Break Your Heart_A Small Town Romance

by Tracey Alvarez

  Her hands rose of their own accord to grip the tightly coiled muscles of his biceps. She swayed into him with a ragged moan, unable to resist utter surrender. He kissed her until she was breathlessly pressed from breast to knees with him, wriggling in his arms as she endeavored to climb up his big body and wrap herself around him. But he had her right where he wanted—trapped by the door at her back and the hard length of him at the front, and God, he was deliciously hard everywhere.

  One of Sam’s hands slid down her side, skimmed over her ass with a quick squeeze, then cupped her thigh. Like a trained puppy, Vee lifted her leg so he could draw it around his hip. He broke the kiss and, teeth lightly grazing her jaw, he found a sensitive spot of skin on her throat to clamp his mouth on. He ground against her.

  “This is what I missed—you under me, making those sexy as hell little moans. I want you back in my bed, Vee.”

  Her hips bucked against his and she arched back, her head rapping against the door. She winced, eyes flying open at the sharp pain. Clarity came moments later as the hunger-for-Sam fog lifted from her brain and his last few statements began to make sense.

  Picking up where they left off. Missing her under him. Wanting her in his bed.

  Her eyelids fluttered shut. Why had she expected more from Sam? Had she honestly believed he’d fallen in love with her, or, at least, that falling in love with her had been in the realm of possibility?

  Silly, silly girl.

  And she couldn’t even use her starry-eyed naivety as an excuse, because she wasn’t a girl. She was a woman old enough to know better, and she had a child who deserved better than a mother who hooked up with a man a couple of times a week to scratch an itch. What kind of example would that model to her little girl? That it’s okay to settle for a man who misses your body and wants you in his bed, but doesn’t feel anything for you apart from an insipid kind of affection. Maybe that would be okay if it were anyone but Sam. If it were a man that she didn’t feel anything for. But she’d been down that particular road before with Patrick. He’d wanted her until the reality of life with her—and life with a baby—had taken the shine off what had been, for him, a totally sexual relationship.

  Vee braced both palms on Sam’s chest and shoved, using every ounce of hurt and fury at her dumb girl-ness to put some muscle into it. She still wouldn’t have been able to budge him, except that she caught him completely off guard.

  He staggered back a step, frown lines digging grooves across his forehead. “Babe?”

  His voice was rough with desire, and where the sound of it would’ve previously melted her to a pool of yes, please, the single endearment, which wasn’t really an endearment, froze her blood to ice crystals.

  A little part of her brain suggested she calm the hell down and just ask him outright if it was just sex between them or something more. But a bigger, stronger, prouder part of her crushed it flat. She had swallowed a gutful of her pride to come here and apologise, to hopefully find out that they were on the same page of the feels, but instead she was pretty sure that not only weren’t they on the same page, but they were reading from two completely different books.

  She lifted her chin. “I want to talk about the lease.”

  Sam stared at her, his jaw comically loosening. Well, it would’ve been comical if it hadn’t bunched again a moment later as if he were biting on tinfoil.

  He stiffened and took a giant step backward, crossing his arms. “The lease?”

  “I kept my end of the bargain, and you got what you wanted from the Wrights.” And from me, she added silently, her stomach doing a lazy, lurching roll down to her toes. “I earned that lease.”

  “I guess you did. And the bonus I promised.” His mouth thinned to a straight line as he looked her up and down. “You earned that, too.”

  She knew exactly where he could stick his bonus, but she wouldn’t let him see her lose her shit. Slapping his face for all but calling her a paid whore would be losing her shit, and she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. So she curled her lips up into a smile she liked to call her I really want to kick you in the nuts but instead I’ll imagine you being slathered in honey and stung by an army of fire ants smile, and twisted the diamond ring off her finger.

  “Since our business deal is now concluded,” she said as she marched over to his toolbox and dropped the ring into it, “I think we’re done here.”

  “That’s it?” he asked. “You’re just cutting me off? Ending it?”

  Blood thudding in her ears, she spun around to meet his gaze, fisting a hand on her hips. “Ending what, exactly?”

