Heartbreak Hero

by Frances Housden

  A wiser man would have thought twice before suggesting the solution. Yeah, man, by tomorrow he could be up to his neck in hot water in more ways than one.

  The hell of it was, when he’d suggested dinner, he hadn’t taken into account her wearing paper-thin white pants that whispered of bronze skin underneath. Or that the new jewel-bright turquoise T-shirt she’d bought at the vineyard would do things to her eyes that made him feel as if he’d been sucker-punched.

  Something he’d probably learned at his grandmother’s knee was niggling at his conscience, telling him those types of reactions to a woman he might yet need to kill weren’t exactly moral.

  So why was he letting his inner voice screw him around? He had only two choices, neither of which came under the heading of ethical. The status quo would just have to stand.

  An easy decision, since he knew calling Chaly for a replacement would be the lever his boss needed to ease him out of GDE. A not uncommon occurrence when an agent began nipping at Garnet Chaly’s heels in the seniority stakes. Kel liked—no, needed—his job too much to give Chaly cause. Besides, whom could they send? Chaly himself? He doubted it. Just the thought of his boss taking his place stayed his hand. No matter what Ngaire had done, or was going to do, Kel couldn’t wish him on to her.

  If you can’t handle the pressure, say so now and I’ll take the job on myself. I hear the target’s built. Maybe I could get myself some of that. For all Chaly’s expensive clothes and English accent, there was no getting away from the fact that his mind would have a stretch to reach up to the gutter.

  Ngaire hadn’t lied to Kel. The food did taste great, and at any other time she wouldn’t have minded the lavish open setting. This evening it felt like eating in a goldfish bowl. For all she knew, the person who’d searched her room could be sitting watching her.

  And it unnerved her.

  The only person she felt sure of was Kel. So sure that she’d almost blurted out the truth about Te Ruahiki. What a disaster that would have been. He’d not only think she was trouble, he’d be looking at her sideways, wondering where she’d escaped from.

  No, much better to keep her beliefs about the supernatural being, presently residing in her day pack, to herself.

  Finished eating, she put her fork down and glanced through the window. Wiping her mouth with her napkin, she watched the evening light become the gray-blue of dusk. The lights on the ferry, churning through the waters from the other side of the harbor, were clearly visible. She remembered her grandfather recounting how he’d met her grandmother on a Devonport ferry.

  God, she missed him so much it hurt.

  She needed him, needed his wisdom and his forgiving kindness.

  In a split second her mind was made up.

  “Look, sorry to eat and run, but there’s a ferry approaching the wharf and I have to catch it.”

  Kel blinked his surprise. “Don’t you want dessert first?”

  She almost laughed. She’d seen him eyeing the dessert trolley and gathered keeping fit didn’t preclude having a sweet tooth. He had to have a great metabolism.

  “No, I want to catch that ferry. But you have some. They looked yummy. I’ll catch you later.” She pushed her chair away from the table, an action mirrored by Kel. Gathering up her day pack, she slung it over her shoulder, then shaped her lips with a tiny pout. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  His face said he minded in spades. The clatter of silverware against his wineglass broke the soft music-filtered ambience.

  A short squeeze of her hand on his shoulder was all the apology she’d time for as the ferry began its run toward the clock tower overlooking the wharf. Then she was off.

  Luckily her shoes didn’t have heels narrow enough to do body piercing, so she had no problem negotiating the crowds that milled outside the downtown watering holes and restaurants. Aluminum masts thrust yacht rigging higher than the rail along the water’s edge, and beyond the silver-slashed foreground, the ferry unloaded its passengers. Ngaire quickened her pace.

  Dodging people traveling in the same direction was difficult, but not impossible, compared to doing a square dance with the squeeze of passengers leaving the ferry. Then the others crossing the street from Downtown as the Walk signal went green swept her round the corner, until she popped out like a cork to check the timetable boarding. No point in taking a ferry going God knows where.

