Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) (3 page)

Wanting to make the most of Honey while he
had her to himself, Dex prepared for a long embrace, but they’d only managed a
brief smooch before a voice interrupted them.

“Put him down, Honey. You don’t know where
he’s been.”

Irritated, he pulled back and glanced over
his shoulder to see a dark-haired, cheeky-looking guy watching them with
amusement. Dex grinned. “Hey, Chase.”

“Koru around?” Chase asked.

“He’s in the café.” Honey straightened her
apron. Her cheeks had flushed an attractive pink. Dex winked at her, and the
flush deepened. He stifled a chuckle. She was very easy to embarrass, and he
enjoyed teasing her, loving the way she reacted to him.

“You may not want to go in, though,” Honey
added as they followed Chase toward the café. “Reuben’s in there.”

Chase stiffened visibly, and his brow
darkened. “What’s he doing here?”

“Waiting for his girlfriend,” Dex said wryly.

“Ouch.”

Pity swept over Dex, and he clapped the other
guy on the shoulder. “Sorry. That was a bit harsh.”

“I’m mortally wounded.” Chase pushed open
the café door and the smell of coffee and hot pastries wafted out. “I may never
recover.”

Unfortunately, Dex thought, that statement
was probably true. Honey had told him the story. Chase had adored Daisy Summers
since the first day Koru had taken him to the café to meet the rest of his
family, and he had been smitten as soon as his eyes fell on the tall,
blonde-haired sister.

Daisy had cast her gaze over Chase, sized
him up in ten seconds flat and dismissed him just as quickly. Smart, astute and
having taken a business degree back in England, Daisy ran the commercial side
of
Matariki
, but wasn’t satisfied with that. She wanted more out of life
than the rest of the Summer siblings. Money. Possessions. Status. Three things
Chase Jackson didn’t have.

Chase worked in his father’s building firm
and wrote science fiction novels in his spare time. Unpublished science fiction
novels. He had no savings, not an iota of business sense and spent every cent
he earned on computer paper, surfboards and beer.

Daisy wasn’t impressed.

She was, however, a romantic at heart, or
so Honey said, although Dex couldn’t see it himself. The oldest sister always
seemed aloof, cold even, and he couldn’t imagine her relaxing her guard enough
to be won over by a bunch of flowers or a love poem, however well written it
was. But somehow Chase had touched the dreamer inside of her, or maybe she’d
just been entranced by the muscles he’d developed lifting bricks all day every
day. Either way, they’d dated for over six months before Daisy had finally
realised that inside the idealistic lover was a lazy layabout who was never
going to amount to anything. She broke up with him and soon after hooked up with
Reuben. “Rebound,” Honey had stated when she’d told Dex that.

Ever since then Chase had been trying to
get her back.

So far, it wasn’t working. Dex admired his
persistence though.

Chase clapped Koru on the shoulder and
wished him happy birthday, nodded at Reuben, who nodded back just as
dismissively, then crossed the café and leaned on the counter. Daisy came over
to the till and put her hands on her hips. Slim, beautiful and sharp as a bee
sting, with bright blonde hair rolled into an elegant chignon, Daisy could make
men wither at twenty paces by fixing them with her cool green eyes. Dex could
see why other men found her attractive, but she wasn’t his type at all.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.

“Hello, beautiful,” Chase said in a low
voice so Reuben couldn’t hear. “What’s the best kiss you have on the menu?”

She gave him a look that would have
shrivelled a lesser man, like sprinkling salt would shrivel a slug. Chase, used
to her disdain, just blew her a kiss. Dex laughed and took his seat.

“I’ll only be five minutes,” Honey said.

“No worries.” He sat back in the chair and
sipped the cooling latte, watching her as she moved about behind the counter,
tidying away.

