“Buzzkill.”
She paused at the corner, careful to keep her distance from the freshly painted wall. “You fell out of that tree and broke your arm when you were eleven. Didn’t you learn anything from the experience?”
“I did.” Harley grinned up at her from his crouched position, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “That was the day I learned you liked me, even though you would never in a million years admit it.”
Heat stung her cheeks. “I didn’t like you. I felt sorry for you…embarrassing yourself in front of all your mates.”
Because she hadn’t been one of his mates. She’d still been the new girl on the island, even though her family had moved there almost a year earlier. She hadn’t quite fitted in with Piper and Erin, the only girls in Oban who were the same age. Or with Shaye and Holly, who were three years younger. And that day, she’d been peeping around the workshop—much like she was now—spying on Ford, Ben, West, and Harley, who’d yelled insults at each other and rattled the branches high up in the macrocarpa. Then, with a yelp, Harley had plummeted two meters to the ground. It might’ve been her imagination, but she could’ve sworn she’d heard a crack a split second before Harley had screamed.
Bree arched her chin. “And you cried like a girl.”
“I saw you that day—before you bolted when Dad sprinted out of the workshop. I saw you standing right where you are now.” Harley’s smile didn’t slip, but something new crossed his face. Something new and wary and…tender. “You cried, too, Queenie. You cried because I was in pain.”
“I wasn’t crying. It was the pollen.”
“Right. Blame the allergies.” Harley’s smile expanded, and a dimple flashed in his cheek just below a smudge of green paint.
Half naked, teasing, and a hundred percent adorable. So much easier to maintain the facade of indifference for the man when he was nine thousand kilometers away in New York or acting like a jerk.
Again—ugh.
Bree aimed disdain down the length of her nose. “Anyway. We’re due at your mother’s place for dinner in an hour, I’d better get Carter out of the tree.”
Harley snorted and continued to rinse his brushes. “Good luck with that.”
Luck? She didn’t need luck.
With a huff, Bree strode around the corner into the yard filled with stacks of tarpaulin-covered spare parts. In one corner of the yard, macrocarpa branches shivered. She stepped into the dappled shade and looked up. Three little faces giggled down.
“That looks like fun.” Bree kept her voice light and non-confrontational, though her heart beat in a slightly jagged rhythm at how high the kids were.
“It is,” said Jade.
“You should come up with us.” Zoe picked a twig out of her dark curls and let it drop. The twig seemed to fall a looooong way.
Carter, two branches higher than the girls, laughed. “Auntie Bree wouldn’t climb a tree, silly. She’s scared of heights.”
“I am not.” She absolutely was. “But Carter, it’s time to go home and get ready for dinner with Denise and Rob.”
“I don’t want to go yet.” Carter’s foot shifted on the rough bark as he stretched up to grab a branch overhead. “And I am ready.”
“You need a shower and clean clothes, and so do I. Let’s go.”
Carter glanced down at Zoe and Jade, who stared at him with sagging jaws and, if Bree wasn’t mistaken, with a hint of admiration.
He switched on a megawatt smile and directed it down at Bree. “Nope.”
Komeke males—even when they were a pain-in-the-butt, you still wanted to eat them up with a spoon.
Bree fisted her hands on her hips. “Carter Bryan Tahere, get down here now!”
Zoe and Jade giggled, and Carter’s chest puffed out. Crap. Now the Komeke ego was involved.
“Come and get me,” he said. “I triple dare you.”
“Triple dare, huh?” a male voice asked. “That’s a serious challenge.”
Bree took her eyes off Carter to glance over her shoulder at Harley, who now stood a few meters behind her, arms crossed over his chest and wearing a smirk to rival her son’s.
“Oh. You think I won’t?”
Harley covered the distance between them, stopping close enough that Bree could smell the chemical tang of house paint mixed in with a hint of his spicy cologne.
He dipped his head, so his face was only inches from her ear. “You’d rather look like a coward than a fool.”
That he knew her well enough to be dead right rankled like hell.
Not for the first time, so far as Harley was concerned, she couldn’t think of a biting remark to fling back. So instead, she gave him an icicle-laden glare and kicked off her shoes. His eyebrows shot upward, gaze fixing on her crimson polished toenails.
