Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “But you could use some help. If there’ll be sneaking.”

  She was frowning. “It’s not a joke.”

  “No,” I said. “I see that. Get out and come around. I’m driving now. You can explain along the way. As we’re in a hurry.”

  Daisy

  I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have money. I didn’t have a place to stay with the girls. I didn’t have a plan.

  Oh. I could ring my brother. My mental processes were slow and no mistake. Why hadn’t that occurred to me? Dorian could use his card and get us a motel room for tonight, and hire a car for the morning, too.

  I didn’t want to ring him, though, for the same reason I hadn’t told him in the first place. Because he’d have thought he had to do it instead of me, and it would hurt him.

  It wasn’t going to hurt me. It was going to feel nothing but good.

  I’d have to ring him anyway. No other choice.

  Wait. I didn’t have my phone. I could borrow … Whosit’s phone, but I didn’t know Dorian’s number. Bugger modern life and not needing to memorize numbers.

  Whosit had been driving into town. Now, he said, “Any time.”

  “Any time what?”

  “The explanation. If we’re going to sneak, I feel we need a plan.”

  He sounded perfectly calm, as if pulling people out of freezing rivers, collecting heroic dogs, and engaging in shady acts of after-midnight derring-do were all in a day’s work. I asked, “What’s your name?”

  He hesitated a noticeable couple seconds, then said, “Gray.” As if it were a fake name.

  “Gray?” I asked. “What sort of name is Gray? It’s a color. Who’s named after a color? What’s your brother’s name, Blue?” That was rich, coming from me, but never mind.

  He glanced at me as if he couldn’t believe I was being so rude. Since I couldn’t believe it myself, he had a fair point. “It’s a name,” he said. “Grayson. What’s yours?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Daisy. What’s this espionage, then? Wait. Your sisters aren’t underage, are they? Could be awkward. I may have to rethink my participation.”

  “No. Sixteen and seventeen.” Of legal age, or I wouldn’t have been able to do this.

  “And we’re rescuing them why?” Still calm.

  I hesitated. If he lived around here, he’d know.

  No choice. I said, “Because they’re in Mount Zion.”

  Another couple seconds while he digested that. It was quiet even in this busy tourist town so long after midnight, and he drove beside the lake for a bit, then turned right and headed uphill.

  The ute wasn’t new. It was a bit battered, in fact, and dusty inside. Who drove a not-new black ute, had scars on his face and knuckles, and stayed up here amongst the rich-listers?

  It would be a mate’s house, something like that. Not that it mattered to me. Surely I wasn’t going to judge him over money. I hadn’t gone that far down the road to materialism, had I?

  I got stroppy when I was scared. Sarcastic. Or you could go all the way to “bitchy.” Blame my rebellious nature, or my sinful one. That was what they’d called it. They’d never managed to beat or shame it out of me, though, no matter how hard they’d tried. Which was good, because that rebellion was my saving grace. It had got me out and kept me going, and sarcasm was par for the course in the Emergency Department, where the humor tended toward the black side. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t any more attractive to Gray than it was to most other men.

  He said, “Mount Zion. The cult. With the …” He gestured down his body. “The clothes and all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they get caught up in it, then? Seduced away from school?”

  “No. They were born in it.” Another breath. “Like me.”

  Another silence, then: “But you don’t live there now. Wait, though. The Whore of Babylon. The tight jeans.”

  “Yes. No. I don’t live there now.” I stared straight ahead, knowing my voice was tight, my body rigid. I didn’t tell people this. Not ever. I had no choice, though, not if I was going to use his ute. And him.

  He turned off the road at the top of the hill and headed up a steep drive, framed by plantings and illuminated by the sort of modern squared-off lights that you had to pay extra for, and said, “Let’s get changed and do some sneaking, then. There’s just one thing I want to know first. Besides whether the dog’s still alive.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, as he pulled the ute to a stop in front of a house like a cube. It was probably expensive, like the lights. I’d noticed that the simplest houses always seemed to be the dearest. Outside, that is, in the world of the Damned. It seemed an odd preference to me, but there you were.

