For all that, there wasn’t much else to say. Anika wanted to see me, to “talk things over,” and she wasn’t far away. In Hamilton, an hour and a half’s drive from Rotorua. And tomorrow night would work for her. It would be over soon, at any rate. If I did it.
I tried not to think about fifteen years ago, or the man I’d been then. There was a reason it was in my past.
By the time I rang off, we were in the Whakarewarewa Forest, pulling off at the tour site. I said, “We’ll decide later, eh.”
Karen sighed and said, “Don’t mind me.”
Hope said, “I like how you said ‘we.’ And I liked how you introduced me. Thank you.” She put a hand on my face and smiled into my eyes, and I had to swallow before I answered.
I said, “I thought you’d like it,” and she said, “I did,” and smiled some more. And then we got out of the car and rode some flying foxes through some forest giants, and Karen did laugh, and Hope did scream and did need a cuddle, and that was all good.
She waited until we were lying in one of the Polynesian Spa’s hot baths to bring it up again. A group of Japanese tourists laughed and talked on the other side of the pool, but Hope held my hand under the water, looked out at the sun setting over Lake Rotorua, and asked me quietly, “What do you think you should do? About your wife?”
I sat silent a moment and watched the sun slip beneath the horizon in a sky streaked by clouds tinted impossible shades of rose and crimson, and thought about the new line I’d finished before we’d left, the one inspired by my homeland. The ideas had taken shape on sketch pads and then on sample garments even as the rest of my mind was consumed with the details of running a business. Going there, into the creative zone, my happiest place, was my escape and my pleasure.
There, and with Hope. They were tied up together.
I’d imagined greens and blues and golds and creams, but crimson and rose worked as well, I was thinking now. Pink could be a powerful color, and silk could make as strong a statement as linen. The strength in softness, in gentleness. The power of water that flowed over hard rock, gradually carving apparently unyielding surfaces into new and more beautiful shapes. It was an exciting concept.
“I think,” I finally answered Hope, “that if there’s a way to make this easier, I should take it.”
She squeezed my hand, said, “That’s good, then. I think you should,” hauled herself out of the pool, and went to shower under the cold tap, because Hope couldn’t take much heat. I saw a couple of the fellas across from me eyeing the curves of her trim little body in the prettiest white bikini you could imagine, too. Until they noticed me watching, that is, stopped staring, and resumed their chat.
There were advantages to being big, tattooed, and Maori in Rotorua. You tended to get credit for more savagery than you might possess. Although, to be fair, I possessed my share.
That decision, though, was why I was in Hamilton at seven-thirty the next evening, ringing the bell to a tidy brick townhouse in a middle-income neighborhood.
She came to the door, opened it, and said, “Hemi,” and it was as if the fabric of space and time had warped.
Anika Cavendish, because she’d changed her name back. At least there was that. Her deep-brown hair was still long, not tied into its Maori knot tonight, but falling in rich, lustrous waves to beneath her shoulders. She was still fine-boned, her cheekbones still aristocratic, her skin still golden, her eyes still dark and liquid. And her figure still held the lushness of a tropical flower, despite what I guessed must have been rigorous discipline to maintain her slimness.
Rigorous discipline. Yeh. That had been the drug that had bound us together. I’d told Hope the truth, but I hadn’t told her all of it.
Anika smiled now, the slightest, slowest curve of her beautiful mouth, stood back, and said, “Come in. Please.”
I reminded myself that I wasn’t twenty years old anymore, stepped inside, slipped off my shoes in the foyer, and entered a lounge decorated in modern style, not unlike my own apartment in New York. Black and white and splashes of color, a fabric piece of woven flax on one wall, all of it cool, spare, and meticulously tidy.
“Sit down,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea? A beer?”
“A cup of tea,” I said. “Please.”
When she came back with them, she’d fixed mine the way I’d used to drink it. Milk and sugar. She handed me my mug, sat down in a chair at right angles to my couch, and said, “It reminds you, doesn’t it? How many cups of tea did we drink, afterwards? We couldn’t afford anything stronger. But the best things in life are free, eh.”
