Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 2

  They’d called in security. To escort me out of my office. My space. My company. My brainchild.

  I was still holding that stupid pen, the one Josh had been using since we’d been at NYU together. That very first day in Firms & Markets, in the junior year of my Biochem degree and the first year of the concurrent MBA program I’d tacked onto it, he’d been sitting in the front row like nobody but me ever did, wearing a black sweater that looked like cashmere. His dark hair had fallen over his eyes as he wrote with his fountain pen, while everybody else took notes on their laptop. He’d caught me looking, had stared back at me for a long moment, and then, when I’d thought he wouldn’t, he’d smiled. A knowing smile, like he knew my dirty secrets. Like he was ten years older and a hundred years more worldly, and he couldn’t wait to show me how. My heart had jumped into my throat, and I’d thought, That’s my guy. Oh, baby.

  Now, he held his hand out for his pen. I ignored him, opened my dollar-ninety-eight, silver-glitter-covered spiral notebook to a new page, wrote Josh Ranfeld is four inches. Maybe five, in enormous sapphire-blue-ink letters, ripped it out, and slapped it onto the table.

  “Karen,” Deborah said, her voice pained. “That’s hardly helpful.”

  “No?” I asked, and my voice barely shook. “And yet I find it strangely satisfying.” I pressed down on the gold nib of the pen, then, like I wanted to press all the way through the notebook to the cardboard backing. I pushed with the strength of a hundred hours of running beside the river to clear my head and let the wonderful ideas come. Five hundred hours of rowing until my palms blistered, heaving air into my burning lungs. Tens of thousands of hours of thinking and planning and talking and testing and working to make all of this happen, because it was going to pay off someday. We were going to make our fortunes, and everybody else’s, and do good for the planet, too.

  I pressed until the ink pooled on the paper and the pen’s nib snapped off, and Josh jumped up.

  “Too late,” I told him. “But then, you always did have trouble keeping up with me.” Then I whirled toward the windows. They still opened, because we couldn’t afford rent on a fancy place, not when we were saving our money for the important things. I yanked the black handle and got ready to throw.

  I checked first, of course, that I wasn’t going to hit somebody. I mean, however mad you got, you couldn’t hurt some innocent pedestrian, or crack a motorist’s windshield and make them crash. The hesitation gave Josh a chance to grab my hand, and gave the security guy a chance to head over, too.

  I shoved Josh hard with my other hand, right in the stupid pumpkin sweater, and sent him crashing backward into the corner. Then I threw the paper and pen out the window.

  The wind swirled and blew the paper against the glass, and it stuck there.

  Josh Ranfeld is four inches. Maybe five.

  The security guy smiled. I saw it. So did Josh.

  The pen landed in the street, like I’d meant it to, and a UPS truck rolled over it and drove off through the slushy snow.

  “Your package is busted,” I told the man of my dreams. “Sorry.”

  Jax

  I was so cold, my teeth were chattering.

  The bone-white sky above me was tinged with brown clouds. Clouds weren’t meant to be brown. They should be gray, full of rain. Keeping the hills green.

  I hadn’t felt rain in so long. I wanted to feel it now. The cool touch of it, the wetness on your face, your tongue. The prickle of wet grass under your bare feet as you ran, and the patter of raindrops on leaves when you took shelter under the trees. Instead, the choking dust hung in the still air. There was wetness in my mouth, but I was desperately thirsty all the same. The liquid tasted metallic, like I’d drunk from an old-fashioned canteen. I could sense movement around me, but I couldn’t hear a thing.

  Somebody’s face over mine, then. Sergeant Sharif Khan, part of the Afghan unit we’d been training. His mouth was moving, his expression urgent, but I couldn’t hear. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and he needed to put it on, because the base was under attack. Wasn’t it? There had been a truck. I’d seen the face in the window, the smile, and had been moving forward at a run, shouting, when the white light and the pressure wave had hit me.

  I needed to get up. Right the hell now. Where there’d been one explosion, there could be more, and I needed to deal with that. The freezing cold was creeping up my legs, though, and I couldn’t feel my feet.

  I turned my head, because there was more movement over there. Figures coming through the brown haze, moving fast.

