Across the table from Amanda-Anna-Angela sat another woman, listening with rapt attention to whatever his ma was currently talking about. Her back was toward him but her blond ponytail bobbed in agreement. Likely another stray his mother had invited. If Ariana Ngata didn’t have at least four or five extras at her Sunday lunch, she’d consider her God-given duty of hospitality a failure.
Isaac stepped out of the living room onto the patio with two cans of soda in his hands. He handed one to Tui, who rolled her eyes but accepted his greeting hug with a returned squeeze of affection. Natalie, the love of Isaac’s life—and Sam thought this with only a hint of an eye roll himself—came outside next, her cheeks a pretty shade of pink. He grinned at his soon-to-be sister-in-law and ambled over to take the can from Isaac and slap him on the back.
“Think your missus has had a bit too much sun,” Sam said as Nat slipped an arm around Isaac’s waist and snuggled in close with a soft giggle.
Natalie’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, raced around the side of the house, two farm dogs in hot pursuit. The excited barking drew everyone’s attention away from his ma, and Sam got his first clear look at the third woman at the table.
It was an oh shit moment as he recognized Kimberly Roberts’s profile. He shot an arched glance at Isaac. “What the hell is she doing here?”
Sam didn’t need to specify which she he was referring to as his brother had dealt with his fair share of surprise visits to the office during what Isaac kindly called Kimberly’s life without Sam adjustment phase. Kimberly was a server at the Kai Moana restaurant in town, and they’d dated—and Sam used the term to be polite—for five weeks. Then out of what he considered the blue, she’d thrown out the L-word and started hinting about them moving in together. That wasn’t going to happen, but he’d let her down as gently as he could. Which was pretty damn gentle considering this wasn’t his first it’s not you, it’s me rodeo.
Kimberly hadn’t taken it well and moved quickly into stalker phase. Fortunately this only lasted a couple of weeks as she lost interest and moved onto an assistant bank manager who was a better boyfriend prospect. Last he’d heard six months ago—thanks to his ma’s sticky finger on the pulse of Bounty Bay gossip—the assistant bank manager had traded Kimberly in for a bank teller.
“Ma must’ve invited her. She doesn’t know about the—” Isaac’s expression did a one-eighty, switching to a toothpaste-commercial-ready smile. “You remember my little bro, right?”
Sam scrunched up his face. Kimberly was right behind him, guaranteed. He added a toothpaste-commercial-ready smile of his own and turned.
“Of course I do, Isaac,” she said. Then her bright, darting gaze zipped to him like a scary little dinosaur-bird hybrid that would peck your eyes out if it got the chance.
“Hey. How’s it going? Long time no see,” he said.
His brother let out a soft snicker quickly disguised as a cough. Sam shoved his fists into his shorts pockets before temptation caused him to smack Isaac upside the head. Kimberly went in for the huggy greeting, wrapping her arms around Sam and momentarily pinning his arms to his side with the strength of an anaconda. He’d started to suffocate on her flowery-but-noxious perfume when she finally released him.
“It has been too long, Sammy, and I was so thrilled when your mum called to ask me to lunch. Come sit next to me and tell me everything you’ve been up to.” Kimberly jammed her hand between his stiff elbow and hip, attaching herself to his side as if she were a padlock. Then she dragged him toward the table.
“Yeah, Sammy.” Isaac’s amused voice came from behind him. “You and Kimberly have a lot of catching up to do.”
Asshole.
Sam’s plans to escape Kimberly’s clutches during lunch were foiled over and over. He tried the old make another drink run and sit somewhere else at the table trick—she just got up and moved her chair over to sit beside him again, using the excuse that the sun was in her eyes. He tried to chat with Tui’s friend—Allie, her name was—but the woman answered his questions in almost whispered monosyllables, blushed furiously, and then withdrew into silence when Kimberly wedged herself into their stilted conversation. He excused himself once to talk to Tori, telling Kimberly that he had business to discuss with her—lies, of course—but he was going to score ten minutes to himself, when Olivia asked them both to feed the horses with her. Kimberly was scared of horses. Thank you, baby Jesus.
