Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) (2 page)

One second, he was crying. The next, he made a strange choking sound, and then every bit of his breakfast was on my jeans.

“Oh, no,” his mother, Moira, called out over his wails. She was clutching the baby for dear life, hanging on with both arms and the grip of a superhero. Or a mother. And if I was scared, how much more must she be? She’d been a cheerful, organized, ponytailed brunette twelve long hours ago, back in Los Angeles. Twelve hours after I’d taken off from New York. Back when I’d been a human.

“I’m so sorry,” she said now. “I’ll just . . .” She took a hasty hand off the baby even as I tried to tell her not to. I grabbed for him myself, and she reached for a cocktail napkin from her seatback pocket, thrust it at me, then resumed her death grip on Sean while I laid the flimsy square of paper on top of the mess on my leg and swallowed back hysteria along with my nausea.

“It’s fine. We’re fine,” I shouted over the nervous laughter, the occasional shriek, the dull roar of jet engines, and the incessant rattle of baggage trying to escape the overhead bins.

If they didn’t spill out onto our heads, we were doing great. Way to test the latches, guys.

Sean kept crying, not that I could blame him. I’d held him during the flight so Moira could go to the bathroom, could take a nap. When she’d thanked me, I’d told her I was pregnant myself, and I hoped somebody would help me someday. It had been my first pregnancy announcement, and it had felt momentous at the time. I’d laughed a little making it, and I’d wanted to cry, too. Moira had looked at the three carats on my left hand and clearly wondered,
Why is somebody with that rock on her finger sitting in the middle section at the bumpy back of the plane?
And because she was a Kiwi, she hadn’t asked, for which I’d been profoundly grateful. I’d done enough crying for a lifetime already. Although it was good I’d gotten it all in, if my lifetime was going to be over right now.

Just when I was thinking it, the airplane lurched hard to the right, then back left again, and I clapped a hand on my mouth and thought,
Oh, God. Oh, God.

We couldn’t actually crash, despite the pounding of my heart and the useless adrenaline flooding my body and making me shake. The pilots surely wanted to go home as much as we did, and they must know what they were doing. You didn’t get those wings from a cereal box.

And I
couldn’t
lose my baby. Hemi’s baby. That wasn’t happening. I just didn’t want to throw up myself, because I’d already found out that they didn’t put airsick bags in seatback pockets anymore. You had to go all the way to the toilet for that. Ask me how I knew.

The plane lurched again, then dropped hard, leaving my stomach well behind, and I stopped thinking about death. It was all about the nausea now. All. About. The. Nausea. Sean had gone into full-blown Scream Mode, a woman was moaning steadily across the aisle, and I clutched the seatback in front of me, laid my forehead against it, and tried not to think about the scrambled eggs, potatoes, yogurt, and, worst of all, sausage I’d wolfed down with the ravenous hunger known only to those in the first trimester.

Please, no. Not on the jeans. Not the sausage.

When the plane hit, it was still tilted to the left. Then it slammed down on the right. Hard. And we bounced. One wheel, then two. We were bouncing some more, and then we were coming down.

Somebody was screaming. I thought,
Karen. Hemi. My baby.
Which was when the lurching stopped, and we were rolling. We were down, we were safe, and the entire plane erupted in cheers and applause, in the exultant relief of three hundred passengers who’d been miraculously delivered, like the Maori adventurers of old, safely onto New Zealand soil.

I put my head back, closed my eyes, swallowed hard, and tried not to cry.

I hadn’t died, and I only had one person’s vomit on my clothes. Bonus.

Hope

Koro wasn’t there.

Hemi’s grandfather, that is. Wiremu Te Mana, the eighty-three-year-old patriarch of the family, who’d promised me the day before—if that had been the day before, because I’d lost track—that he’d be there to meet me at the Auckland Airport without fail. He hadn’t arrived, and I was getting worried.

I stood on an impossibly hard floor and felt as slammed by the voices bouncing off the unforgiving surfaces as if they were actually punching into my weary body. The sound seemed to arrive and recede in waves, and I clutched the handle of my black suitcase just for something to hang onto, looked around, and tried to avoid the word “desperately.”

The arrivals hall wasn’t a big place. It’s not like he could have missed me. Auckland may have boasted the biggest airport in New Zealand, but it wasn’t exactly La Guardia. But then, you’d have to add the sheep to the people just to get New Zealand’s entire population up to New York City levels, so that wasn’t too surprising.

I was trying to think about that, because thinking about anything else was terrifying, and thinking at all was almost beyond me. My brain was doing a slow whirl, and my head felt like a balloon hovering somewhere above my body. I’d fumbled my passport into the scanner, answered the questions from the Customs officer as best I could—Why was I here? Because I hadn’t had anyplace else to go?—claimed my bag from the carousel, ducked hastily into the restroom, and changed my jeans with trembling hands, barely restraining myself from stuffing them into the garbage. The only thing that had stopped me was the knowledge that I was broke again. Or broke still. Broke people didn’t throw away perfectly good jeans just because they had toddler vomit on them and the smell was making their sensitive pregnant selves sick.

