Page 33 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
“You can speak freely now,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “The property settlement could impact your…” He gave a dry cough, a lawyer specialty. “Your future prospects.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.” Comfortable, no. Sure, yes.
For all that, there wasn’t much else to say. Anika wanted to see me, to “talk things over,” and she wasn’t far away. In Hamilton, an hour and a half’s drive from Rotorua. And tomorrow night would work for her. It would be over soon, at any rate. If I did it.
I tried not to think about fifteen years ago, or the man I’d been then. There was a reason it was in my past.
By the time I rang off, we were in the Whakarewarewa Forest, pulling off at the tour site. I said, “We’ll decide later, eh.”
Karen sighed and said, “Don’t mind me.”
Hope said, “I like how you said ‘we.’ And I liked how you introduced me. Thank you.” She put a hand on my face and smiled into my eyes, and I had to swallow before I answered.
I said, “I thought you’d like it,” and she said, “I did,” and smiled some more. And then we got out of the car and rode some flying foxes through some forest giants, and Karendidlaugh, and Hopedidscream anddidneed a cuddle, and that was all good.
She waited until we were lying in one of the Polynesian Spa’s hot baths to bring it up again. A group of Japanese tourists laughed and talked on the other side of the pool, but Hope held my hand under the water, looked out at the sun setting over Lake Rotorua, and asked me quietly, “What do you think you should do? About your wife?”
I sat silent a moment and watched the sun slip beneath the horizon in a sky streaked by clouds tinted impossible shades of rose and crimson, and thought about the new line I’d finished before we’d left, the one inspired by my homeland. The ideas had taken shape on sketch pads and then on sample garments even as the rest of my mind was consumed with the details of running a business. Going there, into the creative zone, my happiest place, was my escape and my pleasure.
There, and with Hope. They were tied up together.
I’d imagined greens and blues and golds and creams, but crimson and rose worked as well, I was thinking now. Pink could be a powerful color, and silk could make as strong a statement as linen. The strength in softness, in gentleness. The power of water that flowed over hard rock, gradually carving apparently unyielding surfaces into new and more beautiful shapes. It was an exciting concept.
“I think,” I finally answered Hope, “that if there’s a way to make this easier, I should take it.”
She squeezed my hand, said, “That’s good, then. I think you should,” hauled herself out of the pool, and went to shower under the cold tap, because Hope couldn’t take much heat. I saw a couple of the fellas across from me eyeing the curves of her trim little body in the prettiest white bikini you could imagine, too. Until they noticed me watching, that is, stopped staring, and resumed their chat.
There were advantages to being big, tattooed, and Maori in Rotorua. You tended to get credit for more savagery than you might possess. Although, to be fair, I possessed my share.
That decision, though, was why I was in Hamilton at seven-thirty the next evening, ringing the bell to a tidy brick townhouse in a middle-income neighborhood.
She came to the door, opened it, and said, “Hemi,” and it was as if the fabric of space and time had warped.
Anika Cavendish, because she’d changed her name back. At least there was that. Her deep-brown hair was still long, not tied into its Maori knot tonight, but falling in rich, lustrous waves to beneath her shoulders. She was still fine-boned, her cheekbones still aristocratic, her skin still golden, her eyes still dark and liquid. And her figure still held the lushness of a tropical flower, despite what I guessed must have been rigorous discipline to maintain her slimness.
Rigorous discipline. Yeh. That had been the drug that had bound us together. I’d told Hope the truth, but I hadn’t told her all of it.
Anika smiled now, the slightest, slowest curve of her beautiful mouth, stood back, and said, “Come in. Please.”
I reminded myself that I wasn’t twenty years old anymore, stepped inside, slipped off my shoes in the foyer, and entered a lounge decorated in modern style, not unlike my own apartment in New York. Black and white and splashes of color, a fabric piece of woven flax on one wall, all of it cool, spare, and meticulously tidy.
“Sit down,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea? A beer?”
“A cup of tea,” I said. “Please.”
When she came back with them, she’d fixed mine the way I’d used to drink it. Milk and sugar. She handed me my mug, sat down in a chair at right angles to my couch, and said, “It reminds you, doesn’t it? How many cups of tea did we drink, afterwards? We couldn’t afford anything stronger. But the best things in life are free, eh.”
She was wearing a stretchy black-and-white striped dress, barely a mini, over black leggings. She looked as sensual and sleek as a black panther, and as lethal as one.
I said, “It was a long time ago.”
She blew on her tea, looked up at me from under her lashes, and said, “It was. But it was good.”
“Was it?”
Another secret smile at that. “You tell yourself, that, Hemi. Tell yourself you haven’t thought about me, haven’t remembered everything I let you do to me, how many firsts I gave you. How hard we fought, and how hard you took it out on me afterwards. Tell me you’ve forgotten your wife. Tell yourself, too. But you’ll be lying, and you know it.”
