However sorry she was, she’d still been willing to do it, and she’d still been wrong. She’d been about as wrong as you could get. And then there was the car. The apartment. Whatever Max had spent his money on. Our money on.
Max came into the room at the point of Nuclear Detonation in My Head, followed by both kids and Buddy, who was prancing behind like Family Time was one big party. He glanced between Violet and me and asked, “All right, babe?”
I was already saying, “Ye—” when Violet said, “Of course,” and I realized he wasn’t talking to me. The red flooded into my cheeks, which wasn’t nearly as good a look on me as Violet.
I had no reason to be embarrassed. I was anyway. I knew I shouldn’t feel humiliated, and I felt exactly that way. Exposed. He hadn’t even commented on my hair. Somehow, I’d thought he would have. He’d hate it, but he’d have to say something. But he didn’t, because he wasn’t really seeing me. He clapped his hands instead and said, “So! Let’s get our skates on, kids. Anoraks all round. Violet’s got dinner ready for us, so no Maccas chicken nuggets tonight. And a movie as well.”
“With popcorn?” Olivia demanded.
“Absolutely, with popcorn,” Max said. “Cozy blankets on the couch, and a fire in the fireplace.”
“Can Mummy come too?” Olivia asked. Points for loyalty, anyway.
“No,” I said. “Remember, it’s your Dad time.” Points for me.
Please leave, I thought.
Violet, at least, got the message, because she stood up, put Isobel gently into her carrier again, arranged a blanket over it, then hesitated and asked me, “Would you rather carry her out to the car yourself?”
I had that sense you get during times like that, like your very skin is being peeled away, watching her pick up the carrier with my eight-week-old baby inside. “No,” I said, forming the words with care, my mouth feeling as clumsy as if I’d drunk too much. “Start as we mean to go on, I guess. Her bottles are in the insulated cooler. Put them in the fridge, obviously.”
She nodded and said, “Please don’t worry. I’ll pay attention,” and we all headed to the door. I gave Hamish and Olivia a cuddle, Max gathered suitcases and bags, and then they all dashed for the car, Violet going last, careful over the wet pavement with the baby. I crouched in the doorway, one hand on Buddy’s collar, since he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t going too, and watched her lift Isobel into her car seat.
They all got inside, and I raised a hand and watched my family drive away.
Matiu
I was moving fast from the moment my shift started, and by the time it was halfway through, I was nearly running.
The extra was traffic accidents, mostly. The only thing more surprising than the variety of things men can manage to “fall on in the shower” and get wedged up their bums is the number of people who still haven’t sussed out that it takes longer to stop on wet pavement than it does on dry, and that you can’t see as far in the rain.
Not too bad tonight, though. Broken ribs, broken arms, contusions, head knocks, shock. I moved from room to room, blessing seatbelts and car seats and airbags. Dinner was a protein bar and a half-drunk cup of tea, and I was back into it again.
A stir, then, and the news coming down. Two life flights from Fiordland. A flash flood had caught a tramping group as they tried to cross a river to get to shelter, and ten kilometers south, a landslide had taken an enormous tree and sent it straight onto a hut filled to overflowing with shivering humanity.
Nature wasn’t Disneyland, and the spectacular New Zealand landscape and the sea beyond weren’t just scenery. They could turn on you in a heartbeat, catching the unwary in their sudden mountain storms, their treacherous rips. Or their raging floods.
The broken arms and the contusions waited, then, as I put in a chest tube and ordered a CT scan on a young German fella of twenty-five or so, his wool socks and hairy legs smeared with mud, his entire body struggling for breath that wouldn’t come. I called the thoracic surgeon in stat, then treated his weeping girlfriend as she told me, through tears of pain from her fractured leg and profusely bleeding head, that her young man, Wilhelm, had heard the groaning of the tree as it was coming down and shoved her off their top bunk, which was why the tree had crushed him instead.
“Will he be all right?” she kept asking. “Will he be all right?”
