That barely-there smile touched his mouth. “I plan most of what I do. Want to take back all those lovely things you said about me?”
“No. If I love you, I love all of you. Even when you frustrate me and make me crazy.”
He sat on a huge, twisting branch that ran perpendicular to the sand, pulling me gently down with him. Behind us was an urban area filled with stores and business and hospitals, with people and all their problems, but we were alone in a green and gray grotto, the gentle swish and roar of the waves our rhythmic background music, kilometers of empty beach spreading in each direction. Sheltered, and alone together, wrapped in the embrace of the sea.
“I reckon,” he said, “that means I love all of you, too. Even when you won’t go along with my perfectly reasonable plans.”
This time, I laughed, and he smiled for real, put his arm around me and pulled me closer, and said, “Did I mention I was over the moon about this baby of ours?”
“Mm.” He was right there, so I had to bury my face in his neck just to inhale his delicious scent, all spice and warm man. A touch of aftershave, and a whole lot of Hemi. I would’ve known his smell anywhere. I would’ve known it blindfolded.
That was when he did the thing that melted all my resistance. He put his hand gently over my lower belly and said, “You were the best thing that ever happened to me. Except now there’s this, too. Now there are both of you. When I start to think of it, sometimes I have to stop, because I can’t . . .”
“You’re overwhelmed,” I said. “Like me.”
“I am.” Surely his eyes were glistening a little, and his hand was so big, so warm and solid on my belly. As if he really could hold both of us under his protection, could keep us both safe there, and what a seductive idea that was, even after everything I’d just said.
“We conceived it here, you know,” I told him. “Probably at Koro’s. Could even have been the night you asked me to marry you.”
“Bloody hell.” He ran his hand slowly down my back and up again, leaving tingles in its wake in that way only he could. “I spanked a pregnant woman. I spanked
my
pregnant woman, and I spanked hard enough to hurt, or at least right up to the edge of the line, and more than once. Doesn’t make me too happy to remember that.”
“That isn’t the part that has the baby in it,” I had to tease. “And in case you couldn’t tell—I loved it.”
“Not doing it anymore,” he said. “Not while you’re pregnant, I’m not.”
“What if I’m really, really naughty?” I had a hand in his hair and was kissing his neck now, just because it was so brown and strong, and I hadn’t touched him in two weeks, and what was worse, he hadn’t touched
me.
Plus, there were those pregnancy hormones. For once, they weren’t making me sick. They were just making me . . . hormonal.
“Then I’ll have to find some other way to get you under control,” he said. “But I’m going to be careful, and I’m going to check in more. I’ll say everything you want to hear, but you’re not getting anything rough. I don’t want to hurt you, sweetheart.”
“Would that keeping-me-under-control thing be why you aren’t kissing me right now?” I asked. “Did I ever tell you how annoying that was to
me?
That first day, when you touched me on my
arms,
and then my shoulders, until I thought I was going to embarrass myself right there on my couch, and then you refused to kiss me? All that buildup, and not a bit of payoff for about two weeks? Then the first time you
did
kiss me, up against that wall in Paris . . . it felt like you were going to steal the soul right out of my body. And after that, how long did you torture me?”
“Things are always so much better if you have to wait for them.” He was caressing me now, not that much differently than he had that first time, his hand tracing lightly over the neckline of my scoop-necked T-shirt. He knew exactly how to make me tingle, and was he ever willing to take his time to do it. “And they’re even better if somebody else is making you do the waiting. At least so I hear. From my point of view, I’d say they’re better if
I’m
making you do the waiting. Nothing I love more than watching you squirm underneath me.” His mouth was at my ear now. “Except maybe hearing you beg,” he whispered, and just the touch of his lips on that sensitive spot made me shudder. “Now, that?” he said, sitting up again, way too much self-satisfaction in his eyes. “I’m willing to do that, pregnant or no, because there’s something about knowing you’re pregnant that’s making me want it even more, reprehensible fella that I am. There are some ways I do want to own you, no matter how much I’m meant to be letting you fly free otherwise, and I’m afraid that’s not going to change. But we’re talking about this baby of ours, not about your sweet little body and everything I’m going to be doing to it . . . tonight. It was really that long ago? You’re that far gone?”
