Santa's Secret (20 page)

Excerpt:

It was the nineteenth of December and
eighty degrees in the shade.

After years of living through cold northern
hemisphere Christmases, Dion’s brain struggled to compute the bizarreness of
his new surroundings. The tarmac on the road shimmered in the hot sunshine, and
Sean had switched on the car’s air con to combat the high humidity. In
December! It just didn’t make sense.

Also, while flying from one side of the
world to the other, Dion had crossed the International Date Line and somehow
lost an entire day. How the hell had that happened? Had he actually travelled
back in time?

Sean signalled and took the road to the
town centre before glancing across at him. “My mother would say ‘if the wind
changes, your face will stay like that.’”

Dion continued to frown as he stared out of
the side window at the lush, sub-tropical landscape of the Northland of New
Zealand. “It looks so alien,” he murmured, studying the arching palms and
large, vibrant flowers. How odd that it appeared so unfamiliar considering he’d
lived there from the ages of eight to eighteen. He remembered collapsing in bed
late on Christmas Eve as a teenager, listening to the sound of cicadas outside
his window, his skin hot and crisp from a day spent in the sun and surf. “I
thought it would feel like coming home. But it doesn’t. It feels weird.”

“You’ve been gone nearly a decade,” Sean
observed. “It’s not surprising it seems strange. And you’re not a Kiwi anymore.
You’ve lost your accent and sound all flash now.”

Dion smiled wryly. His father had taken
great pains to teach him how to speak ‘properly’ before he went to Cambridge.
He’d thought his Kiwi lilt still replaced the upper class twang when he left
the office, but obviously not as much as he’d assumed.

He fixed his gaze on the shops lining the
new one-way road system. The streets were wide and the cafés spilled tables and
chairs onto the pavements. People lazed under big umbrellas that shaded them
from the hot sun, drinking coffee while a busker entertained them with folksy
jazz on a guitar.

It could have been the Mediterranean—the
south of France or Greece. Everyone looked as if they were on holiday, tanned
and wearing shorts and T-shirts, Sean included. Dion felt overdressed in his
shirt and chinos, hot in the thick material, his shirt damp against his back.
Perhaps he should have worn something more casual. Did he have anything more
casual in his suitcase? He’d forgotten how laid back the Kiwis were.

“What’s Christmas like in England?” Sean
asked. “Is it all deep and crisp and even?”

“More mild and damp,” Dion said. “I’ve only
seen snow on Christmas Day once. It usually rains. And it’s more commercialised
than here. Adverts on the TV start in August. And the shop windows are full of
fake snow with cheesy songs piped on a loop.”

“Sounds great.”

“You get used to it.” Even though he’d
criticised it, he couldn’t stop the defensiveness creeping into his voice. He
didn’t particularly love the festive season in the UK, but he’d made a life for
himself there, and he wasn’t going to let Sean insinuate that his move to
England had been a mistake.

He glanced across at his old friend. They’d
kept in touch occasionally over the nine years since he moved away, on Facebook
and via the odd email, but they’d mainly talked bloke talk, about rugby and
politics and movies. He hadn’t been able to get any real sense of how Sean had
changed since their teenage years.

He’d been relieved to still recognise his
once-best mate. He’d spotted him immediately across the tarmac at the small
Kerikeri airport. Sean had been leaning on the gate, waiting, and Dion had
spotted his stocky frame, albeit layered with a few more pounds. His short
blond hair had thinned on top, but it still stuck up in the same familiar way
at the front.

They’d clasped hands and then bear-hugged,
and for a brief moment emotion had swept over Dion. They’d been close when they
were younger, and he would be forever grateful for the fact that Sean’s parents
had taken him in for six months after his mother died, before he left for the
UK.

But then Sean pulled away to help him with
his luggage, and the moment passed. And perhaps he was imagining it, but after
his initial pleasure at seeing his friend, Sean now seemed more reserved, cool
even. Why would that be?

