”

  “Because he could be a vet?” Willow suggested. “Or a proctologist?” She waggled her fingers and plucked at her wrist like she was snapping on a latex glove, and Azra smiled for the first time all morning. “No. Definitely large-animal vet, spending his day with his arms up cows. All the way to the shoulder. Your job will be washing his . . . his rubber sleeves.”

  “Not a common occupation,” Azra said, with some more of her irrepressible smile, “for the well-educated Egyptian Englishman. Gastroenterologist, maybe. Specializing in . . . constipation.”

  Willow was laughing now. “I don’t think that’s a specialty.”

  “Stop it. You’re harshing my buzz.” Azra said it in English, which made both of them laugh harder. They’d heard it at a burger place a couple weeks earlier, as a, yes, surfer type in a hemp-promoting T-shirt had been complaining on being shut down by the Swedish girl behind the counter, like his buzz was her problem. “No. Gynecologist. What could be worse than going to bed with a gynecologist? Wedding night, you’ve got your nightdress off at last, and he’s commenting on the lack of symmetry in your labia.”

  Willow was just about on the floor now. “Careful,” she managed to say. “He’s not going to want you if you look at your labia.”

  “He’ll take my labia as they are,” Azra pronounced, waving her spoon in the air with defiance, “or he’s no man of mine.” She sobered, though, and said after a minute, “But seriously. What am I going to do? Everything my mother said sounded right, and I miss her, too. So much. But I feel like if I go home, I’ll have lost before I’ve found out anything at all.”

  “Then I think,” Willow said, “you should stay.”

  “How can I make that choice, though?”

  Willow thought it through. “Are you sure,” she said slowly, “that you have to? It’s easy to say, ‘We’ll cut you off.’ Do you really think she could?”

  Azra perked up, then subsided again and ate another spoonful of porridge. “You don’t know my father. And I am going to have a gap in my visa, and not enough money to cover it. I’m going to be freedom-camping my way through New Zealand, getting arrested for weeing in the trees beside the freezing beach where I’ve parked my hideous, slogan-covered van.” She shuddered. “Also, my mother will come back in an hour and work and work and work on me, for days if she has to. You’ve never seen her in action, not really. She’s wasted as a wife and mother, because she’s relentless. She should have been the barrister. She’d have won every case.”

  “Hm.” Willow pulled out her phone. “I’d like to share your story. Do you mind, if you’re here to listen to what I say?”

  Azra looked alarmed. “With whom? It’s not exactly a human-rights issue of interest to the world media.”

  Willow smiled. “With somebody who specializes in solving problems, and who seems to want to solve mine. With Brett.”

  “Hey.” Brett answered on the first ring. “That’s my favorite voice to hear in the morning.”

  He always made her feel a little shy. She did her best to be brisk to counter it. “I need your opinion. Actually, your advice. Do you have a call you need to be on?”

  “In five minutes. Go on and lay it out for me. If I need time to consider, I’ll call you back.�
� Crikey, but his competence was sexy.

  “Right, then,” she said. “I’ll be brief. Azra’s mum came. They’re serious about taking her back.”

  “Airline tickets already bought for Monday,” Azra put in. “We’re supposed to be having ‘mother-daughter time, darling, in Sydney, which will be exciting, won’t it? We’ll shop.’ Which means she’ll tell me what would look good on me if I lost weight, like one of us is trained in fashion, and it isn’t me. Wonderful.”

  Willow relayed that, then told Brett, “She doesn’t want to go, but she’s afraid of her mum overwhelming her with pressure, and there’s that pesky work visa that won’t come through in time. Any ideas, other than running away? Or do you want to ring me back?”

  “I don’t have to,” Brett said. “For right now, you call Rafe and ask for his help.”

  “Uh . . . Rafe?” She was, obscurely, disappointed. She’d honestly thought Brett would know, like he could wave that magic wand after all.

  “He’s got a house here,” Brett said, “I’m guessing a great one, and nobody in it. If Azra goes to stay in it for as many days as her mother is here, how’s her mother going to know where she is?”

  “Her job, though,” Willow said. “This woman is determined. She’s bound to turn up there today and waylay Azra on the pavement outside the door. Not to mention turning up here tonight, when my temper’s short already, and demanding to know where she is. That will end well. The mushroom explosion will be nothing to it.”

  “I’ve got that one, too,” Brett said. “Dave. For Azra, that is. For you? You come stay with me, of course. You’ll make me a happy man. As for the rest of Azra’s problem, I’ve got an idea for that, too, but I’ll tell you later.”