  Taliban. Get up. My weapon was there, on the ground, my LMT MARS-L, which should be on its sling, around my neck. I could see it. Out of reach.

  Not if I moved.

  Come on, you bugger. Move. The brown haze was wavering, though, trying to go into blackness, my head was light, and the nausea was rising from my chest and into my throat.

  You’re not dead yet. I raised myself on my elbows and was preparing to scoot back when another shock wave hit me. Another explosion. White-hot, blooming like a mushroom cloud.

  Not an IED, I realized dimly, through the frenzy in my body. This explosion came from inside me.

  You couldn’t feel this much pain. It wasn’t possible. It would kill you.

  I kept working on dragging myself toward my weapon anyway. If I got to it, I could fight back, instead of lying here, unable to help. I set my teeth against the scream, raised my head, scooted back another few centimeters on my elbows, and saw the boot. On its side.

  It wasn’t empty.

  Some poor bastard had lost a leg, because I hadn’t been fast enough. My fault.

  The pale leather had a white mark on it, a deep scratch on the heel that was cut nearly through, from where I’d slid down a gully feet-first and had cut it on a rock outcrop two days ago.

  Somebody else materialized from the dust cloud. Herbie Wilson, medic, and foulest mouth in the New Zealand Defence Force. His mouth was moving, which meant he was swearing, even if I couldn’t hear it. He had his hands on me, which meant I couldn’t make it to my weapon, or that I could stop trying. I could feel the vibration through the ground, too, the steady whomp-whomp-whomp of a bird coming in.

  Medevac, or air support, or both.

  I needed to replace that boot, I thought as the pain took me into the fire, burned me down, and charred my bones. That boot was buggered.

  There wasn’t much more important than your boots.

  You couldn’t . . . run . . . without your . . . boots.

  Karen

  The man came out of the ocean like the god of the sea. Or half of him did.

  At first, I thought, Wait. How is the water that deep? I might only have been in New Zealand for five hours this time around, but I’d spent a fair amount of time in the past on Main Beach at Mount Maunganui, and there was no way the bottom dropped out as quickly as that, even at low tide. It was a long beach. An enormously long, sheltered, peaceful, absolutely New-Zealand-y beach, which was why I’d come here straight from the airport instead of driving the forty-five minutes to Waihi Beach, where I could have—well, gone to the beach. By stepping over the wall from the patio.

  It wasn’t what somebody else would have done, maybe, but I didn’t have to make sense or be logical. I was giving myself a pass on that for today. I might feel like a woman whose soul had been scrubbed raw, who was starting again from the bottom, but you know what they say about the bottom. The only place to go is up.

  Tomorrow, I’d start answering to somebody else, being responsible for somebody else’s money and somebody else’s business. Tomorrow, I’d start getting my optimism back, and my drive. Tonight, I was on my own, and I was going to do what I wanted. And when I’d stepped off the plane at Tauranga Airport more than twenty-four hours after I’d stepped onto another one at New York’s LaGuardia, and had been catapulted magically out of the slushy depths of winter, with icy berms of snow turned to a dirty brown by too many honking cars and too many people hustling through the whis
tling wind like it was a race, and into a sunny afternoon in a place where even the birds looked relaxed, what I’d wanted was to go to the beach right the hell now.

  So I’d left a company I loved and had helped build from the ground up, and been beaten down in the process. So I’d lost a boyfriend, or a fiancé-without-the-ring, or an almost-partner, or whatever Josh had actually been besides “bad boy.” And “rat.” I was far away from all of it and ready for some Girl Time, and I’d learned something, which mattered. Or it would sometime, when it had stopped being “flayed-skin humiliation” and had become “life lesson” instead.

  One of those life lessons should be that every bad boy I’d ever met had just turned out to be a bad man. Yet here I was, caught up once again in the seduction of the slow burn, the sidelong, smoldering glance, and the tantalizing suggestion of darkness inside, just from watching a man coming out of the water.

  Wait, though. The beach didn’t slope that much, because there was a toddler standing in the water not too far from him, and she looked normal. Mr. Intense was on his knees. Walking on his knees.

  Well, that was weird.

