Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (2 page)

And Hemi was some somebody. The truth? By that winter night when my CEO proposed to me as we lay together in his teenaged bedroom in his grandfather’s house in the sleepy New Zealand settlement of Katikati, I’d started to believe that this really could be my life, and that fairy tales really could come true.

You know what they say, though. Be careful what you wish for.

That night, there were no doubts. We slept curled so close together in the undersized bed that I could barely tell where my body ended and his began, and all my dreams were sweet. And in the gray winter morning, when I half-woke to liquid birdsong in the trees outside the window and the feeling of Hemi’s strong hand running down my back and over my hip, it was the most natural thing in the world to sigh, murmur something vague, and turn onto my back so he could touch me better.

I lay, still inside the warmest, most languorous dream, not needing even to wake while Hemi pleased me with his hands, his hard mouth, and every bit of his warrior’s body. Until I was finally being rocked into full wakefulness, the pleasure swirling through my body while my hard, fierce Maori lover murmured words in my ear that I knew the meaning of now.

“Toku aroha,” he whispered. “Taku e aroha nei.”

My love,
he was saying.
My darling.

I rode that river of shivery, silken pleasure all the way to the sea as Hemi lay over me, filled me in the way that nobody else could possibly match, and let me know where I belonged. I kissed his chest, stroked the breadth of his muscular back, smoothed my hands over the bulge of shoulder and bicep, and could have sworn I felt his heart beating in time with mine. I drifted along with him until his harsh breaths sounded loud in my ears and the whimpers I couldn’t help were escaping with every hard thrust, every slow withdrawal. Until my hands were clutching his biceps and I was saying his name, urging him on, begging him for more, and he took my hands in his, threaded his fingers through mine, dragged my hands up by my head, and held me there.

When he did that, I couldn’t drift any more. Harder and faster, and then, when I was so close, starting to get frustrated, to labor too hard, Hemi was shifting, grabbing both my wrists in one hand and using his other hand to help me out. Giving me all his focus, all his attention, all his effort, until he was taking me with him, pulling me up higher and higher still until the waves took us over, the net pulled us in, and we were both shuddering, crying out. Caught, and tumbling hard.

I was his, but then, I’d been his from the beginning, hard as I’d tried to deny it. More incredibly—he was mine.

An hour later, when his grandfather and my sixteen-year-old sister Karen came through the back door from their night out, Hemi and I were finishing breakfast at the kitchen table and looking out the window past emerald fields all the way to the Pacific Ocean below, and feeling a long, long way from New York City.

We weren’t talking, even though there was so much to settle, so much to discuss. I wanted to hold this quiet moment before our lives picked us up and hurtled us on again, and Hemi seemed content to let me do it. But then, talking—and sharing his thoughts—had never been his favorite things, as I was soon to be forcibly reminded.

“Geez,” my sister said, coming into the kitchen on a swirl of chilly morning air and a burst of teenaged energy and eyeing me in my robe. “You guys are slow. We already had breakfast at the café and everything. Bacon
and
sausage
and
eggs. It’s like the whole country’s on the Atkins Diet. Protein delight, and you missed it.”

Hemi eyed her with the lightening around his eyes that was his version of a smile. “Well, Hope and I had a fair bit to discuss last night.”

Karen looked as inquisitive and bright as one of the fluttering little fantails that had dogged our steps on our walk to the coast the day before. “Oh?”

Hemi’s Koro, his grandfather, didn’t ask anything. He just looked at Hemi, his wise old eyes sharp in his lined brown face.

“Yeh,” Hemi said. He was actually smiling for once, not just looking like he might, and now, he took my hand under the table, swallowing it up in that way only he could. “Think you could run to a wedding while we’re here, Koro? Seems I’ve managed to talk this one into it, and I don’t mean to let her get away.”

Karen’s eyes were wide behind her black-rimmed glasses. “Get
out,”
she breathed.

Koro, like Hemi, didn’t smile much. He wasn’t doing it now, but his broad face somehow showed every bit of his satisfaction. Hemi stood, releasing my hand, and his grandfather pulled him into a fierce embrace. “My son,” he said when he finally stood back, “you make me proud.” Then he turned to me, took me more gently into his arms, kissed my cheek, and said, “Haere mai, Hope. Welcome to our family. Don’t let Hemi get above himself, eh.”

“Never,” Hemi said, but I just laughed and tried not to cry. I knew I was happy, but it was too much. I didn’t trust it, or I couldn’t take it in, or something.

Karen had sat down beside me, and now
she
was hugging me. “I better get to be a bridesmaid.”

“Plan on that,” Hemi said. “Hope’s going to need somebody standing up with her if she’s really going to take me on.”

“Wait,” I said, finally processing everything he’d said. “We can’t do it
now.
We’re only here for a couple more weeks.”

“Course we can,” Hemi said. “I asked you, remember? And you said yes. You have your birth certificate. Why d’you think I made you bring it?”

Karen reached out and snitched a chunk of pineapple off my plate. “So you
planned
this? Awesome. Did you kneel down and everything? And does this mean I get a college fund?”

“Karen,”
I said helplessly.

Hemi, of course, was laughing. “Yeh,” he said. “You get a college fund. Long as you earn it, keep working hard.”

“No worries,” Karen said. “I’m very bright.”

She reached for another piece of pineapple, and I slapped her hand and said, “You had breakfast.”