  He didn’t turn the engine off. He left it running, which meant the heat was on, and I was glad. I was still chilled to the bone. I needed a shower, preferably one about fifteen minutes long. I wasn’t going to get it, though, so never mind. And I was tensing, waiting for the question, knowing it would be awful.

  He asked, “How did you get out of the car?”

  Oh. Not awful. I said, “I’m a nurse. An RN.”

  “Admirable,” he said, “but not really on point. Explains why you kept asking me how I was when you were half dead yourself, though.”

  I said, “I work in Emergency. When you’re an Emergency nurse, you hear all the stories. You learn every life lesson somebody else’s hard way, which means you know what to do in most emergencies, including how to get out of a submerged car. As long as you keep your head, but that’s something else you learn to do in Emergency.”

  “And how do you get out of a submerged car?”

  “With a special tool, if you have one. A punch tool. I didn’t have that. Next time, I will.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Next time.”

  “Otherwise,” I went on, “you use your headrest, because it’s got those metal spikes, and it’s the one thing you can reach back and find in the dark. Your best bet is going out the back window. Weaker glass. They make it strong in front now, some kind of plastic layer in there, so people don’t get ejected. The worst injuries happen when you get ejected. Unfortunately, that also makes it harder to get out if your car’s underwater.”

  “So …”

  “So you wait for the car to fill with water first, which means the pressure equalizes and isn’t pushing against the glass as you’re trying to push it out. It can be difficult to wait, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said gravely. “As a person would be holding their breath and all.”

  “Yes. Especially since it’s better to stay belted in, so you’re not floating and can get enough leverage to break the glass. Hard to stay belted in when your instincts are telling you to get out. That’s another reason for the punch tool. I couldn’t stay belted in, but I managed anyway.”

  “How?”

  “I’m strong. And I had a car like a tin can. Cheap glass, probably. Also, I didn’t want to die.”

  He digested that a minute, then asked, “Where did the dog come in?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have thought it was an angel when it started pulling me along, helping me, but I don’t believe in angels anymore. Or miracles, or divine intervention, or that you get what you deserve. I believe in being prepared and keeping your head and doing what you have to do, so that’s what I did. I’d have got out of the river anyway. I wasn’t going to drown after all that. The dog was a bonus. Like you.”

  “Kind of you to say so.” Now, he sounded amused. “Your life philosophy’s a bit grim, possibly.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it works.” I’d talked too much. Relief from stress, maybe, but I didn’t like to talk too much or get too personal. I definitely didn’t like to sound bitchy. Competent, cheerful Daisy, that was me. That was the whole reason for the name. I got out of the ute and opened the rear door, bracing myself to find that the dog was dead. It had been completely silent all this time, and it had been absolutely exhauste
d.

  I’d be so sad if it was dead. I could be sad, though. That didn’t have to stop me from moving on.

  5

  How to Be a Hero

  Gray

  Fortunately, the dog wasn’t dead.

  When I opened the door, he raised his head. It was Labrador-broad, the eyes wise and brown. He had a dusting of gray around his brown muzzle, but when I said, “Come on, boy. Jump down,” he did it without too much stiffness.

  That was when I realized that it wasn’t a he. It was a she. A chocolate Lab of the stocky English variety, without much stockiness. I fondled her ears, she leaned against my knees, and I said, “Let’s go in and get something down you, girl. Reckon you’ve earned a feed.”

  When I turned around, the girl—woman—Daisy—had gathered up my wet clothes and her own and was standing there, blanket and oversized jacket and bare feet and all, looking the last thing from defeated, and not a bit like a woman who’d just escaped certain death. She looked, in fact, like a woman who was waiting for me to get on with it, so she could go do the next thing on her list.

  It’s pretty bloody hard to be a hero if a woman won’t let you do it.

