Isaac leaned in, his face only a foot from hers, his nostrils flaring. Their eyes met, gazes held together by a beat of expectation and…something else. Nat was about to take a step backward when he straightened and pulled out of her personal space, his lips kicking up in a smile.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “Better have an extra half an hour in the shower.”
A returning smile tugged at her mouth. “A polite man would tell a lady she smells like heaven even if she’d been rolling around in the mud.”
“You have been rolling around in the mud,” he said. “And I never said you didn’t smell like heaven, just that your heavenly odor is quite…strong.”
He chuckled and lifted an arm, biceps bulging like crazy as he lowered his head and gave an exaggerated sniff. “And so is mine,” he added.
Not from where she stood. Her nose gave a little witchy twitch as his scent—cut grass and some sort of masculine cologne bubbling with pheromones—curled into her sinuses and fired off crazy-hot synapses in her brain. Damn, the man could lock himself in an airtight room with twenty pairs of worn rugby boots for a week and he’d still come up smelling good enough to lick.
“See you in one hour, then,” she said and speed-walked away from the licking temptation.
Natalie was showered, dressed in her painting jeans and shirt, and deodorized to the max by the time Isaac’s truck pulled into her driveway. She had the paint and brushes set out, and her ‘painting’ radio tuned to a local station to avoid the need for polite chitchat.
She continued work as Isaac walked around the corner of the house. He’d changed out of his sports clothes into faded jeans that were already decorated with splotches of various colored paint, and so was the once-white T-shirt that snugly spanned his broad shoulders. The cotton was so laundered thin that she could make out the dark sprinkle of hair beneath it.
The man was so going to end up with flecks of green paint stuck to his chest hairs.
“You’ve made a start,” he said by way of greeting. He bent, picking up a second brush and examining it.
“Yep.”
She was a lean, mean, painting machine since she’d picked up her brush ten minutes ago. The quicker she worked, the quicker he could leave and she could stop thinking about how that chest hair would feel under her fingertips.
“I’ll catch up.” Isaac poured paint into the tray and set to work at the opposite end of the wall.
He painted in long, even strokes, every movement a quiet display of the confidence a man got from many hours of experience. That much she knew about him—he was always the first volunteer to help out a mate or family member.
“You must’ve painted a few houses in your time,” she said when he returned to refill his tray.
Isaac crouched beside the paint can, his blue jeans pulling taut across his butt. “And fences, sheds, cow barns, and garages. I’ve been painting since I was a kid. There’s always someone in the whānau needing an extra set of hands.”
And Lord, the jeans did nothing to hide the years of physical training needed to sculpt a butt like that. Nat ripped her gaze from Isaac’s glutes and refocused on his paint-flecked hands.
“Fitted it in between training, did you?” she asked.
He shot a glance over his shoulder, the expression in his eyes masked by the wraparound shades he wore. “Yeah. Between training, helping my parents on the farm, and getting into trouble with my younger brother.”
“What sort of trouble?”
The smile that crept onto Isaac’s face caused a plethora of butterflies to explode in her stomach. Their wings continued to flap relentlessly as she looked at her brush and pretended to concentrate on what she was doing. He came to stand alongside her at the wall, working a little closer than he had previously.
“There was the time Sam and I were in the middle of a dried cow shit hurling war and the chair of the Women’s Association got caught in the crossfire.”
Nat laughed. “Oh crap.”
“Yeah, the poor woman got a face full of it,” he said deadpan. “Our punishment was no dessert for the two of us for a month.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
Isaac’s eyebrows rose above his sunglasses. “For a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old it was the worst punishment imaginable. We would rather have had our asses blistered with a wooden spoon than miss Mum’s bread pudding or apple and rhubarb pie.”
“I’ve had your mum’s apple and rhubarb pie, so I guess I understand.”
They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes.
“What about you?” Isaac asked. “Ever get into trouble with your foster brothers and sisters?”
“Not really.” Nat bent to load up her brush, a convenient excuse to turn her face away from him. “I was always too scared of being sent to a new family if I misbehaved.”