Shorter than Daisy, maybe five seven or
eight, with hair the colour of her name tumbling down her back in waves, Honey
Summers had a beautiful spirit that radiated from her and filled him with a
light he’d never experienced until the day he walked into the café. He’d been
captivated from the moment she gave him the extra chocolate fish, entranced by
the flush in her cheeks, her delightful English accent, the frequent smile in
her eyes and the way she appeared completely naïve and innocent—qualities he’d
never thought to find in a grown woman. She seemed to cleanse away all the bad
things he’d done in the past, all the destructive emotions and feelings that had
infected him like a disease. When she looked at him with love and joy in her
eyes, he felt reborn, and he never wanted to let that sensation go.

The more he’d got to know her, the more
he’d discovered the darker, haunted side to her personality. As Chase settled
beside him with his mocha, Dex watched the sun stream through the window causing
a pillar to cast a shadow across the counter, thinking how it mirrored the way
her sunny character was offset by the depression that plagued her every now and
again, usually when she thought about her previous boyfriend.

Dex would happily admit that he wanted to
kill Ian McFarlane. Or Ian Mc-Fucking-Idiot as he liked to call him. How a man
could take a spirit as bright and fresh as Honey’s and corrode it like seawater
does copper, he had no idea. In spite of her insistence to the contrary, he
knew Honey thought herself weak for letting Ian treat her badly for so long. He
didn’t blame her—he’d seen enough of that type of man in his job to know it was
entirely possible for one person to hold another in thrall, to possess them and
control them so completely that their own personality almost dissolved.

Part of him felt resentful that her family
hadn’t intervened earlier. He supposed they’d all been too caught up in their
own lives to notice how bad it had got. Koru had told him that Campbell Summers
had been too worried about Marama’s cancer diagnosis to realise his daughter
was suffering. Certainly their reaction when they found out how unhappy she
was—immediately organising the move back to Marama’s home country—convinced Dex
that they felt guilty for not paying more attention to her. And he knew Koru
felt the same.

Following the consumption of a good portion
of a bottle of whiskey celebrating the All Blacks’ success on the rugby field
against Australia shortly after they met, the ‘seventh sister’ had confided that
he blamed himself for not rescuing her earlier. Koru admitted that when he’d
found out what had been going on, he’d tracked Ian down in a dark alley one
night and beaten the crap out of him, kicking the bastard so hard in the crown
jewels he’d probably never father a child. Koru had looked wary at what his new
police officer friend was going to say to that revelation.

Dex didn’t usually condone violence, but he’d
shaken Koru’s hand and said vehemently, “Fucking great result,” and that was
that. They never mentioned it again.

When he and Honey first dated, it had taken
her two weeks before she told Dex the story about what had happened before they
left England. He’d listened, appalled, already half in love with her, sick to
the stomach to think that someone had treated this butterfly spirit so cruelly.
Clearly, even though it had been nearly a year since she broke up with Ian and
the family moved to New Zealand, she was heavily scarred, plus of course the
death of her mother had only served to make things worse.

And Dex decided there and then he was going
to make her the happiest woman on the planet. He proposed three weeks later,
and suggested that they wait until their wedding night before sleeping
together. By then she already knew about the disaster surrounding Cathryn, and
the thought that both of them needed to take it slowly, to learn to trust
before making that final step, sealed the deal for her.

He watched her now moving about the
kitchen, cleaning the utensils she’d used to make the pastries and wiping down
the counter, and he smiled at her loveliness.

He’d yet to see beneath her clothes. When
they made out watching the TV or lying in the grasses surrounding
Stormwind
—the
large house and estate where all the Summers clan lived bar Daisy, who’d
recently moved to Auckland with Reuben, and Koru, who shared a house with
Chase—he always stopped short of removing her clothing, wanting to somehow try
to preserve the innocence and…he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d call it…the cleanliness
of their relationship, maybe, until their wedding night, wanting it to be right
.

