Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) (23 page)

“Sixteen going on thirty,” I said, and she grinned cheerfully at me and took another bite of eggs.

“So are we being hot for anybody in particular, or just on general principle?” I probed as lightly as I could manage, since we were having a Bonding Moment. “Noah, perhaps?” I didn’t add “The Unattached Buddhist,” Hemi’s nickname for him. Hemi could keep the eagle eye on them and be the bad guy. He was tailor-made for it. It was my job to remain her confidante. That sharing-responsibility thing again.

“Could be,” she said.

“You been emailing with him? Still an item?”

“Yeah. And this year, I’ll be a sophomore. With hair. Also boobs and no glasses. And he’ll be a senior, which is really hot, you know? Although last night, I’m telling you, this guy Michael? He’d totally have gone for it. And he’s Maori, which is cool.”

“Uh-huh.” I did my best casual impression. “But you didn’t?”

She heaved a martyred sigh. Whoops. Not casual enough. “No Aunt Bea. I exercised my freedom of one-hundred-percent choice and decided that I wasn’t making out with a random guy who stared at my boobs, especially not when I was going home two days later and I sort of had a boyfriend. Plus,” she added just as I was giving her major maturity points, “I swear Nikau told him to back off. Like—drew him aside and talked to him. What
is
it with the guys in this family?”

“Nightmare,” I agreed solemnly. “Could be Nikau thought his friend wasn’t good enough for you, what with the boob-staring and all.”

“Which was totally my choice, not his. It’s, like, 1902 around here. I’m not even his cousin, except that he thinks so. Nikau’s pretty hot himself, if you didn’t notice, but forget that, because I’m in the whanau now, so that’s a no. And it goes way beyond that. It’s like I’m, I don’t know, precious or something. Off limits. Even Matiu’s in love with you and never even
looks
at me. It’s like I’m not here. I might as well go home.”

I laughed in shock. “Wow. That’s ridiculous. He is not.” I’d known she had a crush. It would have been hard to miss. She was sassier than ever when Matiu was around. I’d seen Matiu be kind about it, too, which was nice of him—but then, I was sure he was used to it. But in love with
me?
Not hardly.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “He is too. Anybody could see it.
Koro
can see it. Why do you think he told Matiu not to stay for dinner last night? Said he was too tired for company, like we’d believe that. He was practically hustling him out the door. And that wasn’t because of me. He treats me like I’m twelve. I guess he’s saving all his love for you.”

I ignored the lump that had formed in the pit of my stomach. Too many eggs, that was all. “He’s Hemi’s cousin. You just said it. That possibility isn’t on the table. And he’s a huge flirt, too. It’s habitual. Anyway, I’m not the kind of woman men long for.
You
will be, because you’re tall. It’s always tall women, isn’t it? Also mysterious and sultry. I’m O-for-three here. Oh, and pregnant, too, by the way.” I looked at her more closely. “Hey. You really
do
have a crush on him.”

She shrugged, got up, and put another piece of bread in the toaster. “I’ll live. You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, anyway.” She fidgeted around the toaster as if she could physically make it work faster. “I’m not mysterious and alluring
now,
so too bad for me. And I’m going home to live with Hemi. Yay.”

I had to laugh. Karen would get over her crush, and whatever she thought, she
was
going to break some hearts. All you needed was attitude, and she sure had that. “Sorry, Miss Teenage Hormones. That doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing to me. I was out there navigating the dating wilds all by myself, you know. Talk about overwhelming. I coped by backing away from everybody, until, of course, I jumped in with Hemi. Not exactly the kiddie pool. I’m not sure a little guidance would have been so horrible at sixteen. Or seventeen. Or twenty-four.”

She came back over to the table and sat, pulling one leg beneath her before starting in on her toast. “So what did you have going on last night when I came home? Do you guys have phone sex or what?”

I stopped chewing, then carefully resumed, finally taking a sip of the ginger tea that had seemed like a reasonable precaution before I said, “Why do you ask?”

She sighed. “Hope. I live here. It’s a small house.”

I could feel the warmth rising straight up into my cheeks. What the heck was I supposed to say now? Parenting a teenager had been a whole lot easier before I’d hopped the train to Kinkytown. Hemi and I had started out being careful about noise, but we’d probably—
I’d
probably—lost the plot somewhere along the way. Which was awkward.

I believed in honesty and openness. I did. On the other hand, I also believed in the right to privacy. But I
also
believed in Karen. How was she going to be open with me if I didn’t share anything with her?

Oh, man.

I was feeling my way here. “I miss him a lot. And he misses me. So . . . yeah. We get into it a little bit. He’s a . . .” Studying my tea, now. “High-testosterone man, I guess you’d say. And I like that.”

“Are you afraid that if you don’t do what he wants, he’ll cheat while you’re gone? Or what?” She wasn’t pretending to be interested in her toast anymore. She was looking right at me.

“No.” I wasn’t tentative anymore. I knew the answer. “Never. If Hemi isn’t honorable, no man is. Everything we do is mutual. That’s our deal. We don’t do pressure. He doesn’t put it on me, and even if he did, I wouldn’t accept it. He knows that. And I miss him, too, you know. Goes both ways. Nothing two people do together, if they love each other and they both want to do it, is wrong. Including phone sex.”

She studied me, and I willed my eyes not to drop. “You’re turning really red,” she informed me.

