Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (105 page)

It all began frighteningly enough, with following their guide—or, in her case, following Will’s absolutely fantastic rear view, in a pair of shorts again—up an endless ladder set against a tree trunk that was a good six feet in diameter.

Higher and higher into the air she climbed, wanting to stop, wanting to climb down, but that wasn’t an option, because there was somebody else behind her. Finally, she came gratefully to rest on a platform set high in the treetops, a canopy of green and birdsong all around her. She felt a little better when her feet were on solid wood again, despite the fact that the platform was completely open, and that there were nine people crowded around it, including one of them who would rather have been hugging the trunk. That would be Faith.

“Please tell me it’s not possible to fall,” a middle-aged woman, sharing the adventure with her husband and already looking dubious, said to some nervous laughter from the rest of the group.

“Haven’t lost one yet. That’s what the harness is for, eh,” Roman, their male guide, said, exchanging a laughing glance with Will. “Want to show them what happens if they let go?”

Will grinned at the young man, and before Faith realized what he was doing, he had leaned back from the edge of the platform and stepped off, was dangling in midair from the chest, twisting a little in the wind.

Faith gasped, cried out, and in the next two seconds, she had reached for him, grabbed him around the waist, and pulled him back in, and everyone was laughing. Everyone but Will. His arms had come around her instantly, and he was holding her tight.

“Sorry, baby,” he said. “No worries. It’s all good. Nobody’s falling today.”

“Apologies for the moment of heart failure,” Roman said cheerfully as Faith disengaged herself from Will, tried to calm her racing heart and pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. “But, yeh, the harnesses are there for a reason. You’re safe as houses, and we’ve just experimented with our million-dollar man to prove it to you.”

That was it. Will’s cover was blown, because all the guests were looking curious now.

“You’ll hear,” Caroline, the other guide, was piping up on the other side of the platform, “that nothing matters more to Kiwis than the All Blacks. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that our rugby team is our most famous export. If we’re willing to dangle our starting first-five from his harness thirty meters above the ground ten days before he’s due to lead New Zealand to another hard-won victory against England? You know it’s safe.”

“Maybe we should drop him, then. I’ve got twenty pounds on that match,” the British lady’s husband said, and the group laughed again. Everybody but Faith. She was still too embarrassed.

“We’ll start with something easy,” Roman said. “Across the swing bridge you go. One at a time, please. Start us out again, Will.”

“Nah,” he said, his arm still around Faith. “We’ll let somebody else go first, give Faith a minute.”

“I’m all right,” she hastened to say.

“Then why don’t you lead us off?” Roman asked her, and if he wasn’t a sadist, Faith didn’t know who was.

“You don’t have to,” Will was murmuring. “Just say no. You know how to do that. I’ve heard you.”

That did the trick. Faith took a breath and said, “Sure.” Her new life was about taking chances, after all, about putting herself out there, not taking the easy route.

This wasn’t the easy route, no matter what Roman had said. It was just walking, true. But it was walking across two narrow planks set on cables, with two more waist-high cables at either side to hold onto, desperately in her case, until she’d crossed to another platform, the whole thing swaying dizzyingly with every step and sending her heart galloping along with it. Finally, though, she came to rest on solid wood again, and this time, she really did have to force herself not to reach out and hug the tree trunk.

“What you’re standing around is a totara,” Caroline said when the group had reassembled. “One of our most beloved native trees. This one is about four hundred years old.”

Faith’s eyes flew to Will’s again. That had been the tree in the Maori saying, she remembered, the one about his grandfather. He looked back at her, not smiling for once, and she knew he remembered, too.

After a while, when the message got through to her stiffened limbs that she really wasn’t going to fall, she relaxed a little and began to enjoy her adventure. Moving from one platform to the next, surrounded by the murmuring canopy of green, with monstrous ferns sprouting directly from the bark and fern trees swaying in the breeze with all the grace of palms and none of the wicked sharp edges. The melodious song of tui and bellbird filled the air around them, and she was so high, so remote, it was as if she were a bird herself.

