Page 53 of Kiwi Gold
“Oriana,” she said. “What is she going to think?”
“That you’ve hurt your foot. Do you have an elastic bandage in the flat?”
“No,” she said, and tried to laugh. “No. For the first time in so many years—I don’t.”
“Then,” I said, “let’s go get that sorted. I’m not going to leave you like this.”
24
CLASH OF TITANS
Lachlan
I did not need twinsin my life, I reminded myself the next morning, en route to Lark’s house once again. Or a dog. Or a woman with that much trauma in her past. I had sisters, and I had nieces, too. I couldn’t even fix their problems, and my lifestyle didn’t work for any of it. I had my proposal in for a Canadian job, looking for oil, and another in Bolivia for silver, and I was off to Saudi Arabia in a week to meet with the client for the job I wanted most, because I’d been short-listed. That would be the job in Mali. If I got the contract, it would mean weeks of hard work, then a month-long journey of exploration in the Fouta Djallon highlands, teasing out the secrets hidden under the grasslands and the sandstone beneath, all the way down in the granite. I knew Torsten Drake was short-listed for that same contract, and if I wanted to beat him again—well, the two halves of my life hadn’t married themselves yet. In fact, I had the strong suspicion they were headed for a royal barney. A clash of titans.
Which, yes, wasn’t just my sisters. It was the woman, too. Laila. Night beauty, her name meant. Dark beauty.Who either didn’t or couldn’t want me, and I couldn’t sort out which it was. Confusing as hell.
Last night, for instance, when she’d talked about her mum, and then when she’d sung that song, it had felt like I was touching her, or more like—that she was touching me.
I belong to my love, and he belongs to me.
It felt like one of those Maori myths you heard about, ridiculous as that sounded even to myself. Mahinaarangi and Turongo, maybe. Mahinaarangi, the high-born maiden, coming to me as I walked home in the darkness, stealing up to me like a thief in the night and whispering in my ear, ‘Taku aroha e te tau; taku aroha!’ Telling me how she loved me, but not showing herself, and leaving nothing behind but her scent.
Laila’s scent, that subtle floral thing she wore, had lingered in my lounge last night, or I’d imagined it had, and she hadn’t.
All of which made no sense. In the story, Mahinaarangi had done all the running, and Laila was doing none of it.
Well, not quite true. She’d asked me to do the dating thing—thepretenddating thing—so that was some running, I guessed. Pity that half the time, she seemed to be running away.
Oh, and then there were those other titans. My mum and Torsten Drake, which didn’t complicate things much.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Lexi said, when I’d arrived for the post-mortem, bringing, yes, a fruit salad. I needed to find another go-to dish. I was getting tired of fruit salad.
“Yeh?” I asked, holding Lark’s youngest, eight-month-old Thea, in my lap, where she was slowly shoving pieces of scrambled egg into her mouth, getting a fair few of them on me in the process, since Lark had dumped her there while she’d finished making her asparagus-and-shallot frittata. Her husband, Ewan, had the two-year-old, Claire, in a booster seat and was supervising the very messy eating of a toaster waffle and more scrambled egg, and my sisters were bunging various dishes on and off the stove and into and out of the oven, so I couldn’t complain too much.
Well, I could complain. That I wasn’t cuddling a brunette with hair down to her bum, giving her croissants and coffee in bed, which she was possibly eating clad in nothing but that glorious hair and a sleepy smile, or maybe a much more transparent and less billowing white nightdress than the one she’d worn before. After I’d spent the night showing her what a man could do if he actually cared about pleasing a woman and wanted to pay her the attention she deserved, which I’d be showing her again, slow and sweet as you please, as soon as she finished that croissant.
In my dreams. Unfortunately, that was the part of relationships I knew how to do, and it was the part she didn’t want. Widows with six-year-old twins and three-legged dogs don’t tend to have long, lazy lie-ins with their new and commitment-shy lover, and if those women have been raised Muslim, don’t show their collarbones or let down their hair, and have fathers who hate you? They don’t look at you from under their lashes, and they definitely don’t ask you to kiss them. They don’t tend to get anywhere closer to your bed, in fact, than your dining-room table, where they let you wind an elastic bandage around their ankle and carry them home, after which they shut the door in your face and you go to bed alone.
Which had been the agreement.
Lark said, “Nothing dramatic about it. Mum was a bit reserved, that’s all.”
“Or,” Lexi said, dumping a mug of coffee in front of me with so little ceremony, a bit of it splashed out, as if she hadn’t spent half her career thus far as a waitress, “she did her frosty-woman-of-substance thing, because she felt uncomfortable—”
“Or threatened,” Larissa said.
“All right, threatened,” Lexi said. “Whatever. And sat there looking regal and imposing and absolutely unimpressed and uninterested, and the rest of us—"
“What do you say, though?” Larissa asked, interrupting her again. “To the father of your children, who turns out to be somebody you knew and didn’t like the first time?”
“D’you think she didn’t like him?” Lexi asked.
“Obviously,” Larissa said. “Did youseeher?”
“Huh,” Lexi said.
“I was talking, though,” Larissa said. “To Lachlan. And what do you say to your dad who isn’t really your dad? It was so awkward. Like an interview.”
