His Christmas Pearl

by Renée Dahlia

  ‘Your parents. You. Getting to see what true love really looked like. Mine are … well, let’s say generous isn’t a word I’d apply to them.’ Zoe had seen both sides of them, their public face and the way they were outwardly generous when it was good for the church or their own image, and the private side where they were judgemental, and she had to continually navigate her own behaviour so she would be praised for acting how they wanted her to act. It wasn’t just a matter of manners, it was a whole expectation of godliness and presentation, and how she never quite measured up no matter how much she tried. And the really crap thing about it all was how it diminished her self-confidence. Their behaviour towards Jade had allowed her to step away—not precisely guilt-free, but free to discover how to just be herself—and yet she still heard their voices in her head whenever she had to make a decision. Would it be the right decision? What would people think? Too many questions before she could decide on the most important thing of all. What did she want?

  ‘But at least you don’t have to live up to their legacy?’ Kiet’s voice trembled slightly.

  ‘That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself. They aren’t here to judge you.’ Zoe sucked in a sharp breath—that didn’t come out quite how she meant. ‘I’m sorry. I mean … from what you’ve said, they wouldn’t be judging you if they were here. So why do you?’

  ‘I didn’t bring you out here to examine my character. Look at the damned oysters.’

  She giggled, surprised by his sudden return to grumpiness. ‘Sure. You are allowed to be fallible, you know.’ Zoe leaned over the edge of the boat and stared into the stunning clear water. She sat up straight, turning towards him so quickly that the boat rocked, and she had to grab the edge. ‘This is amazing! You should do tours. People at the resort would pay so much money to come out here.’

  ‘Can’t fit them in the boat.’

  ‘Why not kayaks? How far is it from the jetty? Could someone like me paddle out here?’ Zoe scratched the back of her neck.

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Yeah …’ She waved her hand past her body. ‘A not very fit office worker.’

  His gaze travelled over her skin, like a flicker of a flame nearby, hot without burning. ‘You’d do just fine in a kayak. It’s only a couple of hundred metres to the closest oysters. The problem is that Sam and I don’t have the time to organise something like that.’

  ‘And you didn’t replace Elizabeth.’

  Kiet’s hot gaze turned into a glare, his eyes narrowing. ‘Elizabeth was a mistake.’ A muscle in his jaw tightened.

  ‘Okay, I concede that she may yet be proven as the culprit. She knew your bookkeeping system, and it would be … well, not easy, but not too much effort to set up the fake transport company, then bill you, knowing it would get paid by Mrs Doyle. And from there, she could have created Tanner’s Farm Equipment to deepen the scam. But—’

  ‘But what? That sounds exactly like what happened.’ Kiet’s voice tightened, each syllable spat out.

  Zoe picked at her hat, keeping her gaze on her fidgeting fingers. ‘Maybe. I haven’t proven anything yet.’

  ‘Yet.’

  She huffed out a breath. ‘Anyway. Putting Elizabeth’s actions, or whoever did this, aside, the idea of—’

  ‘No,’ Kiet thundered, interrupting her.

  She held up her palm and stared at his fierce expression. ‘Wait. I get it. I do. However …’

  ‘However, what?’

  Zoe presumed she should be intimidated by his anger, and the same anger on another man would have her contemplating leaping overboard and swimming home, but her heart didn’t speed up in panic because she knew he wouldn’t hurt her. He’d done everything he could to save her when he thought her car would explode in the crash on Christmas night. He’d always shown control over his outbursts. Yes, he could be grumpy to the point where she doubted everything, but he’d never hurt her. Even the few times she’d felt intimidated, he’d stepped away as soon as she’d asked.

  ‘Employing someone in that role wasn’t a mistake. Having the desire to grow this business is not a mistake. Maybe you picked the wrong person this time, and we will soon know the answer to that, but the idea of the job wasn’t wrong.’

  He stared at her, his chest heaving, and her breaths mirrored his as his angry glare slowly changed and softened. ‘It feels like a mistake. I just want my parents to be proud of me.’ His whisper sounded like a confession, one that truly mattered to him.