  The fire was back in his eyes. “We’re good together, Vee.”

  “In the sack, you mean.” She didn’t phrase it as a question, though she waited a couple of beats to give him the opportunity to correct her.

  He didn’t.

  Of course he didn’t. She was the one delusional enough to believe that this fake relationship was real. That all this time it might not have been a case of him not wanting to commit to one woman, but that he hadn’t found the one woman he wanted to commit to. And she’d had the ridiculous thought that maybe, just maybe, that woman could’ve been her.

  She dredged up another of her smiles, this one Oscar-nomination worthy. The no, you haven’t broken my heart, I’m just fine smile.

  “I’m sure it won’t take you long to find another vagina to replace me.” She gave him a wide berth and did her best runway model sashay to the workshop door.

  “Isaac has the lease agreement in his office,” Sam said from behind her. “He’ll sort you out.”

  Little hairs lifted on the back of her neck from the ice in his tone but she opened the door and stepped carefully over the doorframe.

  “Nice doing business with you,” she said, keeping her spine so tautly vertical that she nearly overbalanced in her do-me heels.

  She shut the door quietly, but she was pretty sure she didn’t mishear him say, “The pleasure’s all mine.”

  Chapter 18

  Sam sat on the sand and watched the waves peel off into Bounty Bay. His heart rate still hadn’t settled back into a normal rhythm after the past couple of hours’ surfing.

  And what was normal anyway?

  He scrubbed sand-encrusted fingers over his collarbone and up his throat where his pulse beat like a death knell. It was a harsh thud reminding him that even though his heart felt like it’d split open like rotten fruit, it was actually still functioning fine.

  Fine. What women said when men did something stupid and then asked what the matter was. He’d been that kind of stupid when he let Vee walk away from him earlier in the week. Why hadn’t he used his damn words the moment he’d twigged she’d had it all wrong?

  It wasn’t just about resuming their physical connection now that the Wrights were sorted. It was more—so much more—and that he felt so much more about her rattled him to the core. And then she’d brought up the lease, right after he’d lost his very soul kissing her with everything he had.

  In that instant came crushing doubt, and old scars split open remembering the women who’d only wanted him to get access to his brother, or gravitated toward him after Kauri Whare became successful. It’d choked the tenderness and need right out of him. He’d shut down—apparently more like his big brother than he’d ever thought.

  The breeze picked up, tossing a shower of gritty sand across his face. With a grimace, Sam stood and bent to collect his board. Movement from the direction of his house caught his eye and he froze as Vee running across the sand came into focus. His pulse exploded, blood surging through his body like a giant tube of a wave about to break. For a brief moment, every chick flick reuniting-lovers scene he’d been forced to sit through flashed into his brain. Those images came to a screeching halt as two observations slammed into him.

  One. Vee wasn’t just running toward him, she was sprinting. Arms pumping, knees up, zombies are chasing me sprinting.

  Second observation, which stabbed icicles between h
is ribs. Her eyes were wild and terrified, and as she drew closer, he saw the quiver of her mouth and the inky trails of mascara on her cheeks.

  His gut plummeted and he lurched forward to meet her. She flung herself at him, coming in low and fast, wrapping her arms around his back and holding on as if she were trying to meld their bodies together. She was also shaking like a leaf and breathing so fast her attempt at speech sounded like hiccupping sobs.

  Sam cradled her against him, cupping the back of her head with one hand and the other tight around her as she slumped into him. An unbearable pressure rose in his chest like an overinflated balloon and he staggered back half a step, his legs suddenly weak.

  “Ruby,” he rasped. “Is Ruby okay?”

  He felt her nod against his chest, then she straightened in his embrace but didn’t let go of him entirely. She sucked in a shaky breath and blew it out again.

  “She’s with my parents. They got back a couple of days ago, and I was there visiting when…” She sealed her lips together but it did little to stop them quivering so she pressed the back of her fingers to them while she drew in another deep breath. “Nat called me because Isaac and Tui and Uncle Manu couldn’t get hold of you.”