I cleaned and stitched her head, set her leg, and couldn’t answer. Instead, I said, “He was quick. And very brave.”
“Yes,” she said, doing her best to manage her fear and pain. “We have only been together for three weeks. Just since meeting in New Zealand. But he is the best. The best.” Her eyes welled up again. “I didn’t believe, before, that such a thing was possible, that one could know so soon. Perhaps I have learned it too late.”
I snapped off my gloves, then paused a second and said, “Wait for him, then. He’ll want to see you when he comes out of surgery. Even if he can’t talk, he can hear. Talk to him, and tell him. Hope is a great healer. He’s made it this far, which means he’s stronger than most. And Dr. Harvath is the best in the business.”
She swallowed and nodded. “Yes. I will believe. Thank you.”
I heard it, but I was already on my way out the door, because the second helicopter was coming in now. A family group, among those who’d been caught in the river. Dad had held his ten-year-old daughter in one arm, somehow, locking the other one around a tree, battling the raging brown water with the kind of strength a man didn’t know he had, until a chain of hands could pull her out.
The daughter was probably going to be all right. Dad, I wasn’t so sure about.
He was still alive, though. Dad was a fighter. I did everything I could to keep him that way, and when the gurney was wheeled through the double doors again, he was alive still.
By the time I was standing with my two hands braced on either side of a shower stall under the pounding spray of the hottest water I could stand, I was nearly two hours past the end of my shift, my hands trying to shake, my knees weak. The aftermath of an adrenaline rush, that was all, or possibly its delayed onset. I breathed my way through it and sang the low notes of a slow waiata in my head, my best relaxation technique. I centered myself in my body, in this world, my world, and let the stress go.
I’d done my best, and my best was all I had. The rest was up to the nurses, the doctors, and most of all, to the patients themselves. To their bodies, their strength, and their will. To chance, or to God.
Normally, after grabbing a two-in-the-morning sandwich from the hospital café, I’d have headed to the gym to swim away the rest of the shadows, and then I’d have gone home, read for a few minutes, and let sleep take me. Tonight, I ran through empty streets, through the flowing water in the gutters, through the steady, driving rain that still fell incessantly, up the hill to my apartment, where I stripped off my wet clothes, pulled on dry ones, backed my car out of its space, and headed down the hill again.
I took the turn onto Wharf Street in the glistening silver and black of a stormy night, my headlight beams piercing the mist. Nearly three o’clock in the morning on the deserted road to the Otago Peninsula, flying like a sea eagle to his mate. Like a jaguar to his lioness. Like a father in the water, holding on.
Like a man who finally knew who he was.
46
Into the Darkness
Poppy
I’d put my kids first. I’d done the right thing. It was cold comfort, but it was comfort.
Outside, the rain beat hard on the roof, the windows, exactly like that first night, when Matiu had come. Tonight, though, I wasn’t walking a circle, hugging myself with my arms, in my pink-flowered flannel PJs. I might not want Violet as my bestest friend, but she was there for the kids, and I believed she cared. And Max had seemed glad to see them, glad to take them. If he still wanted them despite the disaster of the first time, that was absolutely the best thing for them. What would it be like to think your dad didn’t love you enough, didn’t like you enou
gh, even to want to see you? Especially for Hamish. Hamish needed his dad.
Did part of me still wish for him to be hit by lightning—once he was alone again, of course, or possibly with Violet? Yes, it did. But I’d wanted to move on, and I had moved on, and he was my kids’ dad.
And then there was Matiu.
At a quarter to four, just before he’d started work, he’d texted me.
I’ll see you at two.
Lock your door. Turn off your lights. Go to sleep. I’ll wake you up.
Well, yeah. Oh, baby.
All of that was why, instead of worrying, I drew. I put on music, the kind I liked, soft and sweet and sexy. I curled up on my sitting-room couch, my special place. And I drew. Eventually, these would be pen-and-ink drawings, and I’d make them as perfect as I could manage. For now, I needed the quickness of charcoal to tell the story.