  ‘And they died before you could show them what you could do,’ Zoe guessed. Hot tears built up behind her eyes as her heart ached for him.

  Chapter 11

  Kiet wanted to curse at Zoe’s statement. She was right, and damn he was saying that a lot lately. He wanted one more hug from Mum, one more thump on the back from Pa, one more time where they were proud of his achievements. Grief was one thing. Being scammed was another entirely, and it ate away at him, because ….

  ‘I can’t let this scammer win. The farm was their whole life. Pa gave up everything to be with Mum on the farm. He arrived in Australia from Thailand on a student visa and met Mum while working in the summer holidays. They fell in love and he gave up his studies to stay with her. I can’t lose the farm—the one thing that brought my parents together—because I procrastinated over looking at the accounts, because I dismissed my gut feeling about the money not being right. And …’ Kiet paused, not wanting to tell anyone that he’d ignored his gut feel over Elizabeth being the culprit because she made Sam happy, and he’d spent so many years doing his best to make Sam happy. Kiet had sacrificed his own education to run the farm and pay for Sam to go to boarding school in the city, and then to university. It’d been worth it, just for the satisfaction of seeing his baby brother grown up into a properly qualified aquaculturist. Sam’s choice of degree was good for the oyster farm. Kiet sensed, deep in his heart, that Sam didn’t want to stay on the farm, and had only done that degree so he could give back to Kiet. The farm was Kiet’s world. He should have been the one to do that degree, and to bring all the knowledge back to his parents. But he didn’t begrudge Sam his knowledge, because they were a team. So many complicated reasons for saying nothing about the woman who’d made Sam smile every day. And for naught—Sam’s heart was broken, and Kiet was about to be proven correct about Elizabeth’s scam.

  ‘Kiet.’

  He shifted on the seat to stare into Zoe’s big hazel eyes, mostly brown like his, but with flecks of green, like the hills behind them. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve seen your accounts. You are not failing your parents. Even with this scammer stealing from you, the farm is still successful. You are making enough money to keep going, and once we figure this out, you’ll have enough to do the expansion you’ve been planning.’

  ‘How did you know?’ He was certain he’d never mentioned his plans with her.

  She glanced down at her lap, then lifted her chin to stare at him. The sea brought out the green flecks in her hazel eyes, while the brown centre reminded him of the way a fish’s shadow ran along the sandy bottom of the river on a bright sunny day.

  ‘Just a gut feel. Something in the way you reacted when I asked about your spending on equipment.’

  ‘You are too clever for your own good, you know that?’

  She held up her hands, palms towards him, confusion making her eyebrows knit together in a frown. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s disconcerting to have someone around who reads me so well. I … I mean—’ He cursed under his breath.

  ‘What?’

  ‘And there is that thing you do …’ His mouth dried out as she folded her hands into her lap and started fiddling with the damned hat again. ‘Like now. You just sit there and wait, and then I tell you stuff that I’ve never told anyone. You are a damned witch, aren’t you?’

  Her smile undid him with the way her lips stretched slowly, and her eyes glowed with amusement. ‘No. Being able to forecast isn’t magic, it’s just maths.’

 
‘Forecasting? Like the weather?’ A handy skill to have around the farm. Everything she said made her belong to the farm … to him? Hell yeah. A rush of possessiveness filled his veins and roared in his ears. Primitive.

  ‘No.’ She chuckled, a throaty erotic laugh that was like a kick to the stomach. ‘Statistical forecasting. Taking the data you have and extrapolating to make a decent guess at the future.’

  ‘Are you saying you looked at our accounts and used them to guess our plans?’ Understanding maths well enough to see the future sounded like bloody magic to him. He’d been good enough at maths at school to pass everything. Adequate. His favourite subject had been biology, specifically the sea and all the creatures who lived in it. Pa had encouraged him to go to university and study, but it had been good enough for Pa to work right out of school, and Kiet had wanted to follow in Pa’s footsteps. It made sense for his parents to employ him as an apprentice rather than to bring on someone outside the family. The idea of an aquaculture course hadn’t crossed his path until a few years later, just before the accident. He’d immediately pulled his application to focus on keeping the farm going.

