Heartbreak Hero

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Too long, according to her best friend Leena Kowolski, who’d urged her to indulge in a holiday fling, who’d been so insistent that Ngaire had had to laugh and say she’d think about it, but only if the guy was the kind dreams were made of. And he was.

A small prickle of conscience stabbed as she arched her eyebrows in feigned disbelief and a darker slash broached the tanned skin covering his cheekbones. He leaned closer, resting one arm on the back of the seat her day pack still guarded, and swiped his other hand over his chest in a cross. “Honest.”

His voice was low, husky, intimate. She fell into it, into his eyes, her heart skipping at the dark, liquid intensity in their expression, begging to be believed.

“Returning your pink shades was deliberate on my part, but that’s all. Unless it was fate that made you drop them. Though if I’d known…”

“I didn’t think men believed in fate.”

His dark eyebrows knitted. “What else could it be?”

What else? Let’s face it, she was a sucker for those eyes. She gave him a melting look, putting her own to good use. Leena said they were her best feature, canceling out the nose she’d inherited from her Modoc ancestors. “I owe you an apology. Blame it on the world today. It’s hard to know who to trust.”

His smile drew her eyes down to the indent in the center of his chin and the square, no-nonsense line of his jaw, tempting her to trace the shape and see if it was as firm as it looked.

“Face it,” he said. “We’ve been thrown together by a common language. The only thing to do is grin and bear it.”

“And since the bus is almost full.” Out of the corner of her eye, Ngaire saw the tour guide wave some tailenders onboard.

It was then she felt the engrossed stares and turned to see two Chinese women in the seats behind them. Her next words froze in her throat as they smiled and nodded. She crossed her fingers mentally that the guide had been correct about Kel and her being the only English speakers. The body language she couldn’t do anything about.

She tried to tip him the wink about their audience with her eyes, but he had his own agenda. “If there’s something about me that rubs you the wrong way, tell me and I’ll do my best to help you get over it. Meanwhile, I’m blocking the aisle and there are people heading this way.”

Grabbing her day pack off the empty seat, she made room for him. He slid his beige jacket from his shoulders swiftly, bundling it to toss into the overhead rack. Actions that were easier than folding his length, all six foot three of it, into an amount of space more suitable for her own five foot four.

It took her a moment to notice the last passengers were familiar. Kel had no such problem. “I suppose you’re going to think they’re following you, as well?”

A smile softened his words, turning it into a joke.

“I’m not really that paranoid,” she protested, though the coincidences seemed to be piling up thick and fast. First Kel, and now here was the German couple who’d sat behind her on the shuttle from the ferry.

As the bus eased its way through the city traffic Ngaire stared out the window. The streets went by in a blur of raindrops. Her mind was elsewhere, negotiating the twists and turns of an awareness she hadn’t expected to find. She’d been looking for something in New Zealand, but it wasn’t an affair.

Her heart had called for something much more familial and an answer to the dread that had haunted her since they’d added her grandmother’s history to her mother’s and come up with an answer that had scared her spitless.

First there were the similarities in the manner of their deaths, both the same age almost to the minute and both killed by a car that had gone out of control. Then there was the fact that both deaths had been foreshadowed by changes in the mere. But were they coincidence or curse?

She couldn’t afford not to believe it was more than coincidence; the risks were too great.

Then she’d come up with a solution to possibly guarantee her a future.

Te Ruahiki was tapu, sacred, and returning the mere to his tribe might break the curse on the females of her line.

With all that was going on in her mind, she still found it impossible to ignore Kel or the source of heat as his thigh brushed her own. In an attempt to escape what she saw as a growing problem of too much too soon, she offered, “I don’t mind taking turns at sitting by the window. I wouldn’t want to take advantage by arriving here first.”

“Later. There’s no rush, or anything I haven’t seen before.”

So, no relief there, for a while. In some other place or time, being pressed against the wall with nowhere to go without crawling all over him might have been fun. But they weren’t alone. They had an audience, and she’d no ambition to become their main source of entertainment.

Better just to suck it up and get on with the tour.

Easier said than done.

Beneath the light fabric of her capri pants, her skin burned with an energy that raced to all the salient points of her body. Kel was all solid muscle, thigh, hip, arm. Large, lean, hard. No use reminding herself she’d handled heavier men with ease.

Beside him she felt puny, susceptible, and all female.

She could have told him her problem didn’t stem from him brushing her the wrong way. From her angle it felt too right.

The rain had lessened but not stopped by the time they reached their destination. It made some matrons twitter like sparrows as their husbands helped them into their rain gear.

