I followed him again. “That you actually are crazy, and strong. Or that you’re crazy to think you’ll win, and also crazy as in ‘nuts,’ but not as strong as me. Or as well balanced, of course. Three alternatives, actually.”
“I’m also homicidal, or a sex offender, is what you’re saying in Alternative Two. Alternative Three as well, for that matter. In which case, you’d be madly self-destructive, wouldn’t you? You should probably wait for me in the corridor.”
“It could be that I’m too tired for good judgment,” I said. “I just flew here from New York, over what feels like the past three days.” I followed him off the elevator. “I’ll bet you anything this place has security cameras, and I have mad self-defense skills, so I’m going along to get your leg. Maybe I want to watch the contest, also.”
He said, “Mm,” again, with some more of that almost-smile, then turned left from the elevator bank and went all the way to the end of the passage like he assumed I’d follow him.
You see? It was that bad-boy thing, pulling me in like a tractor beam. And I was past this.
He punched in a key code, held the door open, and stood there. “Are you coming in,” he asked, “or waiting out here? The sand in my hourglass is draining away. Ten minutes gone already. It’s an issue of strategy, the exact point at which you turn up for a challenge like that. Not early, definitely. Late is better, but not too late. Just late enough that they wonder if you’re coming, and have a chance to realize they’d be relieved. If their heart sinks when you turn up, you’re halfway home.”
“I’m coming in,” I said, and did.
“Right.” He headed off, throwing back over his shoulder, “Give me a few minutes. Find yourself something from the fridge, if you like.”
The living space was fairly enormous, and it was also fairly special, New Zealand style. Which meant open-plan, absolutely spare, made of the best materials, and with acres of smooth surfaces, from the pale quartz counters to the oatmeal-colored kitchen drawers to the oversized floor tiles, which looked like quartz again. The couches were cream leather, and they were set in front of floor-to-ceiling, black-bordered accordion glass panels that opened up on two walls of the corner unit to form an L-shaped indoor/outdoor space.
One side looked out onto the green slopes of Mauao, almost like you could step onto it. That could have been forbidding, as close as the mountain was, as much of a contrast to the narrow, flat peninsula beyond it, but instead, it felt cozy. Watched over, because Mauao was a benign mountain. Maybe also because the other side was nothing but openness, looking out as it did over green grass and golden-sand beach to a wide swath of impossibly clear blue sky bisected by the sparkling, brilliant turquoise of the sea, dotted with green islands edged by wave-smoothed gray rock. A high-roller view all the way.
You didn’t need decoration when that was your view. It was so beautiful, you couldn’t look at anything else anyway, and it would change with every shift of cloud, every angle of sun.
I’d made it. I was here.
I found a glass in one of the roll-out drawers in the space-aged, cream-and-sand-colored kitchen, filled it with water from the bottle in the fridge, drank it down, and thought, What are you going to do now? And couldn’t quite answer.
I always knew my direction. And when I knew it, I went that way. I charged that way, you could say. Right now, though, I was absolutely at a loss. I wasn’t enjoying it, and yet . . . I almost was.
This was so confusing.
It would be better if I knew what tack I was supposed to be on. I’d never had a breakdown before. I wasn’t sure what the recovery technique was.
I’d figured that I just needed a break to figure out what to do next. That was what people did, right? They took a break. I’d been preparing to take it, a week or so ago. I’d been deciding. Unfortunately, my sister, Hope, had caught me doing my deciding while curled in a ball on the bathroom floor in the tiny Brooklyn apartment I’d moved into some weeks earlier. At that particular moment, I’d been taking a break from my deciding in order to think about how I was going to slide right across the floor and get myself wedged into the corner, because the bathroom floor sloped so much, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. I’d be unable to get up again in my weakened state, and I’d end up as one of those stories in the Post, where the neighbors eventually started complaining about the smell, the super finally opened the door to check, the neighborhood was horrified and so saddened at the terrible isolation of modern life, and all of New York was left wondering how a twenty-nine-year-old woman with all the lucky breaks in the world could have ended up alone, friendless, and eaten by stray cats.