“Be a shame to ruin such a pretty pedicure.”
“Bite me.” Bree strode over to the tree trunk and tipped her head. “All right, Carter. If I can climb up and give you a high five, do you promise to come down?”
“Yep.”
“Zoe and Jade,” she said, “Can you come down to give me some space?”
Both girls scrambled down the tree, no doubt eager to witness Bree’s adult clumsiness in climbing. Once they’d sprung with cat-like grace to the ground and hurried giggling to Harley’s side, Bree studied the branches.
One thing smart-ass Harley didn’t know was that when he and his mates weren’t around, a young Bree had reached the master level of climbing his dad’s macrocarpa. Being skinny and slightly short for her age had worked in her favor—she’d managed to work her way higher than any of the boys with their bulkier frames.
Problem was, that had been back when she’d been nineteen years younger, probably twenty-five kilos lighter, and a helluva lot braver.
But one more glance over her shoulder at Harley and the girls was all the motivation she needed to reach for the first thick branch and hook her toes over a knot in the trunk. She boosted herself upward, swinging her knee over the branch and wincing as the bark scraped her knee cap through her capri pants. With a couple more wriggles, she sat astride, resisting the urge to cling to the main branch like a monkey. Whoa—she was a lot higher off the ground than she’d anticipated.
“Hah!” She pointed a finger up at Carter. “Half-way there.”
Edging carefully to her feet, Bree stuck her foot in the next vee of the trunk and before logic and sanity could talk her out of it, hauled herself up another level higher…and then another.
She tapped Carter’s sand-speckled foot and grinned. “I made it!”
“Told you it was fun,” he said.
Leaves whispered around her, and flashes of sunshine streaked through the branches. She angled her head, fingers relaxing from fists to flush against the bark as the scent of vegetation and briny salt spray filled her lungs.
“Queen of all I survey,” she whispered and then made a fatal mistake. She looked down with the intention of gloating her twenty-something-year-old butt off to Harley.
“Oh, crap.” She’d conveniently forgotten the hardest part of tree climbing wasn’t the ascent but the descent. And now that her limbs had turned squishy with fear…
Harley stood at the bottom of the tree, staring up, his brow slightly furrowed. “You okay?”
She gave him a thumbs up. Tried to calculate the damage caused by a sixty-kilogram woman falling at a-lot-of-meters-per-second and landing on an unsuspecting male from a terrifyingly high height.
“You’ll catch me if I fall?” she yelled down.
“What are you, nuts? You’ll kill us both.” He laughed, his teeth a bright flash of white far, far below. “You’ve got this, Bree. Baby steps.”
Since hesitating any longer would only tempt Harley to call in more laughing spectators, Bree clutched the tree branch and slid her leg off it, dangling her foot until her toes touched bark below. Whew.
She made it down another two branches to the lowest one and wriggled awkwardly into a crouch—which would’
ve provided her cheering fan group a glimpse of her capri’s straining over her rump.
Please, God, let the fabric hold…
Feeling around with her toe, Bree located the knotty outcrop and lowered her weight onto it. Strong arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her tight against a warm, broad chest. Her breath caught and held, as Harley plucked her off the trunk and lowered her to her feet.
“Bravo,” he said, releasing her. “Once again, I’ve underestimated you.”
She sniffed, quickly moving aside so she wouldn’t be tempted to rub up against him like a cat demanding affection. Carter had followed her halfway down and sat astride a thick branch, kicking his bare feet just out of reach of the ground.
“You were awesome, Auntie Bree,” he said. “But you didn’t give me a high five.”
Bree narrowed her eyes. “Carter.”
“That was the de-al,” he crowed in a sing-song voice. “No high five, no Carter.”
“Get down here, now.” Her teeth clicked together, a burst of heat zipping up her already-hot face.
Talk about looking like an incompetent idiot in front of…but when she glanced sideways, Harley was no longer beside her. She turned—and her jaw loosened, dropped open. Before she could issue a warning, Harley twisted a dial on the hose he’d used to rinse his brushes and sent a blast of water at the tree.