“Nine weeks.” I tore my mind away with a major effort from the places he’d sent it. The man could talk dirty like nobody I’d ever imagined.
Tonight.
I knew I was shuddering again, and knew he saw it, and that he knew exactly why. “It looks like a little person now, I guess,” I said, returning to the point under discussion. “A very tiny person.”
“And it’s made you sick. You’ve lost weight. Too thin here.” He ran a slow couple of fingers from my collarbones down to the edge of my neckline as if he didn’t know how sensitive that spot was. Liar.
“Also normal,” I said. “Though I guess I need to make a doctor’s appointment, now that I’m here. So what do you think?” I moved on, because we didn’t need to go back into Hemi Te Mana Protectiveness Mode at this moment, where he’d, what? Arrange for daily checkups? Hire a nutritionist and a chef? “Do you want a boy or a girl?”
“Doesn’t matter, surely. Whatever it is, the deed’s done. And I’ll be rapt about either one, no worries.”
“Huh,” I said in surprise. “I thought men always wanted a son. But that was what I told Guy. Karen’s dad.
He
only wanted a boy, and he was positive he could get one. He insisted that my mom buy only boy clothes. You never saw a girl baby with so many outfits featuring dogs and fire trucks and dinosaurs. Why are dogs a boy decoration? I
told
him the baby was already made, and he said, ‘Anything can happen.’ Dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I already knew about chromosomes, and I was nine. But then, he was an idiot.”
Hemi was smiling again. “The brains must’ve come from your mum, then, because you got them too, I’ve noticed. But I’d love a daughter, and I’d love a son. In fact, since we’re meant to be communicating here, and this one has been a curious hole in our negotiations, I’ll tell you that I’d love two or three. Four, if you’re willing. I want all the babies you’ll give me, and I’ve been thinking about that since well before I asked you to marry me.”
I was going to be a mother. I was going to make Hemi a father, too, and he was going to be such a good one. “Was that supposed to be another thing I didn’t need to know?” I asked him, staying sassy with an effort. “Didn’t work out so well, did it?”
“No, because you surprised me. I didn’t even have to bring it up.”
“Antibiotics,” I explained. “Apparently they interfere. And apparently we’re both fertile.”
“Well, that’s good news, anyway. Since I’m betting you’ll make me some pretty good babies, and I want to keep you doing it. So. Do we get to go home, so I can watch the process and keep you as spoiled and satisfied as I want you? Whilst remaining fully independent, of course,” he added, not entirely convincingly.
“Ah. Well, no.” Here we were. The tricky part. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. This is all so new. I’m just figuring it out, and it’s too easy, when everything we have is yours, and it’s all on your schedule and your rules, for me to feel like I have to fit into that. I want to do it differently, but I think I need . . . practice first. And time to figure out my future.”
“Practice.” He wasn’t inscrutable now. His face was hard. “What kind of practice?”
“Well, here’s Koro. Probably going home tomorrow, and he needs somebody to stay with him, right, while he’s still fragile? What if that somebody was me?”
“I can hire somebody. And you know the whanau will be coming round as well.”
“He’ll hate you hiring somebody. And of course they can all come around. But he’ll need somebody to sleep there, don’t you think? And I’ll bet he’d like it to be me. Keeping his eye on you and me, giving me advice on how to deal with your highhandedness? It’d make him feel useful, and he’d
be
useful, because I could use all the advice I can get.”
“You think you’re helping your case,” he said. “You’re not. You
and
Koro? How’m I meant to stand up against that?”
I turned toward him a little more and put my hand on his cheek. I loved him so much it hurt, but that wasn’t enough. “Hemi,” I said, keeping it soft. Keeping it loving, because that was what it was. “I want to work this out. I want it more than anything. But I also need to see if we can do it without sex, or without so much sex, because it’s so easy to take all our . . . frustrations there, to do all our communicating that way, and not talk enough. Especially since that’s all I want to do right now. I’m dying for you, and I’m guessing you’re dying for me, too. But I need to know that you
will
talk to me, and that I
can
hold my own. I need to get clear, and I need to get strong, and that’s so hard to do with you right there.”