She was wearing a stretchy black-and-white striped dress, barely a mini, over black leggings. She looked as sensual and sleek as a black panther, and as lethal as one.
I said, “It was a long time ago.”
She blew on her tea, looked up at me from under her lashes, and said, “It was. But it was good.”
“Was it?”
Another secret smile at that. “You tell yourself, that, Hemi. Tell yourself you haven’t thought about me, haven’t remembered everything I let you do to me, how many firsts I gave you. How hard we fought, and how hard you took it out on me afterwards. Tell me you’ve forgotten your wife. Tell yourself, too. But you’ll be lying, and you know it.”
“I remembered you once,” I said. “I also remember that you said you wanted to end it, so we did. Pity it didn’t go through at the time, but you know that’s a niggle and nothing more. My lawyer said you’d been served with the notice, and that we’d have a court date within the next few months. So I have to ask myself—why am I here?”
My first instincts had been right. They usually were.
She set her tea down, curled her legs up under her in the black armchair, set at right angles to the couch where I sat, ran a hand through her hair and let it fall, and said, “That’s a good question, isn’t it? Why did you come, Hemi? If it’s over?”
She’d always had that faint smile, had taunted me with it, daring me to wipe it off her face. She’d got under my skin every time, and had loved doing it.
My hands wanted to fist, and I used every bit of training I had to control them. I breathed, felt the oxygen running through my body like a calming drug, and said, “You said you wanted to see me, that that would make it easier for you, at least that’s what I heard. If you have something to say, say it now. If you need closure, here I am. But we’re closed. We’re done.”
She studied me for a long moment, and she wasn’t smiling now. “Maybe,” she said slowly, “I just wanted to see what you’ve become. I’ve read about you, of course, and I’ve been proud to see it, but it’s different, isn’t it, knowing you’re still my husband.”
She wanted me to ask her about her own life. I could feel it, and I didn’t care. I’d driven an hour and a half for this? And Hope…she’d kissed me goodbye, had said, “Good luck,” had smiled at me, kissed me again, said, “I’ll see you later,” and gone back into the house.
Trusting me.
Anika asked, “What made you check on the divorce after all this time? How did you find out?”
I looked at her and didn’t answer, and she said, “There’s somebody else, isn’t there? Somebody special. Is that why you’re back in the homeland? To marry her in front of your whanau?”
Something in her had shifted, reminding me of the girl I’d loved. The girl who knew about my family, as I knew about hers. The girl whose dad wasn’t any better than mine, so there was nothing to be ashamed of. The girl who knew all my secrets.
“Yeh,” I said. “There is, and I am. How about you?”
She dropped her gaze, took another sip of tea, and said, “I never thought I wanted to get married again, and maybe now I’m remembering why. I have a fella, but you know, after you…maybe one man isn’t enough. Or maybe you and I just aren’t much chop at settling down. Maybe we need too much…stimulation for that. And there aren’t many people who understand us, are there? So many men who want me, who want to try, but nobody who ca
n give it to me like I need it, not the way you could. And I’m guessing you’re the same.” She set her tea down, then sat up again, shoved a hand into her mass of hair, and lay back against the chair. Making me remember, as perhaps she’d intended, how she’d liked me to hold her by her hair, to pull her along by it, to throw her down by it. How far she’d let me go, and the way I’d craved it, stronger than any drug.
“I’m not that man anymore,” I said.
“Ah,” she breathed. “That’s a pity. Nothing wrong with that man. Nothing I didn’t want. She won’t let you do it all, I’m thinking, but you love her anyway. Or you hope you do.”
“No. I love her, period.” It was a bad idea to talk about Hope, and I knew it. “Why am I here?” I asked her again. “What is it you want?”
If I’d expected to disconcert her, I failed. She smiled, a slow, seductive thing, and shifted herself in a way that had me staring at her lush, still-beautiful breasts despite myself. Then she uncoiled herself from the chair, took the two steps over to me, and settled herself over my lap, a knee on either side of me, exactly as Hope had done a few days earlier.
