She pasted on a smile that was more of a warning snarl. “The things we do for family.”
He cleared his throat and stepped out of her doorway, tugging his shirtsleeve cuffs over the flashy watch. “Yes. Well. I’ll see Ruby another—”
Vee cut him off by flicking the door shut and locking it. She ignored his bark of indignation and strode down the hall to resume packing.
Sam arrived exactly on time, though his punctuality didn’t improve Vee’s mood. Ten minutes in Pat the Rat’s company and she went into PMS bitch mode, no matter what stage of her cycle she was currently in. Normally she quietly took out her frustrations with a punishing yoga routine, or if he’d been more of a dickhead than usual, she’d splash out and dive into a tub of Goody Goody Gumdrops or orange chocolate chip ice cream. Her PMS bitch had the tastebuds of a six-year-old. So sue her.
“Sure you’re okay?” Sam asked, returning to her hallway for the last of the boxes. He’d already made one trip with their suitcases.
“I’m fine.” Hashtag: #NotFine and wondering if he’d notice if she locked herself in her bedroom for three minutes to scoff one of the remaining Crunchie bars hidden on the top shelf of her closet.
“Uh-huh,” he said in a tone of I’m not touching that. “We’re all set, then.”
“All set,” she agreed and added a smile aimed at convincing him that she wasn’t that kind of fine, but actually fine. The A-OK, okeydokey kind of fine. “I’ll get Ruby and lock up.”
He nodded. “I’ll wait in the car. It’s the gray minivan parked across the street.”
“Minivan? Where’s your ute?” His big, manly pickup truck with the Kauri Whare signwriting on the sides and an expensive sound system.
He shot her a sheepish glance. “At home. I borrowed my cousin’s vehicle for the week for us to drive.”
She pulled a face and picked Ruby’s safety seat up from the floor. “Wow. Sam Ngata driving a minivan. Hell finally froze over.”
“The ute doesn’t have a back seat,” he said with a grin. “And I don’t imagine you’d agree to letting me take Ruby for a spin on the Harley. At least not for a few more years.”
“Never gonna happen,” she said, but a little of her pissy mood evaporated under the warmth of that grin.
She settled Ruby on her hip and took a last what have I forgotten look through her apartment, her nerves kicking in a little at the thought of what was ahead. She sucked in a calming breath as she locked the front door and carried Ruby out into the sunshine. How on earth would she get through the next six days without losing her mind?
The same way you eat a proverbial elephant. One bite at a time.
She could do this.
But when her gaze flicked across the street to where Sam sat in the driver’s seat of a slug-gray minivan, the window rolled down and the corded muscles of his forearm flexing on the sill, her stomach clenched so hard it seemed to wrap around her spine. It did no use at all to tell herself it was only Sam. Sam, whom she’d known for as long as her memories stretched, from childhood to gawky teenager to now. However she examined and reexamined her visceral reaction to the man, one thing was pointless to deny.
She was annoyingly, undeniably, stupidly attracted to him.
So moving into his sucktacular orbit where she’d be forced to hide that annoying, undeniable, stupid attraction meant she wouldn’t be able to relax. Not even for a moment.
Vee crossed to the minivan and secured Ruby into her safety seat while the little girl chattered away to her current favorite plush toy—a fluffy yellow chicken Isaac had given her.
Sam started the engine as she climbed into the passenger seat. Three failed attempts to slot the seat belt into the receptacle later, with the hairs on every inch of her bare arm reacting to Sam’s casually rested hand on the transmission shifter, Vee huffed out her frustration.
“Need a hand?” he asked. “Or maybe an airline-type demonstration?”
“I’ve got it.” She ordered her hands to stop shaking and finally slotted it in place. Yes! A small triumph, but she’d take it.
They pulled away from the sidewalk, Sam driving like he’d been born at the wheel. You could tell a lot about a man by the way he drove, Vee thought as they cruised through Bounty Bay’s main street on the way to the beach. Unlike herself, Sam appeared to enjoy driving and nothing seemed to ruffle him. When a station wagon pulled out of an intersection without bothering to check for oncoming traffic, Sam just tapped the brakes with a crinkle of his nose and a muttered, “Careful, dude.” Vee would’ve been leaning on the horn and questioning how the asshat managed to get a driver’s license.
