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Authors: Rosalind James

Tags: #Romance

Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) (26 page)

BOOK: Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3)
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“Oh.” Hope looked at me, back at Karen, sank down onto the edge of the recliner, and said, “OK. What?”

Koro’s face was like some kind of carving. Representing benign ancestral power, maybe. I couldn’t spare too much attention for him, though, as I pulled out the vase of flowers from behind my back and set it carefully on the coffee table.

“There,” I said. “Much more cheerful.”

Hope, unlike me, would never be a poker player. I could read the expressions on her face as easily as if they’d been written there. Surprise, confusion, incredulity, delight, one after the other. “Hemi,” she said helplessly. “You found one exactly like it. How? That was
old.”

“I didn’t.” My own eyes may have been misting up the tiniest bit. I sank to a knee in front of her and took her hand. “It’s your mother’s vase. It’s the real thing.”

She tumbled off the recliner and knelt beside me, her hand stroking over the vase. “Where? I can’t see . . .”

I touched first one meandering crack, then the second one, pointing out the barely visible seams in the basketweave pattern of the Irish vase. Green shamrocks on a white background. Hope’s treasure, worth nothing but memory. Worth everything.

“Here,” I said. “I mended it for you. That is, I had it mended. When I saw that you’d broken it and left the pieces on the counter, I thought, what could make Hope do that? What would she have to be feeling not to even try? It wasn’t right to forget what your mum said, sweetheart. I thought maybe I could help you remember.”

“She said . . .” Hope’s hand was shaking on the vase as she traced the crack, stained with brown no longer.

“She said,” I reminded her, the tenderness aching in my chest, “that a crack is just a place where something got loved extra hard, and somebody cared enough to mend it.”

“You remembered.” It was nearly a whisper.

“I did.” I couldn’t imagine why I’d been nervous about this. I knew how to make Hope happy. Nobody better at it, because nobody could possibly love her more. “A broken vase can be mended, and so can a broken heart. It just takes somebody who cares enough to do it.”

We took our shower together, in the end, because I didn’t want to wait through two of them to go to bed with her, and I was pretty sure Karen and Koro weren’t going to fall over with shock that we were retiring early. Afterwards, I took Hope’s flower-scented lotion and rubbed it into her skin while she stood on the bath mat and let me do it.

At last, after weeks of wishing, I was touching that sweet swell of belly. I was smoothing lotion into the body that cradled my son or daughter, murmuring words to Hope that might embarrass me to remember in the morning, and completely unable to care. Telling her she was beautiful, body and soul. Telling her how lucky I was to have her, and how hard I was willing to work to keep her.

We made the quick journey to the bedroom to the welcome sound of the TV. Koro and Karen were watching an action film, and I hoped the explosions were loud and frequent. I closed the bedroom door behind us, pulled off my trousers and tossed them over a chair, dropped the rest of our clothes onto the rug, and went to Hope where she was pulling back the duvet on the bed.

She smiled over her shoulder at me, and then she was shrugging out of her dressing gown and kneeling naked on the bed to light the candles.

There would be no screen substituting for my presence tonight, or for hers. Tonight was all for us, and we took it.

We took our time, and we gave each other our very best. Long, slow, deep kisses and gentle, stroking hands, hers exactly as avid as mine. Sighs and murmurs, sweet words that we both needed to hear. And more.

The catch in her breath when I touched her breast, and the shock it gave me, as sharp a pleasure as any boundary I’d ever pushed. The look in her eyes when she shoved me gently over to my back, the soft touch of her lips working their way down my body with her hands following behind. The softness of her cornsilk hair between my fingers, and the dark, nearly desperate thrill of her lips and tongue finding me at last, pleasuring me every bit as well as I’d ever pleasured her, and more. The helpless surrender when I abandoned all effort at control, and the astonishing absence of fear, of uncertainty, of pride.

Nothing about loving Hope could scare me, not anymore. It wasn’t possible.

And, finally, after she’d pleased me and I’d pleased her, after we’d slaked the first desperate hunger of nearly four weeks without each other . . . that final slow, sweet slide into her willing body. The way she closed around me, my perfect fit. The choked, gasping cry she gave when I began to move, the eager way her legs came up to wrap around my back, the hunger in the hands clutching at my shoulders. As if she couldn’t get close enough. As if she needed all of me inside her, as if she cradled my very soul. The bliss of rocking her to slow, sweet fulfillment, taking care of her every single step of the way.

Watching her underneath me, listening to her sighs, her moans, inhaling her scent, taking all of her and feeling her take all of me. Flowers and softness and strength. A willow, not an oak. The strength to bend without breaking, to hold without grabbing.

The strength to love a man who was too hard to love. The endless patience to fit my broken pieces together again and make me whole. Hope, my unlikely, incompatible, perfect match.

And when she was crying out beneath me, completely unable to keep herself from doing it . . . in that last second where I could still form a thought, I gave thanks for the thing I’d never dared to believe in. For the impossible.

That Hope had brought me to this place. And that I’d been willing to go.

 

Hope

Some men are good at loving. Others are
great
at it.

