Just in Time (45 page)

“Yeh,” he said. “Just that good. How did you think of all that? All those…feelings?”

She turned her head to look at him. “How? From loving you, of course. From knowing how I felt about you. How scared I was that you could never feel the same way, and how hard I fought it, because I was so sure there was nothing but pain there for me. From thinking about what would make my own heart swell to hear, and what would make me cry.”

He swallowed at that. “Well, so you know—If you said those things to me, they’d make my heart swell, too. And you already made me cry.”

“Mmm.” She snuggled closer, put an arm across his chest, and he got an arm under her so he could hold her. “So it was good, huh?” she asked again, as if she couldn’t help it.

“Yeh,” he said. “It was bloody good, and I’m so proud of you. My brilliant partner. But maybe what I’m offering this weekend isn’t quite enough. Should I have brought you a necklace instead?”

She levered herself up to kiss his cheek, then settled down again. “No,” she said tenderly. “That’s fiction. I love what you’re offering. Because mostly, what I want is you.”

It wasn’t her story, now, that was making him choke up, and he pulled her a little closer and bent to kiss her himself, because unlike Hemi, he didn’t have words for this.

He had the right place, though. They were anchored off Tiritiri Matangi in the outer reaches of the Hauraki Gulf, the gentle slap of the waves against the hull the only sound breaking the winter silence. A bit chilly, of course, but they were cozy all the same in their sleeping bag, and if she got too cold, all he had to do was take her to the berth in the cabin below. There was nobody else around, not even another boat, on this early-September Sunday. Nobody to keep them company but the handful of visitors bedded down in the bird sanctuary’s bunkhouse, the little blue penguins, and the kiwis, and that was fine by him. That was perfect.

“I promised you a sky full of stars once,” he said at last. “Took me a while, but I got there in the end. I may not have brought you diamonds, but I brought you these. Or at least I brought you to them.”

“You did.” Her satisfied sigh came to rest somewhere deep in his soul. “And they’re exactly what I wanted.”

They lay a minute more in silence, the black night around them broken by a million tiny pinpricks of stars, and best of all, the broad swath of creamy light that was the Milky Way. He heard her intake of breath, and a split-second later, saw the reason for it. A meteor arcing its way across the vastness of space, trailing a cloud of white behind it.

“What is it to the Maori, do you know?” she asked, sounding dreamy. “A shooting star. Does it mean something?”

“It’s a Raririki. A little shining one. One of the children of Rangi, the Sky Father, playing across his father’s robe, tripping and falling.”

“A good thing, or a bad thing?”

“A bright one like that? Good thing. Good omen.”

“Good.” She snuggled closer, and he held her just a little bit tighter.

“What does it mean to you?” he asked.

“Well, when I was a little girl, I read that it meant you got one wish. But I’ve never seen one before, because I haven’t seen the stars enough. This is my first.”

“So what’s your one wish?”

Silence, and then a sigh. “If I tell,” she said, “it doesn’t come true.”

“Ah. Scared to trust it, are you, even after everything we’ve been through. Scared to think it could last. Or that’s wishful thinking of my own, maybe.”

“Not—no. Not wishful thinking.” Her voice was so tentative. As if she didn’t dare believe it. As if she hardly dared even wish for it. He knew exactly how she felt, because he felt the same way. But it was time to go ahead and speak the wish aloud. There was a point when you had to put it out there, and it was now.

He waited a moment, trying to think how to say it, and then decided there was no perfect way. There was only doing his best, and hoping it was enough. So he took a breath and did it.

“It’s hard, isn’t it, to take that leap,” he said. “To close your eyes and step out into space, and trust that I’ll be there to catch you. Even that you can say it, that you can tell me what you wish for. But you can, you know. I’m standing right here with my hands out to pull you in, and I’m going to stay here. And I’ll be counting on you the same way, because it’s exactly the same leap for me. Nothing to hold onto but you, nobody but you to catch me if I fall. It’s a leap of faith, is what it is, and the only way to take it is together.”

“Oh. That’s…” She’d turned onto her side, not looking at the stars anymore. She was looking at him instead.

“Solomon rang me the other day to tell me he’s got that spot at last,” he told her. “That he’ll be on the squad for the Outlaws, and not the practice squad. He may be a starter and he may not, but he’ll be digging deep for it. If he doesn’t make it, it won’t be because he didn’t try.”

“That’s…that’s great news.”

“And you’re wondering why I told you that at this particular moment. It’s because of this. Because that last day, when I was leaving Las Vegas, he and I were talking about this mad life we’ve got, about how much he’s had to move, all the teams. About all the travel you do when you’re a sportsman. And he said something to me, talking about Lelei. He said, ‘Home is where she is.’ I wondered how that would feel, and I knew I didn’t have a clue. And now I do. I know that these past couple months, when I’ve been gone, when I’m flying home…I’m coming back to New Zealand, yeh, and that’s home, and that matters. But I’m also coming home to you. I know it’s home, because you’re there.”

He thought she might be crying a little. He put a hand out and found he was right, wiped the tears from her cheek with a gentle thumb. “Dunno if crying’s a good thing right now, or a bad one,” he said, trying to laugh and failing. “I’ve got my heart in my throat here. Or maybe I should say I’ve got it in your hands. Maybe you could give me a hint.”

“It’s—it’s a good thing,” she said. “Because this isn’t my home, but it…it is. Because you’re here. Because when you come home, it’s the day I’ve waited for.”

No woman whose eyes are lighting up because you’re home, and this is the day she’s had circled on her calendar.

He heard Koro saying it, and he looked out beyond Faith to the stars overhead, and knew that he was up there, and that somehow, he knew. That his wayward grandson had found it at last, and that, most of all, he’d been able to recognize it. Because of everything his Koro had taught him about living his life like it mattered.

