Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) by Rosalind James

Author:Rosalind James [James, Rosalind]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellbird Publishing
Published: 2020-02-16T18:00:00+00:00

Poppy

It took ages to get the kids into bed. Hamish and Olivia needed a bath first, much as I wanted to move on to my post-bedtime activities instead. They seemed to have spent the day smearing every substance possible over themselves.

“You’ve got geologic layers of dirt here,” I told Olivia, scrubbing the back of her neck. “How’d you get strawberry juice back here, too? It’s either that or blood, and I didn’t hear anybody screaming. And I think you have honey in your hair.”

“’Cause we were cooking,” she said. “Cooking takes all the, all the very many hands of working”—waving her own hands all the while—“because you have to make the strawberries go in a pretty way, Auntie Karen says, and you have to squish all the cheese down. Squish, squish, squish. I don’t want to live in our house anymore. I want to live in this house with Auntie Karen, because it’s the funnest.”

“You don’t get to choose where you live,” Hamish said, scrubbing at his own hair. “I want to live in the house with the dog, but there wouldn’t be room for you, or Mummy, or the baby, so I guess we have to live in our house instead.” He sighed in a heartfelt way, and Olivia echoed him. Pathetically, like the child welfare people would come bursting in at any moment to arrest me for Insufficient Fun and Dogginess. And possibly Insufficient Pizza, though I had that one pretty well covered, if you didn’t get too picky about quality. I don’t want to admit how many times my kids had eaten supermarket pizza since Isobel was born.

Finally, though, they were tucked into their sleeping bags, story told and song sung, and I was shutting the door behind them, my heart picking up the pace as soon as I did, as if the clock had tolled, and this was Poppy Time. As if you could take off your Mum life like a suit of clothes and slip into something silkier, more fragrant, and much more exciting, in a sort of superhero transformation into Sexygirl.

That was when Jax and Karen came in from their swim, a couple towels nearly falling off them. Jax had his leg off and was on his crutches, and Karen had one arm around him already, her other hand gripping a bottle of wine. She gave me a brilliant smile and said, “Freezing, because no sun, but amazing. We’re getting in the shower. We’d have got in the spa tub, but you know ...kids. And you. We refrained. Points!”

“I was thinking about going down there myself,” I said. Nonchalantly. I hoped, and not addressing the rest of it. “To the beach. That, uh, full moon and all. Nice. Now that you’re back, for the kids. Who are asleep. Of course.”

Jax looked at Karen, then said, “Maybe, uh, give us a few minutes.”

“No,” Karen said. “You go. If somebody’s screaming or anything, Jax will respond. Heroically.”

Jax looked like he wanted to say, “The hell I will.

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