She relaxed, that is, until she had to fly, feeling exactly like a baby bird being pushed out of the nest. When she stepped off her first platform into thin air, clutching the handles of the zipline with desperate urgency, the canopy flashing past her with dizzying speed, she thought her heart would stop.

At least she hadn’t been the first to do this one. Will had already done it, had bounced off a far-distant tree and landed on the platform with ease, so she knew it was possible. But it was all so…high. So fast. So scary. And, in the end, so exhilarating.

By the fifteenth or sixteenth time, she was grabbing the handles with eagerness, her blood rushing in her veins, her heart pounding with joyous adrenaline. When she took her final ride, the longest and most thrilling yet, she was laughing out loud, whooping with the fun of it, lifting her feet to bounce off the tree at the other end and releasing the handles of the zipline, moving to re-clip her line so the next person could go, as if this were something she did every day. As if she actually were an adventurous traveler instead of Faith Goodwin, conservative stay-at-home worker bee.

Will’s arm had gone around her to cushion her landing as she bounced, and she laughed up at him, the adrenaline still surging. “Still think you need to hold me? I’m all brave now, see?”

“Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse,” he said. “But you’re right. You are. Awesome, eh.”

She was here, sharing the moment with him, and she also knew that she had to go back and write Hemi and Hope doing this. She had to let Hemi share this adventure with Hope. He had to be able to show Hope his other side, even if—especially if—he showed it to nobody else. Because a man who would do that for you, a man who wanted to have fun with you without making fun of you, who enjoyed making you smile, and laugh, and
live?
He was a keeper.

“Thanks,” she told Will when they were safely at the bottom again, had bade their fellow adventurers goodbye. “I’m a little wobbly still,” she admitted. “Glad to be on solid ground again. But that was super fun. Thank you.”

“Thought it might be.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the car key. “Want to have another adventure, drive home on the left? We should get you practicing.”

“You’d trust me with your car?”

He shrugged. “Why not? I’ve got insurance in case you have a smash. And how are you going to be the perfect houseguest, endear my mum to you with your helpful journeys to the supermarket, if you can’t drive?”

She groaned. “Was it that obvious?”

“Well, yeh. Good try, but I think it’s going to take more than that, if you keep tempting her baby boy. So…drive?”

She was about to say no, but the challenging light in his eyes, the keys dangling from his hand, made her change her mind. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“Why not. Famous last words, eh. I remember saying them myself a few months ago.”

“If I start posing for naked pictures,” she said, punching the key fob for the door and then promptly going around to the wrong side, “stop me. I think I’m all right with driving.”

“They weren’t naked.” He waited until she’d gotten out of the way, then slid in on the passenger side. “As somebody told me over and over again, they were just suggestive. Very tasteful. Hardly even sexy, come to that.”

“Yes.” She shoved the key into the ignition and told herself that she could do this, that she knew how to drive. “But then, I was trying to talk you into it.”

She peeped across at him, and he was smiling. “Think I know that,” he said. “Why d’you imagine I did it?”

“Well, not because of me.”

“No? Maybe not. And maybe so. But today…I had fun today, suspension or no, because that’s what you are. Fun. I’d forgotten how much I liked being with you. And, Faith…” He sighed. “You’re so bloody pretty.”

Surely there wasn’t enough air in this car, not with him looking at her like that. “I’ve been jumping around in trees for three hours,” she managed to say. Her heart had begun to knock against the wall of her chest as if it were trying to escape, because her heart was smarter than she was. It knew how much danger it was in. “I don’t have any…any makeup on. I thought…” She swallowed. “It would smear.” She was turning red now, she could tell, and she was babbling like a fool, and she needed to shut up.

“Yeh. You don’t. And you’re still pretty.” His hand had come out to caress her cheek, his thumb brushing lightly over the mole above her lip that had been the bane of her teenaged existence. “Thanks for caring that I might fall,” he said softly. “Thanks for pulling me back.”

His thumb was tracing the curve of her upper lip now, her lips were parting under his touch in spite of herself, and in about ten seconds, he was going to be kissing her. She knew it, and she knew she should care.

