Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3) Read online

  He was cuddling Obedience now, standing back with his hands on her shoulders and smiling at her, and, yes, that was good. At least Obedience wasn’t looking down. She said, “I remember you. I do. From when I was little. Dutiful.”

  Gray said, “Dutiful.” Flatly. Like he couldn’t believe it. I wanted to say, “It’s not as bad as Chastity.” I didn’t.

  “Dorian,” my twin said, then extended a hand that Gray shook. “Hi. You must be Gray. Thanks for helping Daisy and the girls. I wish she’d told me she was doing it so I could’ve come, but oh, well, that’s Daisy. Sorry about the car, Daise. No hope of getting it back?”

  “No,” I said. “Once your car goes into the river, that’s pretty much it. I did call the police and make a report, and they said the same thing.”

  “Your car went into the river?” Fruitful asked.

  “You didn’t tell them?” Dorian asked.

  “No,” I said. “We had enough to think about.”

  Dorian said, “I’ve got a little while, anyway, before I have to be back at work. I’ll come along with you to show the girls the new place, and then I thought I’d take you all for a shop. You’ll need groceries, anyway.”

  “We’ll need everything,” I said. “But there’s a bit of an issue. With the keys. The flat key was on the ring with the car key, so …” I shrugged, trying to make it look lighter than it felt.

  “Locksmith?” Dorian asked.

  “Who’s going to let me in, with no ID and no proof that I live here? I’m going to have to break in through the window. If I can just borrow that hammer, Gray. Of course, then I’ll have to call somebody to fix the window, but no worries, we can do that. Once I have new bank cards, that is.”

  There was so much to do. There’d always been going to be too much to do, but I hadn’t been contemplating replacing a car then, or doing the rest of all the things-to-do without one.

  Gray said, “No.”

  I said, “Pardon?” This was going to be hard enough with a hammer. He wouldn’t even lend me one? I’d have to use a stick, then. If I could find a stick. Where did you find a stick in the middle of the city? “I know you need to leave,” I said, trying to put myself in his place. The place of a man who’d had to help rescue one woman, then rescue two more, and then do … all the rest of this. “Clearly you need to leave. It’ll just take a minute. We have to get in, though. The girls can’t … I can’t …”

  I had no ID. No bank card. No money. No clothes. No nothing.

  “Wait here,” he said, in the bossy way he did tend to say things, then ran across the street and did that leaping-into-the-truck deal. I wished he’d stop doing that. It was distracting.

  I waited for Dorian to say something like, “He’s made himself at home, hasn’t he?” He didn’t, but then, Dorian was the last thing from bossy. Dorian accepted things as they came, which was a good thing. Except when you needed a window broken into.

  Gray vaulted out of the truck bed again and jogged across the street holding a hammer, and Fruitful said, “I’m glad we can look at men now.”

  Obedience said, “You’re married, though, Fruitful. I mean, you still are, even though you won’t be later, I guess. Chas—uh, Daisy stopped being married, so maybe it’s not exactly true that you’re joined for eternity.”

  I said, “I hope not, because I’m not even being joined for now,” and tried to take the hammer from Gray.

  He lifted it up high. I said, “What?” and reached for it again.

  In answer, he handed it to Obedience and said, “Hold this for me.” Then he told Fruitful, “You can’t walk all the way around the back on that ankle. Mind if I carry you again?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t mind. It does hurt.”

  “We need to get an X-ray,” I said. “We’ll do that, soon as we’ve got things sorted here.”

  “What did she do to her ankle?” Dorian asked, as we headed around the corner toward the narrow back alley, with Gray walking in front with Fruitful in his arms as if he knew where we were going.

  “Twisted it,” I said. “Running away.”

  “Running?” Dorian asked.

  “Dad chased us,” I said. “There was running.”

  He said, “I should have been there,” so I let my vague irritation go and said, “No. You shouldn’t have. You have Chelsea and the baby to think about.”

  “Have you been blessed?” Obedience asked. “I didn’t know that. How wonderful.”

