Page 6 of Kiwi Gold
As for me? I was going to take the very best photos I had in me, and roll with it. And focus on success and solvency and in-command adulthood, not on three A.M. what-ifs and terror.
That was a plan.
3
ABSOLUTELY NO CODPIECE
Lachlan
A man who’s just got home from weeks in the bush and whose boots, not to mention his trousers, still have puncture wounds in them, should not have to go to a costume ball on New Year’s Eve. It should be a rule.
Right. I’d made it a rule. That was a no.
“Come on,” my mate Jax’s wife, Karen, said. “It’s for a good cause, finishing the restoration of the theater. Don’t you care about culture?”
“No,” I said.
She laughed, but she also kept talking. “It’s New Year’s Eve tomorrow, though, and you don’t have a partner, at least there’s nobody with you on that towel. This seems to be the social event of the Dunedin season, too. If there were a Dunedin season, which there isn’t. What else are you going to do, though, go to a bar? Or stay up late with your whanau, maybe? Which is what we’d be doing, otherwise. Not exactly the glamorous life.”
Since those were indeed my two choices, I didn’t answer. At the moment, we were on the beach at St. Clair, where Karen had just dropped down on her towel beside me after a bracing swim in the always-freezing water. Also beside her baby, Logan, who was sitting on my towel and gumming a set of plastic keys like he was confident that if he just salivated enough, he could digest them, in between equally determined attempts to crawl off and eat sand. The kid had a steely-eyed focus I recognized from knowing his father.
And possibly his mother. It was looking like it, anyway.
“Somehow,” I said, interrupting the journey of Logan’s sand-filled fist toward his mouth and handing him the keys again instead, “that’s not selling it for me. I don’t follow the society pages much. Besides, it’s Shakespeare. That means the costume is tights. I went to school.”
Jax, who was ignoring the curious glances at his new amphibious leg prosthesis, with its futuristic, matte-black metal plate and line of drainage holes, picked up his son, settled him on his own towel, and squeaked a dinosaur at him. “Mate,” he said. “I’m being Romeo. If I can be Romeo, you can do this. I wanted to be Mercutio. At least he has a sword fight. Somebody put an end to that pretty smartly, though, and Romeo it is.”
“Only because me as Juliet is funny,” Karen said. “We hadTaming of the Shrewsuggested, of course, and Jax thoughtthatwas funny. Hideously misogynistic, though, so that’s not happening. I tried to sell him on me being the fairy queen and him with a donkey head, fromMidsummer Night’s Dream,you know, which covers most of the Shakespeare anybody knows, but he wouldn’t. This was our compromise. Anyway—date night. New Year’s Eve. Champagne. Attractive costume,withmask, because did I mention? It’s masked. Possible heady flirtation with strangers.” She sighed in a hopeful sort of way.
“Oi,” Jax said.
I hadn’t met Jax at school, like you’d think, even though we were close to the same age and had both grown up in Dunedin. Different sides of the tracks, though. I hadn’t exactly attended Otago Boys, with its gingerbread towers and eye-watering fees. No, I’d met him some years back, in a hotel bar in Abu Dhabi, during a bit of R&R for him and a break in a yearlong stint in the UAE for me. My first big copper find, and I’d been riding high. Back then, Jax had been doing his own flirtations with strangers, and they’d flirted back. A face that was almost too handsome, and a body that had appeared in too many undies ads? Yeh, they’d flirted back.
He was still good-looking, I guessed, in a damaged sort of way. Dangerous, definitely. Except not to his wife. Or his kid, since Jax was making the squeaky dinosaur talk now. If anybody had been tamed, it hadn’t been Karen. I may have shuddered a bit.
“I didn’t saymedoing the flirting,”Karen said. “I said Lachlan. Although … possibly. Would you be jealous?”
When a woman looked for somebody to tease, her first choice probably normally wouldn’t be a Special Forces bomb-disposal expert with one leg, too many scars, and toughness generally rolling off him. Other than Karen, because that was exactly the bloke she’d picked.
“Yeh,” Jax said. “I would. I’m already jealous. What’s Lachlan’s costume, then, so he doesn’t look like a prat?”
“It’s obvious,” she said. “Hamlet. Black tunic, jeans, black boots with the jeans tucked into them, black mask. Sword, definitely. Dark and dangerous. He can borrow the boots from you, if he doesn’t have any. Army boots totally work, and you’re about the same size.” She looked me over in an appraising sort of way.
“No need,” I said. “I have boots. Well-worn ones.” I might have mentioned the punctures, possibly, except that her husband had had his leg blown off by an Afghan IED, which made my snake adventure not all that exciting.
Karen said, “This costume willrock.I’d want us to do it, because Jax as Hamlet is delicious, you must admit.” At which Jax smiled a bit and didn’t answer. “Except that I don’t much want to be Ophelia. She has about ten lines, and her big moment is going crazy from the stress and drowning herself. No, thanks. I’d like some agency, please.”
“I’m not dark and dangerous,” I felt compelled to point out. “I’m a geologist, I’m very nearly blond, and the last time I was in danger, I didn’t have a gun and wouldn’t have shot it if I had. I ran instead. Though I am going in this water, which counts for something.” I stood up to do it, now that my baby-minding was over. It would chill me to the bone without a wetsuit, but I was ready to be cold instead of hot for a bit, and anyway, this was the sea I’d grown up with.
There’d been a period there, back in those high-school days, when I’d been sure my path out of my child-filled, female-centric life was as a commando. I’d come here on the bus every day after school and forced myself into the water for a brutal five or ten minutes before heading home to, yes, babysit.
I may have been overcompensating. I’d also almost frozen off the wedding tackle a time or two, and in case you haven’t noticed yet, I hadn’t become a commando. Whereas Jax, who’d apparently lived to play in all senses of the word back then, had. There you were. Life.
“It doesn’t matter whether youaredangerous,” Karen said blithely. “You pretend. Hence the costume. Although, excuse me, you have a huge scar across your cheek at the moment. Which is from abullet.All you have to do is say that, very casually, and she’s melting. Ask me how I know. Or you can babysit some more, of course. We were planning on taking Logan to Jax’s parents, but I’m sure they’d appreciate a break. If you were just going to hang around home …”
“Do we know that Lachlan has a clue what to do with a baby?” Jax asked. “Pretty cavalier with my son and heir there.”
“You could say I have a clue,” I said, for some reason. “I have quadruplet sisters. Eight years younger. I can change two nappies at once. Ask me how many seconds it takes me. And I’m not boring some poor woman with the story of my bullet wound. I’m not that much of a prat yet.”