Hemi and I made love twice more that night, and by the time we finally got out of bed the next morning, we may almost have been satisfied. Body and soul, because, wow—Hemi did “love talk” almost as well as he did dirty talk. I’d known there was a reason he was so successful. He was one fast learner, and he was nothing if not devoted to his work.

I say “almost satisfied,” though, because we weren’t permitted to find out how long we’d have stayed in the too-small bed that had become a world in itself. Instead, I was jolted awake from sleep by somebody banging on the door.

“Hey, you guys,” I heard while I was still coming out of the fog. “I’ll mow and everything, but I’m not rototilling. I mean, Koro says I’m not. He says rattle your dags, Hemi.”

“Ugh,” I moaned, rolling over. “Is it morning?”

“Sleep,” Hemi ordered, proving that Command Central was up and running again. “You don’t need to do this.”

I climbed out of bed, and if my legs were still a little wobbly—well, yours would be, too, if you’d been through what I had during the past—I checked my phone. Whoops. Twelve hours.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m all good, see? Ready to be a hardworking Kiwi. All set to till the soil.”

I didn’t do that much tilling, though, and neither did Karen. Surprise. Karen did mow the lawn as she’d been doing since the first week, when Matiu had shown her how. Hemi, meanwhile, moved Koro’s chair under a huge old apple tree so he could supervise, then worked a huge, unbelievably noisy cultivating machine in satisfactory agricultural fashion, tramping up and down while he turned over a sizeable patch of dirt until the muscles stood out on his arms and his T-shirt clung damply to his back.

Not that I was looking. Well, peeking, maybe, in between trips to the shed to bring out the endless sets of filled egg cartons that were Koro’s seed trays, which Karen and I had helped him plant, water, and nurse into proud little leaf-bearing seedlings over the past few weeks.

“This is, like,
score,”
Karen had said happily when the first hopeful green shoots had poked up. “Much nature. Maybe I’m not going to die on the desert island after all.”

“As long as you’ve got vegetable seeds in your pockets,” I’d said.

“Way to rain on my Earth Girl parade,” she’d said, making me laugh. “Better be nice to me. You’re going to need me on our island. I’ve got way more skills than you.” Which was sadly true.

Here on our much bigger island, meanwhile, Hemi finished tilling, cleaned the machine and put it away, then started breaking up dirt clods with a hoe as if he weren’t a very rich man with a very large staff. After watching him for a minute—there’s only so long it takes a person to carry trays—I went to the shed, found a second hoe, and came out to join him.

It smelled suitably rich and loamy out there, although the agricultural peace was somewhat spoiled by the dull roar of Karen’s lawnmower in the distance. Still, the sun felt good, and the teamwork wasn’t bad, either.

Of course, the second I had that thought, Hemi looked up and said, “No.”

I didn’t stop. It was oddly satisfying to watch the heavy clumps of black dirt break up under my hoe. “Yes,” I said without looking up. “I’ve been riding my bike and swimming like you wouldn’t believe. You wait until Eugene feels my bicep next time. I’m going to get a gold star.”

Hemi was beside me just that fast, reaching out to grab the handle of the hoe. “No. This is too hard.”

He expected me to let go, but I didn’t. I hung on until
he
let go.

“Ha,” I said. “I knew you weren’t about to jerk me off my feet. You’re too easy to read. And I can do this. If I get too tired, I’ll stop. Trust me to know my own body, OK?”

He wasn’t happy, it was obvious. In fact, he opened his mouth at least twice and then shut it again both times.

I said, “Good job suppressing that,” and got his best hard stare for my pains, then a reluctant almost-smile. But he didn’t grab the hoe again.

I was pretty tired, I’ll admit, by the time we had the whole plot smoothed out and half of it planted. Karen came to help once she finished mowing, and even Koro got out of his chair to crouch in the dirt, scatter seeds, and ease seedlings as tenderly into the dirt as if he’d been tucking babies into bed.
He
didn’t listen to Hemi telling him not to do it, either.

“Poor you,” I told Hemi when he’d given up yet again. “You’re going to have to go back to all those people whose paychecks you sign to get your own way.”

“Why did I ever want a saucy girl?” he muttered. “That’s what I’m asking myself.”

“You can tell
me
to stop,” Karen said. “I mowed. I deserve a break.”

“Nah,” he said. “It’s good for you.”

“Nice,”
she said.

Koro looked thoroughly satisfied, but all he said was, “Go get us some water, Karen.”

She gave a huff. “See, Hemi?
Koro
cares about me.
He
sees I need a break. Do I want to go home with you? That’s what
I’m
asking myself.”

“Yeh,” Hemi said. “You do. Because you want your LASIK surgery.”

“Fine,” she said. “Bribe me.”

“Thanks,” Hemi said. “I will. Meanwhile, go get your sister and Koro a glass of water.”

It wasn’t too much longer, though, before I stood up, put a hand on my back, carefully did
not
sway on my feet, and said, “You know what? I think I’m done,” and saw Hemi blow out a breath. “Congratulations on holding back, though,” I told him. “You encourage me strangely.”

BOOK: Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3)
10.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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