“So, how’s married life treating you?” Dion
hoped to warm up the atmosphere by encouraging his mate to tell tales of family
life. Married guys always seemed to want to extol the virtues of their
partners, and he’d learned that it helped to get men to talk.

He’d seen the pictures of the wedding on
Facebook four or five years ago. He didn’t know Sean’s wife, Gaby, but she’d
looked stunning in her wedding dress. They’d sent him an invite, but it had
coincided with an important meeting in Germany. Plus he wasn’t sure at the time
that he wanted to revisit his old life, so he’d politely declined. He’d thought
they’d be relieved to save some money on a place setting. Had they been upset
instead?

“Great.” Sean’s face relaxed into a smile.
He glanced across at Dion, looking a tad mischievous. “You should try it
someday.”

Dion ignored the taunt. He was adept at
steering conversation away from talk of settling down. “And two kids, eh? No
hanging around then.” They were both only twenty-seven. To Dion it seemed a
young age to already have your family done and dusted—unless…were they thinking
about having more than two kids? Jeez, some folks were a glutton for
punishment.

Sean shrugged, signalled left and took a
new road Dion didn’t remember. It appeared to skirt the old Stone Store. He’d
heard that the bridge across the inlet had become choked with debris and burst
its banks during heavy rain, so they must have removed the bridge and diverted
traffic away. Shame—he’d liked the old road past the historic buildings. They’d
all had some good times in the river. He remembered the day Sean had pushed
Megan in, and how outraged she’d been. She’d stood there with her hands on her
hips and yelled at her brother, beautiful in spite of looking like a drowned
rat.

“No point in waiting,” Sean said. “It’s
good to have kids while you’ve still got the energy. I find it exhausting, even
though Gaby does most of it.”

“I guess.” Dion knew nothing about having
children. One of his half-brothers in the UK had a couple, but he’d never got
involved with them. He tended to hold babies in front of him like a rugby ball,
and when people saw how uncomfortable it made him, they stopped giving them to
him. He wasn’t one of those jolly uncles who took the kids to the zoo and
bought them sweets. The children steered clear of him now when his brother came
to visit, and he was quite happy with that. “Are the kids at home with Gaby?”

“Nah, one of Gaby’s friends has them for a
few hours,” Sean said. “They take turns to give each other a break.”

That didn’t surprise Dion. New Zealanders
had always had the ‘number eight wire’ approach to life. When the first
European immigrants arrived, thirteen thousand miles away from their homeland,
they quickly learned to invent things they couldn’t easily obtain, and the
number eight gauge of fencing wire was soon adapted for countless other uses in
New Zealand farms, factories and homes. The phrase came to represent a Kiwi who
could turn their hand to anything, and they were a people who reacted to
problems by pulling together to help each other out.

The houses thinned, and as Sean took the
road leading to Opito Bay, the countryside spread away from them, rising and
falling in a series of emerald hills until it met the glittering sea on either
side. The finger of land formed part of the sub-tropical paradise of the Bay of
Islands.

Dion blew out a breath. “That’s quite a
view.”

Sean smiled. “Yeah. I can think of worse
scenery to look at on the way to work.”

Dion thought of the narrow, dirty streets
of London, the crowded Underground, the smell and taste of the city, metallic
and dusty. Like an old but revered actress, London was beautiful in its own
way, and of course its history knocked New Zealand’s into a cocked hat, as the
Cockneys would have said. But he’d forgotten the beauty of
Aotearoa
. How
vast and high and blue the sky seemed.

“How’s the business going?” he asked. He
knew Sean had joined his father’s building trade.

Sean gave him a strange look, but said,
“Yeah, good. Things are picking up a bit after the recession. Lots of new
houses being built.”

“Cool.” He tipped his head back on the
headrest as a wave of tiredness hit him. Jet lag, no doubt. It couldn’t be the
pace of life in the Northland. Even the staff at the tiny airport had been laid
back, shrugging off the plane’s late arrival with typical Kiwi indifference.
And Sean hardly seemed stressed, driving along happily at fifty in a hundred
kph zone. What was that—about thirty miles an hour? Jeez. And there weren’t
even any speed cameras to worry about.