But that didn’t stop himself imagining
taking it further. What colour would her nipples be when he finally removed the
white lacy bra he knew she favoured? A light rose pink? Or darker, reflecting
the fact that even though she was blonde, her skin wasn’t English rose but
tanned easily, reflecting her Maori heritage. On their wedding night, he’d peel
away her white dress, slowly remove her underwear, then he’d push her back onto
the bed and kiss her senseless for a while before moving his lips to her breasts.
He’d admire her nipples and tell her how beautiful she was, then he’d close his
mouth over them and suck until she squirmed beneath him. He’d brush his lips
down her ribs, over her soft stomach, and then even lower, kissing, tasting…

Dex closed his eyes, leaned forward and
rested his forehead on the table.

Chase and Koru started laughing.

“What’s the joke?” Reuben asked.

“Dex isn’t getting any,” Chase said.

Reuben frowned. “I thought you were
engaged.”

“He is. They’re not sleeping together until
their wedding night.” Koru grinned.

Reuben looked baffled. “Jeez, why? I didn’t
think anyone waited till they were married anymore.”

“Long story.” Dex wasn’t in the mood to
spill the intimate details of his life. The recent letter he’d had from Cathryn
remained fresh in his memory, even though he’d immediately ripped it into a
dozen pieces and then ceremoniously burned them before tossing the ash angrily
in his garden as if hoping he could scatter the words just as easily. He hadn’t
told Koru about it, or Honey, and he wasn’t going to with the wedding only a
week away. He just had to hope Cathryn had been bluffing, although dread sat
coiled in his stomach at the fear that she might have been telling the truth.

He especially wasn’t going to confide his
innermost feelings to the boorish city dude who’d looked down his nose when he
walked into
Matariki
and found out the restaurant Daisy ran with her
family wasn’t a chic bar with chrome stools and printed menus encased in
leather booklets, but instead a village-style friendly café with checked tablecloths,
creaky wooden chairs and a blackboard with specials of the day written in
chalk. Never mind that they served the best coffee in the Northland and their
selection of pies and pastries wouldn’t have looked out of place on the table
of a medieval king.

“Don’t know how you do it,” Reuben
commented. “I couldn’t go a week without sex, let alone…how long have you been
engaged?”

“Six months.”

“Jeez. You must have balls the size of space
hoppers.”

Koru met Dex’s gaze, his lips twisting
wryly. Chase also sniggered, although he was too busy glaring at Reuben’s
reference to having regular sex with Daisy to pay attention to Dex’s reaction.

Dex decided to change the subject, not
needing Reuben to remind him how desperate he was to get his leg over. “So what
are you up to tonight?” he asked Koru. “Out celebrating, birthday boy?”

“Yeah. Jude should be here in a minute.
We’re going to Paihia, meeting some mates and going to one of the clubs for the
evening. You sure you don’t want to come along?”

There had been a time when Dex would have
jumped at the chance of half a dozen beers and an evening at a nightclub with
the hope of finding a pretty blonde to take home for the evening. He was only
twenty-eight—the same age as Koru, and Jude and Chase were only a year younger.
It was hardly old, and certainly his other three friends showed no sign of
slowing down their fun-filled evenings.

But he and Honey were going to see the
latest Bond movie at the cinema that evening. They’d catch a bite to eat in the
restaurant next door before watching the movie, and then afterward he’d drive
them back to
Stormwind
and they’d probably talk a walk through the
paddocks to the river as the sun grew low in the sky and the cicadas sang in
the bush. They’d sit on the fallen log by the swimming hole and talk about
nothing and everything, about their future, and how many kids they wanted, and
how they were going to decorate the house once she moved in with him. And then
she’d let him kiss her, and he’d tell her all the things he was going to do to her
when he finally got her into bed, and he wouldn’t want the evening to end.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m good.”

Koru nodded, his eyes warm. “Good man.”

Honey sprayed the top of the counter with
disinfectant and washed it down, then looked at the clock. It had just gone five,
so she walked across to the front door and placed the closed sign on its stand
in the doorway, then went through into the kitchen to find her father.