  She honestly didn’t see the man coming, but she heard him say “Oooof!” as her day pack caught him between the ribs.

  The guy was solid, yet he folded over like a deflating weather balloon. “Jeez! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” She bent slightly, shrinking to his level with one eye on the stream of passengers boarding the ferry and the other on the guy she’d winded, trying her best to look sympathetic. “Just take short breaths.”

  “Entschuldigen. Can I be of help?” asked a voice from behind her.

  She recognized the accent straight away. Herr Schmidt had become quite vocal on the latter part of the tour, probably due to the red wine he’d enjoyed. Now his long, lean figure hovered behind her unintentional victim. “That would be great. I accidentally banged into him, now he can’t straighten up.”

  “Maybe he needs an ambulance?”

  “God, I hope not. I didn’t hit him that hard.” She crouched lower. It was hard talking to someone who wouldn’t look her in the eye. “How bad is…?”

  She was the one gasping now. It might have been the angle, but she’d swear the man she’d hit was also the guy from Tahiti. The one who’d tried to steal her case! And her mind wasn’t letting her imagination get away with saying “All islanders looked alike.”

  Ngaire straightened and began edging away, still speaking to Herr Schmidt. “Look, I’m about to miss my ride. Can you see to him for me and I’ll get back to you later?”

  “Sure thing. You run fast. Schnell, huh?”

  “Danke.” She came up with the only useful word of German she knew and took off like the hounds of hell were after her.

  She never even looked back. Ticket in hand, she raced down the gangway. “Devonport, here I come,” she murmured to no one in particular, as if she was about to cross the Pacific from east to west instead of taking a short ride to the North Shore.

  Once onboard, she stopped to get her bearings, then spied stairs winding up to the top deck. She’d reached the bend and the upper deck was almost in her sight when fingers circled her ankle, holding her fast.

  A ripple of fear iced her spine. Even if she’d been able to move, her balance was all wrong to take out the hand’s owner with a kick as he asked her, “Did you really think you could escape me so easily?”

  Chapter 6

  I f looks could kill…Kel knew he’d be a dead man.

  Though you couldn’t tell from the warm sensations he got from holding her ankle. Reluctantly, he released his grasp on the slim-boned morsel of flesh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. You look as though you’d like to kick me. Not that I blame you, but can we leave it until we’re seated? This baby’s leaving port.”

  “I thought you were someone else. I mean…” For once Ngaire looked flustered; pink traced the shape of her high cheekbones and her mouth quivered as if it needed kissing. His kiss.

  He stepped up, balancing on the narrow end of the tread below hers, and brought their eyes level. “No need for explanations. I was at fault.”

  “Actually, I was going to say I thought you were a stranger. I’d no idea you would follow me.”

  “You had me worried, doll. You charged off as if the restaurant had caught fire. Then when I got on board, you weren’t here. What happened? Lose your way?”

  “There was a bit of a tussle in the crowd when I stopped to look at the board listing the ferry timetable. I banged into someone, a guy, but Herr Schmidt came along and took care of him for me. Thank God.” Her eyelids snapped closed, shutting him out of the blue depths he’d been enjoying close-up, as if there was something in them she didn’t want him to see. Th
e evasion didn’t last long as the ferry rounded the end of the wharf and caught the wake of a vessel heading under Harbour Bridge.

  Ngaire fell into his arms. “Oops, guess we ought to go find those seats.”

  Her momentum carried him down a step with her hands clutching the front of his shirt and her mouth close enough to kiss. Boy, did he want to kiss her. He heard her breathing quicken and her heart rate increase. Felt its frantic rush dance behind her ribs, where he’d tucked his palm under her breast.

  He’d only to move his thumb…

  As if she’d read his mind, her eyes darkened, bluer than midnight. That’s when Kel knew he was in deep crap. He needed to get out of it, and quick. He eased her upright, increasing the distance between their mouths, reducing the temptation to sup. Hell, they were blocking the stairs in a public place, and the only thing in his mind would get him arrested if he put his thoughts into actions—the words hot and wet spun through his brain in bold capital letters.

