Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “He is too. Anybody could see it. Koro can see it. Why do you think he told Matiu not to stay for dinner last night? Said he was too tired for company, like we’d believe that. He was practically hustling him out the door. And that wasn’t because of me. He treats me like I’m twelve. I guess he’s saving all his love for you.”

  I ignored the lump that had formed in the pit of my stomach. Too many eggs, that was all. “He’s Hemi’s cousin. You just said it. That possibility isn’t on the table. And he’s a huge flirt, too. It’s habitual. Anyway, I’m not the kind of woman men long for. You will be, because you’re tall. It’s always tall women, isn’t it? Also mysterious and sultry. I’m O-for-three here. Oh, and pregnant, too, by the way.” I looked at her more closely. “Hey. You really do have a crush on him.”

  She shrugged, got up, and put another piece of bread in the toaster. “I’ll live. You want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, anyway.” She fidgeted around the toaster as if she could physically make it work faster. “I’m not mysterious and alluring now, so too bad for me. And I’m going home to live with Hemi. Yay.”

  I had to laugh. Karen would get over her crush, and whatever she thought, she was going to break some hearts. All you needed was attitude, and she sure had that. “Sorry, Miss Teenage Hormones. That doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing to me. I was out there navigating the dating wilds all by myself, you know. Talk about overwhelming. I coped by backing away from everybody, until, of course, I jumped in with Hemi. Not exactly the kiddie pool. I’m not sure a little guidance would have been so horrible at sixteen. Or seventeen. Or twenty-four.”

  She came back over to the table and sat, pulling one leg beneath her before starting in on her toast. “So what did you have going on last night when I came home? Do you guys have phone sex or what?”

  I stopped chewing, then carefully resumed, finally taking a sip of the ginger tea that had seemed like a reasonable precaution before I said, “Why do you ask?”

  She sighed. “Hope. I live here. It’s a small house.”

  I could feel the warmth rising straight up into my cheeks. What the heck was I supposed to say now? Parenting a teenager had been a whole lot easier before I’d hopped the train to Kinkytown. Hemi and I had started out being careful about noise, but we’d probably—I’d probably—lost the plot somewhere along the way. Which was awkward.

  I believed in honesty and openness. I did. On the other hand, I also believed in the right to privacy. But I also believed in Karen. How was she going to be open with me if I didn’t share anything with her?

  Oh, man.

  I was feeling my way here. “I miss him a lot. And he misses me. So . . . yeah. We get into it a little bit. He’s a . . .” Studying my tea, now. “High-testosterone man, I guess you’d say. And I like that.”

  “Are you afraid that if you don’t do what he wants, he’ll cheat while you’re gone? Or what?” She wasn’t pretending to be interested in her toast anymore. She was looking right at me.

  “No.” I wasn’t tentative anymore. I knew the answer. “Never. If Hemi isn’t honorable, no man is. Everything we do is mutual. That’s our deal. We don’t do pressure. He doesn’t put it on me, and even if he did, I wouldn’t accept it. He knows that. And I miss him, too, you know. Goes both ways. Nothing two people do together, if they love each other and they both want to do it, is wrong. Including phone sex.”

  She studied me, and I willed my eyes not to drop. “You’re turning really red,” she informed me.

  “What a shock. It’s not an easy topic for me. It’s personal. I’m telling you because I love you, and I want you to be able to talk to me about sex or anything else. I want you to feel like you can ask me, and that I might know the answers. But—yes. Hemi and me? I miss him like crazy, and he misses me. But we’ll do our best to keep it down.”

  “When he shows up tomorrow,” she said.

  A flare of excitement at that. Near breathlessness, to be honest. “Yeah.” It was a sigh.

  She got up and, to my surprise, picked up my plate and silverware along with her own. Maybe Karen was growing up in more ways than one, now that she was looking after Koro instead of always being looked after herself.

  “Note to self,” she said. “Headphones.”

