Just in Time (24 page)

“I never thought of it like that. Just thought it was ugly, and wished we could wear mufti. I can’t
wait
to get out of school.” Talia’s tone was almost savage as she poked with a spatula at the eggs she’d broken into a pan on the stove. “Go to Uni and get
out
. Like Mals.”

Faith started to ask a question, then thought better of it. “Hmm,” she said instead, focusing on buttering slices of toast as if it required all her concentration. “Maybe it’s easier to be a boy.”

She thought Talia was going to say something. But instead, like Hope in the conference room, she seemed to catch herself. She turned away, pulled plates out of the cupboard, and slid eggs onto them. Faith added the toast, and they pulled stools up to the kitchen counter and began to eat.

“So what is there to do after school around here?” Faith ventured after a minute. Talia hadn’t been around the previous afternoon, she hadn’t missed that. “Seems like it might be a little easier to get together with your friends than where I grew up.”

“Where’s that? Vegas? I always wanted to go there. Sounds so glamorous. Not boring like here.”

Faith laughed. “And here I’ve been thinking how beautiful New Zealand is. How much there is to do. The ocean, the lake, the mountains? It seems like paradise to me.”

That was met with a look of incredulity. “Ha. Dead bore. Everybody I know wants to emigrate to Aussie, or the UK, or even,” Talia said with a sigh, “the States. When I told them you were from Vegas, all my friends were jealous as.”

Jealous as what? Faith wondered. “Well, I guess everything looks different from the outside, because it’s not glamorous at all. I work in a casino. I practically grew up in one, so I ought to know. It’s people losing their money, and outside of that? It’s suburbia, and your friends from school live miles away, and you don’t have a car. I’d think it might be better here. What do you do after school?”

“Huh,” Talia said. “We usually go down by the lake. You know, hang out. Have a chat.”

“I haven’t seen the lake yet.” Faith concentrated on her toast. “I wonder—” She stopped. “No, probably not. I know, I’m kind of old. Never mind.”

“What?” Talia asked. “You’re not old. You’re pretty cool, actually.”

“Really? Well…do you think—would you be willing to show me the lake, maybe? Show me around a bit? Because I’ll bet Will’s going to go to the gym this afternoon again, and your grandmother said something about yoga again, so…please.”

Talia laughed, for real this time, her perfect smooth oval of a face lighting up with it, her dark eyes showing a light Faith hadn’t seen in them, and Faith laughed back.

“Yeah,” Faith admitted, “I’m begging here. Please. Hide me.”

She did end up seeing the lake before the afternoon, though. She saw it on the way to her Canopy Tour with Will.

His mother had come into the kitchen while Faith and Talia were finishing up, and Talia’s face had gone shuttered, their conversation at an end. Faith had sat at the breakfast table with the others once Talia had taken herself off, had offered to do the dishes, and had had her offer accepted, to her relief.

“You can do them with me,” Miriama said. “Emere is off to work today.”

“Oh, do you work?” Faith asked, and then could have kicked herself, because the woman had raised five children.

“Yeh,” Will’s mother said. “At the i-Site—the tourist information site—a few days a week. Keeps me busy. How do you stay busy, Faith?”

Her glance held not-so-veiled hostility, but Will just laughed. “You’re offside there, Mum. Faith has three jobs.” Well, four, but who was counting? “She’s been working already since she’s been down here, haven’t you noticed? She doesn’t spend her time trolling the casinos for hot rugby boys with big bikkies, whatever you may be imagining.”

“Big…” Faith uttered faintly. What had he just
said?

“With money,” he said. “Why, what did you think? Got to stop looking at those naughty pictures, eh. They’re giving you a dirty mind.”

Faith choked back a laugh, because Will’s mother didn’t look amused, and Miriama’s sharp eyes were on the two of them again.

“Hoping to tear you away today, though,” Will said. “I thought we could do a bit of sightseeing. In fact, I already booked, so no choice. As Kuia pointed out to me, here you are in En Zed, and I’m duty-bound to give you an adrenaline rush, aren’t I.”

His face was nothing but innocent, but Faith knew better. She looked right back at him and said, “An adrenaline rush? You think you could?”

This time, he was the one choking, to her satisfaction. He recovered himself fast, though, and said, “Well, maybe somebody else could. And I could watch.”

She started to smile, caught the look on his mother’s face, and got up hastily and began to collect plates instead. “I’ll just start this, then. I’d like to help more instead of just falling asleep on you, since you all are being kind enough to let me visit.” Yes, it might have been a blatant attempt to win a little favor with his mother, but she wasn’t used to being hated, and it was wearing on her.

Will got up with her. “We’ll do it together. And then go for my outing.”

“Don’t
do
that,” she hissed at him under cover of the running water when she was scraping plates and filling the dishwasher.

“Who, me? Did I start that?”

“Your grandmother knows,” she muttered. “I’m sure she does. And, what? Now I’m not just a gold-digging tramp, I’m a gold-digging
exhibitionist
tramp?”

His laugh rang out, and she had to laugh too. “Because you’re bad,” he said, the smile reaching all the way to his eyes as he looked down at her. “I’ve always known it. It’s all a front, that good-girl thing you do. See, there you are turning red again, bang on cue. Nothing better than a good girl succumbing to her dark side. Nothing sexier than thinking about helping her do it.”

“Stop,” she warned. “Stop right now. That’s our deal.”