What would it be like to get up every
morning and know your day involved driving to a field somewhere and hammering
nails into planks of wood until home time? No airports, taxis, extended
lunches, long business meetings in boardrooms, laptops, iPhones, annual
reports. No air conditioning, stewed coffee, dry sandwiches, or the cloying
smell of beeswax from the polished oak tables. No talking, talking, talking all
day until he thought he’d used every word in his vocabulary and would never be
able to utter anything ever again.

Actually, it sounded quite attractive now
he thought about it.

Then he sighed.
You’d soon get bored
,
he scolded himself. He was disillusioned and tired, stressed after the events
of the past few months, maybe a bit burned out, and he needed a break. But he wasn’t
due a mid-life crisis yet.

Sean glanced at him again.

Dion raised an eyebrow, sensing a question
hovering in the wings. “What?”

Sean’s brow furrowed. “Are you really not
going to ask after Megan?”

Dion blinked. He hadn’t asked about any of
Sean’s family yet—there had hardly been time for that sort of conversation. He
stared, surprised at Sean’s glare. And then realisation sank in.

Sean knew
.
Shit
. It had only
been the one night. They’d both agreed to keep it quiet. Why had she told her
brother?

Guilt filtered through him, and he had to
force himself not to squirm in his seat. He and Megan had had a fiery
relationship from the first moment he met her when he was twelve and she was
nine. Irritation and exasperation had eventually matured into a simmering
sexual attraction throughout their teenage years, and even though he’d tried
his hardest to remind himself that she was Sean’s little sister, he hadn’t been
completely shocked—and he suspected she hadn’t either—that when they bumped
into each other the previous Christmas, they’d ended up in bed.

Her passion and apparently genuine desire
for him had both shocked and thrilled him. He liked to think himself fairly
experienced in bed, but he could safely say that night had been the hottest,
most erotic night of his life. They’d practically set the bed alight, and he
suspected that if they’d lived in the same half of the world, it would have
changed their relationship forever, an irreversible chemical reaction, like
baking eggs and flour to make a cake. A hot, sexy, chocolate-covered and
caramel-filled sumptuous delight of a cake, but changed nevertheless.

Still, they
did
live on opposite
sides of the world, and it had only been a fling—they’d both accepted that.

He cleared his throat. “Of course I was
going to ask. I was just…building up to it. How is she?”

“Good.” Sean slowed at a T-junction, but
they hadn’t met a single vehicle on the way, so he didn’t bother stopping and
turned the car onto the main road to the bay. “Her paintings are really taking
off. She sells heaps of local landscapes at the galleries in town, and she’s
getting commissions now.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah. She’s really good, Dion. People are
starting to take notice, you know? She’s been interviewed on national radio,
and she held art classes in Auckland during the winter.”

“That’s so cool.” He was pleased, but not
surprised. Megan had been painting the first time he saw her. He’d met Sean in
their first year at high school, and Sean had invited him home for tea. She’d
been sitting on the deck, trying to capture their Boxer dog on paper, and she’d
scolded it when it dashed off to greet them.

With a typical twelve-year-old boy’s tact,
he’d laughed at the brown smudges she’d made on the paper, and she’d threatened
to shove her paintbrush where the sun didn’t shine, earning her a telling off
from her mother. The memory still made him smile. Her feistiness seemed even
more prominent because it stood out against the disorder she’d had to fight
against her whole life, like a black cloud hovering in a bright blue sky.

“How’s she coping?” he asked. “With the
agoraphobia, I mean.”

“She’s good,” Sean said.

“I’m glad.” Dion had become aware of the
condition when she was eleven. They’d walked into town with a group of friends.
Crowds from the annual summer fair choked the town. They queued up to buy a
burger, and the unfamiliarity of the situation and the crush of bodies
triggered an attack.