  Hope

  Even the weather gods were cooperating on this Friday. It was only the second day of September, and spring hadn’t sprung, but the ever-changing New Zealand climate was giving a good imitation of it. I rode my bike down the hill to town, then along to the café, under a sky so clear and bright, a breeze so fresh, I may have had to sing a little. “Oklahoma,” which made no sense at all, except that it was upbeat, my mother had loved show tunes, and somehow, I did feel I belonged to this land, almost like I was a for-real Maori instead of an honorary one. Not to mention that the land I belonged to was grand. All of that.

  Besides, if you couldn’t sing out loud zipping down a New Zealand hill on your bike with the wind in your face, past fruit orchards, green fields dotted with sheep, and laundry flying like flags on clotheslines, with the wide Pacific spreading endlessly before you, when could you do it?

  Plus, I wasn’t sick, and I’d had to wear my yellow dress today when I hadn’t been able to button any of my jeans. Because I was having a baby.

  It was a quiet day at the café. Sunshine or not, it was a weekday in early September, the summer rush still far in the future.

  “In fact, love,” Sonya said at two o’clock, eyeing the lone couple lingering over coffees and a vanilla slice, “if you want to knock off a half hour early, I won’t say no. You’re jumping out of your skin today, and that’s the truth. Something about those two days you’re taking off?” It was easy to spot the teasing light in her eyes.

  “Could be.” I ran my thumb over the band of my engagement ring in a gesture that had become habitual. A reminder I needed.

  She shook her head. “Hard to remember those days. My John’s idea of a romantic gesture is pouring my beer into a glass instead of handing me the bottle.”

  “Well,” I said, “a glass is good.”

  She laughed. “Go on, then. Get started on your holiday. But I’m not paying you for the time, mind,” she hurried to add.

  Kiwis. They could teach Scots a thing or two about pinching a penny. But I didn’t care. I hopped on my bike again, pedaled to the pool, and put in my half hour.

  I wasn’t just paddling around anymore, either. I was doing laps. All right, slow ones, and not exactly a hundred of them, but they were laps. And, yes, before you ask—I’d learned to dive off the side, too, although the diving board and I were still unacquainted and would probably stay that way. There was no need to get all crazy about it.

  Even putting in some extra time, though, I still left the pool twenty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Matiu. He was taking me to Countdown to do some shopping for the weekend, and to practice my driving, of course. Extra shopping because of that extra mouth we’d be feeding. Hemi’s.

  I’d even stopped dreading my driving lessons. Sometime over the past three weeks, sitting behind the wheel had gone from “white-knuckle exercise” to “transportation,” and maybe even “personal power.” I could parallel park, I could drive at a hundred kilometers an hour on narrow, winding New Zealand roads without needing CPR, and on two memorable occasions, I’d even done the motorway. Merging and everything. Karen might have more natural flair than I did, but as Matiu pointed out, one of us checked her mirrors every time, and it wasn’t her.

  Hemi would be surprised, that was for sure. I wondered how he’d feel about me driving him. In his car. That would be a true test of his evolution. He said I held his feet to the fire. I intended to do it, too, in the intervals when he wasn’t holding mine there.

  Down, girl. Time to take it to the sea, or I’d be jumping up and down and babbling like an idiot by the time Hemi showed up tomorrow. A little serenity here. A little perspective. I grabbed m
y bike again, rode three blocks, dumped it by a bench along with my bag, and headed across the broad stretch of sand.

  The sea was relatively calm today, and the tide was out. I’d started noticing the movement of the tide, too. I was becoming an ocean person.

  As always, the steadiness of the waves’ endless pattern, sensed as much as seen, worked its magic on me. The sight of all that ruffled blue, glinting with a million diamonds where the sun hit each tiny wavelet—that was only one piece of it. It was the sound, as much hiss as roar, made up of so many component parts that you couldn’t identify them all, except to say that the whole experience could never be anything but the sea. The clean salt smell, the space, and the emptiness. Nobody out here but a black-and-white dog racing along the shoreline toward its master, receding rapidly into the distance.