My jaguar was in Africa, I realized, because he’d escaped from some sort of big-cat research facility. Cleverly, because he was clever. Clever and cunning and strong, determined to be free. He didn’t have a place anymore? He’d make his own place. In the forested grassland, down by the river, because that was where he could live.
He found his place, and then he had to survive once more. When wildfire came and swept over the land, he swam the river to the other side with panicked antelopes and warthogs and zebras and found a new territory, because jaguars were powerful swimmers, and he was more powerful than most. After that, he survived the leopard who wanted to claim that territory for himself. He fought, and he won. An outsider, and he always would be, but that only made him stronger and more single-minded. He hadn’t come this far and learned this much to give up now.
He thought this would be all he ever had, and that he’d have to make it enough, because there was no choice. And then, one day, a lioness stepped into his clearing. A lioness who was afraid, and curious, and so tempted, and he was determined again. Determined to get her, and determined to keep her safe. Believing he could do it, because he had enough strength for anything. It would take a plan, and it would take daring, but they could make a plan, and they could be daring. Their lives were worth it.
I worked until my eyes burned and my hand was sore from clutching the charcoal. After that, I took a bath.
I had to dig the candles out from a bottom drawer, where they were still in their boxes, and then go find matches. I didn’t have to scrub the soaking tub itself, dusty as it should have been from disuse, because Analyn had done that. I did have to drop in a rose-scented bath bomb and run the water, though, then sit on the edge to test the temperature, trailing my fingers in the fragrant bubbles.
It was dark in the house except for the pool of light that was my bedroom and bath. The music was still playing, a slow thing made up of piano chords and a dark voice soaring like the music they’d make in heaven. Stan Walker, and the man could sing. And candles scented with geranium, amber, and peony, with rosewood, spiced musk, and sandalwood. I knew that, because I was reading the label.
The name etched into the front of the frosted blue glass was, “Makes you wanna say whoa,” and it did. The scent was floral and earthy and deep, like the smell of sex. I could think that, because I was all alone, and because I’d just drawn the most sensual mating scene you could ever imagine. The jaguar padding forward beside the river, his eyes glowing gold. Every step placed perfectly, every hard muscle fluid, every last cell in his body focused on his need.
Closer, and closer still. Driven to this by everything inside him, and by everything inside the hidden lioness who was pulling him on.
The lioness in the shadows, watching him, her eyes intent, her tail twitching. Wanting it, needing it, and a little afraid, too, because what she was feeling was too strong.
Until he reached her.
I lit the wicks one after the other, then placed the candles at the four corners of the tub like a ritual. I’d bought them during an unaccustomed shopping spree a year ago, in the throes of a burst of optimism that had turned out to be nothing more than a hormonal surge, since I’d been newly pregnant with Isobel at the time.
I’d never used them. Tonight, I would. Tonight, I was going to take my optimism and my hormones and put them right here.
Tonight, I was going to own it.
I turned off the light. The water was still running like a waterfall. In the bath. On the roof. Over the eaves. I unbuttoned my shirt, slid it down my arms, and watched my flickering, shadowy reflection in the mirrors. Not looking for what was wrong with my body. Looking for what was right.
Hair in all the colors of fire, falling over one cheek, down my neck to my shoulders, wavy and new and free. White skin with a few freckles on my nose, over my cheekbones, dusting the tops of my collarbones.
I unfastened my bra and dropped it on top of the shirt. That was good, too. Round, full breasts, and below them, the curve of my waistline, the indentation of my navel, the gentle rounding of my belly.
Shorts gone, then, and undies, and I looked at that, too. Full hips, round bum, firm, white thighs, and shapely calves.
It was a woman’s body. A body that could carry humans, and birth them. A body for a lover to hold and kiss. A body that would welcome him in, every time. A body made for love.
