Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (102 page)

“Mum!” Will’s mother exploded. “Talia’s right here.”

“Either Talia doesn’t understand, or she does,” Kuia said. “Either way, we’re all good.”

“Talia understands.” It was almost the first time Will’s sister had spoken this morning. “Talia’s sitting right here. Talia is fifteen, and she isn’t an idiot.”

“Talia needs to remember who she’s talking to,” Will’s mum said. “And we need to get back, because she’s missed two days of school already.”

“Which wasn’t my idea,” she muttered.

“Wasn’t mine either,” Will said. “Much as I appreciated all of you turning up to welcome Faith,” he added with only a bit of sardonic intent.

“No,” Kuia said calmly. “It was mine, and it’s my idea that you drive down today with Faith. You can have all the privacy you want in the car, show her a bit of the country as well. She’s flown all this way, and she’s only going to see Auckland? That’s not New Zealand.”

“Privacy in the car isn’t exactly what I was talking about,” Will said.

“It was when I was young,” Kuia said, and his mother was spluttering again, and he was laughing again, and that was just about that.

New Challenges

“What’s going on with your sister?” Faith asked later that day, shifting in her seat to look at Will. He drove absolutely competently, no surprise there, but not fast, which
was
a surprise. But then, the roads here weren’t wide, and they did some fairly serious winding. They’d even had to stop once for a herd of sheep being moved down the highway by a man on an ATV and a couple of very agile dogs, which Faith had already chalked up as one of the highlights of her life, and this was only her second day in New Zealand.

“Who? Talia?”

“No, I mean some other sister that I haven’t met yet.”

“Bit testy, aren’t you?”

“Jet lag,” she admitted. “I guess you fly a lot, huh?”

“You could say that. Or you could say that it’s only every other week, and only about a quarter of those journeys are halfway across the world, so, nah. Not so much.”

“So talk to me.” She tucked one foot up under the other leg and wriggled around to get comfortable in the leather seat. “Because I
am
jet-lagged, and I’m nervous about hanging out with your family. Besides, I don’t want to fall asleep and be up at four again tomorrow.”

“Nah, we don’t want that. Having to watch you drop things and bend over to pick them up? Bloody nightmare. Just imagine, tomorrow I get to watch you get up at seven. In the light. Unless you want to stay in bed, of course. I’d be good with that, too.”

“I’m not happy,” she warned him. “You said one night, and it’s going to be, what? Seven? You’d better have enough pillows, because that wall stays up.”

He shot a look across the car at her.
“You’re
not happy? You’re not the one who had somebody holding up her lacy undies at him this morning. I wore a T-shirt and shorts to bed. I had some consideration.”

“Aren’t you making a pretty big assumption? That I’d find your naked self irresistible?”

“What, you wouldn’t? Here I thought I was God’s gift and all.”

“To your
grandmother.”

He laughed. “And the knife goes straight in again. Cut to the bone, aren’t I.”

She smiled with satisfaction. Yes, he was doing a pretty good job of keeping her awake and entertained, which was necessary, because the landscape spooling by outside the car was too pretty, too pastoral, and too storybook to do more than lull her to sleep. Rolling emerald-green hills dotted with sheep as white and fluffy as the clouds that floated serenely overhead, with the occasional teardrop of a serene blue lake to add its grace note, and a higher ridge fading to blue beyond.

“Your sister,” she remembered. “Talia. What’s the story?”

He shrugged. “She’s a teenager.”

“Really? Because it seems like more than that to me. She’s the only one still at home?”

“Yeh. Two sisters in Aussie, and Mals at Uni, doing an engineering course.”

“Engineering. Huh.” He hadn’t exactly looked like a serious student to her, but then, Will knew him and she didn’t, and she didn’t need to be butting into Will’s family life. She was here for two weeks, and then she was leaving.

“So when you talk to her,” she pressed anyway, “what does she say?”

“Talia? You’re assuming she talks to me. I’m not that interesting to her, am I.”

“Really? A celebrity like you?”

“Not a celebrity to her. Just her brother, who she barely knows, because I left home when she was six, and I’ve been playing rugby ever since, gone all the time. Four years of that in Aussie, too, remember.”

“Why’s that? Why’d you go to Australia? Seems like you like New Zealand, from what you’ve said, and your family’s here. So why?”

