Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand Book 10)

by Rosalind James

  Chloe did the only things she could think of. She rang the agent back and said yes. And then she rang Josie and said as little as possible.

  That explained why, when she got home from the studio at three o’clock the next day without Zavy, who was staying with Carolyn until Sunday night—because a three-year-old at a house move was about as helpful as a walrus at a beauty pageant—Josie was in the apartment. It didn’t explain why so many other people were.

  Chloe came through the door and blinked. Music was blaring, the upbeat 80s pop Josie loved, which was probably why nobody had heard her come in. Charlie and Amelia, Hugh’s brother and sister, were on their knees with their backs to her, packing books and DVDs into two boxes. Other boxes stood, neatly taped and labeled, in orderly towers against her walls. So many, many boxes. Her pictures had been taken down from the walls, and somebody had even plastered neatly over the nail holes.

  As Chloe continued to stand there, Noelle shouted, “Josie!” from the kitchen.

  Josie came hustling out of the bedroom, said, “Oh, hi, darling,” in passing to Chloe, and Noelle waved at a cabinet—Chloe’s dish cabinet—and asked Josie something.

  Chloe found the remote and turned the music down, and Josie said, “Oh, good. You’re here. We’re almost done. Come help me with your clothes. I haven’t actually binned anything, but I have a pile practically as tall as your head for you to go through. I found seven pairs of pink tights that looked completely buggered. Seven. And I don’t even want to go into your undies.”

  Holly held out a couple mugs to Josie and said, “Keep or bin?”

  “Bin,” Josie said.

  “Wait,” Chloe said. “I was still using those.”

  “Chipped,” Josie said.

  “So? I just drink out of the other side.”

  Josie said, “You sound like Hugh. I’ll bet the new place has even less cabinet space than you have here. You’re one person. You don’t need to keep chipped mugs.”

  Chloe felt as if she were caught up in a whirlwind. Or a cyclone. Cyclone Josie, stronger than the storm that was still battering the northern end of the island in wave after wave of wind and rain. Josie’s hair was tied back in a Maori knot, she was wearing absolutely no makeup and had a smudge on her cheek, and she had on a T-shirt and faded jeans. Of course, she still looked stunning, like she was acting in a film about a glamour model pretending to be a regular person, but that was Josie.

  “I asked,” Chloe said, “if you’d mind coming over to give me a bit of help this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting ... how long have you all been here?” There was an open pizza box on the coffee table, she realized, and a packet of digestive biscuits as well.

  “All day, of course,” Josie said. “We need to be ready by tomorrow morning at nine, when Connor comes with the truck.”

  “We can’t move everything out of here tonight,” Chloe said with alarm. “Even if we used your trailer, we’ll have to take a few loads. Not possible. I still have to clean, too. Can’t they wait a day?” Just the thought of it made her tired, and she’d always had energy. Always. Until now.

  “Silly,” Josie said affectionately, “they’re coming to move you, of course. And they’re doing the cleaning. Part of the price of getting you out fast. Brenna does that, and Connor turns the truck around as soon as he’s helped us unload it and goes back to their place for their things. Efficient, eh. Both families in and out in one weekend, and you only pay half the cost for the truck. I’m very good.”

  Chloe finally dropped her dance bag. “And how did all that happen?”

  “When I rang them and worked it out,” Josie said. “The one-weekend bit was Brenna’s idea. She’s an organizer, that one. Come on. Bedroom. Clothes. Some of those bras are dead. You’re meant to replace them at least once a year, you know, not once a decade. One of them had a tape on it that I’d swear was from the school laundry.”

  “You may have to replace yours once a year,” Chloe said. “Mine don’t have to work that hard.”

  “Well, they’ve earned a rest,” Josie said. “Or a burial. Come on.”

  “Ah ... cheers, girls, for the help,” Chloe said to Kevin’s sisters. “And Charlie and Amelia, of course. Thanks. What is there left for me to do?”