“You flew under the radar.”
“Yeah. Invisible Natalie.” She turned back to the wall, tiny threads of tension weaving through her stiff arms. Her stint as a foster kid had become public knowledge thanks to Jackson’s popularity with the media and her last foster family’s willingness to cash in on that popularity.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She gave a half shrug, continuing to brush paint along the straight board. “I’m not ashamed of spending my teenage years in foster care. The families were nice on the whole, and the alternative of continuing to live with my mum was much worse.”
“How’s she doing?”
His voice was gentle, and full of the memory of the time Nat’s mother had shown up at the house to ‘visit’ her granddaughter when Isaac was there. Michelle Donaldson hadn’t been looking her best. She’d lost muscle mass, her clothes hanging from her skinny frame. Her once gorgeous blond hair was matted in places, her skin was sallow, and her gaze jittery. She looked even worse than the day child services had taken nine-year-old Nat into care. With a meth-addicted mother and a father who’d died a third of the way through his nine-year prison sentence for aggravated robbery, Natalie Donaldson could’ve been the poster child for a kid screwed up by her parents’ fucked-up life choices and being in and out of foster care until she was dumped out of the system at sixteen.
If Nat had allowed herself to be. But she hadn’t.
“She’s clean at the moment and living in a group home for recovering addicts. We talk every couple of months.”
“Do you still keep in touch with your foster families?”
An innocent enough question, but some of those memories were a slow-burning simmer in her gut.
“No,” she said. “Call it bad luck or I was jinxed, but I was shunted off when one foster mum got pregnant, then again when another parent got sick or moved out of the district for work, and so on and so on. The foster kid is always the first to get the boot. Up until the Palmers. I lived with them for nearly three years, but once I reached sixteen was cut loose from the system. I was welcomed to early adulthood by a passive-aggressive suggestion that it was time to find my own way in the big bad world by moving into a tiny apartment with two other girls, all of us barely surviving on a government benefit while we finished school.”
The small laugh that exploded out of her contained more humor now than it had six months after Jackson’s death when Janet Palmer and her daughter, Isobel, had sold their foster-family story to the highest bidder, one of New Zealand’s women’s magazines.
“The media jackals loved the Palmers,” she continued. “Full-color spread over two pages, with Janet looking suitably grief-stricken clutching a framed photograph of me and Isobel. Janet must’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel to find that rare shot of the two of us together in the same space.”
“The Palmers treated you badly when you were living with them?”
Nat paused, mid-loading her brush. “I wouldn’t say badly. I had my own room, three meals a day, and nobody hit me, screamed at me, or left me alone for hours at a time.”
“Kids need more than to be treated like a
stray dog being taken in out of pity.” Isaac set his brush down in the tray and straightened. Casting her a sideways glance, he walked to the nearby patio table and chairs where Nat had set out a jug of ice water and glasses. He poured water into two glasses and offered her one.
Nat took it and sipped, the cold liquid soothing the rising burn in her chest. “Your family took in foster kids, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Foster kids, other whānau kids if their parents needed a break, and kids like Owen who came from a good family but needed a place to stay. My mum and dad are Mum and Dad to a lot of people, and having extras around never worried Sam, Tui, and me because it meant more kids to play with after school and more hands helping with the chores.”
“Your extras sound like they became part of your family.”
“They did. For however long they were with us. It wasn’t like that for you?” Isaac’s forehead creased in a sharp V.
“Oh, no. It was subtly made clear to me that I was a charity case, there out of the goodness of Janet’s heart.”
“How?”
He pulled off his sunglasses and dropped them to the table, his stare pinning her to the spot with a curious but kind intensity.
Nat dropped her gaze to the water in her hand, the chunks of ice melting in the glass. A pit formed in her stomach, tiny and cold like the cubes in her drink. You’re grown up now, she chided herself. Don’t emotionally overreact and be silly about it. But she couldn’t prevent the rise of Natalie the Invisible Girl from clogging up her throat. Ice rattled against the glass.