  ‘Yeah?’ Zoe looked apologetic. ‘It’s okay to not like maths. I have this theory that the way they teach maths in schools only works for about twenty per cent of brains. I was lucky.’

  ‘Twenty per cent is very specific.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s just a guess from talking to people. Maybe my sample isn’t a good baseline.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise for every damned thing. I’m okay at maths, that’s how I knew something was off with the figures. It’s the detailed accounting I find painful.’ Kiet hated sitting still more than he hated doing the accounts, but the outcome was the same. His choice to work on the farm—a gap year or two—before university had been driven in part by his inability to cope with sitting still at school. He’d needed time to work with his body before he could stomach the idea of more sitting and learning. His leg started to jiggle, and he tamped his heel against the bottom of the boat to stop it. With a shift of his arm, he guided the boat along the row of piles, and started an inspection, peering into the depths of the water. Over the past few years, the hanging basket system they’d put in place to replace the old tray system had allowed more sunlight to reach the sea-bed, and the grasses had started to regrow. More fish lived among his farm than a decade ago, a sign of health and hopefully good fortune.

  ‘Okay, apology rescinded. And I don’t believe that you don’t care for details.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Kiet looked up, curious to see why she said that.

  ‘On Christmas Day, when you were shucking oysters, you lined them up perfectly on the ice. That’s a detail.’

  He shrugged, amazed that she remembered such a little thing. ‘That’s just work. Oysters are a luxury product, people expect them to be evenly placed and look just right.’

  ‘Not everyone would bother with that millimetre correction.’ She peered at him with big guileless eyes.

  ‘People should take more pride in their work. If you are going to do something—’

  ‘—do it right.’ She completed the sentence in unison with him. If it’d been Sam, he might’ve laughed and high-fived him or something. Instead his heart thumped uncomfortably. Why was being seen by her so bloody terrifying? He leaned over the edge of the boat and pulled up a basket of oysters. With a twist he harvested one for her and dropped the basket carefully back into the depths of the river.

  ‘Here. Try this.’ He grabbed a shucking knife from the pocket on the side of the boat and opened up the oyster for her. A quick rinse in the river water, and he passed it over. She tilted her head back and the morsel slipped into her mouth. Immediately he regretted the gift, because the sight of her lips pursed as she sucked down the oyster was bloody erotic. He shifted on the seat, rocking the boat a little, to make himself more comfortable. If it wasn’t for the way Sam ended up manipulated by Elizabeth, he wouldn’t have been so reticent about his attraction to Zoe. But that whole damned situation meant he needed to keep space between them until he was certain about everything. Zoe, the business, Sam’s heartbreak—it was bloody hard to see his baby brother hurting—and if that wasn’t a cautionary tale not to follow the demands of his dick, he didn’t know what was. Thinking about Sam’s hurt helped quell his erection, provided he didn’t look at Zoe.

  ‘Thank you. That was the most delicious oyster I’ve ever eaten.’

  ‘Fresh is best, and nothing is fresher than right out of the sea.’ Kiet smiled as Zoe put her hat back on her head. Her dress shifted across her breasts as she lifted her arms up, stretching her back. She belonged in an advertisement, comfortable in his boat, eating oysters without a hint of seasickness. It wasn’t exactly rough today, but he admired her sea-legs.

  ‘I really think it’d be a great idea to do a kayak tour with the resort. They could organise it, and just pay you a fee for the access. With oysters tasting like this, you’d get extra sales from tour guests too. It wouldn’t take much of your time, because the resort would do the organising, and it’d be easy extra income.’

  Kiet considered the idea. It certainly had merit—especially with someone else running the tours. He didn’t have time to go kayaking on his own farm, nor the inclination to talk to people.

  ‘You don’t have to. It’s just an idea.’

  ‘Stop.’ He grabbed her hands. ‘Stop underselling yourself. It’s a good idea.’

  ‘But you didn’t respond.’