The short drive through town with warm air blasting over her skin, her hair flying around her face and catching in her mouth eased some of the tension wiring through her. If she pretended she and Ruby were on vacation, like the ones she and her family took as kids, camping near the beach over Christmas, they’d be okay. It was just a vacation from her life, that’s all. They turned onto the foreshore road, and the air circulating around the car went from humidly warm to a cooler salt-tinted breeze straight from the ocean.
Pulling into the driveway of Sam’s house—a classic Kiwi villa with a wraparound porch—tension threaded through her again. Get a hold of yourself, she ordered as he parked and killed the minivan’s engine. She’d been to Sam’s house a number of times in the past year, but only in a group get-together situation with Gracie and Nat.
She unclipped her seat belt—go her, she didn’t fumble this time—and climbed out of the car. Sam had already pulled the first of the boxes from it and he walked with a casual swagger to the front porch. Okay, she might’ve fumbled getting Ruby’s door open since her gaze tracked the bunch of his flexing butt muscles as he bent to set the box down.
“What is wrong with me this morning?” she muttered, yanking open the door. “Butt muscles. Gah.”
“Butt.” Ruby beamed up at her from her safety seat. “Butt, butt, butt!”
Of course, Sam chose that moment to return to the car. Speaking of muscles, one flickered in his jaw but he wisely refrained from asking how butts had become a topic of conversation. He tipped his sunglasses down, dark eyes gleaming at her above the lenses, likely suspecting what she’d been staring at. He just would guess, wouldn’t he? Cocky bastard.
“Can you shut the gate so Ruby can’t get out onto the road?” she asked.
“Just going to.” He strolled to the metal gate and slid it back across the driveway.
Vee set Ruby on her feet and she immediately crouched to examine the crushed seashell driveway under her sandals. “Boken.” She held one up for Sam’s appraisal. “Shell boken, Sam.”
“We’ll find you some that aren’t broken on the beach later.” He smiled at her, retrieving another box from the car.
He whistled shrilly on the way to the house, and a few beats later what Vee had initially mistaken for a crunched up, mud-brown sack in the far corner of the porch twitched and rose slowly to a sitting position.
“Is that—” Vee took a few steps toward the house. “Is that a D-O-G?”
She spelled the word because if there was one thing Ruby loved above cookies and her stuffed toy collection, it was critters. She didn’t much care whether the critters had fur, hooves, or eight hairy legs—Ruby loved them all equally and demonstrated this with single-minded devotion to hold them and cuddle them within an inch of their lives. Ask Vee how well that worked with spiders. Ew.
“Yep.” Sam set the box beside the first and whistled again, this time at a less ear-splitting volume. “Don’t worry, he’s totally harmless and kid-friendly. Come and say kia ora, Turbo.”
She narrowed her eyes through the rails of Sam’s porch at the dog who continued to sit, panting, for a moment longer before slumping back down into its previous sack-like position. A gruff and disgruntled woof came from the animal who positioned his head back on his paws.
She hefted a suitcase from the car and dragged it over to the porch. Casting an
eye back at Ruby, happily sorting out little piles of shells, she climbed the two steps to stand beside Sam. “When did you get a dog?”
His mouth twisted and he shoved his sunglasses on top of his head, slanting her a sheepish glance. “I picked him up from my auntie’s place about an hour ago. I’m borrowing him.”
“Borrowing. Right. Like you’re borrowing a soccer mum’s minivan?”
“Van, missus, kid, and dog. Gotta look the part of a man about to make a lifetime commitment to one special lady,” he said easily and snapped his fingers. “Hey, lard ass. Come and say hi to your temporary mum.”
The dog, some sort of basset hound cross, with droopy jowls, droopy ears, droopy everything, communicated a silent stare full of make me, human. He thumped his tail once on the porch. Farted. Jumped at the sound of his own fart—more movement than Vee had seen him make so far—and then shut his eyes, slipping back into a catatonic state.