“Bloody hell,” Tori said after they grabbed a couple of apples from the kitchen fruit bowl and headed out the side door toward the grazing horses. Olivia ran ahead, calling out to them. “That chick wants to climb you like ivy round a drainpipe.”
“Like poison ivy, you mean,” Sam said glumly, darting a look back over his shoulder to make sure Kimberly hadn’t escaped Nat and Isaac’s tag-team effort to keep her occupied. Nat, bless her sweet heart, had taken pity on him and subtly ordered her fiancé to stop torturing Sam and help him out.
“Good one, bro.” Tori chortled and affectionately punched his arm—hard enough to leave a bruise. But that was the way it was between the two of them. Always had been. Tori was one of their gang, in the best kind of way.
He retaliated by hooking an arm around her neck, dragging her in, and planting a deliberately wet and noisy kiss on her cheek. She shoved him away, strong enough to knock him back a couple of steps. As a tomboy who’d become an adventure tour guide down in Queenstown, she didn’t take shit from men. If he’d been any other man, he’d probably have lost a few teeth.
“Piss off.” She laughed. “I don’t want that crazy wāhine thinking I’m after her Sammy.”
“Shit.” He shook his head. “What the hell was Ma thinking?”
“She’s worried about the Wright deal.” Tori brushed aside a bee that buzzed around her face. “She’s trying to find you a woman.”
“Figured that out all on your own, did you?”
She laughed again, a deep throaty sound that brought back memories of him and his cousins all playing together at family gatherings. Sometimes in Bounty Bay, other times at the Hunters’ family home in the nearby Crimson Cove, all of the time happy.
“I’m meant to be a prospect,” she said.
Sam stopped dead, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. “You’re kidding me. We’re cousins.”
“Second cousins, third cousins or whatever. Who cares?” she said. “But thanks for the ego boost.”
“Desperate times calls for desperate measures.” He ducked sideways with a laugh as Tori’s fist flew toward his bicep again.
“Dickhead.” She gave him a cheeky grin. “You’d be bloody lucky if I did try and climb your drainpipe.” She tossed an apple up in the air and caught it one handed, her smile fading. Her favorite younger cousin, Robbie, was Sam and Manu’s apprentice wood turner, someone who’d be affected in a good way if the Wright deal went through. Or in a potentially bad way if it didn’t. “No one’ll believe we’re burning up the sheets together, not even some Yankee lawyer and his missus, will they?”
“Nope.” It was the truth. Put aside their family ties, he and Tori had a sibling-like relationship that could be in no way mistaken for a sexual one.
“Allie’s sweet,” she said as they started to walk again.
“She is. But I think her heart would explode like a little mouse’s at the prospect of moving into my house for a week.”
“You’re going to get the woman to move in?” This time Tori’s eyebrows went sky high. “Sheee-it. Well, that’s one strike against Kimberly. You’d never get her out of your house.”
“Only one?” He shuddered at the thought.
She snorted. “Guess you’ve scoured your little black book for any other women?”
They reached the fence line where Olivia was already crooning to Richie and feeding him his second apple.
“Yeah. None of them fit my requirements,” he said.
Tori offered her apple to Eddie who’d ambled over toward them to check out what they were carrying.
Eddie delicately took the fruit between his huge teeth and lifted his head, crunching the apple down probably without tasting a damn thing. Tori slanted Sam a slitted glance as she patted the animal’s muscular neck. “Oh, pray tell, cuzzie-bro, of what unobtainable standards a girl has to reach to become Samuel Ngata’s main squeeze for a week?”
“Not unobtainable.” Sam folded his arms and watched Eddie riffling through the long grass to find the remains of the apple he’d dropped. “Just sensible. She has to be confident enough to hold her ground when dealing with the Wrights, believable as a woman I’d be interested in marrying—”
“You mean smokin’ hot, but not slutty,” Tori said with an eye roll.
“Something like that. But most importantly, a woman who’s not emotionally involved with me or who’d become emotionally involved with me.”
