Page 10 of Just Say Christmas
Never mind. What did it matter? She liked dogs. She’d always wanted one, growing up, but her dad had said, “A good dog is a working dog, and we don’t have a job for a working dog to do. No point feeding something useless.” These days, of course, she worked too many hours to be fair to the dog, so that was it with her and dogs. She’d thought, though,I’ll throw a ball for them, maybe thump a Labrador on the shoulder, in that way they like that makes them smile, and have a laugh.The alternative was staying home and getting a start on Monday’s workload, because she’d finally given her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Seb, the push some weeks earlier, though he’d called again last night. When he couldn’t find something better, she’d bet, but she’d been tempted anyway, even though she knew he didn’t really like her enough. Too often, she exasperated him. Who wanted to be with somebody who was exasperated by her? Saturday night, though, alone with a rugby game and her music? She’d been tempted.
If she wanted to switch Seb to the off-switch for good, she needed to be doing something else that interested her, and watching two dogs get married, then observing Nyree unveiling a terrible dachshund’s very silly, overpriced portrait and trying not to laugh? That sounded perfect. Maybe they’d have chocolate cake for once instead of fruitcake, too. Maybe the rules were different for a dog wedding. One benefit of being congenitally unable to gain weight: you could eat chocolate cake. It was a pretty good benefit.
“Hi,” the bespectacled giant said, his voice coming from inside a couple hectares of chest. He’d uncrossed his tanned arms, which were absolutely filled with muscle and had some dark hair on them. His chest couldn’t possibly be waxed, either. Medieval swordsmen hadn’t done much waxing. “I’m Kane,” he went on. “You must be Victoria. You ready for this thing? Can’t believe I’m doing it.” The words were casual again. The look in his eyes wasn’t.
Wait.Kane. Kane Armstrong. Nyree’s stepbrother, Crusader, and perennial All Black.ThatKane. He was tall and powerful because he was a lock, and her heart was stupid. What, tall men were made just for her, and she was meant to get a warrior? Then why did so many of them go out with undersized women like, say, Nyree? Because they enjoyed feeling massive, muscular, and masculine, that was why. Because they couldn’t get enough of that contrast. And because they could take their bloodypick.
She had a confused moment of wondering whether she should offer to sit in the back seat of the car. A novelty for her, but Tom was nearly as tall as Kane, and Ella was pregnant. As she hesitated, Kane held the door for her, smiled again, and said, “Keep me company?” And she thought,Yes.
She was never spontaneous. She never followed her heart, if she even knew where her heart wanted to go.
Well, the hell with that. Today, she knew. Today, she was saying yes. Today, she was going to try.
Which she had. Pity that trying didn’t necessarily mean it would work. That was why they called it “trying.”
6
The Wheel of Fortune
NYREE
Nyree painted the dainty, translucent wings of a fairy, who was holding a leaf over her head as an umbrella while she flew, and kept one eye on Tom. He was doing the basic painting-in of the castle in the background, the outlines of which she’d sketched in to make it a paint-by-numbers. That was one eye on Tom, one eye on her fairy, and both ears on the passage outside, because she thought she’d heard Victoria’s voice, and it sounded odd.
Tom hadn’t talked for a wee while, she realized. He also wasn’t painting. She asked him, “Going all right, then?”
“What?” he said. “Sorry.” He started painting again. “I’ll finish the castle, then head to the airport. That do you?”
“I thought Marko was going to collect Ella and Caro,” she said. “As he’s out and about already, and they’re staying with us.”
“Yeh, nah. Told him I would.” He was frowning at his castle, painting cream-colored stone walls like fury up in the left corner of the mural. It would be perched on the edge of a rocky cliff, but she was going to paint that. Too much detail required to farm that one out.
She focused on the curling edge of the leaf while she thought about that, adding a bit of yellow that made it look nearly translucent. A little more mischief needed on the fairy-face, too, because she was flying away from somebody. A male fairy, it was going to be, and they were playing teasing games in the rain, zigzagging amongst spotted mushrooms. She wanted Casey to have a wall full of stories, a jumping-off point for her imagination. Casey’s life might seem charmed to most people, but she was in a new place with a new school, a new dad and, soon, a new stepmum and a cousin who would become her brother. That was heaps of change, and heaps of complication. Nyree knew all about that. Casey shone orange-red, full of vitality and courage, but she could still need some stories.
There should be a fairy family somewhere, too. A dad and daughter, and a mum and little boy running to join them. Casey might need to tell herself a story about that as well. Everybody had a story they told themselves, a way they arranged the events of their life so they made sense. You could paint that narrative into a picture in your head, the hard times and the good times both. You could make it beautiful if you had the tools, and anchor your story into belief. That was another kind of art, maybe.
Casey had some help to do it, of course. Nobody more protective, nobody more careful with a precious heart than a hard-man rugby forward who’d let his guard down at last, and Nyree reckoned Casey had found that out.Shepainted the fairy’s face, looking back over her shoulder and daring the chaser to catch up, and thought about painting that fairy family, and also about how much fun it was not to have to worry about being too sentimental, or too fanciful. Whyshouldn’tyou paint pretty things, peaceful things,funthings? Who had decreed that pain and heartbreak were somehow more real and more important than the lovely times in life, and why had anybody listened to that killjoy?
Wait.She wrenched her mind back. Tom. And where was Victoria?
The second part got answered, because Vic came into the room, looking pretty flash for the end of a work week. Nyree still wasn’t quite used to it. She was used to Victoria with her bare feet up on the edge of the coffee table, her hair twisted up at the back of her head with a couple of bamboo chopsticks stuck through it, “because they work, they’re cheap, and you can even get them in colors if you want, though who cares,” wearing yoga pants despite the fact that she didn’t do yoga.
She needed to ask more about why Victoria wasn’t wearing yoga pants right now, because Vic looked more than tense. She decided to start with, “Hi. You don’t look ready to paint.”
“Well,” Vic said, “you don’t look ready for a glamour pre-bridal weekend suitable for press coverage, so there’s that. What are you going to put on your Instagram page?” Trying to sound like her relaxed after-work, wine-and-pizza self, and failing.
“I don’t have an Instagram page,” Nyree said.“Youdon’t have an Instagram page. Why are we talking about our Instagram pages?”
“Maybe we should,” Vic said. “Maybe we should enter the current decade before it’s over.” She’d unfastened her sandals and kicked them into the corner and was stripping her shirt off over her head. Tom looked over at her, then hesitated, his brush frozen in the air, looked away again fast, and started to paint his castle wall like it was his one dream in life.
“Vic,” Nyree said. “Why are you taking off your clothes? Tom’s about to bolt.”
“Oh.” Victoria looked down at herself. “To paint.”
“In your bra?”
“It’s blue, though. They even call it a T-shirt bra, because it’s the same material. It’s basically a short T-shirt. I don’t want to get paint on my regular shirt, as I just bought it, and it’s warm in here with the windows open. I didn’t think this through when I changed to come over.”
“Tom,” Nyree said, “explain to the room why they call it a T-shirt bra.”