There was a shocked moment of silence then a maniacal soprano scream swooped out of the tree, followed by near-hysterical giggles. Icy water droplets pinged off leaves and dripped down Carter’s open-mouthed face. Harley pulled the trigger on the hose, and another arc hit the boy’s legs. Carter squealed and hugged the trunk harder.
“This is helping, how?” Bree gritted out between clenched teeth.
Harley handed her the hose. “Wait here.”
Then he strode under the tree, directly below Carter’s dangling feet. He murmured something to the boy and then backed away.
Five seconds later, a sheepish-looking Carter was on the ground. “Sorry, Auntie Bree,” he said. “I’ll go get my stuff off Kezia.”
After he’d raced away with Zoe and Jade close at his heels, Bree turned to Harley.
“What did you say to him?”
Harley took the hose nozzle from her hands and started looping it. His grey eyes gleamed. “I mentioned that cold water had an unpleasant effect on the male anatomy, and he had three females to witness it. So if he didn’t want me turning the hose on his shorts next, he’d get his ass out of the tree.”
Bree shook her head, struggling to keep her lips in a straight line. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I’m very believable—maybe you should try it someday. And you’re welcome.” With a wink, he walked away, continuing to coil the hose until he reached the workshop wall.
Wait—what? Bree watched the play of muscles shift across Harley’s back as he hoisted the heavy loops of hose onto the metal holder. She huffed out a sigh and stalked out of the Komeke’s yard.
Believe in him? Oh—she’d believed in Harley once, believed to the very depth of her poor, gullible soul.
And look where that had gotten her.
Chapter 7
Call her a spineless jellyfish, but Bree couldn’t say no to Carter when he’d asked if Harley could come for dinner the next day. After another two hours of him “helping” paint the mural that afternoon, Carter reported to Bree that Harley had agreed.
The next evening, she and Carter added the final touches to the plate of sushi they’d spent the last hour making. With ten minutes to go, Bree fled into her room to change out of her work clothes. Skimming through the hangers, she pulled out a dress and held it up against her. She caught herself doing the little twist from side to side in the mirror and snarled at her reflection. Harley was coming to see their son not the woman who’d kept Carter a secret for the past nine years.
She put the cute, Audrey Hepburn-style LBD back into the wardrobe. Selected, instead, plain black leggings and a print tunic in spring shades, which slid appealingly off one shoulder. Because she wouldn’t look like a slob, even if the man didn’t warrant her looking her best. She slid on wedged flip-flops, refused to fuss with her hair, and decided she’d rather die than go without mascara and at least a spritz of Femme.
The sound of knocking reached her ears from downstairs.
“I’ll get it.” Carter thundered down the steps.
Murmured voices slid into her room as Bree gave her reflection one last glance—with a minor adjustment of her mouth so she wasn’t beaming like an excited teenager being picked up for a date—and stepped into the hallway. She froze, a possum in headlights, outside her door. Harley’s head appeared above the top step, his eyes finding hers with unnerving accuracy. Then came broad shoulders covered in a button-down grey shirt, tailored to skim the slightly bulging muscles in his arms—the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, emphasizing corded forearms. Lastly, faded blue jeans appeared, worn soft so they clung to his thighs and…other bits.
Bree often joked with the girls that she’d never date a man who considered jeans formal attire, but Harley? He somehow managed to make denim and grey cotton rival a bow tie and tuxedo. And oh, dear God, as he reached the landing and strolled toward her, his scent—freshly showered male with a trace of turpentine—rocked her back on her heels.
Olfactory memory was a powerful thing.
For a couple of drawn-out seconds, she was eighteen again. Rushing to open the door of the student flat she shared with three other girls. Desperate to drag Harley out into the night to the party he’d invited her to. Desperate for him to notice the red dress she’d scrimped and saved for. And there he’d stood, just beyond the doorway, as if maybe he’d had second thoughts about the invitation.
He’d worn tatty jeans and an off-the-rack shirt, the outside light casting angled shadows on the stark lines of his face. Beyond him, parked at the curb, idled his battered Honda with the windows rolled down. Two guys and a girl were squished in the back seat, bottles of something in their hands. Bree’s stomach had dropped to the soles of her best pair of heels when she’d realized Harley hadn’t so much asked her to the party as offered her a ride.