  “The bath, mostly,” Josie said. “Which I’m doing with you, because you also don’t need to be packing and unpacking lipsticks that were never your color and never will be. Let’s go. Oh,” she tossed back over her shoulder, “and you can either sleep downstairs in Kevin’s bed tonight, or come sleep with me, keep me company. We’ll get up early and watch the boys play, eh. Six tomorrow morning. Which just gives us time to meet Connor with the truck afterwards. A whole Sunday to get you unpacked, and you’re good as gold, ready for your week.”

  “Do I get to supervise that?” Chloe asked, trying to be narky and totally failing, because she was actually torn between laughing and crying.

  “Only if you want to,” Josie said serenely. “Or you can leave it to me.”

  Which was why Chloe was on Josie’s couch at six the next morning sipping tea.

  It was never going to have been Kevin’s bed. She hadn’t even spoken to him since their phone call. How could she have slept in his bed, as if she assumed she had the right?

  He’d sounded so ... disappointed. As if he didn’t understand at all, or as if he understood too well. She didn’t know which it was, and it was too hard to tell on the phone.

  She’d thought he loved her, that he understood her. Surely love meant accepting the other person, good and bad. Or was that too much to ask? Was that just a romantic dream, the kind she should have abandoned long ago?

  She wasn’t good at talking. She wasn’t good at sorting out the tangled skeins of her emotions, either. She was good at moving. That was how she thought best. If Kevin had been here, if they could have gone for a walk on the beach, and she could have read his face, his body, and he could have read hers ... then she’d have known. Have understood herself, at least. As it was, she’d started to text a half-dozen times, and her fingers had stopped on the keys when she hadn’t been able to come up with the right words.

  The last thing he’d need was drama just before his match. She’d texted him from Josie’s bathroom the night before, finally, and just said Good luck. I’ll be watching. She’d hoped it was enough, and had known it wasn’t.

  The thoughts had caromed around her head all night as she lay in bed next to Josie. Her friend had slept the peaceful sleep of the virtuous after her long day putting Chloe’s world in order. Chloe, though, had lain awake, her mind as unsettled as her topsy-turvy life.

  Her possessions were in boxes, her son sleeping somewhere else, her dreams gone and her reality not looking like enough to replace them, and the man she loved was twelve thousand kilometers away and didn’t understand her after all.

  Did it help, in the darkness of a stormy winter morning, to watch Kevin run out onto the field at Ellis Park behind Hugh? The team looked determined, their faces set, with nothing like “it’s just a game” about their demeanor. The man on the screen looked like the Kevin who’d kicked out that windscreen and faced off to Rich, and like her fierce, hard lover. The responsible brother, the reluctant landlord, the dutiful son, though? Not so much.

  Watching this Kevin jumping so high, impossibly athletically, as he waited for the whistle to blow, seemingly impervious to the screaming crowd of Lions supporters? Seeing his face, all eyebrows, nose, and fierce purpose, as he quit jumping and lined up for the kickoff? Sensing his focus, his power, as he chased down the speedy Lions back who’d ended up with that kickoff and dragged him to the turf?

  The man who’d remembered exactly what she’d said about peonies, who’d written her that letter—surely that wasn’t the man shoving a palm into his opponent’s chest, sending him sprawling in order to gain two more precious meters before he was hit hard and pummeled to the ground. The gentle giant who’d handed Zavy his very own rainbow-maned pony couldn’t be the same per
son who leaped high into the air for the ball in total disregard of how hard he’d be hit once he landed, came down with it, then ran straight at—straight through—his charging foe as if there were no such thing as doubt, as if “fear” were a word he’d never even heard.

  Chloe’s tea was cold, her hands gripping the knitted throw by the seventy-two-minute mark of a game full of spectacular runs and bruising tackles. The Lions were a running team, a daring team. The Blues were being stretched to the limit, behind 17 to 10 with seventy minutes gone, and the crowd loved it.

  Everything she saw told the same story. The forwards with their hands on their heads, lungs heaving to draw in precious air, a Lions player on the ground, resting his weight on his palms during a stoppage of play, pedaling his feet to drive out the cramp. Effort to the max by both teams, as if this game were the only one that mattered. As if it were do or die.

