Meet Me in Tahiti

Chapter Twenty

Finn served Daniel two plates of crepes.

With a smile.

He had to. He was the owner of Poerava. And the media visit to the food trucks had been his brilliant idea. And it wasn’t Daniel’s fault Finn hadn’t got on that plane this morning after all, or that he’d decided to come tonight even though he’d spent all day telling himself he wouldn’t.

At least cooking the crepes meant he could see Zoe (because he really needed to see her) but also keep his distance from her. And because she and Daniel had chosen the most secluded of the tables, half tucked behind the trunk of a palm tree, he was getting exactly what he wanted. He could see her...but only because she glowed like a golden shaft of sunlight even under the moon.

“Hey, Finn!” Matilda said, smiling at him in that hideous way he was unfortunately getting used to. “Cris has gone to play footsies with Captain Joe. Are you on shift all night or do you feel like joining me for an adult beverage and—dare I say it—some crepes?”

An automatic “no” rose to Finn’s lips, but then an overloud trill of Zoe’s laughter seared the air and he caught the quickest flash of a look from her that told him she was doing it on purpose and he knew his concentration was shot for the night.

“I’d be delighted,” he said to Matilda. “Go back to your table and I’ll bring the crepes over.”

“Um, not that one you’re currently incinerating, I hope?”

“What...? Oh! Go, you’re distracting me.”

“I am, am I?” she tossed over her shoulder.

Finn traded places with one of the local cooks and a few minutes later was plonking two plates of crepes on Matilda’s table. “I hope you like lemon and sugar.”

“I do, but this little catch-up isn’t about crepes, it’s about information,” Matilda said.

“What do you want to know?”

Matilda jerked her head in Zoe’s direction. “Why you’re letting him have her.”

Finn took a savage bite of his crepe, chewed, swallowed. “She’s not my property. It’s not up to me to let anyone have her. She has the choice. He’s a nice guy. They make a great pair.”

“And there I was thinking you were a fighter.”

Finn made some kind of noncommittal grunt.

“She’s certainly a fighter,” Matilda said.

Another grunt. Yes, Zoe was a fighter, even if in that shimmery gold dress with those beads in her hair she looked like a fairy child. All she needed was a pair of gilded wings. Another savage swallow of crepe.

Matilda threw back her head and laughed—clearly the sight of him choking on food was amusing—and that drew Zoe’s eyes to them. It felt so much like those times in the village when Zoe had seen him with another girl and had come over to him anyway, he could almost believe she’d bring Daniel over any moment.

But all she did was go back to her conversation.

Slowly, he put down his fork. He was tired of keeping everything inside. He wanted to ask for advice, wanted to know how to say goodbye, because he was flying out in the morning (again!) and he didn’t know how to do it without tearing out his heart. And God, he should not have come tonight.

Matilda cut delicately into her lemon-and-sugar-soaked crepe, placed the bite carefully in her mouth, swallowed without allowing any juice to dribble onto her chin, and Finn wondered why he couldn’t be attracted to her even as his eyes flickered in Zoe’s direction.

“Whoa!” she said as Finn surged up out of his seat, clamping a hand on his wrist. She looked over at Zoe and Daniel. “So he’s wiping her chin, big deal.”

“She doesn’t need him to wipe her damn chin. She’s not a baby.”

“No, she’s not a baby, so what makes you think she needs you racing over to save her?”

For a split second what Finn would do hung in the balance, but just as he took a step in Zoe’s direction Daniel backed off, making placating hand gestures. Finn settled back into his seat.

“Nice guy, huh?” Matilda said, amused. “They make a great pair? Tell you what. How about I take Daniel off everyone’s hands because we both know they don’t make a great pair.”

“You don’t have to sacrifice yourself.”

“I’m not the self-sacrificing type so believe me when I say this is going to be pure pleasure. I’ll get Daniel on the first run back to Poerava. You stay around for the second transfer. If you can’t work out what to do—”

“I know what to do, Matilda.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said, and got gracefully to her feet. “Well, au revoir!”