“Money.”

She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t, and something in the set of his jaw made her decide not to pursue it. She wanted to ask about the tension she’d sensed in his mother and Talia. She wanted to ask about his grandfather, and why his grandmother, who had lost her husband only six months earlier, was the only person in the family besides Will who seemed remotely happy, but maybe today wasn’t the time.

It wasn’t her business anyway, because it wasn’t her family, and she wasn’t really his girlfriend. She was just pretending. So she lapsed into silence, looked out the window at grass and hills and sheep, and went somewhere else.

“So…” Hope asked tentatively. “Will you be seeing any more of your family while we’re here?”

She trembled a little as she waited for his answer. She knew he had a soft side hidden beneath the sternness, the discipline. Nobody could have been more caring or kinder than he had been towards Karen—or towards Hope herself. As fierce and demanding as he was when they made love—when he was holding her afterwards, she could feel all the emotion he had so much trouble expressing. The gentle touch of his hand stroking down her back. A kiss on her forehead when he thought she was asleep.

She knew his feelings ran deep, but when they’d met his cousin the night before, and Tane had mentioned Hemi’s father, it was as if a steel curtain had come down. Hemi’s face had been so forbidding, even Tane had dropped the subject.

“No,” he said tersely, his knuckles showing white on the leather-wrapped steering wheel of the big Mercedes sedan.

“They don’t live here anymore?” she tried again. “Nobody but your…your cousin? Is your father not around, then?”

“Hope,” Hemi warned, his lips barely moving, his face carved from teak. “This isn’t a subject I discuss.”

“You’ve helped me so much, though,” she dared to say. “With Karen. With everything. Couldn’t I…”

“No.” His voice was so harsh, it sliced straight through her. “You couldn’t.”

***

It was the smell that brought her out of it. Sulphur, strong as a gas leak.

“What
is
that?” she asked.

“That,” Will said, “is the smell of home. That’s Rotorua.”

The rolling fields of green had turned to higher, more rugged hills. They came around a corner, and there was the lake, a huge expanse of blue bordered by forested slopes stretching away on both sides.

“I thought it was a city,” she said.

“It is. At the bottom of the lake. But it’s ten more kilometers around it to get there. The smell is the geothermal features—all the hot pools. They’re everywhere—back gardens and all. Rotorua’s all about the hot pools. Geothermal areas all around here that are tapu—sacred. To Te Arawa, that is. My iwi. I’ll take you to see one, if you like.”

“Your iwi. That’s your tribe? Te…Te Arawa?”

“You did the research. Of course you did. You researched the Maori? Should I be flattered?”

“It was for a project. You know, the site.”

“Of course. The site. How could I forget.”

***

“Oh, good. You’re here,” Will’s grandmother said when they walked through an oversized front door and into the soaring great room of another big modern house set in a tree-shaded garden on another quiet, upscale residential street. No ocean this time, but the lake, Will had told her, was only a couple of kilometers away. “Show Faith around, Will, and then I’m taking her to three o’clock yoga.”

“I don’t actually know how to do yoga,” Faith said.

“Course you do. You just don’t know you do,” Miriama answered, and there really wasn’t a good answer to that.

Will sighed. “Remember that privacy we talked about? Maybe we want it.”

“And you can have it,” his grandmother said. “Tonight. Because don’t tell me you’re not headed straight to the gym anyway.”

“Well, yeh,” he said. “But it didn’t have to be this minute.”

“Wasting time,” she said. “Go get Faith settled. She and I are going to yoga.”

“Yoga sounds nice,” Faith said, partly because it did, and partly because Miriama didn’t hate her yet, and Faith wanted to keep it that way. “Nice and relaxing.”

“Hmm,” Miriama said. “We’ll see.”

That sounded ominous, but how could it be ominous? It was just yoga.

Except that it wasn’t. It was
hot
yoga.

Fifty minutes into the class, she was dying, she was fairly sure of it. And what was worse, she was being shown up by a seventy-five-year-old. Or rather, she was continuing to be shown up.