  Sand, water, and sky, as far from Brooklyn and Manhattan as it was possible to get. The rush and hurry of the city replaced by the timelessness of water that would evaporate into the sky and fall again as rain, the cycle repeating as long as this great blue ball of ours kept spinning.

  Our lives mattered, no matter how small and unimportant each of us was. Our lives were everything we had, all we could contribute to this complicated world. Sending the next generation on, giving it the best start you could—that mattered, too, but our legacy wasn’t only in the genes we left behind, was it? It was in what we created, and maybe most of all in the kindness we showed. The understanding we demonstrated, the gesture that made somebody else’s day fractionally better, the small acts whose effects spread like ripples in a pond.

  Those ripples—maybe they were the true measure of what we’d offered the world. All the little ways we looked after each other, both the people we knew and loved and those we didn’t. The million times we touched somebody else, that we shone a little light into somebody else’s life.

  An aged husband helping his wife of sixty years take her pills, his hand barely steadier than hers, the love of a lifetime on his wrinkled face. A baby putting a starfish hand on her father’s cheek, and him turning his head to kiss that hand, however hard a man he might be otherwise, because she was his daughter and he loved her. And, after that, going out into his day that much softer, that much kinder, his heart that much more open.

  A friend offering a shoulder to cry on, a willing ear, an entire evening spent sitting on a couch letting the tears fall without judgment when love went wrong. A teenager coming out of her preoccupation for a moment to let a young mother into line ahead of her at the grocery store because she had a toddler fussing in the cart. Or the group of four Maori girls I’d seen at the school bus stop this morning on my way to the café, bursting into song the same way I had on my way down the hill, their voices rising, strong and true, in the morning air. They’d been completely unselfconscious as they sang in their school uniforms, enjoying each other, the music, and the morning. Giving each other the gift of their joy, and giving it to me as well.

  Joy. It was here, it was real, and it was mine. I was alive, and I was in love. In love with a man, a country, and two families that were about to become one. In love with my life.

  I picked up the edge of my skirt in one hand and ran. I had to express my gratitude somehow, had to let that joy flow out through the fingers that stretched toward the sea, down through the soles of the bare feet that struck the sand, leaving footprints that would last only as long as the tide took to cover them up.

  All things passed, the good and the bad, and so did everything on earth. Every bit of our lives was temporary, and that only made it more beautiful. All I had, all I knew for sure, was this moment. The past was gone, and the future was yet to be lived. I had now, and now was good. Now was enough.

  I was still running, although slower—running wasn’t actually my best thing, but what did it matter? Who was here to judge?—when the touch on my shoulder made me whirl. I had a hand on my chest, was laughing when I said, “Sorry. Talk about making you go out of your way. I lost track of time.”

  Matiu smiled down at me, his dark eyes lighting with his habitual amusement. “You were going along at a pretty good clip there.”

  “Carried away.”

  “Mm. Let’s walk to the end before we turn around. I could use having my head cleared.”

  “Rough day?”

  A pause before he answered. “A bit. Horror smash. Dad survived—the driver. Mum died, and one of the kids, too. On the table. Little fella. Those are the worst.”

  “Oh, no.” I could feel his pain despite the matter-of-fact tone. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t let it get to you, or you’d quit the first year. You get a bit hardened, maybe. Detached, you could say. We all go sooner or later. It’s my job to make it ‘later,’ but you can’t work miracles.”

  I shivered, maybe with cold, but more like sympathy and horror. “I couldn’t do it.”

  He laughed, the sound sudden and unexpected. “Nah, I don’t reckon you could. Too much soft side, haven’t you. But then, that’s your charm.”

  Flirting again, and why did “soft side” always sound like “weak side”? And I knew Karen’s idea was ridiculous, but still.

  He was silent for a few minutes until he finally said, “Hemi’s home tomorrow, eh. Visiting.”

  “Yes. He is.”

  “Taking Karen home with him, but not you.”