Finn watched as Matilda sashayed her way over to Zoe and Daniel. Watched as Cristina and Captain Joe joined them. There was a conversation that looked like some sort of negotiation. Next thing he knew, Matilda, Daniel, Cristina and Joe were all heading for Little Micky, leaving Zoe alone.

No.

Wait.

Cristina was turning back. Her eyes locked with his. She nodded, then recommenced boarding.

So they weren’t leaving Zoe alone, they were leaving her specifically with him.

Did Zoe know what they were up to?

He looked at Zoe, found her eyes unwaveringly on him, and his heart skipped a beat.

She knew.

Only four journalists, plus Aiata, himself and Zoe, were left to return to Poerava on the second transfer. Aiata and the others were clustered around the last caravan in the row of roulottes, which was operating as the bar.

Heart thundering, Finn made his way to Zoe. He had no idea what to say, but he had only twenty minutes in which to say it. That was when the boat would be back.

He took the seat beside Zoe’s wheelchair. Saw that her hands were running up and down her thighs, which for once he was glad to see because it meant he wasn’t the only one who was nervous. She said nothing, which he guessed meant the ball was in his court.

“Zoe,” he said, and had to stop to clear his throat. “I...” Nope. He didn’t know what to say.

Zoe looked at her phone, which was face up on the table. “Nineteen minutes until the boat comes back for us,” she announced.

Sand sifting through that hourglass. Time, as always, running out. And she was actively watching the clock.

Now or never. He was going to have to blaze his guns a little.

“I don’t usually play it safe,” was what he came up with, and he immediately thought that was too tepid an approach to be classified as a blazed gun, but hell, everything was riding on these nineteen minutes and he wasn’t going to stuff it up the way he’d done ten years ago.

“I know that,” she said. “It’s why I thought—” Stop. Chin jut. “Go on.”

“I don’t usually play it safe but I did...with you...that summer.”

“And?”

“And I want to know...need to know...if you want me to play it safe now.”

She pursed her lips. “You’re going to have to be a little less inscrutable.”

He shoved an impatient hand through his hair. “How can you not know what I mean, Zoe?”

“I don’t trust myself to know. I don’t think I ever trusted myself to know because...because I was me and you were you.” Her hands were still moving up and down on her thighs. A glance at her phone. “Seventeen minutes. How about you to tell me exactly what you mean when you say you always played it safe and what it means to stop playing it safe. You say you need to know if I want you to keep playing it safe but I need to know if we’re on the same page or if we’re reading completely different books.”

“We were always reading the same book, Zoe, but...it was a fairy tale, back then. Because, as you say, you were you and I was me and no one was going to let us...let us...be. Just be.” He tore both hands through his hair. “Ah dammit, Zoe, you want to know what playing it safe meant? It meant not touching you. Not then, and not in the two years that followed.”

Her hands stopped on her thighs. “I...I see.”

“Do you, Zoe? Do you? You didn’t back then, but if you see now then I guess at last we’re reading the same book.”

“I don’t want the book to be a fairy tale,” she said. “I want it to be real. I want to know it’s real.”

He laughed, a short, harsh laugh. “Last time I let myself be real for you, you called security.”

“Finn—”

“Sorry, sorry, stop. Let’s forget that night because this is now and things are different and time’s running out and I’m wondering what it would feel like if you... I mean, if I asked you... I think what I’m trying to say is...” Stop. “I’m messing this up and I don’t want to.”

“Just say it,” she said, staring intently at him.

“I want to know...” Swallow. “I want to know what you’d do if I asked you to touch me.” There, said, done. But his head was like a newsreel, running on a loop. All those times he’d seen her touch other people, easily, effortlessly. Hugging, patting, kissing her friends. The timid stuff with Brad he’d hungered for even as he sneered at it. Strange, now, to know he would hate her to touch him the way she touched anyone else. He wanted a touch that was just for him. That she gave to nobody else. He wanted her to touch him because she couldn’t help it. Passionate and needful and burning and in the moment only his.