  He wasn’t the god of the sea anyway, because that would have been Neptune. Poseidon. Whatever you wanted to call him. Old guy, white beard. This guy wasn’t old, and he didn’t have a beard. He did have some very manly shoulders, though. And not much tan at all, which was strange in a sea god. Not even a below-the-T-shirt-sleeve tan, like you’d expect from a man who spent any time at all outdoors. He did, however, have abs you could eat off of. Like a table, that is, not in a dirty way. Or possibly in a dirty way, too.

  New York women of my acquaintance, especially those who’d gone to NYU, tended to be drawn to the metrosexual type. The sensitive, artistic type. Unfortunately, my preference now seemed to be muscles, non-gym levels of toughness, and men who could do things with their hands and possibly didn’t smile much. See “Bad-boy obsession, unfortunate.” Right this moment, I was liking dark, aggressively short hair sticking up spikily from what I guessed had been a hard swim, shoulder and arm muscles that announced they were here to work, and something about his body language that was way too purposeful for a guy hanging out at the beach.

  There was something odd about his shoulder and chest, though I couldn’t see quite what from here. Maybe he was a merman. That would explain the top-half deal, the no-tan, the fined-down muscle, and the intensity, if mermen were intense. I’d read a book once, as a teenager, about an intense merman. He’d stuck with me.

  There were no actual mermen, though, in New Zealand or elsewhere, so . . . why was he on his knees? Had he stepped on a stingray? Been stung by a jellyfish? You’d be hopping, though, or hobbling, in that case, wouldn’t you? Also, you’d be screaming. At least I had, the one time I’d been stung by a jellyfish, in Australia. I’d thought I knew all about pain, but that had hurt.

  He looked too calm to have been stung by a jellyfish, no matter how tough he was. Just as I was thinking it, he leaned forward, set his palms on the firm sand at the water’s edge, swung a foot up and between them in a sort of yoga pose that was nearly a handstand, got upright on his feet—foot—and hopped.

  Oh. His left leg ended a few inches below the knee. That was something you didn’t see every day. He hopped on the other leg up the beach, bent over and lowered himself down, and came up shoving glasses onto his face. Black-rimmed, rectangular glasses. Nerd glasses.

  Nerd glasses and muscles and toughness? Whew.

  Maybe I had a previously unrealized amputee fetish. That would be weird and uncomfortable, except that I wasn’t checking out his missing leg. I was checking out the rest of him as he pulled a khaki T-shirt over his head and down a whole long stretch of torso.

  No tattoos, which meant he was unlikely to be Maori or Samoan even in part, disappointing as that was. In New Zealand, tattoos were mostly tribal, and you didn’t ink up with a tribal tattoo if you weren’t part of the tribe. It was disrespectful, which was why I had no tattoos. Non-tribal ones seemed lame in comparison: Flowers or zodiac signs or birds, not to mention Chinese characters that turned out to mean “Terrible mistake” or “Barbecue grill” instead of “Courageous heart,” like the tattoo artist had told you. My sister Hope had bought me a robe like that in college, when I’d finally moved out and gone to live in the dorms, and a classmate had had to clue me in. I’d wondered why the Chinese girls had giggled when I’d encountered them in the bathroom. Imagine finding out that was your tattoo. The mind boggles.

  And if I felt like I was wearing that “Terrible mistake” tattoo right now—that was why I was here, wasn’t it? Life reboot.

  Which reminded me that I didn’t want a man anyway, so the merman’s ethnic background didn’t matter. I was in no position to have a romance, and I was bad at hookups, since I tended to lead with my heart. At least I’d been bad at them eight or nine years ago. Call me out of practice. The very last thing I needed was an encounter, romantic or no, with a brooding, damaged bad boy. A fling guaranteed to leave me sobbing into my pillow and seeing a couple more ribs in the mirror? Nope. I didn’t need any more drama.

  That sounded breezy. Breezy was good. I’d used to be that way naturally. Right now, I was having to fake it, but it beat sobbing and collapsing again.

  Meanwhile, I was noticing that my not-rebound had really nice thighs, thick with defined muscle. When he hopped, they had to work hard, and I could see them doing it.