“I’m a growing girl. With a college fund. Who’s going to be a bridesmaid.” She sighed. “Is this an awesome vacation or what?”

“But…” I said again.

“No buts,” Hemi said. “Three-day waiting period after the license, and we’re there. Call it five or six days, maybe, from today. Time to buy you a dress, find Karen something new as well, get the details sorted, and get people invited. It’s better anyway,” he went on, overriding anything I might have said, “as we’re on holiday already. I’ll take you to the Far North for a honeymoon, if you like, where it’s warmer. Or to the islands, if you want the tropics. Samoa, maybe. It’ll be short, but we’ll do it better later. And then we’ll go home and get you moved.”

I had my hands over my face. “Wait,” I said. “Wait. I can’t…that’s too fast.”

“What?” Hemi said, his face closing.

“Hope,” Karen said, “that’s just stupid. You
have
to want to marry Hemi. Come
on.”

I tried to think of what to say, and couldn’t.

“Karen,” Koro said, looking at me. “Quiet, now. Come help me in the garden. We’ll leave these two to get themselves sorted.”

Hemi

“Right,” I said to Hope when Koro and Karen had disappeared outside again. “What?”

You could say my mood had changed. You could say that.

Hope jumped up from the table. “Do you want another cup of tea?”

I grabbed her hand and pulled her to sit beside me again. “No, I don’t want a cup of tea. I want you to sit here and tell me what’s wrong, so we can fix it. When I asked you last night, you seemed keen. What happened?”

“Keen? I seemed
keen?”

“Happy. Excited. This isn’t a bloody vocabulary lesson. It’s our lives. And Karen’s.” Right, so I wasn’t playing fair. “Fair” was for some other bloke who didn’t need it this much.

Hope looked down at her slim hands, clasped together at the edge of the table. Her absolutely unadorned hands. “I wasn’t thinking it would be so soon.”

“That’s what I asked you, though. If you wanted to get married here. Now. And you said yes.”

She flinched at the tone of my voice. The color was rising in her cheeks, and she rubbed her hands over the wood until I grabbed one of them again, because I had to hold her. Somehow.

“I don’t think I was listening too well,” she said.

I sat and tried to breathe, then finally said, “Well, listen now. I don’t care what the problem is, I’ll fix it. If it’s that you don’t have your friends here, we’ll bring them over. If you’ve got some family you haven’t told me about, tell me that. Whatever it is, tell me now.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have anybody else. And that’s…that’s part of the problem. You’ve got this. Your family, your
place.
All this…” She gestured wildly, though I couldn’t have said what she was pointing to. Koro’s house wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. I’d offered to buy him a better one, of course. And he’d said no, of course.

Just like Hope was saying now. “This is going too fast. It doesn’t give you a chance to think it over.”

“I thought it over already. I’m done thinking. You mean it doesn’t give
you
a chance. You’ve never been scared with me. Why now?”

She stared at me. “I’ve never been
scared?
Whose life have you been looking at? It sure hasn’t been mine.”

I tried to step out of myself and study her, the way I would in a tough negotiation, but I couldn’t get past my own emotion, and it was frustrating the hell out of me. “All right,” I said. “You’ve been scared. It’s never stopped you from telling me what you thought, or from doing what you had to do. So why now? Unless you’ve changed your mind.” The thought was freezing my blood, but I’d never run away from the truth, and now would be the worst time to start.

I tried to remember what she’d said, what she’d done when I’d made our announcement, and couldn’t. All I’d thought about was how I felt. “That’s it, isn’t it,” I said slowly, not wanting the words out there, and knowing they needed to be. “You’ve changed your mind. You’ve had a night to sleep on it, and you’ve decided you can’t. I thought you just wanted to be quiet this morning, but it’s more than that.”

Her eyes had widened as I spoke, and now, she put a hand on my arm. “Hemi, no. It’s not that. I’m not—I’m—it’s what Karen said about college. Everything. How does this change things? We need to work all that out first. We need to
know.
We need to figure out what we’re doing.”

“No,” I said. “We don’t. We need to get married, and everything else will take care of itself.”

“Will it?” Her hand was still there, tight around my forearm, like she was hanging on, when that was the last thing she was doing. When she was cutting me loose. “How?”

“What do you mean, how? I’ll tell you how. I’ll take care of you, and I’ll take care of Karen. And whatever else needs to be done, I’ll do it.”

I waited, but she didn’t say anything, just sat there. “Well?” I demanded.

“There’s so much wrong with that,” she said, “I can’t even tell you. That’s a one-way street.”

I would have said something. What, I don’t know. But Karen came back into the kitchen then. “Sorry, guys,” she said. “I just have to get a jacket. It’s starting to rain.”

“Right.” I stood up and pulled Hope with me. “We’re out of here.”

“What?”
she said.

“Going to a hotel for the day—and the night as well,” I decided. “We’re going to fix this. Go get dressed and pack a bag. Right now.”

She wasn’t moving. She was folding her arms across her chest. “You are ordering me,” she told me through her teeth.

If she’d been scared before, she wasn’t scared now. And she ought to be, because I was furious.

“Well, yeh,” I said. “I’m ordering you. I’m saying, pack a bag so we can go work this out until we’re done. If you don’t want to change and don’t want a bag, I’ll take you as you are.” I knew she was naked under the dressing gown, and having her naked during our “negotiations” would work for me. “I’ll carry you out to the car if I have to, but we are leaving. Now.”