Vee nearly strained her eyeballs rolling them upward. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you? But if your fake dog doesn’t believe I’m your special lady, no one else is going to.”
“Ye of little faith in my acting skills.” Sam turned away from the sleeping canine and unlocked his front door. He pushed it inward and a shaft of sunlight cut past him to light up the hardwood floor of the small foyer.
A shiver worked its way up her spine. Inside lay the highway to hell, paved with her good intentions to expand Bountiful into a thriving business, cemented with her need to provide a future for her daughter.
Vee folded her arms, attempting to smother the shivers before they became visible and Sam got the wrong idea. “You better have some mad skills in improvisation when it comes to telling the Wrights our proposal story.”
He looked at her blankly. “Proposal story? What the hell is that?”
Riiiight. Serious relationships leading to a proposal and marriage were a foreign, inexplicable concept to a man like Sam. “When you announce to the Wrights that we’ve gotten engaged, his wife will want to hear all about how you surprised me with a flash mob of friends and family waving red roses in the air and dancing to Bruno Mars’s ‘Marry You’ before you appeared in a tux on bended knee with a beautifully prepared speech and a ring tied in a bow. That’s a proposal story.”
Sam appeared scandalized. “You want me to do a dance routine in a penguin suit before I pop the question? Bloody hell. Why don’t I just wave my testicles in the air and then hand them to you tied in a bow.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re the one who mentioned engagement, and trust me, the Wrights will ask so you’d better have something better than, ‘Bro, I told her it was about time we got hitched.’” She deepened her voice to try and mimic his smooth baritone and he grinned at her. Grinned in that superior, cocky as hell way she both hated and kinda liked, even though it scared her with the swarm of tummy butterflies it caused.
“Actually”—he leaned against the doorframe, his broad shoulders blocking her view of the hallway beyond—“I’d planned to pop the question while the Wrights were here to witness it. Make them feel part of our sappy little love story.”
Her pulse gave a massive bunny hop in her throat, momentarily kicking against her vocal chords so she could only stare at him. “Are you joking?” she said finally. “That’s a terrible idea.”
Sam proposing in public—even if it were only in front of two other people—gave her the heebie-jeebies. It was one thing to pretend they were in a serious relationship for a week; it was another to take what should be one of the most memorable days in a woman’s life and make a mockery of it.
“Why?” Sam’s eyebrows drew together and he folded his arms, looking genuinely baffled.
Yeah, why, Vee? It wasn’t as if she’d had a memorable and special proposal herself when Patrick had suggested they got hitched on the floor of her bathroom by the toilet she’d been puking into. What was one more insincere proposal in the scheme of Vee’s track record of screwed-up relationships?
“Because you, ah, I—I don’t even have a ring.” It kinda popped out of her mouth and it didn’t even make sense in the context of what they were talking about. As evidenced by the deepening frown on Sam’s face.
“I may be a rookie here,” he said, “but isn’t the ring meant to appear at the same time as the proposal?”
She made a noncommittal noise of agreement in the back of her throat and he gave her an arched eyebrow look which clearly communicated he thought she’d lost her mind.
“Don’t worry. I’ll pick out a ring this week.” His eyes gleamed tiger bright and the corners of his mouth kicked up. “If I promise it won’t be an onion ring or a plastic kids’ toy, will that do?”
“Yes,” she said stiffly. “But don’t go into the crass and ostentatious range of rings. It’ll just look like you’re trying too hard.”
Little footsteps thudded up the porch step beside her, followed by a squeal of joy as Ruby spotted Turbo. She ran over and crouched beside him, cooing endearments. The dog opened his eyes and wagged his tail, which thumped against Ruby’s leg. She patted his belly then snuggled up beside him, wrapping an arm around his neck. Tired out from the attention, Turbo returned to his previous setting of dog dead to the world.
“Let’s get your stuff inside.” Sam unfolded himself from out of the doorway.
“Sam?” Vee asked as he gave her a wide berth and jogged down the porch stairs. “Would you really ask a woman to marry you with a fried vegetable?”
He turned, shading his eyes from the rays of sunlight spilling over the roof of his house. She couldn’t decipher the expression on his face as he reacted to her question, but she sensed an angle of tension in the line of his spine.