“What a shock. It’s not an easy topic for me. It’s personal. I’m telling you because I love you, and I want you to be able to talk to me about sex or anything else. I want you to feel like you can ask me, and that I might know the answers. But—yes. Hemi and me? I miss him like crazy, and he misses me. But we’ll do our best to keep it down.”

“When he shows up tomorrow,” she said.

A flare of excitement at that. Near breathlessness, to be honest. “Yeah.” It was a sigh.

She got up and, to my surprise, picked up my plate and silverware along with her own. Maybe Karen was growing up in more ways than one, now that she was looking after Koro instead of always being looked after herself.

“Note to self,” she said. “Headphones.”

Hope

Even the weather gods were cooperating on this Friday. It was only the second day of September, and spring hadn’t sprung, but the ever-changing New Zealand climate was giving a good imitation of it. I rode my bike down the hill to town, then along to the café, under a sky so clear and bright, a breeze so fresh, I may have had to sing a little. “Oklahoma,” which made no sense at all, except that it was upbeat, my mother had loved show tunes, and somehow, I
did
feel I belonged to this land, almost like I was a for-real Maori instead of an honorary one. Not to mention that the land I belonged to was grand. All of that.

Besides, if you couldn’t sing out loud zipping down a New Zealand hill on your bike with the wind in your face, past fruit orchards, green fields dotted with sheep, and laundry flying like flags on clotheslines, with the wide Pacific spreading endlessly before you, when could you do it?

Plus, I wasn’t sick, and I’d had to wear my yellow dress today when I hadn’t been able to button any of my jeans. Because I was having a baby.

It was a quiet day at the café. Sunshine or not, it was a weekday in early September, the summer rush still far in the future.

“In fact, love,” Sonya said at two o’clock, eyeing the lone couple lingering over coffees and a vanilla slice, “if you want to knock off a half hour early, I won’t say no. You’re jumping out of your skin today, and that’s the truth. Something about those two days you’re taking off?” It was easy to spot the teasing light in her eyes.

“Could be.” I ran my thumb over the band of my engagement ring in a gesture that had become habitual. A reminder I needed.

She shook her head. “Hard to remember those days. My John’s idea of a romantic gesture is pouring my beer into a glass instead of handing me the bottle.”

“Well,” I said, “a glass is good.”

She laughed. “Go on, then. Get started on your holiday. But I’m not paying you for the time, mind,” she hurried to add.

Kiwis. They could teach Scots a thing or two about pinching a penny. But I didn’t care. I hopped on my bike again, pedaled to the pool, and put in my half hour.

I wasn’t just paddling around anymore, either. I was doing
laps.
All right, slow ones, and not exactly a hundred of them, but they were laps. And, yes, before you ask—I’d learned to dive off the side, too, although the diving board and I were still unacquainted and would probably stay that way. There was no need to get all crazy about it.

Even putting in some extra time, though, I still left the pool twenty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Matiu. He was taking me to Countdown to do some shopping for the weekend, and to practice my driving, of course. Extra shopping because of that extra mouth we’d be feeding. Hemi’s.

I’d even stopped dreading my driving lessons. Sometime over the past three weeks, sitting behind the wheel had gone from “white-knuckle exercise” to “transportation,” and maybe even “personal power.” I could parallel park, I could drive at a hundred kilometers an hour on narrow, winding New Zealand roads without needing CPR, and on two memorable occasions, I’d even done the motorway. Merging and everything. Karen might have more natural flair than I did, but as Matiu pointed out, one of us checked her mirrors every time, and it wasn’t her.

Hemi would be surprised, that was for sure. I wondered how he’d feel about me driving
him
. In his car. That would be a true test of his evolution. He said I held his feet to the fire. I intended to do it, too, in the intervals when he wasn’t holding mine there.

Down, girl.
Time to take it to the sea, or I’d be jumping up and down and babbling like an idiot by the time Hemi showed up tomorrow. A little serenity here. A little perspective. I grabbed my bike again, rode three blocks, dumped it by a bench along with my bag, and headed across the broad stretch of sand.

The sea was relatively calm today, and the tide was out. I’d started noticing the movement of the tide, too. I was becoming an ocean person.

As always, the steadiness of the waves’ endless pattern, sensed as much as seen, worked its magic on me. The sight of all that ruffled blue, glinting with a million diamonds where the sun hit each tiny wavelet—that was only one piece of it. It was the sound, as much hiss as roar, made up of so many component parts that you couldn’t identify them all, except to say that the whole experience could never be anything but the sea. The clean salt smell, the space, and the emptiness. Nobody out here but a black-and-white dog racing along the shoreline toward its master, receding rapidly into the distance.

Sand, water, and sky, as far from Brooklyn and Manhattan as it was possible to get. The rush and hurry of the city replaced by the timelessness of water that would evaporate into the sky and fall again as rain, the cycle repeating as long as this great blue ball of ours kept spinning.

Our lives mattered, no matter how small and unimportant each of us was. Our lives were everything we had, all we could contribute to this complicated world. Sending the next generation on, giving it the best start you could—that mattered, too, but our legacy wasn’t only in the genes we left behind, was it? It was in what we created, and maybe most of all in the kindness we showed. The understanding we demonstrated, the gesture that made somebody else’s day fractionally better, the small acts whose effects spread like ripples in a pond.

Those ripples—maybe they were the true measure of what we’d offered the world. All the little ways we looked after each other, both the people we knew and loved and those we didn’t. The million times we touched somebody else, that we shone a little light into somebody else’s life.