30. Whole
Roman
By the time we got onto our second flight the next Saturday, the short hop from Auckland to Tauranga, I’d almost got used to looking at Summer. I hadn’t got used to having her close enough to feel her heat, though, and I definitely hadn’t realized how much the clothes and beauty treatments would turn up her wattage.
When I’d driven down the hill this morning and climbed out of the car, she and Delilah had been waiting, suitcases beside them. Delilah had looked vibrant in a deep-red dress with tiny white polka dots, her short dark hair cut into a sort of feathery cap, but Summer had looked …
You knew she was beautiful, I told myself, and couldn’t stop staring anyway. The hair was shorter now, waving to just below her shoulders, pulled up on one side away from her face, her pale curls shining. I’d forgotten how her brows were shaped, delicate and pointed as a swallow’s wing. Her makeup was subtle, but it was there, because she looked almost eerily pretty, like an illustration in a fairy story.
And then there was the dress.
Bright yellow, printed with huge orange flowers and green leaves, with some … gathering, or whatever you called it, on the two triangles that outlined her breasts, and ruffles on the skinny straps. It was cut closer all the way down to the waist, showing off her body, then flared out below. It wasn’t too low and it wasn’t too short, but it was low enough and short enough to give you almost every single bit of information you needed about the body beneath. Almost. The skin of her chest, arms, and legs glowed the same warm ivory I remembered from that first night in the firelight, when she’d been wearing only a towel, and her legs were smooth as silk, set off by wedge sandals that would still be reasonable at a barbecue, but that made her calf muscles bunch and her ankles look that much slimmer.
She wasn’t overdressed. She was just … perfect, and looking at her was like looking at the sun.
I took her shoulders, because how could I not touch that skin? Kissed her cheek and smelled the delicious scent, like cherries soaked in brandy. Soft and feminine, but with an undertone of smokiness and sin, Summer all the way. That beautiful kitten face, and then that voice that promised something darker. I felt her hands come up to grip my shoulders in my much more underdressed golf shirt, and almost lost it right there.
How could I have thought she’d move out and that would be that? How could I have wanted her to go? I’d been a fool that first day, and unfortunately, she hadn’t forgotten it. And then, of course, there’d been what I’d said last week, what I’d come to think of as the prostitution proposition. Not my cleverest idea ever.
I pulled back eventually, because I had to, and she told me in that smoky voice, “You look good. You smell good, too. Did you get a haircut?” It felt like she was leaning into me, but that was probably me.
“Yeh,” I couldn’t tell if I was smiling, that was how distracted I was. “For the day. And for you. I thought I’d need to do justice to you. Should’ve realized that wasn’t possible.”
“Mm,” she said, but she didn’t look unhappy to hear my opinion. “You smell so good up close. Like yourself, only even better. That’s not Creed Aventus you’re wearing. Thank goodness. You can’t imagine how many too-rich-too-soon footballers wear Creed Aventus.”
“One in particular, I’m thinking,” I said. “No worries. I won’t wear that. You can keep on with yours, too. That’s, ah, pretty.” It was more than that, but I wasn’t going to say it.
“Tom Ford Lost Cherry,” she said. “One of my favorites. Since you were buying.” She looked into my eyes and didn’t quite blush, but I could tell she wanted to. She smelled so sexy and sweet, I wanted to kiss her everywhere, and do some licking, too. A man could drown in those gray eyes. If you were watching them flutter closed while her pretty mouth opened, because it felt too good … that would be something to see. That would be power.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Delilah said. “Could you two stop admiring each other long enough that we don’t miss our plane?”
“You look very pretty, too,” I told her.
“Thanks for nothing,” she said, and climbed into the back seat.
I laughed, touched Summer’s cheek, felt her silky hair on the back of my hand, and forgot all about Delilah. “Mine’s called Dark Lord,” I said, “I’m embarrassed to say. Too strong?”
“Dark Lord,” she said. “That’s … it’s you. I only smell it up close, and it really is like you, but even better. You really did pull out all the stops. I know I’ve smelled this before, but I’ve never experienced it like this. On you, it’s sort of … warm and dark and deep and sweet and dangerous. Like something I want that’s so bad for me.” She stepped closer and practically buried her face in my shirt, and I got even more distracted. “I can’t stop smelling it.”