I turned off the tap. I sank down deep into the warm water. I took the pleasure that candlelight and warmth and scent and music offered me, and I rolled it over my tongue and through my body like a lover’s kiss.
And I waited.
My eyes opened. The door had banged. Hadn’t it? I listened, my heart beating hard, and didn’t hear anything else.
I was in bed, and I had no idea what time it was. It felt like the darkest hour of the darkest night. It felt like the ends of the earth. I’d lit a candle in a glass holder on the bedside table, but it had gone out while I’d slept. The rain was still coming down outside, and I couldn’t hear anything else over its patter.
A footfall on the stairs. Or no? I was sitting up, the duvet clutched to my chest.
He came in the door like a breath of darkness. He was at the bed, a shape in the night, and I wasn’t afraid. I knew who he was, and I wanted him.
He came down over me exactly like that, tumbling me over, shoving me down onto my back. His mouth closing over mine, his hand in my hair. The nightdress I’d chosen so carefully being shoved, unseen, up my legs, to my waist, and his hand on my thigh. I had my own hands under his damp T-shirt, pushing it over his head, then pulling him down over me, kissing him some more, stroking my hands over his shoulders, his back. I felt the dangerous urgency in him, and my body rose to meet it.
He was down my body, his mouth at my breast, his hand opening me up like there was no time for finesse, no time for anything but this. I could hear his hard breath, and my own panting ones. One hand was still in his hair, holding him to me, and the other one over my head, because I couldn’t get my breath.
A moment, then, when he was gone, and I scrambled to my knees, my nightdress falling down over my legs again, and put out my hands for him. I heard the soft swish of denim hitting the floor, and he was back. On his knees facing me, lifting my nightdress in two hands, pulling it over my arms, my head, and dropping it to the floor. Kissing me again, pulling me close. His tongue was in my mouth, but his skin was cool, and he was nearly shivering.
When he pulled me down again, I went. When he slid down my body, I gasped. When he drove me up fast and hard, his mouth on me and his fingers inside me, with no subtlety at all, I didn’t think about whether I was doing it right, whether I was going to get there. I was starting to cry out, and then I was stiffening. Shaking. Spasming, on and on and on, like there was no end to this.
An invader in the dark. A dark angel. A man who couldn’t take any more.
Matiu
I’d found the box with the key in the rain, in the cold, and by the time I’d got to the front door and opened it, I was soaked and shivering, and I was moving fast.
The need had got worse with every kilometer I�
��d driven in the dark, like she was pulling me in. I got my shoes and socks off, dropped my anorak where I stood, gave Buddy a pat and saw him trot off again, job done.
I found the stairs. I didn’t have my phone, and I didn’t need the light. I wound my way up to her in the dark, and I could swear I was navigating by her scent.
Through the sitting room. Into the bedroom. And she was there.
Now, she was shaking under me, and I was rising up her body again. No time for anything but this. No space to think. I was holding her hips in hard hands, and then I was inside her.
Her heat was a shock. Her tightness was almost too much. She lifted her legs up and wrapped them around me, high above my waist. Her hands were on my shoulders, urging me on, and my own palms were on the mattress beside her head.
Breathing hard. Going deep. She was making noise, and I wasn’t. I drove into her like she was my cure. I took her body like she was my salvation. I felt her tightening even more around me, under me. I was piercing to the very heart of her, and she was going up again.
Into the darkness. Over the cliff, arms around each other, falling together all the way down. Falling free.
47
Shaky Ground
Matiu
Sometime in the night, the rain stopped. I knew, because the silence woke me up.
I didn’t get that thing you normally do when you wake in a strange place. I knew exactly where I was.
Poppy was beside me. I knew that, too, even though we weren’t touching. She was sprawled on her side, facing away from me. I wanted her closer, but you can’t actually just grab a woman. At least, you can’t do it every time, and definitely not while she’s sleeping.
She stirred, and I felt her turning. “Matiu?” she asked. “What?”
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 34
