Copyright 2019 by Rosalind James
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc., http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com/
Formatting by Polgarus Studio, www.polgarusstudio.com
Afghanistan hadn’t quite killed me. Karen Sinclair just might.
You don’t find many too-pretty rich boys in the New Zealand Defence Force. Turns out there’s a reason for that. Fortunately, you can find your true self in the oddest places. Of course, you can lose yourself in those places, too—at least some pieces of you.
Since I was back home with a new leg, some facial alterations, and time on my hands, I might as well help out my sister. Showing a potential buyer around some of New Zealand’s quirkier ecotourism sites, having a few adrenaline-fueled adventures? Fine. It wasn’t like I’d never been camping, unlike the walking tornado that was Miss Karen Sinclair. Unfortunately, Karen had never heard of the phrase, “Let me get that,” let alone, “We don’t have time.” She’d definitely never heard, “There’s no more room in the car.”
And then there was the sexual frustration.
1 - Winter Chill
2 - Definitely Not a Fetish
3 - One Little Punch
4 - Henry the Eighth
5 - No Mermaids, No Highlanders
6 - Wrong Time, Wrong Tide
7 - Pretty Bloody Wonderful
8 - Like an Ancestor
9 - Not in the Bamboo
10 - Lift and Support
11 - A New Normal
12 - Power Dynamic
13 - Mitre 10
14 - An Accident of Genetics
15 - A Different Man
16 - Tentacles
17 - A Refined Woman
18 - One More Day
19 - All the Missing Pieces
20 - Nothing but Weakness
21 - Hormones, Etc.
22 - An Attractive Life Partner
23 - If the Pieces Fit
24 - Evil Te Mana
25 - Eviler Te Mana
26 - What Goes Around
27 - Tossing the Bomb
28 - The First Thirty
29 - Find Your Reason
30 - True Love
31 - Star Siblings
32 - Dirty Secrets
33 - The Lonely Mountain
34 - Undercurrent City
35 - A Quick Errand
36 - The Light in Her Eyes
37 - Beyond Reason
38 - Dinner Conversation
39 - Perspective, Maybe
40 - Not Being Fine
41 - On From the Panelbeaters
42 - Moeraki Boulders
43 - Nobody Cries Over Sausage
44 - People in Glass Houses
45 - The Power Seat
46 - Just a Tap
47 - Nine Thousand Miles
48 - Not a Race
49 - Valentine’s Day
50 - Transcendent
A Kiwi Glossary
Links
Acknowledgments
A coward dies a thousand deaths before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
He toa taumata rao.
Courage has many resting places.
— Maori proverb
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Karen
The annoying beep-beep-beep of my phone alarm finally pierced my concentration.
Nine fifty-five, and five minutes until I had to be in the conference room. Damn it. I pulled off my headphones and shoved back from my desk, and the rolling wheels of my chair took me all the way across my work space, which was separated only by a filing cabinet from the next desk in our not-yet-gentrified loft space in Philadelphia’s Brewerytown. The whole place was buzzing with the heady excitement of a company about to explode, like the moment when the booster rocket fires and the space shuttle launches into the stratosphere. Just that scary, and just that exciting.
I was so close to getting this proposal together, though, and I’d wanted to surprise Josh and the corporate reps with it in the meeting, my own “Welcome to our new incarnation!” gift. You got what you gave, I’d figured, and I had so much still to give. I’d been up until two this morning working on it, and had caught three hours of sleep on the couch in the break room before the ideas had pulled me back to my desk again. Which may have meant that I wasn’t quite as put-together as a woman might want to be on the occasion of her company being bought out by one of the largest food conglomerates in the world, but I wasn’t being brought on board for my glamour.
I’d meant to wear a red knit turtleneck dress and high boots today—the building was never quite warm enough, especially in December, and red was my celebration color—but they were at home in the closet, so there you were. I pulled my oversized gray sweater down over my skinny jeans to hide the mustard stain from where a piece of yesterday’s sandwich had dropped into my lap, hoped my hair wasn’t too much of a disaster, grabbed my phone, a ballpoint, and the spiral notebook I carried everywhere—glittery silver this time, because it had seemed like the right month for glittery silver—and headed across the office to the conference room.
“Hey, good luck,” Jada Castor called to me from where she was lying on the floor, going from bridge pose into a backbend. “Getting my mojo back,” she called it, “and the blood to my head, where it can do me some damn good.” I should do that, too, stretch during the day. I always forgot.
I waved at her, and at the other heads that popped up like prairie dogs to watch me. Not everybody would be moving to New York after the buyout, but at least they had the choice, and the prospect of so much more. This was the best thing that could happen for the team.
As for me, I couldn’t wait, even though I’d miss the world’s coolest condo. Josh and I had already given notice on our place in the brick building on Race Street, in the heart of Old City, with its art galleries and coffee shops. I’d miss running three blocks to the river, too, then starting to push it for real, getting in my workout along the Delaware. If the guy with the Saint Bernard was around, I’d get the chance to pet her while she leaned her head against my leg and waved her enormous tail. There’d be dogs in New York, of course, but where would I find one sweeter than Buttercup? I’d also miss the rowing club. I got a pang even now thinking that this spring, I wouldn’t be out there helping to put the boat in the water for the first outing of the season.