  Dorian started to tell her, but I didn’t pay attention, because we were in the alley and had reached the iron staircase bolted to the brick wall that took you up to the flats, and Gray had put Fruitful down and was taking the hammer from Obedience.

  I said, “I’ll do it.”

  Gray said, “No, you absolutely will not.”

  See? High-handed again. He was already up the stairs, which meant I couldn’t argue with him unless I wanted to shout my disapproval or run up behind him and try to grab the hammer from his hand, which would clearly be a pointless exercise. And besides, I didn’t want to balance on that rail. I had more physical courage than most, if “courage” is defined as, “Being scared and doing it anyway, because you’re too stubborn to give up,” but I would’ve had to steel myself for that. I also wasn’t one bit sure I could’ve done it without falling.

  At the same time, I wasn’t loving thinking of Gray doing it. It wasn’t his flat. It wasn’t even close to his flat. He had exactly zero obligation here.

  He called down, “Window’s on which side?”

  I opened my mouth, shut it, opened it again, and said, “Left side. Be careful. You have vertigo.”

  “I’m always careful,” he said. “Quit mentioning the vertigo. You’ll jinx me.” Then, somehow, he swung himself up onto the handspan-wide iron railing like it was easy, then balanced there with one hand lightly hanging onto the windowsill and tapped the glass of the little window above with the hammer until he broke all the jagged shards out. They fell into the room with a faint tinkle, and I thought, Second one in two days. Call this a destructive pattern.

  I wanted to go up there and help. I could’ve held onto his belt or something. I also wanted to say, “You’ll need something to put over the base of the window so you don’t cut yourself.” I couldn’t do any of that, though, because his balance was too precarious.

  He wouldn’t die, if he fell. Not as athletic as he was, he wouldn’t. He’d break something, though. Five meters to fall, and the alley was paved.

  Oh, bugger. This was going to be my fault.

  Obedience had her hands over her face and was peeking out between her fingers, muttering something. A prayer, I was sure. Fruitful had her hands over her mouth. Dorian was just staring at Gray, then at me. And I was frozen, afraid that if I moved, I’d startle him.

  This wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t saving a life. It was getting into my flat to get the spare key. What had I been thinking, even suggesting it?

  I was going to have heart failure.

  He wasn’t even wobbling. Why wasn’t he wobbling? Instead, he was jumping down to the iron platform again and taking off his shirt.

  This time, I didn’t wait. I was running up there.

  He looked around at the sound of my feet on the metal stairs. “What, you don’t trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you. That was … it was …” I was waving an arm. “Too dangerous. So much too dangerous.”

  “Hence why I didn’t let you do it.” He leaned over and put the shirt over the bottom of the window frame. His torso was shaped like that V you so rarely saw in real life, his skin was golden brown, and the tattoo went all the way over his shoulder. All the way over his pectoral muscle, a diagonal line of black across the shoulder like the edge of a feather cloak, and a design of spearpoints and triangles and a suggestion of plaited rope. Black ink, brown skin. He had so little body fat and so much thickness of muscle, you could do an anatomy lesson just looking at him, his back and shoulders perfectly illustrating the sh
ifting slabs of rhomboids, trapezius, and latissimus dorsi.

  Stop it. This is not about his muscle development. “It’s my flat, though,” I said, keeping to the program. “And here.” I pulled off my own T-shirt. I had to wriggle some. It fitted snugly, because I liked to wear clothes that fitted snugly, because I’d grown up never wearing clothes that fitted snugly. I handed it to him. “Use this. And what? One shirt isn’t enough protection, and you’ve already seen me half naked. Twice. Besides, I’m wearing a bra.”

  “A red bra.”

  “Yes. I enjoy color. Sue me.” It wasn’t any kind of fantasy lingerie. It was a normal bra that happened to be red and unpadded, because I refused. I had small breasts and wasn’t ashamed of them, but, again—that made showing my bra, or me, absolutely no big deal.

  “Nah,” he said, and he was starting to smile. “Red’s good.”