  Playing, to a man, exactly the same way you performed. For the audience, because no matter how many times you’d danced this role, it was their first time seeing it, and they deserved your best. And for yourself, because you deserved your best, and you were determined to give it. Every single time.

  Because somebody else was waiting in the wings or on the bench to take your spot if you fell short? Maybe so, and maybe that was only one piece of it. Maybe most of all because your own standards demanded it. Because you were always trying for the perfect performance, the perfect game. A performance that had as much to do with drawing the best out of your partner and the entire company, everybody else on the stage, as it did with you.

  You did it for those times when you’d gutted out the pain, dancing with bleeding toes, or even on a fractured leg. You did it for the twenty-four swans in the corps de ballet, holding their arabesques for excruciating minutes, fluttering their arms in perfect unison, working as hard as you were, hoping and dancing with everything in them, trying to earn their own time to shine. You did it for the man whose arms you leaped into, the man whose job it was to hold you and lift you and allow you to move the audience with the most heart-achingly poignant performance you could possibly achieve. You did it for the orchestra, and for Tchaikovsky, and for tradition.

  You did it for ballet. You did it because you had to, and because you could.

  On the screen, the Lions had the ball, were driving for the tryline. Keeping it with their forwards now, trying to get there a meter at a time. Straight up the guts, all heart and will. Ten meters away now, each man being tackled, recycling the ball, and somebody else diving into that same human wall. Hearts and bodies on the line.

  And then the moment when a thunderous tackle from Iain McCormick, the enormous lock, felled the Lions player carrying the ball, and Hugh’s impossibly determined hands wrested it from him.

  “Yes!” Josie was up, jumping. “Now, boy! Go!”

  Hugh passed the ball a good ten meters, straight into the hands of ... somebody.

  “Nico!” Josie was all but dancing now as the player sent the ball off his boot and then charged up the field in pursuit of it, looking only at the sky, at the place he knew it would land. And, somehow, some way, caught his own kick, leaping what looked like two meters in the air and coming down with his hands, and a Lions player’s hands, all wrapped around it, fighting hard.

  There could be only one winner, and this time, it was the one in a blue jersey. Nic was darting, weaving, with his teammates running in support on either side. A pass to a flying Koti James, who drew two players into the tackle and then, at the screaming last second before he went down, flipped the ball behind his back.

  To Kevin.

  Kevin, plucking the ball out of the air and putting his foot down. Kevin, outdistancing every pursuer.

  “Yes, boy!” the Kiwi announcer was shouting, and Josie was shouting with him. Chloe was up, too, still gripping her throw, watching Kevin run. Running like his life depended on it, like nothing could stop him. Running for the joy of it, the thrill of it. Running for his team, for himself, and for rugby. Running because it was what he’d been made for.

  He dove across the tryline, was surrounded by his teammates. Hugh, who’d started it off, pounded his shoulder. Nic, whose kick had sparked it, leaped onto his back in a way that would surely have hurt any other man, and Kevin was laughing, jogging back to midfield, ready to do it all again. Ready to do anything it took.

  You don’t choose what you do. It chooses you.

  Passion. Fire. Grit.

  Courage.

  The Blues lost. One penalty kick by the Lions, and that was the game.

  Pity real life so rarely gave you a Hollywood ending.

  “Ah, well,” Josie sighed, getting up from the couch as the men on the screen started slapping shoulders and backs, celebrating the result or accepting it. “You can’t win them all. That’s what the All Blacks are for, eh. I’ll admit I’m hoping just a wee bit that the Blues don’t make the semifinals. It’ll give me more time with Hugh, anyway. Captaincy’s good for him, and I couldn’t be prouder, but I’d like that extra week, and that’s the truth.” She switched the set off and told Chloe, who was folding her throw, “Come on. You can get the eggs started while I wake up Charlie and Amelia.”

  “I should tell you,” Chloe said, focusing on getting the edges even, “it’s a bit of false pretenses, maybe, getting everybody’s help with the move like you did. Kevin’s family, I mean. He isn’t best pleased with me. I didn’t know how to say it yesterday, but ...”