“Nat?” Isaac set his water down on the table and took a step closer to her, gently removing the glass from her trembling fingers and placing it safely beside his.
“Just little things that as a teenager I probably threw way out of proportion and became oversensitive about. Like Isobel going to a private school while I went public—which I totally understand now as private school fees are so expensive—but at the time it made the gap between Isobel and myself so much wider. Or Isabel having brand-name clothes and shoes, while I got the no-name knock-offs, the only thing the foster-child allowance would pay for. The hugs and kisses that Isobel pretended to hate and which I secretly envied because the only time Janet showed any affection for me was to impress her friends. Isobel’s after-school piano, violin, ballet, tap, and tennis lessons, while I went once a week to a free sewing class at the community center”—she shot Isaac a glance to see if he was rolling his eyes at her poor little me story—“but that was the best thing to ever happen to me. That’s where I learned what I wanted to do with my life.”
She pressed both hands to her mouth and let a belly-deep sigh escape between her fingers. “Wow. That was a little TMI. Guess I’m still a little oversensitive about it. Especially when in black and white Janet was quoted as saying I was a ‘damaged, fragile flower that bloomed under the Palmers’ loving care.’”
Isaac slid her sunglasses onto her head then he stroked a hand down her bare arm, cupping her elbow. Shivers spread out from the point of connection, shimmering over her skin. Nice shivers. The kind of shivers that had her unintentionally shifting her weight to lean into his touch.
“Feeling isolated and invisible in a home where, regardless of your circumstances, you shouldn’t, doesn’t make you sensitive. It makes the woman you’ve become even more remarkable.”
“I’m not remarkable, but I’m not damaged or fragile either,” she said.
Except part of her was damaged and fragile. The part that she hid from everyone. The light and color had drained away from her when Jackson died, leaving her a shadow puppet. Invisible again. And invisible people couldn’t find love, couldn’t be loved. Most days that felt safer than the risk of stepping out of the shadows to even try.
“Agree to disagree about the remarkable bit,” he said.
Her breath caught and held, every atom of her body on high alert from the touch of his fingers still on her elbow and the scent of clean, warm male curling into her nose. Heart thudding against her ribs hard enough to leave a bruise, Nat attempted to decipher the emotion behind his hooded gaze. But she couldn’t. She’d no experience with Isaac’s emotions, no familiarity borne over time, to say that the intensity of his stare meant anything other than a study of the paint spots dotting her nose.
“And you’re definitely not invisible. Not to me,” he added.
Before she could interject, he dipped his head and the smooth, cool brush of his lips caressed her cheekbone. Her thudding heart leaped, then froze mid leap. A comforting peck on the cheek, one step more intimate than an air kiss, but completely platonic. Of course that’s all it was.
Then why did the thunder of her pulse resume when his mouth lingered near her skin? Why did the air leak from her lungs in a breathy sigh and her eyelids flutter shut as if they were lead weighted? Why were her lips angling up to his, once again behaving like a moth drawn to the light? That stupid, reckless moth—and, oh—his sudden ragged inhale then the soft collision of his mouth on hers.
There was nothing platonic about his lips on hers. His hand released her elbow and skimmed up to cup her nape, as if the slightest pressure from his fingers would trigger her to pull away. But she couldn’t pull away. His mouth slanted against hers, his cool, firm lips warming quickly as he coaxed kiss after kiss from her. One kiss led to another, and each lingered a little longer, grew a little less tentative, and became a whole lot hotter.
Blame it on the dazzle of sunshine or the paint fumes addling her brain, but Nat’s hand crept over Isaac’s chest and fisted in his shirt, holding him in place. She’d forgotten the dreamlike quality of being kissed by a man who knew exactly what he wanted. Isaac’s tongue danced along hers and her fingers tightened on his shirt, her knuckles pressed to the firm muscle beneath—
The slam of car doors in the driveway cracked the silence like a starter pistol going off. Nat ripped her mouth from Isaac’s, her hand on his shirt turning from fist to palm as she shoved at him. He didn’t budge an inch—of course—but it served the purpose of pushing her two steps out of the temptation zone. The stupidity zone. Her gaze leaped to his and found a glimmer of hunger in them before he grabbed his sunglasses off the table and slid them back into place.