I’d had a whole narrative going, which said something for my imagination, anyway. It had been a weak moment, though, not a life choice. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law, the force of nature who was Hemi Te Mana, had stepped in and Made Things Happen. As usual. A woman couldn’t even have a breakdown in peace with Hemi around.
He’d said, once Hope had helped me up off the floor, brought me a cup of tea, and fussed around me until I wished I had been eaten by cats, “You have two choices. Move in with us for a bit, or get back to work, if you’re not actually as much of a mess as you look. Decide now. Make it good, though, or we’re taking you home.”
He’d been standing over me at the time, and Hope had been sitting beside me on the bed, rubbing my back and ignoring the fact that I hadn’t showered for days and was disgusting, like I was one of her kids instead of a fully independent and capable woman with some very good degrees and all kinds of esoteric job skills. Who might possibly not be as smart as she’d always thought she was, but everybody had downturns. From which you were supposed to emerge heart-whole, running through the winter streets for miles, then up several brutal flights of steps, before you turned to face the city, raised your arms over your head, and told the world that it hadn’t beaten you after all.
And, yes, that would be Rocky. I was more of a boxing girl than a Cinderella girl. I’d thought that would happen, but it just . . . hadn’t. Maybe I just wasn’t quite at “conquering” stage yet, though. I’d been taking a break. That was why I said, “Forget moving in. I’m not sleeping on Maia’s top bunk and having Hope check that my jacket is zipped before I go out. I am not your fourth child, and I’m not suicidal. I’m just . . . reflecting on my choices. I haven’t had a personality transplant. I’m upset. Geez, can’t a woman be upset for a day or two? And I know you were right about Josh. I’m saying you were right. ‘You were right.’ There you go. Done. I thought he was like you. Sue me. I thought he was the real deal, no artificial ingredients. I didn’t realize he was cake mix. You did. Good job. Maybe someday, I’ll be smart like that, too.”
Hemi’s mouth twitched, and he said, “Sounding more like yourself, anyway. And fair point. Maia’s using her top bunk now, so there you are. Says she’s five, and she can climb the ladder. Hope puts her on the bottom, and there she is an hour later, sneaked onto the top. Takes after her auntie, eh. Which means you’d be on the bottom bunk. Hitting your head.”
“Ha,” I said. “See? So—no.” I was faking it, of course, but it was better than wondering which part of you the cats would eat first.
“New Zealand, then,” Hemi said. “Change of scene would be good, I reckon. I’m considering an investment there, actually, a line of ecotourism properties. Glamour camping. Time to do some investing in Aotearoa, and I quite like the idea anyway. Diversification, eh. I can’t buy it without checking it out, though, as well as meeting the staff, because that’ll matter. You can only get so much from photos, and I’ve got too much on at the moment to leave.”
You could say that, as Hemi had hit the billion-dollar mark some years back and was still going strong. In the fashion industry, not the property industry. No pressure or anything, with him as your benchmark.
“My expertise is in food science,” I reminded him, “not . . . sleeping bags, or whatever. So-called solar showers that are a trickle of lukewarm water out of a
plastic bag. I went camping once. It was horrible. And I’m not even talking about the outhouse, because nobody needs to think about that. Hey, look, I’m giving you advice already, and I didn’t even go! Besides, if you really don’t have anybody else you trust to check it out, you have more problems than I do.”
“Nobody I trust as much as you. Nobody better at forecasting shifts in consumer taste, either,” he said, which knocked my breath out of my lungs one more time, and possibly made me struggle not to cry. I really was at the bottom. I. Did. Not. Cry. “I thought you were keen to learn survival skills. What happened with that?”
“I realized that discomfort’s overrated?”
“Perfect for the job, then. You’re the target customer. American, clueless, and spoilt. Besides, you’re oddly disarming, I’ve noticed. I can put a seller’s back up, for some reason.”