He sighed. “Right. Washing-up, sightseeing, showing my innocent American girlfriend the beauties of my native land. The program as scheduled.”

It didn’t turn out to be sightseeing. It turned out to be a heart-stopping journey through the treetops with two guides and five other guests, none of whom had recognized Will, because none of them had been Kiwis. The guides had known who he was, but they hadn’t made a big deal of it. But then, Kiwis didn’t make a big deal out of much, Faith was figuring that out. Well, nothing except rugby.

It all began frighteningly enough, with following their guide—or, in her case, following Will’s tight, muscular, absolutely fantastic rear view, in a pair of shorts again—up an endless ladder set against a tree trunk that was a good six feet in diameter.

Higher and higher into the air she climbed, wanting to stop, wanting to climb down, but that wasn’t an option, because there was somebody else behind her. Finally, she came gratefully to rest on a platform set high in the treetops, a canopy of green and birdsong all around her. She felt a little better when her feet were on solid wood again, despite the fact that the platform was completely open, and that there were nine people crowded around it, including one of them who would rather have been hugging the trunk. That would be Faith.

“Please tell me it’s not possible to fall,” a middle-aged woman, sharing the adventure with her husband and already looking dubious, said to some nervous laughter from the rest of the group.

“Haven’t lost one yet. That’s what the harness is for, eh,” Roman, their male guide, said, exchanging a laughing glance with Will. “Want to show them what happens if they let go?”

Will grinned at the young man, and before Faith realized what he was doing, he’d leaned back from the edge of the platform and stepped off, was dangling in midair from the chest, twisting a little in the wind.

Faith gasped, cried out, and in the next two seconds, she’d reached for him, grabbed him around the waist, and pulled him back in, and everyone was laughing. Everyone but Will. His arms had come around her instantly, and he was holding her tight.

“Sorry, baby,” he said. “No worries. It’s all good. Nobody’s falling today.”

“Apologies for the moment of heart failure,” Roman said cheerfully as Faith disengaged herself from Will, tried to calm her racing heart and pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. “But, yeh, the harnesses are there for a reason. You’re safe as houses, and we’ve just experimented with our million-dollar man to prove it to you.”

That was it. Will’s cover was blown, because all the guests were looking curious now.

“You’ll hear,” Caroline, the other guide, was piping up on the other side of the platform, “that nothing matters more to Kiwis than the All Blacks. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that our rugby team is our most famous export. If we’re willing to dangle our starting first-five from his harness thirty meters above the ground ten days before he’s due to lead New Zealand to another hard-won victory against England? You know it’s safe.”

“Maybe we should drop him, then. I’ve got twenty pounds on that match,” the British lady’s husband said, and the group laughed again. Everybody but Faith. She was still too embarrassed.

“We’ll start with something easy,” Roman said. “Across the swing bridge you go. One at a time, please. Start us out again, Will.”

“Nah,” he said, his arm still around Faith. “We’ll let somebody else go first, give Faith a minute.”

“I’m all right,” she hastened to say.

“Then why don’t you lead us off?” Roman asked her, and if he wasn’t a sadist, Faith didn’t know who was.

“You don’t have to,” Will was murmuring. “Just say no. You know how to do that. I’ve heard you.”

That did the trick. Faith took a breath and said, “Sure.” Her new life was about taking chances, after all, about putting herself out there, not taking the easy route.

This wasn’t the easy route, no matter what Roman had said. It was just walking, true. But it was walking across two narrow planks set on cables, with two more waist-high cables at either side to hold onto, desperately in her case, until she’d crossed to another platform, the whole thing swaying dizzyingly with every step and sending her heart galloping along with it. Finally, though, she came to rest on solid wood again, and this time, she really did have to force herself not to reach out and hug the tree trunk.

“What you’re standing around is a totara,” Caroline said when the group had reassembled. “One of our most beloved native trees. This one is about four hundred years old.”

Faith’s eyes flew to Will’s again. That had been the tree in the Maori saying, she remembered, the one about his grandfather. He looked back at her, not smiling for once, and she knew he remembered, too.

After a while, when the message got through to her stiffened limbs that she really wasn’t going to fall, she relaxed a little and began to enjoy her adventure. Moving from one platform to the next, surrounded by the murmuring canopy of green, with monstrous ferns sprouting directly from the bark and fern trees swaying in the breeze with all the grace of palms and none of the wicked sharp edges. The melodious song of tui and bellbird filled the air around them, and she was so high, so remote, it was as if she were a bird herself.

She relaxed, that is, until she had to fly, feeling exactly like a baby bird being pushed out of the nest. When she stepped off her first platform into thin air, clutching the handles of the zipline with desperate urgency, the canopy flashing past her with dizzying speed, she thought her heart would stop.

At least she hadn’t been the first to do this one. Will had already done it, had bounced off a far-distant tree and landed on the platform with ease, so she knew it was possible. But it was all so…high. So fast. So scary. And, in the end, so exhilarating.

By the fifteenth or sixteenth time, she was grabbing the handles with eagerness, her blood rushing in her veins, her heart pounding with joyous adrenaline. When she took her final ride, the longest and most thrilling yet, she was laughing out loud, whooping with the fun of it, lifting her feet to bounce off the tree at the other end and releasing the handles of the zipline, moving to re-clip her line so the next person could go, as if this were something she did every day. As if she actually were an adventurous traveler instead of Faith Goodwin, conservative stay-at-home worker bee.