  He huffed out a breath. ‘Give me a moment to think about it.’

  ‘Oh, okay. You liked it?’

  He nodded, lazily tracing her wrists with his thumb. Her skin was so soft under his rough digits, the contrast reminding him of eating cookies and milk. Crunch followed by smooth.

  ‘Yes. It has merits. There would be some details to sort out, but yeah, it could work.’

  ‘And the details are why you paused?’ A flicker of a frown between her eyes gave him the impression of self-doubt. Why now? She was so confident when faced with lines of accounts, but his pause seemed to make her doubt her ideas.

  ‘Of course. I was thinking through all the options. Sam and I struggle to find time to do all the things, and we had been contemplating taking on an apprentice, but it was a matter of dollars. We could afford to employ one person, and a marketing person had the potential to bring in more income than an apprentice would.’

  Zoe nodded. ‘That’s great business sense. Grow the business, then employ someone to help with the expanded tasks.’

  ‘Plus, oysters take three years to grow, so there is a time lag to consider as well. We have to plan each season a long way in advance and knowing there are new markets to sell them into meant we could grow more seed and spat for the future.’

  ‘It’s a big risk.’

  Kiet wanted to thump his fist against his thigh. ‘Especially when the risk didn’t pay off.’

  ‘Kiet?’ Zoe shifted her hands and he realised his grip on her had tightened. He dropped her hands and swallowed down the rising bile as she rubbed them together.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I understand.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it okay for me to hurt you.’

  ‘You didn’t hurt me.’ Her soothing motions as she still rubbed her hands showed her words were a lie. ‘I will find the person who stole from you. I can’t guarantee I’ll get the money back, that’s for the courts to decide, but I will try.’

  He couldn’t work out why the hell she wanted to keep helping him, when all he did was grump and curse and squeeze her hands too tight. He needed to get her safely back to land before he did any more damage.

  ‘Sounds like we both have work to do. Let’s go.’ He revved the engine and spun the boat around. Zoe yelped and he immediately cut the engine.

  ‘My hat!’ Her hat floated on the breeze then landed on the water, quickly sinking beneath the waves. ‘Blast. You could have warned me that you were going to rush off. I w
ould have grabbed it.’

  ‘I’ll get you another one.’ He needed to get away from her before he did something foolish like kiss her. Kisses would hurt him as much as his huge hands hurt her. The whole mess with his business was caused by a woman charming Sam, and now he was about to make the same bloody mistake. It would be so easy to fall for Zoe. She was easy to have around the house, clever and insightful, not to mention so attractive that his body damned near vibrated whenever she was near. ‘Hold on tight.’

  Chapter 12

  Zoe couldn’t figure Kiet out. He had moments of happiness where the weight of his problems disappeared, and other times when he reverted to the grumpy guy she’d met on Christmas Day. Why did both sides of his personality have to be so appealing? When he smiled, she wanted to bask in the warmth of it, and when he growled or sneered, she wanted to soothe him. From the moment she’d spied him in the kitchen, efficiently shucking oysters, she’d been drawn to him. He had a confident aura about him, a stillness that spoke of hidden depths. The discovery of his accounting problem gave her a reason to spend time with him, and every time they talked, she learned more and realised they had so much in common. They both put their siblings before themselves. He was practical and good with his hands—and thinking of the way his hands felt against her skin brought a warm bloom to her cheeks—while she was helpful and good at data analysis. He moved with confidence, someone who knew exactly what he wanted in life, and that was the most attractive thing about him. His strong body, handsome face, and those dark eyes were all a bonus package that came with him. Kiet. She licked her lips, dry from the sun, the wind, and the reflective glare off the water. The boat’s engine cut suddenly, and silence surrounded her. She breathed in the salty water, the fresh scents on the wind, and closed her eyes. If she breathed in deep enough, she imagined she could smell Kiet’s unique sea-salt and woody scent.

  ‘Zoe.’

  She opened her eyes to see Kiet leaning in close to her. The boat rocked on the gentle waves, floating without the engine pushing it along.