On the other hand, New York meant my family. My sister, Hope, my brother-in-law, Hemi, and my three favorite kids in the world. I’d loved living there before, and I could love it again, the same way I’d come to love Philadelphia. I was good at adapting, and I’d be moving for the best of reasons. For opportunity. For progress.
The sky outside the huge windows of the freezing-cold conference room was too dark for this to be morning, though, surely, and I got one of those sideways moments where your reality tilts, when you’re not sure what you’re seeing or even where you are.
Never mind. Lack of sleep. Excitement. I shook reality back into place, then went to sit beside Josh, on the window side of the room, and said, “Huh. Snowing.”
He looked at me oddly, and his blue-marbled, gold-nibbed fountain pen tapped against the leather-bound legal pad under his hand. Back and forth, a tattoo of nerves. “It’s the biggest storm of the season,” he said. “Didn’t you even look out the window last night?” He looked me over, and probably saw the mustard stain, but he didn’t say anything.
I should have asked him to bring my good clothes from the condo. It had never even occurred to
me. He was wearing a black blazer and wool slacks that Hemi would have approved of, especially on Josh’s muscular physique, with black leather sneakers and a pumpkin-colored crewneck sweater in fine wool, and he’d obviously shaved about an hour ago. He’d gotten a haircut, too, in the past couple days. Unlike me.
Oh, well. I wasn’t the outward-facing part of the company. I was the idea woman.
The door opened, and Deborah Delaney came in with David Glass. The representatives from M&P, the conglomerate that was acquiring Prairie Plus. The acquisition I’d worked toward, and possibly dreaded, too, for seven years now. It meant sharing the responsibility, and it opened so many doors, but it also meant not having nearly as much say. I wasn’t all that good at toeing somebody else’s line. I’d been able to work with Josh because he treated me like a partner. Witness my being part of this meeting. What would it be like when we were folded into M&P?
I stood up and shook hands, but as Deborah and David took their seats, I muttered to Josh, “We could still change our minds.”
He stared at me like he didn’t know me, or like he knew me too well. “No. We couldn’t. It’s done.”
“Let’s get started,” Deborah said, “shall we?” She nodded at Josh, and he pulled a couple stapled sheets of paper from his leather binder as she tapped her own pen—also fancy, because being corporate obviously meant having a fancy pen—on the secondhand table we’d bought from an office-supply liquidator.
I was surprised that the document wasn’t longer, and that Josh had it. I’d pictured him signing in fifty places. But then, I’d also been surprised the formal handover wasn’t happening in New York. Josh had told me not to worry, so I hadn’t.
Deborah said, “First order of business. We’ve had quite a few discussions at headquarters over how to structure Prairie Plus over the past few weeks, and, Karen, our final decision on that concerns you.”
“Oh, good,” I said, “because I have a new idea. A whole new product line. Sausage. Everybody loves it, but it’s about the worst thing for you, and if it isn’t bad for you, it doesn’t taste good. I’ve figured out how to fix that.”
Deborah had her hand up, palm out, and I stopped talking and glanced at Josh. His pen was going faster. Taptaptaptaptap.
Deborah said, “We’ve decided not to bring you on board. We have the R&D capability in-house, and it’s a question of economies of scale and being free to find the most efficient processes. It was a tough decision, and I know it will be a disappointment to you, but I suggest you look at it as your next opportunity. You still have your stock options, of course, and Josh is going to take care of those now.”
Josh slid the paper over to me. Silently. He also wasn’t quite looking at me. I stared down at the black type. I was having trouble breathing. I was having trouble not passing out, in fact.
Meanwhile, Josh was pulling something else out of the folder. Another piece of paper. A green one. The exact size and shape of a corporate check, in fact. Our corporate check. He cleared his throat, and the blood drained from my head.
They’d planned this. They’d rehearsed this.
We’d ordered the first batch of checks together, choosing the cheapest option, black type on a green background, because we were going to be about the product, not the trimmings. It was one of those scary, heady days at the very beginning, soon after I’d joined the bare-bones, not-yet-profitable corporation Josh had started on the money he’d saved from five extremely well compensated years as a brilliant and ruthlessly efficient Wall Street analyst. We’d come up with our concept before we’d even finished the MBA program, when I’d woken from a dream of green grass, black-and-white cattle munching contentedly, a flock of orange chickens pecking around them, and a field of garbanzos beyond them. Who dreams about garbanzos? Me. I’d sat upright in bed and shouted, “Prairie Plus!” And here we were.
Right here.
Prairie Plus was everything we were, I’d thought on the day when the fake-leather binder full of cheap-ass green checks had arrived. It was our bodies and our minds both, and Josh’s body and mind were as well trained and as intensely focused as mine. What was even better, though? They were focused on the exact same thing. I’d felt so lucky to have found that. To have found him.