“Man, how do you fit through your ma’s front door with a head that big?” Tori plucked the apple from his hand and offered it to Eddie. “Like a woman’s going to fall for you in a week? Puh-lease. What if you got emotionally involved with her?”
“Then I’d ask you and Isaac to sign me in to the nearest psychiatric hospital.”
Eddie whinnied as if in agreement then made short work of Sam’s apple.
“Look,” he said. “Can you think of anybody who isn’t going to turn me or her into a candidate for a padded cell at the end of a week?”
Tori pulled a face, cupping her chin on her propped-up palm. “Hmm. Josie Wilson?”
“Going through a messy divorce.”
“What about the redhead that works at the BNZ bank? Kristina something-or-other. Didn’t you date for a while?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “She married a fireman last year.”
“Nice.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Olivia wandered over to them now that Richie had lost interest and meandered back to the shade under the macrocarpa trees.
“We’re trying to fix your uncle up with a nice woman.” Tori draped an arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “One who won’t drive him pōrangi in a bad way, if ya know what I mean. Any mums of your rugby team fit the bill?”
Sam resisted a double face-palm. “You are not turning my teenage niece into a pimp.”
Olivia snickered and shot him a glance, wise beyond her years. “You don’t have to pay for it, right, Uncle?”
Save him from teens with access to Netflix and the God knows what sort of angst-ridden melodramas that were on it.
“Not so far,” he ground out.
Olivia giggled again, then reined in the chuckling by nipping her bottom lip. “Is this about the fake girlfriend thing? I heard Isaac and Mum talking about it.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “And I expect you, like everyone else, has a suggestion—just please don’t say Donna Clarke. That woman is scary.”
Both Olivia and Tori pursed their lips and tilted their heads to the side, looking unerringly like two of his ma’s favorite hens contemplating a juicy corn kernel.
“What about the youngest Sullivan girl?” asked Tori after a few more contemplative beats had passed. “The one who used to hang around with Tui when we were kids.”
“Oh, you mean Vee,” Olivia said. “One of my mum’s partners in their clothing store.”
The sudden and unexpected sizzle of hearing her name hit him as if the wire fence pressing into his hip was electrified.
“Yeah, Vee, that’s it. She’s pretty in a skinny white girl way, and she knows how to go toe-to-toe with you Ngata boys. That woman knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to give a fella a piece of it. At least she did when she and Tui were bratty teenagers.” She nodded, looking as if she were further warming to the idea. “Plus, hasn’t she got a ready-made kid? That’ll give you a nice family-guy feel with the Wrights.”
“Whoa, hang on, time out,” he said. “Vee’s not an option.”
Olivia wrinkled her nose. “I agree. You guys are always snarking at each other. I don’t think she likes you very much.” Her expression brightened. “But Ruby thinks you’re okay.”
Behind them, Sam’s ma hollered for Olivia to come help clear the table ready for dessert.
“Better go. I want some of that pav before Isaac eats it all.” Olivia whirled around and sprinted back toward the patio.
“She’s right, you know,” Tori said amicably as they watched Olivia run—there was a reason why she was on Bounty Bay High School’s all-girl rugby team. “You can charm any girl out of her swimsuit without breaking a sweat. Why don’t you channel some of that charm into getting Vee to play along?” She smirked and elbowed him in the ribs.
“Yeah, yeah.” He laughed and elbowed her back. “C’mon, I want some of Ma’s pav, too.”
Sam laughed, but inside, not a damn thing funny was churning in his gut.
He’d noticed Vanessa Mae Sullivan was all grown up. He’d noticed how her eyes were the color of Bounty Bay’s midsummer sky. He’d noticed the way she filled out a swimsuit so nicely that, as a volunteer lifeguard, he sometimes hoped someone would get into difficulty just so he could peel his gaze from her ass.
He’d noticed, though he didn’t want to have noticed, because he needed confident, attractive, and agreeable. And Vee? Well, she was headstrong to the point of stubborn, sinfully sexy, and would never in a million years agree to be his fake—or real—anything.