  “Also,” I said, moving on, because here we were, pretty bloody close together and, you know, half-naked, and I’d swear I could feel his heat, and I also wanted to study his tattoo, especially the part on the pectoral, because there it was, more or less at eye level, and that was a lot of pectoral … “Also,” I said again, “you should stand here and boost me instead. I was thinking I could hold onto your belt while you stood on the railing, but you’re too much heavier. You’d pull me over and I’d break my arm, and you’d fall anyway. Whereas I’m nimble and not big, we know I can get through a tight window, and you’re clearly strong. Your holding me makes sense.”

  “Not to me,” he said. Then he was up on the railing again, arranging my shirt over his, then grabbing the window frame while I wanted to put my hands over my eyes like Obedience, but couldn’t stand to. He hoisted himself up and swung his body over the sill, though, like a circus acrobat. The last thing I saw of him was his legs in those snug, faded jeans, and then the soles of his boots. He must have landed on his palms in there. I hoped it hadn’t been his head.

  I leaned against the railing, put my hands on my knees, and tried to breathe.

  My heart couldn’t take all this adrenaline.

  It was a good thing he was leaving.

  22

  The Bat Cave

  Gray

  Once again, I was riding an adrenaline overdose. What was I doing here?

  I knew what. I was riding my bike on one wheel past a girl’s house. Fifty-fifty chance of success. You’d end up on your back on the pavement with the bike on top of you, or you’d wow her with your mad skills.

  Had that ever actually worked on the girl, though? Probably not.

  Just now, I was upside down on my palms, avoiding the shards of broken glass closer to the wall, with my boots still on the other side of the window. I walked my hands forward, jumped my feet down, heard the crunch of those glass shards under my feet, and stood up. After that, I took a couple of deep breaths and thought about a man subject to vertigo who chose to stand on a narrow railing and pull himself through a high window.

  Such a man would probably not be thirty-seven years old. Presumably he’d have learned better by then. On the other hand, I couldn’t have let Daisy do it, and her brother hadn’t exactly been stepping up.

  That was the explanation. At least that was the one I was going with.

  Bloody hell, though, but she’d looked good in that skimpy little bra.

  I found the rocker switch in the dimness and switched on the lights. Then I stood there a moment and looked around.

  Well, no.

  A muffled knocking frenzy, and I unlocked the apartment door to find a narrow, dark corridor that smelled of moldy carpet and old cooking, and turned the lock on the outside door.

  Daisy was in before I’d stepped back. In fact, she barreled straight into me, and my arms went around her, my palms against the smooth skin of her narrow back, that dip at the base of a woman’s spine where her waist curved in and her bum curved out. She softened against me for about half a second and held on herself, then stepped back and said, “You scared me to death.”

  “Yeh?” I went over to the window for our shirts and tossed her hers. Mine had a couple little rips in it. I pulled it on anyway and tugged it down. Daisy was staring at me, but I couldn’t tell why.

  Oh. She’d been scared. I said, “How d’you imagine I’d have felt knowing you were doing it?”

  “It’s. My. Flat,” she said, pulling on her own shirt, which I’d have watched more closely, but her brother and sisters were watching me and looking pretty shocked, so maybe better not. “In other words, my responsibility. You could have broken your leg.”

  The girls were following us with their eyes as if this were a tennis match. Dorian was, too. Dorian, I thought, was definitely a spectator. That wasn’t kind of me, maybe. Too bad. I said, “I didn’t break my leg, though. Have some faith, woman. And not much of a flat, is it? This is the escape pod? Emphasis on ‘pod’?”

  Daisy said, “It’s not exactly flash, no, but …”

  “Not exactly flash? No, it’s not. It’s not exactly not horrible, either. I’d better get your window fixed, because you only have two in the whole place. Once I cover it up, you’ll have only half as much completely inadequate light as you did before. You’re all going to get scurvy from the lack of sunlight.”

  “You try getting something on a week’s notice that’s walking distance from the school and the supermarket,” she said. “And from my work, by the way, as I don’t have a car now. Since somebody pushed me into the river. And you don’t get scurvy from lack of sunlight. Scurvy’s lack of Vitamin C. You get a Vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “A vitamin deficiency. That’s what you’re all going to get.”