I’d hurried through the quick change, then a rapid brushing of my teeth before I’d dashed cold water onto a face that felt as if it had the grime of nations embedded in it, and realized only then that there was no way to dry it. I’d settled for wiping it on my shirt, in the end. The shirt wasn’t a whole lot better than the jeans anyway.

The whole thing was a long, long way from first class, let alone Hemi’s Gulfstream G650, but that was just too bad. Coming here had been my choice, Koro would be waiting for me, I would get a job, and it would all get better. I didn’t have to solve all my problems right now. I just had to get through today so I could start over tomorrow.

Except Koro
wasn’t
waiting.

Finally, I went over to the Vodafone kiosk and waited as patiently as I could behind a young couple whose gigantic backpacks leaned against the counter beside them like fatigued travelers. Even though it took a good fifteen minutes, there was still no reassuringly broad-shouldered grandfather figure to be seen when the clerk had replaced my SIM card and I had restored my contacts and was dialing Koro’s number.

Four rings. Voicemail.

“Uh,” I said at the beep, “Hi. It’s Hope. I’m here. I guess you’re stuck in traffic.” It was barely six-thirty in the morning, but I did know that Auckland sported one thing New York City shared. Traffic. “I’m just, uh, letting you know I’m waiting for you in the arrivals hall.”

In the half hour that followed, I sat on an uncomfortable chair and called twice more, and he still didn’t answer. The sinking feeling in my stomach wasn’t just nausea now, and my fluttering heartbeat wasn’t just for myself. Something had happened.

What now? I wanted to sit on the floor and cry like a little girl, but I hadn’t been a little girl for a long, long time, so that wasn’t an option.

What would Hemi do in my shoes? I’d left him, and I might have destroyed my future with him for good, but he was still the person whose judgment and initiative I admired most—well, except in the matter of interpersonal relationships. I longed to have him with me right now, because he’d
know
what to do, and then he’d make it happen.

Well, then, figure that out and do it.

Who did I know?

I knew Hemi and Koro and nobody else here, not to have their number. And I wasn’t calling Hemi. What, I’d left him to establish my independence, and twenty-four hours later, I was calling him and asking him what to do, begging him to work his magic and rescue me? No.

All right—what could have happened?

Koro had changed his mind and wasn’t coming for me. He’d talked to Hemi, and the two of them were trying to force me to go back.

No. Not possible. Hemi would never, ever have left me here alone, and neither would his grandfather. It was that Te Mana thing. My baby was going to have a father with protectiveness embedded in his very DNA. I got a flash of Hemi’s big arms cradling somebody tiny and helpless, and knew exactly how gently and carefully he’d hold our baby. How fiercely he’d guard us both.

Stop that.

Right. Back to thinking rationally. Koro wouldn’t have left me here on purpose, so . . . an accident on the road holding him up? An emergency at home? No, he’d have called me, surely. All right, a simple dead battery in his phone. Mine was on its last red sliver of battery life itself. Or the likeliest thing of all: he’d mixed up the day. I couldn’t remember what day it was myself, now that I’d crossed the International Date Line and gained nearly twenty-four hours. Koro had looked at the confirmation I’d hastily emailed him and assumed it was for tomorrow. And today he was . . . well, sleeping, probably, with his phone off.

Go, or stay?

Go. Katikati was only a three-hour drive, and there was no point waiting here any longer. I’d leave Koro another message along the way telling him what I was doing and when I’d get there before my phone died entirely. I wasn’t in Outer Mongolia, I was in New Zealand. There was an information booth in the corner, and if I knew anything at all about Kiwis, I knew the person behind that counter would be helpful.

Right, then. I was going to Katikati, where at least I knew my way around and nothing was confusing, and there would be a shower and a bed somewhere. Where I could get ready to face tomorrow.

It was actually more like six hours later by the time I’d trudged the couple of uphill miles from the Katikati i-Site, the information center where the bus had discharged me, to the little house on the hill. I’d wolfed down a chicken pie at a brief rest stop that felt like hours ago, but I was hungry again, and so far beyond “tired” that I seemed to be floating in some alternate space, with my consciousness fully outside the shell that was my body. And, yes, it was still raining, the wind was still blowing straight from Antarctica, and despite an anorak with the hood pulled up, I was soaked and shivering. For the last half mile, the part where I was dragging my suitcase behind me up a final steep hill that felt more like a mountain, with my backpack feeling like it held bricks instead of a laptop, I honestly wondered if I was going to make it.

I did, of course. You could always do more than you thought you could, and your limit was always another step farther ahead. I’d learned that long ago. And when I reached the driveway, Koro’s car was there. A much-used small Toyota SUV, parked beside his boat.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d feared he’d been in an accident until my knees threatened to buckle. He was fine, and he was home—at least there was light coming from inside.