You can stay. You can stick. Your choice. Your life. You can run away from it. Or you can run towards it.

He was going to run towards it. Starting right now.

“Your tourist visa’s almost up,” he told her.

“Uh…I know.”

“Another thing you’re wondering why I’m saying. I’m saying there’s another kind of visa you could get, so I can keep coming home to you. If this is a life you think you can live, and if you want to live it with me. And it’s a…” He breathed deep, felt all those old shackles falling away, and said it. “It’s a fiancée visa. And if it’s too soon,” he hurried to add when she didn’t answer right away, “we can wait as long as you like for the wedding. We can wait a year, if that’s how long it takes you to be sure. But I can’t let you go home, not without trying to keep you. I’ve got to try. I’ve got to take the leap. I’ve got to hope that you’ll be there to catch me.”

“Oh, Will.” She was crying for real now. “Of course I’ll catch you. I’ll always catch you. And how can I go home?” She laughed a little, and it wasn’t steady at all. He could feel her shaking, and he needed to hold her so badly.

“I’m already here,” she told him, her voice so tender, “because that’s what love is, isn’t it? I’m already home. Because I’m with you.”

The End

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Escape to New Zealand episode. Want to hear about new releases, sales, and preorders—plus receive a FREE Escape to New Zealand book? Sign up for my
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My thanks as always to my awesome critique group: Barbara Buchanan, Carol Chappell, Mary Guidry, Kathy Harward, Bob Pryor, and Jennifer Spenser; and to my editor, Charlotte Herscher, for helping me make this book the best it could be.

Check out more sweet, sexy rugby players in the Escape to New Zealand series

Learn more about the places from the book, listen to Maori songs, watch the All Blacks doing the haka, and more on the
Rosalind James website
.

Read on for the first chapter of Hope and Hemi’s stand-alone erotic romance (NO cliffhangers!)

Fierce (Not Quite a Billionaire, Book 1)

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re around certain people, you seem to grow an extra thumb, and not in a good way? That you say the wrong thing, trip over your feet, and the more you realize you’re doing it, the worse it gets? That’s what that day was like.

“You’re late,” Vincent snapped at me the second I hustled through the door of the photography studio.

I handed him his coffee. “Sorry,” I said automatically. Even though I wasn’t. Sorry or late. I just wasn’t as early as usual, because I’d woken to find the double bed I shared with my sister Karen empty, and to the sound of her moaning behind the flimsy partition of the bathroom. She’d only just made it out the door to school on time, insisting she was “fine.”

“Have you managed to forget since yesterday,” Vincent said caustically, “that this is, oh, only maybe the most important day of my
life?
Something else matter more? Your girls’ softball team win the championship and stay out late having pizza? One too many wine spritzers during St. Theresa’s annual quilting bee?”

“I’m here now. Put me to work.” I managed to get the words out around the tongue I was biting for the 2,763rd time, and stuck another mental pin in my Vincent-doll. The things I put up with for the twenty-two bucks an hour that, with the Social Security check Karen had been getting since our mother’s death, was all that was keeping us clothed and housed. Well, you did what you had to do.

Vincent shook his handsome head of jet-black hair and snapped his manicured fingers at the studio space beyond. “Get set up. White seamless. Go.”

You might think that working for a New York fashion photographer was glamorous. You might, until you took a closer look and saw that I was a gofer. It was my job to make sure everyone was comfortable; that coffees and bottled waters and exotic teas were available on demand for everybody from the photographer to the stylist to the models; to keep track of the shot list and move the lights and, in general, do whatever anybody said. There was no room for ego. But then, another ego wouldn’t have fit in the studio anyway. Between Vincent, the clients, and the models, there was always more than enough ego to go around.

Especially today. The first day of a shoot for Te Mana’s menswear line, the first time Vincent had been landed this most coveted of contracts. As he’d told me again and again in the past weeks, this was his ticket. If I didn’t screw it up.

Like the assistant was the linchpin. Yeah, right.

I was hustling like always, keeping track of the models, half a dozen ridiculously handsome, sculpted men who were getting their hair and makeup done now. Checking that everyone had everything they needed, obeying Vincent’s hissed, frantic instructions, all while I kept an anxious eye on the clock as it ticked ever closer to ten.

Business as usual, until I set the shot list down for Vincent, and he reached for it and knocked over his coffee.

“Clumsy
bitch,”
he hissed, whirling, and I really thought for a second that he was going to slap me. Too late, because I was already moving.

I grabbed the roll of paper towels and dropped to my knees to mop up, and he shoved his chair back, caught my hip a painful blow, and sent me sprawling. My arm landed in the pool of coffee, the brown liquid instantly soaking the sleeve of my white long-sleeved T-shirt.

That was when
he
walked in. To the sight of my butt in its tight jeans sticking straight up into the air, my hair in my face, and my arm in the coffee.

“Good morning, Mr. Te Mana,” I heard Vincent say.

I took a couple of final hasty swipes, clambered to my feet with my hands, full of sopping paper towel, tucked well behind me, and smiled. My hair was still in my face, and I reached a quick hand up to dash it away even as I was stepping back, staying out of the way. Staying invisible. And trying not to stare.

In this business, you get used to hype. Everything’s the most. No, the
utmost.
Everybody’s drop-dead gorgeous, and everything is fabulous. Except he actually
was.

Hemi Te Mana. Wunderkind designer and, some said, ruthless investor, the man who’d assimilated lesser enterprises as fast as they’d run into trouble. The man with the golden touch.

And the golden skin. Or bronze, because that was the word. The
perfect
word. For a statue.

Maori, I reminded myself. From New Zealand. Tall and big and so clearly strong. His great-great-grandfather had been a warrior chief, they said, and it wasn’t one bit hard to believe.