“I’m completely overdressed; let me throw on some jeans,” she’d said, trying to retreat inside the flat.
“You’re dressed just fine, Queenie.”
He’d tugged her gently outside, and she’d stumbled, bumping up against his chest, fingers instinctively clutching his arms to steady herself. His cologne, while probably only a supermarket brand, had given her a little head rush—but it was the faint, pine-trees-and-liquorice smell of turpentine that had caused her to sway toward him again.
And she was in the middle of experiencing another little head rush now.
“You okay?” Harley’s deep voice hauled her back from an innocent eighteen to a wiser, saner twenty-eight.
A sane woman who wouldn’t let a man who smelled amazing and looked good enough to give a tongue bath to seduce her into yet another regrettable one-night hook up.
No more hook ups for Bree Findlow. Period.
“I’m good. Just a little hungry.”
“What’s on the menu?” he asked.
“Sushi.” Carter came up beside Harley and tugged on his arm. “I helped make it. Come and see.”
He pulled Harley down the hallway into the kitchen-dining area, leading him to the dining table Bree had fussed over once Carter had grown bored of pretending to be a Ward On Fire contestant. Three place settings were perfectly laid out, complete with bamboo placemats, glossy red and black, rectangle plates and chopsticks. A tray in the center of the table contained a simple teriyaki chicken, cucumber, and red capsicum sushi. Bree’s rolls were sliced foodie-magazine pristine. Carter’s…not so much.
Carter slid into a seat, forcing Bree and Harley to take either end of the table.
“We’ve got soy sauce, pickled ginger and”—Carter pointed at a ceramic bowl with a tiny spoon beside the green paste—“wasabi.” His tone bo
rdered on reverent awe. “It’s really hot.”
“Did you know your Auntie Bree is a wasabi eating champion?” Harley shook out the white napkin and flicked it into his lap.
Bree’s hand stilled on the napkin by her plate, fingers pinching a fold of the neatly pressed linen.
Carter’s eyes widened and he looked from the little dish to Bree. “Are you?”
“Mmmm.” How had she bypassed that memory when preparing tonight’s meal? Selective recall—embarrassment must’ve relocated it to the farthest reaches of her brain and shelved it under Never Think of This Again. “A long time ago.”
“It’s crystal clear in my memory,” Harley said. “Your auntie and I were at a party together…”
The same damn party she’d thought of earlier, the one with the out-of-place red dress and heels.
“And a bunch of us got roped into a wasabi challenge.”
“Sweet,” said Carter.
“Tongue-blisteringly hot, actually.” Harley grinned at the boy and helped himself to a wonky round of sushi. He scooped up a pea-sized amount of wasabi and smeared it on top. “She and I ended up pitted against each other in the final round. But instead of this much”—he showed Carter the sushi in his hand—“we each had one more bit of sushi covered in wasabi, plus whatever was left over in the bowl, to get down in the fastest time.”
“Who won?”
“Who do you think won?” Harley asked.
Carter switched a thoughtful gaze between her and Harley. “Auntie Bree,” he said finally. “She plays hard. And she never lets me win at board games; she says it would be cheating.”
“I can’t imagine your auntie would cheat.” Harley’s gaze paused briefly on her mouth before flicking up to her eyes.
And yet she had—and he knew it. Tipsy on beer and egged on by the sudden enthusiastic warming of the other partygoers, Bree had devoured the last piece of sushi and swiped the last finger-full of wasabi from her bowl. Her taste buds had felt as if they’d been blasted by a flame-thrower, her eyes were streaming, but damn if she wouldn’t win this stupid game. Through tears she’d seen Harley scoop the last of his wasabi onto his finger. Before common sense prevailed, Bree had lunged across the couch they’d both been sitting on and had grabbed his wrist. Then she’d turned his hand and sucked the wasabi off his index finger.
Drawing Me In: A New Zealand Secret Baby Second Chance Romance (Due South Series Book 7) Page 9