  He needed to change the subject.

  “Schmidt must have fixed that guy up in no time flat. He came onboard a few seconds after you.”

  Her eyelids dipped. Again the evasion. What was she hiding?

  “That’s a relief. He couldn’t have been as bad as I thought.” The movement of the ferry jogged her toward him again, but this time she grabbed for the rail instead of his shirt. “We could stand on the stairs until the ferry docks and see nothing, or go up top to get a load of the view. The second gets my vote.”

  She swept around to make good her suggestion, her impetus swinging her long black braid out to slap his cheek, as if in chastisement for the lusty thoughts he was about to have as her neat little butt swayed in front of him.

  Kel forced himself to think of something else. For starters, he needed to remember exactly why he was following Ngaire. She was the enemy. No matter how delicious this little crumpet appeared, he wouldn’t be feasting on her. No more imagining how her neat, firm breasts would feel in his hands, or wondering if those bronze legs, shimmering under her white pants, were long enough to lock round his waist. No. No. No! He was doing it again, and for his own sanity, he had to stop.

  Only two steps behind her when she reached the top, he called out, “Let’s go outside, I could use the fresh air.”

  At that time of day, there were few people interested in sitting out on the deck. And in Ngaire’s opinion, finding a seat seemed a waste of time. She headed straight for the rail overlooking the bow.

  “If you’re thinking of doing a Titanic stunt, forget it. I’ve had enough of that kind of excitement for one day.”

  “Hey, I climbed that cliff, too, remember.”

  “Yeah, but you took the quick route down. I was the one at the top with my heart in my mouth.”

  “It didn’t show.” As if to confirm her statement, she looked up at him without shifting her position at the rail or moving her folded arms across it. “I take back what I thought of you in Tahiti. You’d be a good guy to have on one’s side in a crisis.”

  “So, where did I get promoted from? Bottom of the class?”

  Her eyes widened, blue as the night-dark sea, but the stars in them were the reflection of the ferry’s lights. “I think you might have been stood in the corner with your face to the wall.”

  “Whoa! You hit low and hard.”

  She twisted round, chin tilted in his direction. “Admit it, your first impulse was to let that creep steal my case.”

  “What if it was? It took me a moment to get my mind off the sexy woman I’d been watching, but my second impulse has to count for something. I did catch him.”

  “Only because he was at least sixty pounds heavier on the hoof. A lighter guy might have gotten away. Or I could have—”

  “No, you couldn’t,” he cut in. “Forget about pretending you’re a superhero, at least while I’m around. Considering you attract trouble like a magnet, you ought to be glad we’ll be together the whole trip. One thing for sure, since we left that guy behind in Tahiti, he can’t be the one who trashed your hotel room.”

  He caught a quick that’s-all-you-know flash in her eyes before she looked down, pointing at the water below. “See here, where the wave breaks on the bow, the water is phosphorescent. Did you know Benjamin Franklin thought phosphorescence was due to electricity?”

  “Frankly, doll, I don’t give a damn,” he paraphrased as his gaze followed her directions. Kel looked but didn’t see, his priorities focused on discovering what she wanted to conceal rather than watching a shimmer as insubstantial as the feelings she aroused in him. Here one moment, gone the next. They had to be. The cost was too high for anything more.

  For the space of a heartbeat, Ngaire almost stuttered out the truth when Kel put on his Rhett Butler act with her playing the part of Scarlett. The dimple in his chin had deepened as he told her she ought to be glad of his company, but would Kel willingly continue as her companion for the trip’s duration if he knew the nightmare wasn’t over? For her, anyway.

  Not yet.