  “He pushed you into the river?” Dorian asked. “And you went to stay with him anyway?”

  “I didn’t—” I started to say.

  “What’s your point?” Daisy asked me. “Fruitful and Obedience don’t care that the place isn’t that nice.”

  “I think it’s very nice,” Obedience said. “It’s got a couch and everything, and we’ve got our own cooker and fridge! And a TV. Isn’t that a TV? Or is it a computer?”

  “It’s a TV,” Daisy said.

  Obedience had already headed into the back of the flat. “And a bathroom!” she called out. “And a separate bedroom for you and me, Fruitful! With a closet! Come see!”

  “I can’t,” Fruitful said. “My ankle.” She’d taken off her shoe and was resting her bandaged foot on the coffee table. The table was all right, if you went for “basic.” The rest of the place wasn’t.

  If they’d been bats, it would’ve been perfect, because it was a cave. Or a home for the mole people, maybe, because it was grotty as hell, with a floor so sloping that a marble would have been gathering speed all the way across. Under the other of the exactly-two windows for four rooms, a single stretch of scratched green-laminate benchtop ran between the dented, dull stainless-steel sink and the white cooker with some of the paint rubbed off and probably only two working burners, topped by a few cabinets of the absolutely cheapest material known to man and a refrigerator that had seen better days. That would be the kitchen. The two metal-framed windows looked out onto that alley, and the flat had no baseboards and no trim, which was probably because they’d never have managed right angles.

  As a builder, I was offended by all of it. It was technically clean and freshly painted, though. That would be Daisy. I could see her in the tiny kitchen space with its torn lino, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees, scouring the oven that had probably held the burnt-on remains of a thousand student dinner disasters, fumigating the fridge, throwing a blanket over the couch and hanging pictures, making a space for her sisters. The lighting in the kitchen was fluorescent, and the floor under the carpet she’d put down in the main room was more scuffed yellow lino. I was willing to bet the bathroom was a horror show, though I wouldn’t have put it past Daisy to have regrouted the tile during her dinner break from the Emergency Department.

&nb
sp; I asked Dorian, “What did you think, when she rented it?” Since he was still just standing there.

  He said, “It’s not down to me to decide, surely. It was always Daisy’s choice.”

  “Did the two of you paint it?” I asked.

  “No,” Daisy said, going for a broom and starting to sweep up the broken glass. “I painted it.”

  Dorian said, “I offered.”

  “It’s three rooms and a bath,” Daisy said, tipping the glass into a plastic bin. “Three small rooms. I only did one coat. It barely took two days.”

  I said, “I have an idea.”

  Daisy

  Gray explained.

  I said, “What? We’re not going to live with you. No.”

  “Not forever,” he said. “For a couple weeks. And I told you, it’s not ‘with me.’ You’d have your own place. Until Fruitful’s ankle is better, so she doesn’t have to do those stairs. How did you get her up here just now? It can’t have been pleasant, and going down will be worse. Until I’ve fixed your window, and you have a new car and have used it to enroll the girls in school and buy their uniforms and …” He waved a hand in a sort of blessing-the-waters gesture. “The various other things. Clothes and all. Hair. Makeup. Shoes. Whatever it is girls need.”

  Fruitful said, “Uniforms?” Obedience said, “Makeup.” Dorian said, “You could come stay with us, of course. Chelsea’d love to have you.”

  Chelsea just about wouldn’t. “You have a one-bedroom apartment,” I said. “I’m done fitting a whole family into a one-bedroom apartment, and as Chelsea never has done it and is six months pregnant, that’s a no. I’d like my sister-in-law not to actually hate me. Anyway, why would we stay with you when we have this? And no car, and would be farther away? Not that I don’t appreciate your offer,” I went on hurriedly, because Dorian could get his feelings hurt. Apparently, I could be blunt. “But no. And you realize, Gray, that there’s a flaw in this plan of yours.”