He didn’t say anything at all, and I waited, then waited some more. Finally, he said, “I want to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ I know that’d be wrong, but I can’t think what else to say.”
“Because you only know how to be in charge. That’s why.”
He was all the way past “hard” now. He was scowling, but somehow, it didn’t intimidate me as much as it might have. “I’m hating this.”
I had to laugh a little at that, and to give him a kiss, too. He hadn’t kissed me yet, and I needed to brush my lips over his, to feel that electric
zing
as every nerve ending lit up from my mouth to my toes. I needed to feel his hand coming out to hold me at my waist, because he couldn’t help it any more than I could help touching him.
It was only a moment, but it was a good one. I pulled back and said, “Well, how about if I had Karen, too? I miss her like crazy, and that way, you could have your orderly life back for a while, and we could both think about how we’d . . . how we’d work better together. We could talk. We could work it out without the sex there to make us think we’d solved something we hadn’t. Koro’s in the cast until around the last week of September, they say. We could use that as a rough time frame, don’t you think?”
“Karen’s school has to start up before then. When?”
“Early September, right after Labor Day. So I send her back, if you’re willing to take her. It would still get us through that first month with Koro, which is when he’ll need the most help. And then I could be there to make sure he was all right at night.”
“Karen has this fella,” he said, surprising me. “Noah the Unattached Buddhist. Had him at the house the night you left, in fact, while I was going after you. Gave her the biggest love bite on her neck you ever saw.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow. All right. That’s not too surprising, I guess, even though she didn’t tell me. Huh. She’s catching up fast.” Too fast for me.
“I wasn’t sure what to say about that,” he said. “Told her he couldn’t come over when she was alone, but about the ‘why not’ of it . . .”
“Hemi Te Mana at a loss,” I teased. “Not being able to make a decision.”
He was half-scowling, half-smiling. “It wasn’t funny. Bloody uncomfortable, tell you the truth. She asked why she shouldn’t have sex, since I’d probably done it when I was younger than her, and with girls her age. Couldn’t come up with a proper answer for that one.”
“So how old
were
you?” I glanced at him sideways from under my lashes.
“Not telling,” he said promptly. “And I never wanted to hurt anybody, but now? I wonder. I probably did. Not ‘hurt’ hurt,” he went on hastily. “Not if . . . anyway. Just that I was never serious about anybody. I didn’t do force, and I didn’t do coercion. Then or now.”
“Except for telling women who worked for you that you wanted to fuck them,” I pointed out.
“Ah. That was an experiment.” His smile was a bit sheepish. “We’ll call it a fail, eh.”
“You read me wrong.”
“I saw the response to me. Didn’t see the rest of the woman. My loss.”
“Mm. But Karen. I’ll have to think about that. How to talk about it. Birth control. Responsible choices. But I think it’d help if you tell her what . . . what boys can be like, maybe. I think you’d have more impact. Though you know you’re going to get the rolling eyes.”
“I can do that, rolling eyes and all. Nobody better for the job, sadly. But we’re off the subject.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think we are. I want to stay for a while, and I’d like Karen to stay with me. That way, I can see if I can get a short-term job, too. I’d love to work for somebody who
liked
me, and to feel like I was being . . . at least satisfactory. My pride’s kind of bruised, you know? Battered, you could say.” I tried to joke, even though it was no joke at all. I’d spent five years working for bosses who’d belittled me and told me I was nothing. If that was them, I needed to change the pattern. If it was me, I needed to know why, so I could fix it.
Hemi said, “Not many short-term marketing jobs in Katikati.”
“Nope. But there are some jobs I could do, I’ll bet. And I need to find one.”
I’d found a piece of bark and was busy shredding it, because I was nervous again. Not Hemi, though. He just got more still. I knew he was processing, deciding, all those scarily fast neurons zipping around his brain and drawing conclusions. Finally, he said, “I still want to say ‘absolutely not.’ You have no idea how much.”
“Oh,” I said, “I think I have some idea.”
“But it won’t work.”
“No. It won’t. I think this is our best way forward. I think it’ll help both of us to . . . renegotiate from a more level position.”