Kel stood in the gangway, leaving Ngaire room to maneuver a snarl of sleeves and arms. As she started juggling her day pack and raincoat he stretched out a hand to take the one she wasn’t struggling into. “Let me grab that for you?”

For a heartbeat her eyes flashed a warning with all the force of a push in the chest. Back to square one?

“No need, I’m used to managing,” she answered lightly. Had he imagined the back-off signal? He wondered as she hatched into a canary in her bright coat, instead of another brown sparrow.

He blamed it on Chaly. The man had given him leave to do whatever necessary and unleashed the rampant attraction he’d felt the moment he’d laid eyes on her.

Sleep with her if necessary.

Lies were all part of being undercover. Maybe it was being back home that made him feel Grandma Glamuzina’s finger and thumb twist his ear with every falsehood falling from his lips.

Look what almost an hour of having her scent tease his nose had brought him. With every breath, he’d calculated the risk factors in this operation, not to his health, to his libido.

He was here to watch, not to touch. Yet every time they were thrown together by the movement of the bus driving down Muriwai’s winding lanes, he remembered the lines of separation were only two thin lengths of cotton. Though she’d edged away from the contact, while he’d wrapped a white-knuckled fist around a handle to prevent him chasing her across the blue upholstery, he’d known he was in trouble. Big trouble.

He was the hunter and she was his prey. Now her spoor was firmly fixed in his head along with a picture of her naked. A lethal combination meant to keep him clinging to the edge of his seat for the duration of the trip.

For once, he felt torn between duty and desire.

A park ranger awaited them all outside the bus. Ngaire dawdled at the back. Kel kept close, not wanting to force the situation and mindful of her look. His grandma had had one that could strip paint off walls, and Ngaire’s had run a close second.

Grouped with the other passengers in the car park, he’d no problem seeing over their heads as he listened to the ranger. He and the German guy were the tallest, with a couple of Taiwanese runners-up.

Maori Bay was small compared to the other beaches nearby and sheltered by the arms of land stretching on either side. But in this kind of weather with the wind from the southwest, every now and then a gust whipped the ranger’s voice away. “So easy to get the feeling of being dominated by Muriwai…” he shouted, standing against a backdrop of sand-churning waves as gray as the sky, the black silhouette of a lone surfer balanced on top like a bolt holding the two together.

“Powerful elements…wind and sea formed, dominate…this wildlife park.” Ngaire appeared intent on the ranger’s spiel as she clutched the straps of her day pack, arms crossed. Just then a crack of sunlight broke through the clouds, caught her for a second, disappearing as if her black hair had swallowed it.

“Imagine the lifeblood…earth, lava, spilling here from a massive undersea volcano. Where you…stand was born of fire from that eruption.” Every time the ranger paused, the tour guide filled in with translations, and while the cameras whirred and clicked gannets and terns performed a ballet over rocks of greenish black like a licorice stick newly bitten in two.

“This fire still rages beneath the surface.” A ripple of in-drawn breaths punctuated the translation. Their guide spoke so swiftly, she had to know the spiel by heart.

“Imagine its rhythm beating a pulse…echoing its heartbeat.”

Finished, the ranger turned, leading them up the path to the summit, their heels on the gravel sounding like crunching toffee.

Two paces ahead of him, Ngaire’s dark braid bumped against a bed of yellow, begging to be tugged. He caught up to whisper, “That guy’s a shoo-in for the lead in The Tempest.”

She forgot herself long enough to give him a glimpse of her smile. Gaining her trust was like pushing sludge uphill, one step forward, two steps back. And though he’d gone ahead, he was aware of her every move. As they crested the path, a squeal made him turn. “You okay? What happened, did you turn your ankle?”

For a microsecond she took her eyes off the view beyond the rail. “No.” She gestured with a hand flung out to encompass the horizon. “I saw all of that.”

He guessed it might take your breath away if you’d never seen Muriwai beach before, its black sands fringed with gray-and-white surf, curving for more than sixty kilometers into the distance. Too far to see on a day like today when it resembled a monochrome photograph.

“What makes the sand black?”

“Nothing romantic. Just plain old iron,” he said, but she’d stopped listening and was focusing her camera instead.

To reach the viewing platform they walked across a wooden boardwalk, which wound through a tunnel of pohutukawas. It was one of the only native trees that didn’t mind salty air, but it was too early yet for the red tassled flowers that heralded Christmas. There was still beauty to be found in the twisted shapes from its no-holds-barred tussles with the wind.

All too soon, they stepped out of the green-washed light onto wooden treads that softened their footfalls and led to a cliff top spiked with flax plants.