A whirr as Delilah buzzed the window down. “Excuse me?” she said. “Plane?”
“Right,” I said. “Plane.” I held the door for Summer, shut it behind her, threw the cases in the boot, climbed in on the driver’s side, and thought, Get some sophistication, boy. Get some distance. But Summer was right there beside me, with those eyes and that skin, smelling that sinful, her smooth arms and legs draped gracefully over the leather seat, and it wasn’t possible.
Summer
By the time we got to Tauranga, I wasn’t wondering how I’d pretend to be Roman’s girlfriend. I was wondering how I’d manage not to kiss him tonight. Delilah had ostentatiously worn her headphones and read a book on her phone the whole way in her window seat, while I’d sat in the middle seat, felt Roman’s shoulder against mine, asked him about the wind farms, looked at his stern profile and the perfect bronze of his skin, reminded myself that physical attraction was just that—physical—and tried not to fall any harder.
“Was it a passion project?” I asked. “Or …”
“More of an obvious opportunity,” he said. “My specialty—seeing the obvious. New Zealand power is mostly hydro and geothermal. Riches of the land, eh, but wind’s coming on strong. Wind and sun and water—that’s what we’ve got, so why not use them? Solar’s lagged a bit, but it makes sense. Most parts of the country get over two thousand hours of sun a year and some get heaps more, and the government seems likely to put money behind getting people to switch over.”
“Because switching’s expensive,” I said. “Is the wind power mostly purchased by utility companies?”
“Mostly.”
“And if solar’s what’s up and coming,” I said, “are you going to go into that, too?”
He smiled. “You’re too clever. Yeh. Off to Wellington later this week to talk to some people about what’s happening there. I have a few MPs to chat up.”
“Ah,” I said. “Another opportunity. So if you do start … a new company for that? A new subsidiary?”
“Clever again,” he said. “Probably put them both under a parent firm. Got names for me? I’ll ask the marketing people if we go ahead, but I’m rubbish at names. ‘Zephyr’ wasn’t me.”
“Good name, though,” I said, “and a great logo. Distinctive, with the ‘Z’ and the swirls around it like the wind.”
“You looked,” he said. “Yeh, though we pronounce it ‘Zed.’ Seems like we want something like that for the solar, a sun-sounding word.”
“Soleil?” I suggested.
“Too hard to pronounce. And most people don’t know French.”
“Hey,” I said. “We’re brainstorming. That means we throw out ideas until something sounds good. No judgment. Sol. Solar Ventures. Mr. Sun.”
“That one sounds like I’d be doing adverts for it,” he said.
“With a cutout sun around your face,” I said, and we were both laughing. “Never mind. I’ll keep thinking, though, shall I?”
“You do that,” he said. “Parent energy firm, too, while you’re at it.”
“Not D’Angelo Energy?” I asked. “You must admit, it slides off the tongue pretty easily.” I was so far gone, I got distracted by the word “tongue.” I could practically feel his on me.
Stop it. Lots of men aren’t interested in using their tongues. Especially rich men. Except that I had a feeling he wasn’t one of them. He’d looked at me this morning like he’d wanted to eat me. I’d practically felt him doing it, and that feeling had been shiver-inducing.
He made a face. “I’ve never liked using my name. Not the Kiwi way.”
“Mm,” I said, determined to keep this on a more elevated plane instead of asking him, “How exactly do you make love to a woman? Can it be as slow and hot and strong as the message I’m getting from you? Would my thighs really quiver and my brain really melt? Would you make it last as long as I’m imagining, until I’m stuffing my fist into my mouth to try to keep quiet?” or whatever horrifying thing I’d blurt out. Instead, I said, “So solar’s different. Retail instead of wholesale, won’t it be?” He looked at me in surprise, and I said, “Well, obviously. Different customer base, and a completely different business model. You’d be hired by commercial outfits, I assume, or governmental ones—office buildings, schools, maybe some apartment buildings—but if you’re talking about government schemes and incentives, isn’t a lot of that going to be retail? People putting solar on their roofs?”
“Yeh,” he said, with a smile in his eyes. “That’s it.”