I started to stand up, but she had both hands in my hair, was stroking them over me, and was talking again, her voice smooth and strong as whisky, but rough-edged as the tongue of a cat. The spicy oriental notes of her perfume filled my head, and her long legs covered me, reminding me despite every better intention of how they’d felt when I’d had my hands on the backs of her thighs, shoving her up high. And the way she’d moaned when I’d done it. The way she’d begged me to do it harder. And then, one night after a flaming row, the way I’d done it differently.
“She won’t let you do it all, will she?” she said into my ear, as if she knew exactly what I was remembering. As if she were the witch she’d always been. She bit down on the lobe, hard enough that she’d be leaving a mark, and I held myself rigid and didn’t flinch. “You’re still my husband, Hemi, and I know you’re angry as fire about that. You’re so angry at me, aren’t you, for still being here, for getting in your way? You didn’t come over tonight because I needed closure. You came because you did. You’re a selfish bastard, in the end. You’re here for what you want. You’re here to win. We both know it. So go on. Take your win.”
My head was spinning, the rage rising, and the unwanted, dangerous desire with it. She was pushing me, the way she always had. Daring me.
“Will she let you hurt her?” she purred in my ear. “Does she love it the way I did? I’m thinking not, and you’ve got so much need bottled up in you, haven’t you? I can feel it. Bet she won’t give you her sweet little virgin arse, either, because she’s scared that you’re too big, and it’ll hurt, and she’s not woman enough for that. And I know you’re wishing you were man enough to go on and take it anyway. Remember the first time you did it to me? Remember how I screamed?”
This was wrong. I had to leave.
“Oh, I see how it is,” she said. “You don’t want to cheat on her. Poor Hemi.” She stroked my hair, and then she was murmuring in my ear again. “My fella—Julian. He knows you’re coming by. He’s got his own ideas about that, and he’d be rapt to show me exactly how he feels. You can’t bring yourself to do it to me? You know you’d love to watch while he does. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t, because I know better. And then, after you’ve watched him give me the flogging I know you want to see me get right now, and he’s got me on my hands and knees and is giving it to me hard, so I can’t move—well, if you held my head and shoved it down my throat, I’d have to take that, too, wouldn’t I? And you won’t be cheating then. You’ll just be taking what’s yours. Just helping him fuck your lying, cheating, deserting little wife in every way she deserves to get it. You want to punish me for what I did to you, and for what I’m doing now. You want to make me pay. I know you do.”
It was all too much. I was hard as iron, mad as fury, and I had a hand on either side of her waist.
She wasn’t smiling now. She was looking into my eyes. Daring me. “Go on, Hemi,” she said. “You know you want it. Make me take it.”
Hemi
I was gripping Anika’s waist so hard, I’d probably leave marks. I knew she’d love seeing them, too. I was breathing in her scent, tasting the power she’d offered me. And I wanted it.
I lifted her off me, stood up, and set her down on the couch.
“No,” I said.
“Hemi.” She stood up and went for me again, and I shot an arm out, took her by the shoulder, and held her off. It wasn’t easy, because she was tall, and she was strong. But I was stronger.
“No,” I said again. “I told you, I’m not that man anymore. You don’t have anything I want.”
Her perfectly cut nostrils were flaring with rage now. She was rangatira, descended from Maori nobility, and it had never showed more.
She said I wanted the power? I knew the truth.
“I have exactly what you want,” she said. “And you’re afraid to take it.”
“No,” I told her. “You’ve never wanted the same things I did. I wanted domination, and you wanted pain. I wanted control, and you wanted humiliation. I don’t want to hurt anybody anymore. I don’t need to.” I didn’t say that it had always made me sick, afterwards, because I hadn’t wanted to feel cruel, and I’d known I had been. She’d always wanted to push me past my limits, and I’d always gone. But not anymore.