“You’re arrogant,” I said. “That’s the reason.”
He almost smiled. “Mm. You could also spend some time with Koro and tell me how he’s going.”
How did I argue with that? Or with the way Hope was looking at me, like she was about to volunteer for some more Night Nurse duty, as if she hadn’t worried about me enough in my life? And Koro? He wasn’t my grandfather, but he was. I’d be going to Katikati to see him tomorrow morning, and it was the first thing I’d looked forward to in . . . however long this had been. The weeks had kind of run together there. New Zealand might heal my soul, if it hadn’t already died a lonely, starved death, but being with Koro would heal my heart.
My sea god, though? He wasn’t going to heal anything. Looking for a man to heal your ego was a bad bet all the way around, this guy looked as easy to handle as nitroglycerin, and I wasn’t up for a juggling act. I was curious, that was all.
And, possibly, coming a tiny bit back to life.
Jax
I finished fastening my leg on, stood up, felt the bionics make contact with the nerves in my leg in a most reassuring way, and tried to get my breathing under control.
I’m not shy, I’d told her. It might be true, and it might not. I never had been, but I’d never looked like this before. At any rate, I now had ten minutes to make it across the road again to meet my new friends, and she was showing every sign of coming to watch me do it. Which meant I’d bloody well better be impressive.
Women were complicated. Men were simple. At least I was. I mostly just wanted to win.
I didn’t check out my face in the bathroom mirror, or my shoulder, either. I knew what they looked like.
Did she have some Beauty and the Beast thing going on, looking to be treated badly by a hard, damaged man? That would be better than the women who wanted to take care of you, but not by much. I didn’t think that was it, although there was vulnerability in her along with the toughness. She was bold as brass on the outside, but there was something else underneath, some siren song of the mermaids that called my name.
Stupid. How could she be a mermaid? I hadn’t even seen her in the water. For all I knew, she couldn’t even swim. She might be one of those women who wore a bikini she never got wet, because that would involve mussing her hair.
She wasn’t that woman, though. I knew it. And I didn’t want to treat her badly. I just wanted to thrill her. To leave her breathless. Wondering. Waiting. And then to make it all pay off. Very slowly.
Could I still take her on that kind of ride? I had no idea. I knew I wanted to try.
I’d order up some dinner, maybe, and we’d see how we went. And if that gave me nerves . . . well, all the best things did. But first, I needed to win.
When I got out there again, she was standing with her back to me and her hands wrapped around her upper arms, looking not out to sea, but at the Mount. Something wistful about that pose, surely. And then there was the thin strap of her bikini top, the tender nape of her neck, and the twin dimples at the base of her spine, their tops visible at the edge of her little black shorts, because they were that low. She turned at my footfall, took in my leg and both feet, the real one and the manufactured one, in their running shoes, and said, “Maybe you can run.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Ready?”
“Probably,” she said, “though I should ask you first who you are. I don’t want to, but I know I should.” She studied me. No fear at all in her, despite what she’d said. She had more intelligence and definitely more personality behind those whiskey-colored eyes than any ten women had a right to. “You really care that much,” she said. “That you . . . teach them a lesson, or whatever. More than you do about what’s going on here, between us.”
I had to smile at that, despite the way she unbalanced me. “Maybe you shouldn’t put that to the test. But I committed back there, for whatever reason. I need to see it through. Not turning up isn’t an option.”
“Right,” she said, picking up her bag again. “Then I’d better come help.”
I gazed at her with as much severity as I could muster. She’d sounded as brisk as a headmistress. It was fortunate that my own headmistress hadn’t messed me up like this, or I’d have got into even more trouble at school than I had done. “Thought I said I didn’t need your help,” I said. “I thought I’d made that point pretty clearly, in fact. Could be I’m not coming through with full authority.”
“Oh, you’ve got lots of authority,” she said, like she was reassuring me. “I just have authority, too. See, that’s your problem. You’re missing that.”