  Josie stopped on her way out of the room and searched Chloe’s face. “Oh? Let me guess. He didn’t want you to move. Or he wanted you to move downstairs, maybe. And you were your cautious, careful self. You said no. That’s why all this is happening in such a hurry.”

  “How do you know? Are you actually a witch?” Chloe tried to make it light. She was still shaken from the match. Or something.

  “Hugh, of course.” Josie headed into the kitchen and started to pull eggs and vegies out of the fridge, apparently forgetting that it was meant to be Chloe’s job. “Sketching it out, at least, and me filling in the blanks. Kevin’s fallen hard, he says, and I’d have sworn you had too. Tell me more.”

  “Charlie and Amelia?” Chloe suggested.

  “Go wake them up, then come back and tell me.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Chloe said with a sigh. “I knew it.”

  “Nah. How’m I meant to put you right if I don’t know where you’ve gone wrong?” And Chloe had to laugh.

  “Right,” Josie said when Chloe was back in the kitchen again. “Condensed version, please. You know, I’ve always hated it when mums said things like, ‘You’ll never understand what it’s like not to have five minutes to yourself,’ when I’d have done anything to know how that felt. But maybe now I understand. So go. Tell. Fast.”

  “Nothing to tell.” Chloe popped bread into the toaster and pushed the button, as Josie was apparently the Egg Queen this morning. “It’s what I told you, and what you guessed. He didn’t tell me Connor and Brenna needed the place. He wanted me to move in with him. Zavy and me, I mean. I thought he was pushing me, and I told him so. Which meant he pushed me some more.”

  “Mm,” Josie said, sautéing spinach and mushrooms with vigor. “What you’re describing is an All Black. Which is, of course, exactly like you. And me, come to that.”

  “Excuse me? How is that like me? Like you, yes, Miss Boss. And how is it an All Black?”

  “Discipline. Decision. All that. Of course, men tend to run that way already. Fixing the problem. And Kevin ... why does he have half his family living with him, exactly?”

  Chloe sighed and began to butter toast, popping in four more slices while she was at it. She could hear Charlie and Amelia talking out there, so she didn’t have much time to explain. Suited her. “He’s the student housing, as he’s always had the ... well, the house. And the money, and he’s always been in Auckland, obviously. Plus, he was born with ... I don’t know.”

  “What it took Hugh time to learn,
but Kevin already knew,” Josie decided, saving Chloe the trouble of trying to explain it. “That there’s nothing in the world more important than your whanau. He’d have made a good Maori, Kevin. Could be that’s frustrating, though. Here he is with his sisters, after he got his brothers out the door at last, and he’s getting older. Feeling like he’s ready to settle down, maybe, even though anybody else would say he’s been settled all his life. He’s been doing for everybody else, though, and now it’s his turn. And just when he’s thinking that, he meets somebody special. Somebody wonderful. Somebody he wants. That’d be you, love.”

  Chloe was buttering toast again, trying to maintain some semblance of her composure. “How do you know all this? You’re just guessing.”

  “Nah. Like I said. Hugh. Plus—actress. It’s my job to understand people. And I know you. So there he is, with this wonderful woman and her darling son, and he loves them both already. Just roll with it,” she said when Chloe opened her mouth again. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. So—this woman. She’s got a problem, and so does he. His problem is that he needs her in his house and in his bed. Because they hate leaving like that, you know. They want to go with the team, course they do, because it’s their job and their life and they love it, but they want to know we’re here at home waiting for them while they do it. Not easy, leaving a beautiful woman alone over and over again, telling yourself she’ll still be there when you get back. I don’t think Hugh drew an easy breath until he put a ring on it, and I know how much happier he was when I finally moved in with him. And I was next door.”

  “It’s been a month,” Chloe said. “One bloody month. Actress, hah. My life isn’t a soap. Nowhere near that dramatic.”

  “Have I got it wrong, then?” Josie asked, shoving her dish of scrambled eggs into the oven to keep it warm. “Pop the toast in here as well. I’d go tell those kids to rattle their dags, but I want to hear the rest of this.”