“Want to change our deal?” he murmured. “Say the word.”

She wanted to. She wanted to so badly. “I can’t,” she forced herself to say instead. Because she liked him too much. She wanted him too much, and if she had him, she’d want to keep him.

His smiled a little crookedly, and his hand caressed her cheek one last time, then fell. “Right.” He shifted in his seat. “You can’t. Got it.”

He was back to his cheerful, teasing self again after that, as if the tender moment hadn’t happened. He coached her as she drove around the lake and into town, somehow managing not to hit anything, and only once starting to turn into oncoming traffic, until a sharp word from Will and his quick hand on the wheel swung them out of danger.

“Sorry,” she said shakily, her heart pounding for an entirely different reason now.

“No worries. Everybody does it once, usually just when they’ve started to relax a bit, have stopped paying quite so much attention. Same for me when I drive in the States. Pull over and park here, and I’ll take you to lunch.”

“You know what?” she said when she’d managed the nerve-wracking ordeal that was parallel-parking on the wrong side. She blew a tendril of hair out of her face, then kept exhaling, because she had so much tension stored up in her body by now, she was like an overfilled balloon.

“What? And keep breathing,” he advised. “You did it. First time’s always the worst. That’s what I tell all the girls.”

That surprised her so much, she laughed, and he was laughing, too. “What?” he asked again.

“You’re nice,” she said. “You are a nice man.”

“Hmm,” he said. “That sounds suspiciously like ‘I value our friendship.’ But come on. Rattle your dags, because I’ve got a date with the gym this afternoon, and unless I’m guessing wrong, Kuia’s going to be dragging you off to yoga again. Need to get you fortified.”

“Nope.” She hopped out of the car. “She’s not, because I’m one step ahead of her. Never underestimate the power of desperation.”

Close Personal Friends

At three o’clock that afternoon, sure enough, Faith was on a bicycle following Talia’s blue-cardiganed back. She was breathing cool outdoor air, too, however tinged with sulphur it was, instead of the Sweat Vapors of the Damned.

They rode through city streets, skirted the bowling green and the rose garden beside the flamboyant half-timbered expanse of the Rotorua Museum, then turned onto a paved path. The smell was stronger here, steam rising in plumes on either side. When they reached the lake, Talia hopped off her blue bicycle and began pushing it by the handlebars, and Faith followed suit. She followed the girl down a path edged with the ever-present ferns, the expanse of Lake Rotorua on one side, the green hills and the clouds overhead reflected in the water. Black swans floated, majestic and serene, in the shadow of weeping willows that draped their branches over the water’s edge, while mallard ducks paddled nearby.

“So pretty,” Faith said, feeling all the inadequacy of the word.

Talia didn’t answer that, because, Faith supposed, this was nothing but her back yard. “There they are,” she said instead, and Faith had to hurry to keep up as the girl rushed the last few yards, left the path, and dumped her bicycle on a rocky shore where a group of five or six young people were gathered, some sitting on a log, a couple standing.

A young man in a hoodie and jeans turned his head at their approach. The only one of the group not in school uniform, he looked a little older, too, with a faint mustache and beard decorating his lean face. He was Maori, Faith thought, at least partly so. Not as tall or as well-built as Will, but with the thin build in skinny jeans that would appeal to a teenage girl.

“You’re late today,” he told Talia.

“Sorry,” she said, sounding a little flustered. “I had to go home first and get my…Will’s partner. This is Faith, everybody. And this is Chaz,” she said, indicating the young man. She went around the group, naming the rest of them, and Faith did her best to smile and look young and fun, like somebody who wanted to kick back and share the moment.

Chaz pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out and offered it to Talia. “I can’t,” she said, with another quick glance at Faith. “Will’s here.”

“Wouldn’t want to get big brother’s knickers in a twist,” Chaz said. “So, Faith. Escaping the house? Talia’s mum giving you a bit of a bad time, with Will in the naughty chair and all?”

The rest of the group laughed a little nervously, and Faith smiled coolly. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think mothers tend to be protective of their sons. Your mother’s probably exactly the same.”