  The chilled web of unease that had settled on his shoulders turned into tentacles of dread. His hands dropped away from her, hanging uselessly by his sides. “What happened?”

  Blue eyes brimming with tears met his. She laced their fingers together and pressed the sweetest of kisses on the spot over his heart. “Your mum and dad were in a car accident. They’re alive,” she said hurriedly, “but it’s serious.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, but the fear rolled over him anyway.

  Vee tugged his hands, pulling him in a stumbling step in the direction of his house. “Your family is waiting at the hospital. I’ve come to take you there.”

  “You came?” He couldn’t speak a coherent sentence if his life had depended on it. All he could comprehend was that Vee had come for him on what could prove the worst day of his life.

  “Always,” she said softly. “I’ll always come, Sam. Now let’s go.”

  He and Vee stopped in at his house long enough for him to grab a shirt, his shoes, and his phone, and then she drove him straight to Bounty Bay Hospital. He’d called Tui and had gotten the basic rundown. Their parents had been driving home when a tourist-hired campervan crossed the center line and caused a head-on collision. The van’s driver was dead, the passenger badly injured, and Pete and Ariana lucky to be alive.

  Isaac was en route to Whangarei following their dad, who’d been airlifted by emergency chopper to the bigger city hospital. Tui didn’t know the extent of their dad’s injuries, only that he required surgery and by her definition was “Fucking bad, Sammy.” Their mother’s injuries were less severe, she said, but she was still being examined in the ER and they were waiting to hear an update.

  Sam strode into the emergency waiting room with Vee at his side. He spotted Tui pacing beside Manu, who was hunched over in a plastic chair, looking every one of his sixty-plus years. Tui ran to Sam and flung her arms around him, squeezing like a boa constrictor. He squeezed her back, muttering, “Kia kaha,” over and over into her hair, which was ironic, as he was the one who needed to be strong now.

  Tui peeled herself from him and turned to Vee. After only a moment’s hesitation, the two women embraced, clinging together. For the first time in Sam didn’t know how long, Tui allowed the tears to come and let her old friend comfort her.

  Vee sent him a glance over his sister’s shoulder and guided her to an empty seat where she wrapped her arm around Tui’s shoulder and bent her head to talk to her. Sam crossed the waiting room to take the chair next to his uncle.

  “Manu,” he said softly. “Dad’s a tough old bastard. He’ll pull through because he knows Ma’ll kill him if something were to happen to him.”

  His uncle raised his head and managed a glimmer of a smile before the ghost of grief returned to his dark eyes. “That she would. I was on the way home when I came across the accident. I got out and heard my brother screaming for Ari. Your ma was trying to fight the paramedics to get to him.” A tear rolled down Manu’s weathered cheek. “Never heard Pete make a sound like that, like his spirit was being torn from his body at the thought of losing her.” He shook his head. “Don’t think he even realized how bad his own injuries were. He loves that woman.”

  Manu’s gaze bored straight into Sam’s own soul. “There’s much aroha between them. A lifetime of it, and no matter what happens, they’ll be together.”

  “They’re both fighters.” The words fell numbly from Sam’s mouth.

  Once more a small smile creased his uncle’s mouth. “You’re more like your dad than you know. When Pete and your ma were courting—because that’s what we called it back in the day—the two of them couldn’t see eye to eye about anything. In fact, the rest of us were convinced they weren’t so much courting as they were training for the ultimate gladiator showdown.”

  Sam blinked at him. “I never knew that. They always told us kids they were a match made in heaven.”

  Manu snorted. “Match made in hell, more like it. They blazed like bonfires every time they were in the same room—hot for each other, they were.” Something in Sam’s expression made his uncle chuckle. “And not just in that way, son. That fire between them never died out. Both Pete and Ari said in hard times it tamped down to embers, but it’d never fail to reignite.”

  His uncle reached over and gripped Sam’s hand. “I see that same fire in you and Vee. You love her, eh?”