Maybe it was what Hope had said. That there was something wrong in that dance, something dark and destructive from our pasts that we’d carried into our present. But it wasn’t Hope’s and my dance that was wrong.
Anika’s eyes were darker now, deep pools of fury and scorn. “Be a man, Hemi. Tell the truth. That you’re too soft, underneath. That I had to practically make you do it every time. In the end, for all that power you try to show me, that you try to show everybody, you’re nothing like the man you’re pretending to be. You’re weak, and you’re soft. So go back to your little girl, because I’ll bet she is a little girl, and that she thinks you’re big and strong and hard, when we both know the truth about that. We both know what you really are.”
“I don’t know if you know,” I said, still holding her away from me, wanting only to be gone, “but I do. I know that I’m not interested in being with somebody who doesn’t want the man I am. And I know that I don’t want you. I said you wanted humiliation? Your dirty secret is—you do want that, but you want me to be the one feeling it. You want a man crawling to you, and I’m not interested in crawling. I walked, and I’ve been walking ever since. I’m standing upright here, and I’m going to keep standing.”
“Don’t you remember? I left you.”
“No. You didn’t turn up. There’s a difference. And now you want me? It’s been fifteen years. Where have you been all this time?”
“I wrote to you,” she said. “I knew I’d made a mistake. Where have I been? Where have you been? I wanted to start again. More fool me, because you never even answered.”
“Yeh, right.” She still looked beautiful, but she was about as seductive as a black widow spider, and I didn’t like spiders anymore. I preferred butterflies. “I know when you wrote to me, and I know why. When I bought my first company, wasn’t it? When you started to hear the drums beating for me? When you started to think that maybe, just maybe, you’d made a mistake? And that maybe you could get me back that same way you always had, the same way you’re trying now? You say you want me. Tell me, what exactly do you want?”
“Nothing.” She practically spat the word, the spider showing its venom. “I don’t want any part of you.”
“You sure about that? You’re the one who wants the win. You want to know you still have the power, and if that doesn’t work? You’ll take the money instead. Or you’ll take both. But you won’t get either, not from me. There’s nothing here for you. You had your chance, and you lost it.”
“No?” she said. “I think you’re wrong.”
I stood and breathed, and when I went on, my voice was
measured. Controlled. Sure. “You try it,” I said. “Try it and see. You say I’m soft? You don’t know me. You don’t know how hard I’m willing to play. You have no idea how rough I can be. You get in my way, though, and I’ll show you. That’s what you’re going to have to take, and it won’t be pretty.”
I walked out knowing that there’d be a price to pay. There was always a price to pay. The question was whether you were willing to pay it.
Hope
I didn’t know what to do with myself.
During the first couple hours after Hemi left, I had dinner with Karen at a restaurant near the high-end holiday house he’d rented near the lake and tried to talk about other things. Until I couldn’t.
“Are you worried?” Karen asked me over her salmon. “Isn’t it weird to have Hemi be visiting his wife after they’ve been separated for, like, twenty years? Are you scared they’ll get back together? They fell in love in college and got married when they were only four years older than me. I kind of can’t imagine that. Not getting married.”
“Of course I’m not worried.” I took another bite of a white fish that should have been delicious, but somehow tasted dry as bone. I would have looked out at the lake, but the window next to me showed only my own reflection, and that was nothing I wanted to see. I didn’t know how to arrange my face, so I looked down at my plate instead. “It’s fifteen years, not twenty. And just think about all the women whose husbands were married before, men who have children with their ex-wives. Are those women worrying every time their husbands have contact with their exes?”
“I bet they are if she’s still hot. I hope she isn’t. Did Hemi say what she looks like?”
“He doesn’t know, remember? He hasn’t seen her. I know she’s Maori, and that’s all.”
“Maybe she’s, like, really ugly now,” Karen said. “She’s old, right? So maybe she is.”
She wasn’t. I knew, because I’d looked her up online, and had found her, too, in words and pictures. A fiercely beautiful face, golden skin, and lots of thick, dark hair. And a body.
Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) Page 11
