Page 58 of Catch a Kiwi
We weren’t driving, and we weren’t back at the house. We were at the Niagara Falls Café, which was a not-really-a-restaurant somewhat-converted house, off the not-really-a-highway in the not-really-a-town of Niagara, but was charming as it could be, its tables covered with colorful mismatched cloths and looking out at a peaceful landscape of—yes, green. Green and sheep and sunshine and peace. New Zealand in a nutshell.
It hadn’t been that many hours since breakfast, but we’d hiked about seven muddy, hilly miles, and besides … well, the food was all locally sourced, and the menu had been too tempting. Roman was eating a lamb burger on homemade bread spread with hummus, feta, and other Greek-type treats, and I was attempting some discipline by having a salad. A salad made of greens and herbs from the café’s garden, tossed with Stewart Island salmon that tasted like the fish had been swimming this morning. I wasn’t complaining. I also wasn’t craving scones with cream and jam for dessert. Much.
“I’m not joking,” Roman said. “I’m dead serious. I don’t want to do this, but you’ve convinced me. Win for you, eh. If I have to go, I want company and an escape plan, and bringing my girlfriend along seems like the best way to get both. You could also be a bit better than me in fraught situations. Not in business, but in, ah …”
“Situations where you don’t want to bark at people or terrify them with your killer stare?” I said. “Possibly. Can I have a bite of your lamb burger?”
He didn’t complain, the way some men would have done. He also didn’t cut off a bite. He held it out so I could chomp at it like that Golden Retriever. Which I did.
“Mm,” I said, wiping my mouth. “That’s so good. Want some salad?”
“No,” he said. “And, yeh, that’s what I meant. If I’m not meant to walk out on my so-called father or to tell him or anybody else what I think, I could need you there to smooth things over. In case I haven’t mentioned it, I don’t want to go.”
“How about your assistant?” I asked. “Can’tshebe your girlfriend?”
“Esther?” He laughed. “She’d be worse than me. Esther suffers no fools, and she’ll pretend to be my girlfriend or let me hold her hand when hell freezes over. Nah, I need your sweet kitten face.”
“Mykittenface? I know I look like the girl next door, but akitten?I do not! I’m a software engineer! I’m a?—”
“Sorry, but you do.” He took another bite of burger. When he’d chewed it, he said, “Not the girl next door, though. I’d remember if I’d had you living next door. You’ve got that sweet thing going on with your face, but then there’s the body. Gives a fella whiplash.” He rotated the burger in the air. “But the forehead and eyes and chin and all? Sexy little kitten all the way. And the way your voice is a bit growly, too. That’s seriously sexy.”
“I’mgrowly?”Well, this was horrifying.
He gestured again with the burger. “Smoky. Husky. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh,” I said, and couldn’t think how to answer that. “Delilah’s not disarming, though, and she’s not interested in smoothing anything over.”
“Ah. Delilah.” He looked at me speculatively.
“I’m not leaving her here alone,” I said. “No way. Setting aside the tailbone—in case you haven’t noticed, she thinks she knows it all. Perfectly capable of deciding she should throw a party in your house and drink all your wine, because no one person should own that much of the world’s resources. Especially if we’re going to be—where, exactly?”
“Katikati,” he said. “North Island. Bay of Plenty. Near Mount Maunganui, but not nearly as flash.”
“Waytoo far away,” I said. “She’d have a party for sure. Go down to the beach and invite everybody she meets. I can see it now. If your house wasn’t actually burned to the ground due to a pizza-oven accident, you’d be lucky, and I just spent weeks cleaning it. But we spent a little time there, in Mount Maunganui. Great beach. Lots of cafés, too, but we couldn’t afford to eat in them. But …”
“Look.” He set down the burger. “It’s one afternoon. Saturday. We fly up that morning, we meet people, we chat, we leave. Stay over and go to the beach at the Mount on Sunday, if you like, and eat in some of those restaurants before you fly back to Dunedin. Call it a mini holiday. You, me, and Delilah.”
“And I’m your girlfriend,” I said. “Why, exactly? Why can’t I just be your friend? Your houseguest? I don’t have the wardrobe anymore to be the girlfriend of somebody as fabulous as you.”
“I’ll be wearing shorts,” he said. “It’s a barbecue.”
“Yeah, right. You’re a tycoon and can get away with it, andanyway, men’s dress codes and women’s dress codes are different. I’m guessing you know that. I don’t even have any makeup except one lipstick, because guess what? It got thrown out of the van and I couldn’t find it, and I figured I wouldn’t need it anytime soon. You’d look pathetic in the girlfriend department. I’d better be your houseguest.”
“I’m going to take it on myself to invite my houseguests to my newfound grandfather’s important party, am I?” Roman said. “I thought about fiancée, but …”
“Yeah, that’s a no.” I ate some more salmon. “I’ve been a fiancée. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Delilah would do it, though. She’d think it was funny. We boughtherreplacement makeup, and she even has a dress. Fancy an eighteen-year-old fiancée?”
“No,” Roman said. “Why can’t you use her makeup?”
“Because it’s unsanitary? Because she’s a brunette and I’m a blonde? Because her eyes are brown and mine are gray? Because our skin tone is completely different? Do you really not know that?”
“Oh,” he said. “Being a woman seems like heaps of work.”
“You’re right about that. Too bad I sold the ring, though. The thought of Delilah in it is amusing me. That thing cost over four hundred thousand pounds. I know, because some reporter found out and published the price, or more likely, Felipe told them. It was hideous. Huge triangular yellow diamond like a yield sign, surrounded by a whole bunch of white diamonds on fastened-together gold rings, one above and one below the ring with the yellow diamond. You cannot imagine the tackiness. It covered my finger all the way to the knuckle. Gaudy doesn’tbeginto describe that ring. On the other hand, it looked like it came out of a gumball machine, so maybe people just thought I had bad taste in costume jewelry. What do you say when the guy gives you a ring like that? ‘Oh, my’? ‘You shouldn’t have’? I tried both of those.They didn’t work, and short of screaming, ‘I hate it! Take it back!’ I couldn’t figure out how to get out of wearing it. I’m sure everybody at my job thought itdidcome out of a gumball machine. That was amusing. If Delilah was wearing that thing, sounding eighteen and looking fifteen the way she does? There’s a phrase in the States. Trailer trash. I’ve always hated it, because being poor and living in a trailer doesn’t make you trashy, but Delilah could have some real fun with it. Your family probably wouldn’t invite you ever again, so if that’s the idea …”
“What did you do with the money?” Roman asked. “I’m not addressing the rest of it. Just going to ask why you’re planning to sleep in a tent if you sold a ring like that.”
“Bankruptcy, remember? And it didn’t fetch as much as that. It was ausedgumball-machine ring by then.”