  Her hand curled round the strap of her day pack, and she garnered reassurance from the weight on her shoulder. She decided her safest bet would be to sleep with the mere under her pillow from now on. That way, if anyone wanted to steal it they would have to go through her. Kel didn’t know she would fight to the death in order to retain the prize nestled against the small of her back. Sure, her mettle hadn’t been tested to any great degree since she was fourteen, but now she had the skills to rise above the scenario that had played out when another kid had leapt up from behind a Dumpster in an alley and stabbed her low down in her belly. Robbed of her womanhood for little more than grocery money.

  Devonport was one of the places on her wish list to visit. It was the place where her grandmother had lived and worked before moving to the States. And as the lights on shore evolved from specks that flickered in the deepening shadow of the hill into discernible street lamps and uncovered windows, Ngaire’s dream turned into a reality.

  Kel pointed out to sea. “Look along the length of my arm. See that dark starless shadow on the horizon?”

  When she nodded he went on. “That’s Rangitoto Island. It’s a volcano, a perfect cone that looks the same from every angle.”

  “Aha, it must be one of the forty-eight that Auckland’s built on. A bit rash of the city fathers to choose here.”

  “Trust you to know how many volcanoes there are. I lived here and never even bothered to find out. Though, it does seem kind of reckless in hindsight. They’d have been more interested in having a harbor each side of the isthmus.”

  “Everyone knows hindsight is always twenty-twenty. I think the number of volcanoes was listed in a travel brochure I read before leaving San Francisco.” She looked at him from under her eyelashes, trying not to smile. “You know, the kind of advert that plays on your adventurous spirit. Come to Auckland and be blown away by it.”

  “Ah, San Francisco of the Blue Grasshopper fame,” he replied, slipping in a dig of his own. “Now, that’s a brilliant example of planning, the city’s built on a fault line. In all my years in Auckland I never felt the ground shake.”

  Maybe she could make it shake for him.

  She thanked heaven that the darkness spared her blushes. Where Kel was concerned, her thoughts were becoming increasingly graphic, setting her skin alight every time she was around him. Like now.

  “My grandparents met on one of these ferries during World War Two. Grandma was a kitchen hand working in Elizabeth House, where the navy WRNs were billeted, and George, my grandfather, was a GI stationed in Auckland for a while.”

  Darn, the hot flashes were going to her head. She hadn’t intended to inform Kel of her Maori ancestry.

  “So that’s the reason for your sudden urge to take a ferry ride,” he said on a long huff of breath, as if that explanation made more sense than her running to catch it on an impulse. “I think Elizabeth House is still standing, but they turned it into apartments years ago.”

&n
bsp; “Do you think we can go see it?”

  “Sure, it’s not that far a walk. We can do it in ten minutes.”

  “Good, because that’s what I want to do.”

  As they watched the ferry edge closer to the stark modern terminal that she guessed was a far cry from the days of World War Two, he surprised her by asking, “So were you named after your grandmother? And why didn’t you want me to know?”

  “My grandmother was half Maori and half Scots.”

  “Hell, doll. I’m guessing at least a quarter of New Zealanders have some Maori blood, and are proud of it. It would sure cut down on the number of friends I’d had if I let that bother me. Just wait till we reach Rotorua tomorrow, then you’ll see something.”

  “Pops told me the moment his eyes met my grandmother’s, he knew. It was as if they recognized something in each other that wouldn’t exist with anyone else. I guess that was through Pops being half Native American.” She laughed slightly to break the tension she felt inside. When George Two Feathers repeated the story to her as a little girl, she had always felt it was just too heartbreakingly beautiful. “On the other hand, it might have been because they were both half Scots and it was the sound of bagpipes calling.”

  Down below, passengers had begun to disembark. As she watched, Ngaire remembered the first moment she saw Kel, that moment when their eyes met and he’d yet to disappoint her. Ancient history now. He’d more than made up for it, so much so she found it hard to believe they’d only met yesterday.

  “All ashore who’s going ashore,” she murmured in a singsong voice, pushing away from the rail.

  “That would be us. Don’t look so sad, the journey isn’t over yet. We still have the return trip.”

  It sounded like a prophecy, as if he’d said, “We still have the rest of our lives.”