“Well...” she said, deliciously breathless, “let’s find out.” A drift of laughter from the booze van. The scent of her. A throb in the air. “But I don’t think it’s going to work unless you come a little closer, Finlay.”

Dear God. She was going to do it. It was happening, it really was. Here. Now. Zoe. His.

He edged toward her, hopeful, afraid.

“Closer,” she breathed, and when he leaned in and she took his face between her delicate palms, the hope surged and the fear receded and he knew that if a bolt of lightning arced down from the sky and hit him he’d die happy.

They stared into each other’s eyes for one heartbeat, two, three. No words, no smiles; this trembling moment of awareness was too precious, too serious, for that. And then she closed her eyes and the breath-distance between them, and laid her lips gently on his. He felt the shiver that wracked her, and twelve years of longing shuddered through him so that he started to full-on shake and he did not care that his vulnerability was palpable. Let her feel it, let her know what she did to him, what she’d always done to him. He would have stayed like that, tireless, unmoving, for eternity, just to have her mouth resting against his.

But then she said, right there against his lips, “How about a little reciprocity? You’re not the only one who’s been waiting, you know.”

He thought about all the times he’d wanted to kiss her, wanted to run his hands all over her, and now, at last, he would know. He moved his lips against hers, coaxing her mouth open. More, he needed more, so his tongue came out, licking at her lips, into her mouth, drinking her in. When she opened wider, hunger writhed inside him and he deepened the kiss, helpless, wanting to devour her. Did she know he was hers? No time machine and yet he had been hers from the moment she’d smiled at him, he’d been hers ever since, he was hers now.

Emotion swelled in him so that he could barely breathe. He needed to tell her in case she still didn’t get it. He pulled back from the kiss and as she moaned a protest, her hands slipping down from his face to grab fistfuls of his shirt to drag him back, he decided words could wait, he would tell her with his mouth. Kisses, a hot, hungry, sucking chain of them, each one a story. I’ve been waiting forever for you. I want you. I love you, love you, love you, love you, Zoe. Zoe, feel it, feel what I feel.

And then his hands were cradling her face, angling her so that her mouth fit seamlessly with his, wholly, entirely, completely, frantically. He wanted to drag her onto his lap. He could do it, she’d told him he could, that night in the bar. I do let peoplepush my wheelchair. Lift me out of it, too. People I know, people who understand me. Some people, the ones I trust, don’t even have to ask, they can just do what needs to be done.

And she trusted him. She’d told him so. And oh how he wanted to know what it was like to have her in his arms, wanted his hands in her glorious hair and his mouth all over her body, wanted to touch all the places she could feel and also the ones she couldn’t because they were still her and he loved every inch of her, wanted to learn everything that made her tingle, know every patch of her skin, wanted all of her to be his to cherish.

A shout. A clang.

Time had run out.

He eased back from her, and when she murmured a protest, keeping a death grip on his shirt, kissed her again and groaned against her mouth, “Little Micky.”

She slumped against him, her head on his chest. He ran a shaking hand down her hair, absorbing the shiver that ran through her. A long, long moment, and then her hands loosened and with a sigh she raised her head, sat back. “So I guess we should...” She gave a deliciously breathy laugh, a helpless little shrug. “Actually, I don’t know what we should do.”

Her trembling hands went to her cheeks as though they’d press the red heat out of them, then to her lips as though feeling his kiss through her fingertips.

Hunger for her roared through him. Words trembled on his tongue. I know what we should do. Come to bed with me. Let me have you. Let me show you how I feel. Stay with me.

His heart ached with the need to say the words but he forced them back. Yes, he knew what they should do, but ten years ago he’d had his heart mangled when he’d dared to say the words. What he needed before he offered his heart to her again was for her to say what they should do.

And so he bit back those words.

And he waited.