Chapter 2
Vee knew it was going to be a shit-weasel of a day when she found a colony of ants in her pantry. The little booger-snots had found their way into the open box of her daughter’s favorite cereal and were partying like it was 1999.
Ruby, who currently embodied the clichéd phrase ‘terrible twos,’ sobbed long strings of snot over her Vegemite on toast—the only alternative since she’d already knocked over the offered bowl of Vee’s bran flakes. Her daughter had no idea and couldn’t care less that her mum made the box of budget bran flakes stretch like bubble gum so Ruby could have her preferred cereal every day.
By the time Vee had cleaned the pantry, positioned ant poison out of Ruby’s reach, and gotten her daughter dressed—no, Mummy, I want to be balla’ina—in shorts, T-shirt, and pink sparkly tutu, she was developing a lack-of-caffeine headache. Her stomach was also groaning like an eighty-year-old trying to climb out of bed.
Finally, with Ruby’s day-care backpack in hand, she slammed the front door of their tiny apartment and nearly twisted her ankle trying to avoid tripping over Ruby’s plastic trike which had rolled onto the garden path sometime during the night. The front lawn of their rundown apartment block had dried to rock solidness, the few remaining blades of grass a sickly green color.
She closed her eyes for a moment, squeezing her daughter’s tiny hand. One day Ruby would have a big yard with a swing set and a slide and maybe even a treehouse like the one Vee’s dad had built her and her sisters. But that yard, that house bigger than the two-bedroom apartment which was stinking hot in summer and damp and cold in winter, would stay a one day dream until Vee could make it happen. Right now, getting by was the daily goal.
They made it to day care without further incident and Ruby happily went to play in the sandpit without a backward glance. Normally, Ruby only went to day care twice a week on the days that Vee’s mum couldn’t mind her. But since her dad had surprised her mum with a six-week-long European tour that he’d been promising for only the past thirty years, Ruby was attending day care almost every weekday. Thank God she loved it—and so she should for all the added strain on Vee’s already wobbly budget.
Joys of solo parenting, right? Get your big girl panties on and get your butt to work.
Vee didn’t slow down for the next five hours. It was her turn to collect and drop off new work to their outworker machinists—a range of summer dresses that Gracie, the third partner of Bountiful, had designed. Then there were the usual morning admin tasks to complete, plus an impromptu stocktake of new season board shorts which were selling like hotcakes according to Susan, their newly employed sales assist
ant. Given summer was their busiest time, Vee had stayed on the shop floor helping with the steady stream of customers. On top of all that, she managed to slip into the hairstylist’s to use her birthday treat from her parents. Wash, cut, and auburn highlights. She almost felt like a yummy mummy again.
Five minutes before Vee planned to duck out for lunch, a courier dropped off a new shipment of T-shirts. With the boxes taking up precious room in their cramped workroom behind Bountiful’s retail store, lunch was out and messy screen-printing was in.
Natalie stood up from one of the workroom’s industrial sewing machines and stretched, sliding a sideways glance at Vee. “I’m going to grab a sandwich from Surf’s Up. You want something?”
Elbow deep in crimson screen-printing ink and feeling like the star of a slasher flick, Vee shook her head. “I’ve gotta get these done and out of the way.”
Natalie’s cheeks puckered inward. “I still don’t understand why you won’t let me talk to Isaac. That last space isn’t going to be available much longer.”
“Can we do this some other time?” Vee held up her stained hands. “Kinda busy here.”
“You’re always too busy to talk about this, Vee, and you wouldn’t be so run off your feet if you’d just get over yourself and quit being so damn stubborn.”
The argument was becoming as familiar as a comfortable pair of well-worn slippers. Before Natalie and Isaac sorted their shit out and fell in love, her friend had been on the same page as Vee. Bountiful would be a success on their terms, from their hard work and dedication. They’d already upscaled from Vee’s Closet, which had been her tiny but unique clothing store on a side street away from the main shopping center.
Break Your Heart_A Small Town Romance Page 2