His heart, though? His soul? Maybe not so much.
He was talking. Confidently, as always. Persuasively. He said, “You have forty thousand options. I’m calling them. At the forty-dollar strike price, and a fifty-dollar buyout price, that leaves you with four hundred thousand dollars. All you have to do is sign, and the money’s yours.”
He handed me his pen, and I took it without thinking as I stared at him, then at Deborah, and at David Glass beside her. They both looked absolutely calm. David’s hair was parted too perfectly, and it lay too neatly. His hair annoyed me.
They weren’t sweating, of course. Nobody was, because it was cold in here. Nobody was burning but me.
Four hundred thousand dollars for seven years of eighty-hour weeks, working in the test kitchen until my eyes blurred and my muscles quivered with fatigue, finalizing my notes so I wouldn’t forget, and then cleaning up after myself, when all I’d wanted was to crawl onto the break-room couch and collapse? Seven years of making calls and taking flights and meeting farmers, of negotiating and persuading and listening? Of taking half of what I could have earned in a larger company, so Josh could pour back more into the business? Seven years of helping him build a national brand that was poised to take off and soar, knowing that once it did, I’d be set?
This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
Wait, though. I was out? I was off the team? I didn’t get to do any of it with them? How could I . . . how could that . . .
I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to keep looking at Josh, but I did anyway. He said, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea.”
“When did you . . .” I had to stop and haul some air into my lungs. “When did you know?”
“Barely more than a week ago. I couldn’t tell you. It was part of the deal.” I kept staring at him, and his blue eyes slid away, then back to mine. “And it’s probably for the best. For you, too. It was time. You’ll see that, when you’ve got some distance from it. I know you think you’re the only one who can do this, the one who really makes it happen, but you’re too idealistic. We’ve talked about that. It gets in your way. It got in our way. Anyway, now the deal can go through, which will be better for everybody else, which you care about, and you can develop some of your other ideas. You can be as idealistic as you want.”
I was so hot, I wanted to pull off my sweater, and the red mist was rising into my head, behind my eyeballs. I said, “It’s for the best? Is that why you didn’t tell me before? For somebody who’s supposed to love me, selling me out sure came easy, didn’t it? But that’s not even the worst part. You’re dumping me because I keep insisting on doing it right. That’s not just wrong, it’s stupid. No matter what you think, you can’t separate the ideals from the business. The ideals are the business.”
I looked at Corporate Ken and Barbie. They weren’t impressed. They were waiting for me to finish melting down, after which they’d start in on stripping the soul and the mission from Prairie Plus, turning our carefully sourced, sustainably produced products into more plastic-wrapped packages from the factory farm.
“I’m not dumping you,” Josh said. “This isn’t about us, it’s about the business. Your ideals aren’t realistic. They’re not cost-effective, and they’re holding us back. You’re not living in the real world. It’s a phase that you can move out of, though. You have everything it takes.”
Wasn’t that special? “No,” I told him, “I’m living in a new world. Lots of other people want to live there, too. Like our customers. It’s why we sell! It’s what people want! And—” My brain was catching up too slowly, my thoughts too jumbled. I wasn’t professional? I might as well own it. “Where’s loyalty in your real world?” I asked him. “Is that idealism, too? You told me we were partners
in every way that counted. That somebody had to be in charge, and the business side was the boring side. I was so smart, so talented, so I should just focus on what only I could do, and let you do the rest. I believed you. I’m sure that makes me even more stupid, but what does it make you?”
Oh, boy. I was realizing something else. Slowly, but what could you do. “And this doesn’t have to do with us? What about when we made love, what, three nights ago? You already knew that you were going to stab me in the back, didn’t you? You didn’t have any problem with me being too generous then, either. You didn’t have any problem at all asking for more. Remember how you said that next time, it was my turn? It’s not my turn, is it? It’s never going to be my turn, because it’s always your turn.”
Josh glanced at the others, then away, and said, “This isn’t the right time or place. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but this isn’t personal. We’ll talk about it later.”
My chair made a scraping noise as I got to my feet, and I realized I was still holding Josh’s pen. What kind of Judas moment was that, having me sign the separation papers with his special pen? Who would do that? I signed my name to the paper in a looping scrawl and told him, “Give me my check.”
He handed it over without a word, I folded it and stuffed it into my jeans pocket, and I could see the relief on his face. Like—"Whew! Glad that’s over! Now let’s get to work, shall we? Without any of that pesky emotion. Any of that troublesome passion and determination.” Everything that had made me push for us to be the best, and not to settle for less. Everything I was.
He didn’t want that? Well, I didn’t want him, either. I didn’t need a weasel sellout in my life. I didn’t need a rat.
Behind Deborah, the conference-room door opened. A guy stood there. A driver, he looked like. A big guy.
They’d called in security. To escort me out of my office. My space. My company. My brainchild.
Kiwi Rules Page 1