  “That’s right. She’s due back at school. I’ll stay with Koro until his arm’s out of the cast, anyway. Not too much of a hardship. I love it here.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?”

  I shot a look at him, and for once, he wasn’t smiling. Instead, he was staring straight ahead, hard lines around the corners of his mouth that I hadn’t seen before.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “When people are sure,” he said, “they stay together. Especially if they have a baby on the way. And babies don’t make things easier. They make them harder. If you’re having problems now, they won’t get better once you add that complication.”

  However soft he thought I was, I wasn’t feeling that way now. “My relationship with Hemi isn’t something I discuss.”

  “Could be you need to.” He was looking at me now, I could tell, but I didn’t return the favor. “Could be it’d help. He’s a hard man, and everyone knows it. Too hard for you, I’d say. Too old for you as well. Too powerful. Too arrogant. I could add more. And ‘pregnant’ doesn’t have to mean ‘stuck.’ I know you don’t have family, but that doesn’t mean there’s nobody to step in and help.”

  “I don’t need anyone to step in.” My heart was tripping along in an agitated rhythm. This was going nowhere good. “I love Hemi.”

  “But does he love you? Does he love you enough?” His tone was gentle, but the words made me flinch. “Hemi doesn’t compromise, and I’m guessing that’s what you’re trying to make him do. Anyone who doesn’t toe his line is out of his life for good. We all saw him throw Anika under the bus this week. It would take a strong woman—a tough woman—to stand up to him.”

  “That’s true.” I kept my tone even. Matiu was Hemi’s cousin, and that mattered. I wasn’t burning bridges or driving wedges into Hemi’s family. Not today, and not ever. “But you see, I am a strong woman. Stronger than you know. I’m strong enough to stand up to Hemi. I’m strong enough for anything. I know I am. I’ve had reason to know it.”

  I risked a glance at him. His eyes searched my face, no trace of amusement in them anymore. “If that changes,” he said gently, “if you find you can’t do it after all, you’re not alone. You have somebody here for you. You have me.”

  He took my hand, swallowing it up. I tried to pull it out of his grasp, but he held it tight, and he was too strong.

  “You’re his cousin,” I said. “This isn’t all right.” I didn’t feel soft now. I was getting mad.

  “It’d be rough,” he said, “but it’d be possible. Hemi doesn’t dwell on the past. He cuts his losses and moves on.”

  �
��No.” This, I knew for sure. “He doesn’t. Hemi holds hard, and he holds forever. You don’t know him, and you don’t know me. I love him, I always will, and I’m marrying him. And because I know how important his whanau is to him, I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened. I know what you’re saying, and what you’re not saying. Don’t ever say it. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Hope,” he said, “it doesn’t work that way. Some things, you can’t help.”

  “Maybe you can’t help your feelings,” I said, finally freeing my hand. “You can help your words and your actions, though. You can keep them to yourself.”

  My hands were shaking, I realized in disgust. I was strong. I knew it. But why did using my strength always have to take such a toll? Why did it have to feel so bad?

  I didn’t hear a thing. Nothing but the sea, nothing but my own harsh breathing in my ears. Until he was there, stepping in front of us. As hard as rock. As grim as iron.

  “Hope,” Hemi said. “Matiu.”

  Hemi

  I hadn’t been able to wait until Thursday night to leave New York.

  Holiday weekends had always been an annoyance to me. All those days gone to waste, and you couldn’t even expect your executives to put in a few hours, because it was meant to be family time.

  I’d said something like that last Christmas, and Tane had laughed hard, caught June’s eye, and they’d both laughed some more. Bloody annoying, I’d thought it.

  “Cuz,” Tane had said, wiping his eyes and heaving in an unsteady breath, “it’s a good thing you’ve given up your New Zealand citizenship already, or they’d ask for it back. We’ve got a job to do to cut this tall poppy down, eh, Koro.”

  “Quality of life,” June had added. “It’s a thought, eh.”