“Muuuuum?” came Olivia’s voice from the driveway.
“Out back,” Nat yelled—and damned if there wasn’t a slight shake in her voice.
She picked up her glass and drained half the water in one go. Cold enough to make her back teeth ache, the temperature would hopefully douse the slow burn spreading over her kiss-damp lips.
Olivia and Morgan strolled around the corner of the house, their matching expressions set to grown-ups suck.
“Hey, girls,” Nat said, praying her mouth wasn’t as red hot as it felt. To be on the safe side, she dropped her sunglasses over her eyes in case her vacant just been kissed stare was another giveaway. “You’re back early.”
Owen ambled around the corner and gave the half-painted wall a once-over. He wore a ratty T-shirt which Nat was surprised Gracie allowed him to keep, and a faded pair of cargo shorts.
“We’ve come to help,” Owen said. “The girls told me you were painting this afternoon and it isn’t fair to let you two have all the fun, right?”
“Right,” Olivia and Morgan said together.
Obviously super impressed with the turn of events and the ‘fun’ they were about to have.
But at that moment, Nat wanted to march up to Owen, grab him by the ears, and plant a wet, juicy one on him. Then buy him dinner and give him flowers, just to say, “Thank you for being an unintentional chaperone preventing me from repeating a gigantic mistake.”
“Great,” Nat said. “There’s an extra couple of brushes in the garage. I’ll go get them.”
“Mistake,” she muttered under her breath as she walked to the garage. “An oops, I tripped and my mouth smushed into yours, oh-so-wrong mistake. My bad.”
But saying it out loud didn’t stop the trem
ble in her knees as she stretched up to grab the brushes from a high shelf. Because it wasn’t that it felt so wrong to be kissing Isaac that scared her.
It was that it felt so right.
Chapter 8
Very few excuses given to Ariana Ngata for missing the Sunday family roast would fly. If you were in another part of the country or overseas, you got a pass. If you were in hospital undergoing surgery with Death observing, scythe in hand, you got a pass. Any other reason—hangover, forgot, other plans, slept in—forget about it.
And not showing up at midday to the farm because you were calling yourself ten kinds of fucking fool and you didn’t want to be roasted alongside the leg of lamb in Ma’s oven would result in a maternal guilt trip that would be worse than just enduring the two-hour meal.
Isaac sat at the family dining table laden with roast lamb, potatoes, pumpkin, kumara, and various salads to make the meal stretch further. He ate with methodical concentration. Head down, food in mouth, only chance of avoiding family drama. His ma and dad were positioned at either end of the large kauri dining table. Across from Isaac sat Tui, doing her sisterly best to get a rise out of him. Bookending her was Uncle Manu and one of his mum’s church singleton older ladies who didn’t have any family remaining in Bounty Bay.
Seated next to Isaac, and eating like he hadn’t been fed in a month, was Sam. And beside him, Tony Johnson, one of the Ngatas’ foster kids who’d spent nearly a year with them when Isaac and Sam were still in primary school. Tony—or TJ as the Ngatas called him—had a fascination with horses as a kid, and Isaac’s dad’s patience teaching the boy to ride had paid off, since Tony was now one of New Zealand’s top jockeys.
God bless TJ, since this flying visit with his ‘ma and dad’ meant Isaac was currently avoiding the interrogation spotlight while the smaller man glowed under it. Until TJ took too long in chewing his last mouthful of lamb, and Isaac’s little sister threw him under the bus.
“How’s the coaching going?”
Anyone who didn’t know Tui would think her sugar wouldn’t melt smile reflected the same sweet and harmless personality beneath it. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Tui Ngata was fierce and a little wild, too much hurricane bottled inside her for many people to handle. Not her big brothers, though.
Mend Your Heart (Bounty Bay Book 4) Page 9