“A different marketing plan, then,” I said. “A retail ad campaign, more salespeople, lower margins but higher volume.”
“How do you know this?” he asked. “And why the hell are you working as a waitress if you do?”
“I had a business once,” I said. “Much smaller, of course, but it’s still interesting to me.”
“Test preparation,” he said. “University admissions counseling. I don’t understand it well—we don’t do it—but they do in the States, I guess.”
“They sure do,” I said. “But how do you know that?”
“Delilah.”
“Ah. She shared.”
“Along with Barbie and the Disney princesses. So, yeh, that’s a decision. Whether to invest in that sort of operation. Not exactly what I know, since the only retail I’ve done has been online, but nothing I’ve done has been something I know. Addicted to risk, eh.”
I said, “That’s how you feel to me, but not. Addicted to risk, but holding yourself back and being careful, because risk can be dangerous, too.”
“Got to take the risk to get the reward,” he said.
“So it depends on how much risk it is,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It depends on whether the reward is worth it. If it’s reward enough, if you really want it, you’ve got no choice but to jump. If you want it enough, it pulls you in despite yourself.”
Wait. Were we still talking about solar power? I could feel his heat right through the fine white cotton of his shirt, and his hand lay on his strong thigh, so close to mine. A big hand, and a capable one, the fingers long and clever. My own hand sported barely-peach polish now, but my nails were ridiculously short, and there were calluses on my palms. I looked at our hands, so close together, and tried not to let that matter.
He said, “I’ll run the numbers, see what makes sense,” and I tried to remember what we’d been talking about.
“Oh,” I said. “The salespeople. Obviously, that’s the big expense, although you could do strictly commission, I guess.”
He frowned in concentration and drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Yeh. That’s the question. There are different kinds of panels. Different product lines. The more efficient they are, the more they cost, but none of them are terrible. The question is—pay more upfront and get more benefit, selling your excess energy back to the utility, or go lower-end, because that’s what you can afford. If you’re compensating strictly on commission …”
“You’ve set up an incentive to talk people into something too rich for their blood,” I said. “Which will hurt your company’s reputation as well as being—well, rotten. It’ll be an educational campaign as much as anything, helping people make that decision. An online calculator would help, public seminars, things like that. Maybe partnering with the government.”
“Ideally,” he said. “Unfortunately, though, I won’t be the only firm looking to do it.”
“You could still suggest some partnering,” I said. “While you’re having those meetings. There have to be commissions to investigate possible schemes. There are always commissions. Wouldn’t they be looking for people from industry to be on them along with politicians? That would be a great opportunity to figure out whether it makes sense, and I’ll bet that once you decide to move, you move fast. I can’t imagine anybody getting out ahead of you, or if they did, I can’t image them staying there. I looked you up, too.”
“Do you want a job?” he asked, a smile lifting the corner of his mouth.
“What, as a flatterer?” I asked, and he laughed. “No. Too awkward. Too unbalanced.”
“If we’re involved, you mean.” No smile now, just plenty of intensity.
It was so hard to think. My brain was telling me one thing, but my body was saying something entirely different. As for my heart—who knew what it was saying. But then, my heart had always been a confusing organ. I decided to say, “Same answer I gave you before. I don’t want to work for you or be your fun-for-now girlfriend, and I definitely don’t want to do both, but I think I owe you a better answer, because all you did was ask. I know I should probably get back in the game, do some casual dating, but I can’t. There’s just been too much …” I trailed off, wishing I had the right words.
“Too much hurt,” he said.
I swallowed. “Yes. And I can’t be … casual about sex. I thought I could, before. Felipe was?—”
“Yeh,” he said. “I don’t much want to hear about the bloke.”
It was as if he’d slapped me. I actually rocked back in my seat.
He didn’t say “Sorry,” or whatever I’d expected. He took my hand, the same way he’d done at the table a week ago, and wrapped it up in his. With his other hand, he touched my cheek again, a bare brush of his fingers, and said, “I’m a jealous bastard. Tell me.”
I said, “It’s on the show,” and tried to get my equilibrium back. Up this close, I could see the darkness where his beard would grow, and the smoothness of the skin on his neck below the whiskers, and I had a sudden, intense desire to kiss him there and feel him respond. To let his arm go around me, and to feel the comfort of that, to breathe in his heat and his sureness and his scent.