“That’s a loaded question,” he said. “Would I ask a woman to marry me—for real?” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Haven’t felt the urge to yet. But if I did, I wouldn’t want to be saddled with a woman who’d say no to an onion ring.”
Chapter 6
Sam opened the door to his spare room with a flourish, standing aside so Vee, with Ruby on her hip, could enter.
“Oh.” Vee’s blue eyes widened in what Sam hoped was pleasurable surprise. “Ruby, look at your pretty room.”
Sam could only take credit for cleaning all the crap out of one of his spare rooms and transferring it to the other. Plus he’d borrowed a couple of things from Kauri Whare—namely a carved four-poster single bed that a client with more money than brains had ordered for his daughter and then changed his mind. Sam had also commandeered a chest of drawers and a blanket box which would double as Ruby’s toy chest while she was here. But the girlie stuff—the new pink comforter and sheets, the fluffy white rug covering the hardwood floor—that was all his mum’s doing.
Vee set Ruby down and, hugging her chicken toy, she ran over to the bed and scrambled onto it. “My room!” she yelled and launched herself at the pile of decorative cushions. “My pretty room.”
An unexpected jolt of longing zapped Sam right in the heart region. With Ruby’s dark curly hair and tans-easily complexion, the little girl could be mistaken for his. Not that he was clucky—hell, he had multiple second and third cousins if he needed a reminder of why contraception was a good idea. And not that he didn’t like kids, having been around them all his life. Little kids were kind of fun—but an investment of wife and kids for real wasn’t something he was up for.
So that jolt was most unwelcome.
He cleared his throat as Ruby bounced off the bed and made a beeline for the box containing some of her toys that Sam had put beside the empty wooden chest. “Why don’t you play with your toys for a bit while I show your mum around?”
“’Kay.” Without glancing up, Ruby pulled out a stuffed pig from the box. “Hi, Peppa,” she said, and then proceeded to babble in what Sam thought sounded like Swahili.
He and Vee turned away from the open door and started down the hallway.
“I don’t need a tour.” Vee halted outside his second spare room
. Before he could open his mouth, she’d cracked open the door. “I have been inside—”
Her voice snipped off into shocked silence at the piles of boxes, exercise equipment, stacked surfboards that Sam hadn’t got around to doing anything with, and various other guy junk that left only a few square feet of space available in the room. Yeah, he was a bit of a hoarder.
Her jaw sagged and she turned to him, fists on hips. “How am I supposed to fit in here?”
“You’re not.” He tipped his head in the direction of the next room, the master bedroom. “You’re with me.”
She blinked at him, the two spots of strawberry flush on her cheeks expanding outward. “Oh hell no, I’m with you.”
“Hell no, Peppa. Hell no, hell no,” came Ruby’s higher pitched voice from behind them.
Vee swore under her breath and marched forward, giving his stomach a sharp elbow as she bumped past him into the narrow hallway. She glowered in the open doorway to his room then her head whipped toward him with murder by dismemberment written on the downward curve of her lush mouth.
“Get in here,” she whisper-yelled and stalked into his bedroom.
A not unexpected result to springing this on her. Sam bit down on a grin at how smokin’ she looked when caught off guard, and followed her. She stood in the center of his room and faced off with him.
“Shut the door,” she said, and holy hell, her breasts rising and falling so prettily under her thin cotton shirt meant he was like a spectator at a tennis match only his gaze was tracking vertically instead of horizontally. The sudden punch of pure lust into his system was to blame for the stupid thing that came out of his mouth next.
“Didn’t your mum tell you not to shut the door when you had a boy in your room?”
And, yep, it had the same rocket-up-the-ass effect as telling a woman to calm down and listen.
Her jaw bunched and the fingers splayed on her hips tightened, nails digging into sweetly rounded hips. Out of all the Sullivan sisters, Vee was the one with the shortest fuse, likely because she’d been the youngest of the five girls. He’d always gotten a reaction from her when they were kids because she bit as easily as a kahawai snatching a chunk of bait dangling from a hook.
Break Your Heart_A Small Town Romance Page 7