  Sam convulsively squeezed Manu’s hand back, staring over the older man’s shoulder to where Vee sat with her arm still around Tui’s shoulder. Loved her? Hell. Putting a label like love on the turmoil of emotions that raged within him was like calling one of his kauri sculptures a whittled stump. The need to march over there and claim her zapped through him like static electricity. But he squelched it.

  “Just like your dad, as I said.” Manu sighed and slumped back into the hard plastic chair. “He nearly lost your ma because he was too damn chicken to tell her he loved her first. Thought you might’ve grown a bigger set of balls than your dad. But what would an old fella like me know?” He shrugged, narrowing his eyes into crinkled slits. “’Cept pride and cowardice where women are concerned must be a Ngata trait. I let my aroha walk away for the same heahea reason.”

  Before Sam could think of a reply, the glass sliding doors opened and a female doctor hurried out, making a beeline for them. Vee and Tui must’ve spotted her, too, as they rushed to Sam’s side, Vee slipping her smaller hand into his.

  The woman’s expression went from searching to a smile as she approached. “Ariana Ngata’s family?”

  For a moment, Sam swayed on his feet before his brain instructed his tongue to move. “Yes,” he said. “We’re all her whānau.”

  An hour later, Sam, Manu, Tui, and Vee were allowed to crowd into the tiny curtained cubicle where Ariana was still undergoing tests. The doctor had listed her injuries—fortunately most were superficial, including bruised ribs and a fractured arm—and told them she would need to remain in hospital under observation for at least a night. His mum’s gaze locked onto him the moment Sam stepped around the curtain.

  “Pete?” she rasped, straining to sit upright. “Have you heard?”

  The nurse who was monitoring her blood pressure pressed a gentle hand to Ariana’s shoulder to keep her from rising. It made Sam’s heart ache that his ma didn’t have the strength to resist. She sagged back onto the pillows, the cuts and bruises on her face stark in the harsh white hospital light. Tui rushed to the opposite side of the bed, out of the nurse’s way, to sit on the cubicle’s visitor chair.

  “He’s in surgery. Isaac’s with him, and Nat’s on her way to join him,” Tui said.

  Sam stood at the foot of his ma’s bed and lightly laid his hands on her blanket-covered ankles. “Owen contacted Whangarei and they said Dad was in a stable bu
t serious condition when he arrived. The surgeon is repairing his ruptured spleen, and he’s going to be setting off airport security with a few metal pins, but Owen says his prognosis is very good.”

  “He’s going to be okay? You’re telling me the truth?” His ma shut her eyes, as if bracing for her worst fears.

  “Yes. He’s in for a long recovery, according to Owen,” Sam said. “And he’s likely to drive everyone bloody insane while he’s undergoing physical therapy”—a glimmer of a smile from his ma at that—“but he’ll pull through this.”

  Tui bent and kissed her mother’s damp cheek as the nurse left the cubicle. “Me and Uncle Manu will drive to Whangarei tonight. Sam’s going to stay here and when you’re discharged tomorrow, he’ll drive you down to see Dad.”

  Ariana’s eyes fluttered open. “Thank you both.” Then her gaze slid sideways. “And thank you, Vee.” She lifted her good hand and made a beckoning motion.

  Vee edged around the bed beside Tui and cradled Ariana’s hand in her own. “Stay with him tonight,” he heard his mum say softly. “Be each other’s rīrā and tāwharau.”

  Prickles sped up and down Sam’s spine.

  Be each other’s strength and shelter.

  At Vee’s crumpled brow, his mum chuckled. “You’ll have to ask Sam for the translation, and that means the two of you need to talk. And you need to listen to this.” His mum lifted her and Vee’s joined hands and bumped them lightly against the left side of her chest. “Mānawa. Always listen to your mānawa, aye?”

  Vee nodded her agreement.

  His mum turned her laser beam stare on him. “And you, too, Samuel James Ngata.”

  Which, as anyone knew, meant an offspring better pay attention or risk maternal wrath.

  The nurse returned with an orderly. “We’re ready to take you to orthopaedics to set your arm.”