My stupid heart.
“I don’t want to watch the show,” he said. “I want to hear it from you.”
“Make up your mind,” I said.
He smiled. Rueful, that’s the word for that smile, and his thumb was rubbing down the side of my jaw. I could feel every single nerve ending lighting up, that was how much that touch affected me. “I have,” he said. “Tell me.”
“It’s so hard to explain,” I said.
“Try,” he said, his eyes intense.
I gave a shrug. “I can barely figure it out myself. It was like a fever dream. An out-of-body experience, except that I was so completely in my body. An out-of-mind experience, maybe. You can’t imagine what it’s like out there on a show like that. Yes, you’re being filmed, but that disappears into the background shockingly fast, because your physical experience is so intense. You’re barely eating—you lose a good fifteen to twenty percent of your body weight in six weeks, like your body is consuming itself. You’re hardly sleeping. You’re dirty and sore and so fatigued, you don’t want to get out of bed, except that there’s no bed and you’re sleeping on the ground. You have to turn to each other, but you’re competing with each other, too, so sometimes, you turn on each other, or somebody you trusted turns on you. Your whole mind is upside-down. And for me, in that kind of situation, I tend to …”
“To help,” he said.
“Yes. That’s my go-to mode, and I didn’t have as many … as many boundaries then. I thought I did, but that was another thing I seemed to lose out there. Felipe was so physically strong. Agile, too. I mean, the guy became one of the best footballers in the world. He ran the fastest. He swam the fastest. Any kind of race, any sort of physical effort—he was the best. But he didn’t have … he didn’t have steadiness. He didn’t have the kind of perseverance that’s not about being flashy, that’s just about putting your head down and doing what you have to do, grinding it out. He didn’t have …”
“Grit,” Roman said. “Ticker. And you did.”
“Yes.” I admitted it, then, in a way I never had before. “He wasn’t used to doing something that emotionally hard, being cut off from everybody he knew, not being able to trust anyone. Being deprived of literally everything—it gets to you, and he didn’t have as much at … at the center of himself as I did when the chips were down. He needed me. More than he said he did. More than he thought he did. He needed me, and I needed to be needed. Then. It was my addiction. I don’t need it anymore. Because his need … it sucked me dry. It melded me to him until I hardly knew where he ended and I began, until half of me became that need, and feeding it. I can’t give in to that addiction anymore. I have to be enough in myself. For myself. I know you don’t understand, and you’re not the only one. But how can you share yourself with somebody if you’re not whole? I need to choose myself now, until I can grow myself again. Until I’m whole. I know it sounds selfish, but I can’t apologize for that.”
“So you rescued your cousin,” he said, “and worry because you can’t pay for her to go to uni anymore, though I’m guessing you’re still planning to try. And you feel bad about every one of your husband’s bills that you couldn’t pay. Because you’re so selfish.”
“I was ashamed to go bankrupt, yes,” I said, keeping my voice steady with an effort. This was too deep. It was too uncomfortable. “Anybody with a conscience would be ashamed to leave people deprived through no fault of their own. Some of those creditors were small businesses, just trying to hang on. As for Delilah, maybe I just wanted company, so I dragged her along. Maybe that was selfish, too.”
“You tell yourself that,” he said, “if you need to. But I know the truth. Some things are buried too deep to overcome. The ones that have been burnt into you in the furnace? You’re not getting rid of them, because that’s the person you are. And why should you? From what I’ve seen, what’s been burnt into you is responsibility. Determination. Courage.” He paused, then said it. “Mana.”
I wanted to say something. I couldn’t. I could only feel his hand around mine and look into his hard face and wish that I could resist being told that I hadn’t been stupid. That I hadn’t been weak. That I hadn’t been to blame.
He wasn’t done. “You were hurt. That’s obvious. That doesn’t mean you were weak. Nothing I’ve heard says weakness, and nothing I’ve seen does, either. I’ve been judging people half my life, and what’s at the core of you isn’t weak, and it isn’t selfish. What’s inside you is nothing but heart. Nothing but mana. You’re not selfish, but I am. Because I want it, and I want you. And I can’t stop.”
Tell me how a woman’s supposed to resist that.