  I’d started out from Dunedin as a determinedly single man with a work problem, and arrived in Wanaka with a woman and a dog and heaps of further complication in my very near future. And, possibly, with a chance to be that hero after all, so I grabbed my boots and led Daisy up the steps to the house, with the dog padding along beside her like a guardian. Just the three of us, calmly moving ahead, doing what we had to do.

  Seriously, though? Mount Zion? The weird, secretive compound on the side of the mountain, where hundreds of people dressed like it was 1850 and thought like it, too? Where they oppressed their women, didn’t allow contact with the outside world, and bred kids by the dozen? I hadn’t realized anybody ever left that place.

  And, yeh, I was all about getting those sisters out of there.

  By the time I made it into the lounge, my mum was coming down the stairs, her graying dark hair in a plait, pulling her dressing gown closed around her. I said, “Mum. You didn’t have to get up,” like always, and she said, “Of course I did,” also like always.

  Then she took in Daisy, the dog, and our blanket-intensive attire, and said, “What’s happened? Sit down while I make a cup of tea. Turn the fire on, Gray. You both look half frozen.” My mum was all about getting on with things herself, which was why she headed into the kitchen at one end of the big room instead of coming over to give me a cuddle and kiss.

  Daisy, who hadn’t sat down, said, “Oh. It’s your mother’s house. I suddenly feel much better about all this.”

  “Yeh, nah,” I said, not correcting her, “you were always safe. Stay there. I’m getting the dog something to eat.”

  “I need to change,” she said. “We need to go.” She fondled the dog’s ears and glanced at my mum. Possibly calculating their size differential, which was considerable. My mum, like most Samoans, enjoyed her food, and Daisy was definitely wondering about those clothes.

  I said, “How about this? I’ll show you the bathroom and sort out something for you to wear after your shower.” When she would have argued, I took the wet clothes from her and went on. “Which you’ll be taking while I’m feeding the dog and finding that mysterious item in my wardrobe that isn’t a blanket, yet fits somebody who weighs a third of what I do.”

  “I don’t weigh a third of what you do,” she said. “I’m heavy for my size. But—fine. If you insist.”

  Daisy

  “I’m heavy for my size”? That had been my brilliant rejoinder? He knew how heavy I was. He’d carried me. And why hadn’t I been more gracious? If he’d really take me to get the girls, and then … and then what? I had no clue—anyway, if I wanted him to do anything at all, I needed to be nice to him. Why hadn’t I done that?

  I was still vaguely wondering as Gray led us both upstairs to the tune of the dog’s toenails clicking on the hardwood floors, through a sleekly modern and extremely posh house, all white walls, pale wood, black-framed photos that tended toward black and white as well, and gray leather, that didn’t seem to exactly fit his mum. My judgment of things like that was obviously still impossibly bad, though, because clearly, it did fit his mum. It must. It was her house. Gray took me all the way to the end of the corridor and through double doors into an extra-large, expensively but starkly furnished bedroom I tried hard not to look at—though it was his mum’s, so why was it making me nervous?—and opened the door to a bath that was like something out of a magazine, beyond anything I’d ever seen in real life. He pushed switches and said, “Use anything you need.”

  “We don’t have time,” I said, trying not to be seduced by glamour. It was all so … clean.

  “We don’t have time to argue. Come on, girl,” he told the dog. “Downstairs. Food,” and shut the door.

  I undressed—well, I took off my blanket and borrowed jacket—under the welcome heat of some sort of overhead infrared-type thing, then climbed into the shower. Actually, I walked in. Quite a way in, because it was long.

  It had eight showerheads. Eight. I am not joking. It also had a soaking tub at the far end, with glass blocks to let in filtered light, and lush ferns on a ledge.

  I’d lived in apartments smaller than this bathroom, and it was made of marble, walls and floors and all. The benchtops were as well, at least I thought it was marble. No seams. No grout.