She’d been sweating from the moment they’d walked into the studio, which was Vegas-hot, stickily humid, and by now, frankly disgusting, filled with the sweat from twenty straining bodies, with no way for it to dissipate in the stagnant air. Each pose was more grueling than the last, and this one was the worst, because Miriama was flat on her back beside her, her feet lying neatly beneath her hips, while Faith was only halfway down, the only upright person in the room. She must have lost at least five pounds in perspiration alone by now, and her mind, instead of being calmed, was a roiling mess of resentment. She’d tried more than once to take a break, but the instructor had called her out.

“Stopping isn’t an option,” the soothing-voiced woman, whom Faith was rapidly growing to loathe, had said. “Breathe into the discomfort.”

Discomfort, hell. This was pain. This was torture. This was being pounded by iron hammers under the glare of the equatorial sun, and human beings weren’t meant to twist this far. She hated the bully of an instructor, she hated the other students, all serenely twisting and bending away, and she was starting to hate Will’s grandmother, too.

When she was finally allowed to stagger to her feet again and hang up her mat, which was probably going to have to be burned, she could barely bring herself to speak to Miriama. Luckily, Will’s grandmother was busy exchanging cheerful goodbyes and hugs that couldn’t have been sanitary with the other participants, all of whom looked equally, and  loathsomely, refreshed after their punishment by the Hell-born.

Miriama was introducing her now, though, and Faith rearranged her features hastily into what she hoped was some semblance of good humor, although she probably looked more like a melting wax mask of tragedy, especially with her mascara and eyeliner running down her face.

“Will’s partner,” Miriama was saying. “You will have read about her, maybe. She’s got the Kiwis up in arms, hasn’t she, about losing another All Black to the Yank girls, but you can see why, can’t you? Will’s brought her down for a wee visit this week, seeing as he’s been stood down anyway.” Which was so forthright, Faith blinked. She’d thought
her
mother was honest.

“Well, we did notice that,” one of the women said. “Noticed Will, too. Lovely photos, I have to say, and some
very
naughty stories. Stood down or not, I’ve been enjoying them, and I don’t mind admitting it.” She seemed to catch herself. “But I shouldn’t say that to you,” she told Faith. “How are you enjoying New Zealand so far?”

“I just got here yesterday.” Faith wished they would move outside, because if she didn’t get some air soon, she was going to keel over. “But so far, it’s very…pretty,” she finished lamely.

“First time doing hot yoga, eh,” the woman said with a smile.

Faith laughed, then decided it had been a bad idea, because laughing took too much oxygen. “It shows, huh?”

“It does, a bit,” the woman said, and they all laughed. “Never mind, we’ve all been there. Come every day for a month, though, and you’ll have a new body and a new outlook on life.”

Or I’ll be dead.
And what? Her body was bad? She thought she was looking all right these days. There was still too much of her in a bathing suit, of course, and she’d just make absolutely sure Will didn’t see that, not that she’d planned anything different. But this thing wasn’t going to work if she didn’t look like anybody Will would really date. Not that she hadn’t thought that from the beginning. Not that she wasn’t feeling so gloomy right now, she wanted to lie down and cry.

“We’ll get on, then,” Miriama said. “Let Faith breathe. See you tomorrow.”

Maybe
she
would. Faith wouldn’t.

“A bit much?” Miriama asked chirpily when Faith had made it to the front door at last after swimming through the soup of water and sweat molecules that was the studio’s air supply, and was taking in deep lungsful of the crisp autumn atmosphere outside.

“You could say that,” Faith managed.

“Well, a lovely ride home and a shower will help,” Miriama said, and Faith remembered with horror that she was supposed to ride a bicycle back to Will’s house. Maybe she could call him to come get her instead. And maybe he’d laugh at her if she did. Maybe she should just suck it up and try to make it without falling off.

She did, in the end, though her legs felt so shaky, she could barely pedal, and once again, she was having difficulty keeping up with Miriama.

“Go take a shower,” Miriama instructed when they got back to the house and were stowing the bicycles beside one of the garages. “Meet me in the spa pool afterwards. Best part.”

Half an hour earlier, climbing into hot water would have been the last, the very last thing Faith would have wanted, but she was shivering a little now from cool air meeting sweat-soaked clothes, and she muttered agreement and staggered her way upstairs and into Will’s bathroom. She was glad he wasn’t here. She couldn’t negotiate one more thing today, and she didn’t even care anymore that she would be sharing a bed with him tonight. If he didn’t make moves on unconscious girls, she was all good, because she was going to be unconscious for sure.