Now, I was laughing. My laughter muscles weren’t as well exercised as they’d ever been, but she was making me laugh now. “The name’s Jax. Jackson MacGregor, at your service.”
“Huh,” she said. “I don’t like J names much, but that sounds like some kind of sexy Highlander. Especially with the scars and all. Like you should have a sword.”
She didn’t like J names? Well, that was bizarre. “It may have been once,” I said, heading out the door again. “Rob Roy was a MacGregor. Of course, they also lost their right to exist about five hundred years ago. Just using their name was a death sentence, which means no ancestral pile in Scotland, and no lands, either. There’s a pit behind a castle, in fact, where their bodies were thrown by their enemies. Not what you’d call history’s winners. Fortunately, history isn’t destiny. They took the name back, anyway, eventually, and here I am.”
“The question is,” she said, getting ahead of me and pushing the button for the lift like a woman who’d never heard the phrase, “Let me take care of that” about anything, or if she had, hadn’t listened to it, “whether you have a kilt. I’m more interested in that than your ancestral lands. I may have read a few novels in my past,” she explained when I started to smile again. “While procrastinating, or taking a break, whichever way you want to look at it. My life can get a little intense at times. I have an issue with over-focus.”
“Surprising me not at all,” I said, because the lift had opened, and she was already inside, punching buttons again. “I could have that issue myself, although in my case, it’s considered a positive. Or it used to be. And, yeh, I have a kilt. I don’t generally wear it out and about, but I’ve got it.”
She sighed. “See. I knew it.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Got an ancestral pile somewhere yourself, the reason for the confidence? Got a name?”
“Karen,” she said. “Karen Sinclair. No ancestral pile, and no kilt. Not even any parents, for that matter, at least any who want to show themselves. Just a ticket to New Zealand and a job to do.”
“What kind of job?” I asked. We were headed across the zebra crossing again, into which she’d charged like she’d never imagined the possibility that not every car might stop, or like she reckoned that if they didn’t, she’d hold them off by force of her Wonder Woman magic bracelets. I caught up to her without effort, thanks to the New Zealand Defence Force’s commitment to restoring my functionality and my own fairly rigorous rehab efforts, so all wasn’t lost quite yet.
“I’m checking out an investment for my brother-i
n-law,” she said. “Not really my skill set, but I’m adaptable. At least I want to be, which is half the battle, right? And look. Your friends showed. Cool.” She was speeding up at sight of them, no matter what she’d had to say on the subject earlier. If she’d ever met a challenge she hadn’t embraced, I missed my guess.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think women could be warriors. I’d known some girls who’d been as tough as any bloke around them. I just wasn’t used to wanting to engage in close combat with them, so to speak. I said, “You are remembering that this is my challenge.”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s the point. I can’t help it if I’m excited about it.”
I was still laughing when we joined the four boys, who were standing more or less where we’d left them. The ginger kid’s nose was red and swollen, and he could have a black eye tomorrow as well. He looked absolutely miserable, but he hadn’t left. The other two blokes were trying to fade into the background, but the ringleader still looked belligerent. As we approached, he spoke fast, like he was getting the words out before his courage failed him. “Thought you weren’t coming. Also, you’re wearing shoes. We’re barefoot. Can’t race like that. Not fair.”
“He has one leg,” my champion—Karen Sinclair—said, before I could say anything. Jumping straight in there again. “You have two. If it’s not fair, that’s not the way it isn’t fair, and you know it. Chickenshit.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed, and I had my body between him and Karen before his leg muscles had finished tensing. Which she wasn’t going to appreciate. Too bad. I said, keeping it calm, “I’ll be swimming with one leg, of course. There’s that.”
“You also realize,” Karen said, poking her head out from behind me like a woman who’d also never heard, “Let me handle this,” “that this whole thing is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Why are you racing at all, again? What are you trying to prove?”
Kiwi Rules Page 4