  I didn’t have time, but I turned on seven of the showerheads anyway. In my defense, I was cold. A big rainfall-type one sprayed down from overhead, and three more in a line down either side sprayed out horizontally, bathing me in sprays of warm water from my neck to my knees. It was ecstasy, and yet what I really wanted was to get into that bath. It was deep, and it had spa jets and a wide marble rim around the edge. I was going to count it as a moral victory that I didn’t succumb.

  I was shuddering under the hot spray in that way you do when you’ve been chilled to the bone and now you’re not, tipping some spicy-smelling shampoo into my palm, when I realized it.

  This was my first time ever showering in an ensuite bath. One that was in a bedroom, and reserved for you alone.

  In Mount Zion, there’s no such thing as an ensuite bath. There’s no such thing as a family bath. There are two baths on each floor of the hostels, one for men and one for women. The women’s have a long trough sink made of gray concrete and an open shower room, plus twelve toilet stalls. The men’s substitute urinals for some of the stalls. I knew that, because scrubbing in and around the toilets and urinals of our hostel had been my daily job during the months when I’d been on Bath Rotation, starting at eight years old.

  They had the younger girls do the toilets. They were smaller and could crawl around behind more easily. You could think that it was also because they were too young to argue, but girls in Mount Zion don’t argue. They know better.

  The reason for so many stalls is that even though there are four private rooms per floor in the hostels, that private room with its wall of bunks, each with a drawer underneath it, is the entire living space for your family. My family’d had twelve kids in it, and we’d shared those two baths on our floor with three other families.

  I didn’t want many things in life. Or, rather, I did, but not material things, not usually. I did crave a bathroom, though, that was—well, not like this, because this was over the top, but a bit like this. One with a whole stack of fluffy white towels rolled up on open shelves, a clean towel for every day if you wanted. With walls and floors lined with enormous tiles, meaning almost no grout to scrub. A toilet that only I would use, and a floor that would never, ever give off the ammonia stink of dried urine, because unlike most of male humanity, I didn’t wee on the floor. The whole place would be white, maybe with some pale gray like this, because that was nice, and it would have impossibly clean, uncluttered surfaces and a pink orchid on the windowsill.

  So far, I had the orchid.

  I realized that I’
d drifted off when the door opened. I’d nearly fallen asleep standing here, my arms braced against the walls as the blissful heat filled me. How had I forgotten how urgent this was? I should have been done, dried, and ready to go by now.

  It was steamy in here, and I couldn’t see out. I stepped out anyway, because what choice did I have? My heart, though, was pounding in ridiculous fashion, just because if he was out there, he’d see me.

  He’d already seen me naked, or near enough. He’d taken my clothes off. What else was there to see, and what did it matter?

  It wasn’t him. It was his mum, and she was holding a white towel that I realized was heated, once I wrapped it around myself. Just like the floor, which was making my feet feel lovely and toasty. I did my best to haul on some kind of composure and said, “Thanks. You probably don’t normally get strange women turning up and using your bath in the middle of the night.”

  “Oh, I dunno, love,” she said cheerfully. “It can happen, though Gray wouldn’t thank me for telling you so. Clothes are just there. Drink your tea before you go.”

  Well, that told me.

  Gray

  Daisy came downstairs about sixty seconds after Mum did. She hadn’t spent much time on her beauty routine, and her mug of tea still looked full. She hadn’t even dried her hair. The dog trotted forward to greet her, and she gave her a pat. As for me, I’m afraid I laughed.

  She tried to scowl at me, but couldn’t keep it up, because it turned into a smile, then a laugh. “Stop it. I didn’t choose them. Also, our new dog’s a girl.”

  I tried to compose my face, but it wasn’t easy. I’d found her a long-sleeved tee and a pair of track pants, because they at least had a tie inside the waistband. She’d rolled the legs up and cinched the waist as much as possible, but I could see even under the T-shirt—which reached to her upper thighs—that the waistband was sort of … bulging. She pulled on the fella’s oversized jacket again, found her soaking-wet shoes by the door and put them on without any comment at all, and asked, “Ready?”