  Possibly, I was creepy. But I hadn’t even looked at a man this way for so long. Josh had been surprisingly insecure, I was realizing. I’d thought it was “sexy possessiveness,” but then, I’d thought a lot of stupid things. Now, it was like being too sick to eat for months, when you hadn’t been able to stand even looking at food, and then getting well and thinking, “Ooh. I want some of that. With bacon and extra cheese.”

  I’d stop staring at him, though. Not cool. Anyway, if I had somebody in mind to help me over my rough patch—and I might—it wasn’t him.

  My non-staring wasn’t quite working, because I noticed when he wobbled a little on the sand, then caught his balance and looked around. He saw the kids at the same time I did, and he went—“on alert,” I’d call it. Like something was going to happen, but what could happen? The teenagers were a good twenty-five yards away, and he was balanced on one foot. The guys were messing around with a pair of crutches. Laughing. Entitled. Punks.

  Oh.

  I knew that kind of kid. I hated that kind of kid.

  I could do something about that, anyway.

  Jax

  First time, worst time, I’d thought when I’d come out of the anonymity of the sea on my knees and prepared to face the world again.

  Swimming had been better than I’d expected, once I’d adjusted for the difference in my kick that’d had me traveling persistently to one side at first, since my left leg couldn’t do as much without a foot, and there were no lane markings here to keep me on course. The salt water was cooler and more buoyant than the pool at the therapy center, and the solitude, the endless, scrubbed-clean expanse of sea and sky, were exactly why I was in this spot, the thing I’d missed most during four and a half very long months.

  The quiet, or not exactly, because the sea was never that. The murmur and swish of the water as you passed smoothly through it, the undulating sound that was the ocean breathing, the taste of salt water on your lips. The feeling that settled all the way into your belly. You could call it peace. Not something that had been in overlarge supply in my life in recent years. I wouldn’t want it all the time, I hoped, but I could use it just now.

  I’d had to use my core more during the swim to compensate for my lower legs, which was all good. I had more core strength now than I’d ever possessed in the past, when I’d supposedly had everything. Counting my blessings, as per requirements. Now, my muscles were trembling a little with hard use, which was also a good sign.

  You could get a sort of aqua-leg that ended in a swim fin, and put a regular fin on your remain
ing leg. You’d be nearly superpowered then. I hadn’t wanted to do that straight away, though. I’d needed to go out there under my own steam, unburdened by technology, and see what happened. And to let people see me outside of any kind of controlled environment, uncovered, scarred, and without my leg, and get the first time over with. If you couldn’t look at things straight on, you couldn’t see past them, and I needed to see past them. I had absolutely no intention of staying in this spot, because this spot sucked.

  I wasn’t wearing my specs, which was unfortunate, or maybe not, because I couldn’t see people staring. If I were looking at things straight on, though, that included admitting that this was bloody awkward.

  Don’t fall over, and you’re all good. This morning, I’d rolled out of bed after a dream in which I was running with my squad, my heart pounding, my lungs burning, and everything in me responding to the challenge. My body was weighed down with its usual thirty kilograms of kit, and I was holding my weapon like an extension of my hands, with the adrenaline flowing through me and making me feel invincible. Unbreakable. It had all been so vivid, and more real than anything in my life had felt for nearly half a year. It had been right there, under my feet, in my hands, all around me. Power. Hardship, and surmounting it. The possibility of death, and the awareness that you were alive.

  I’d woken, realized it was daylight outside, I wasn’t in the desert, and there was no life-and-death happening at all, had let the wave of disappointment wash over me, then thought, Bathroom, and headed for it. Upon which I’d fallen straight over, bang onto the floor, because I’d tried to set down a leg that wasn’t there.

  It was a good sign that I’d forgotten, I reckoned. It meant I felt like myself again, and not like a capital-A Amputee. It was one leg, and a few cosmetic alterations to my face and torso. Half of one leg, actually. It wasn’t like I’d lost the wedding tackle.

  I’d be remembering to forget some more right now, except that I was lacking the necessary equipment to do it. I couldn’t see perfectly, but I could see that. My shirt was where I’d left it, four or five meters from the water’s edge, but when I got there, my specs weren’t on it as I’d left them. They were beside it instead, half buried in the sand. I shoved them onto my face, got my shirt on, and looked around.