He stretched across to take her hand. “We didn’t exchange names. Mine’s Kel.”
Good grief, she was going to have to touch him. She put down her glass, wiped a palm that had gone sweaty on her pants, until she could no longer leave his hand floating in midair without looking as dweebish as her luggage.
No good pretending her hesitation had anything to do with knowing the average amount of germs on the human hand. It was the thought of ending up as a wet puddle melting all over his shoes.
Too late, she laid her hand in his. Held it a moment too long as the shock sent the blood rushing from her extremities to vital organs like her heart, which was pounding fit to burst. “Ngaire, I’m called Ngaire,” she repeated like an idiot with a few brain cells short of a mind.
“Now, I guess that’s spelled N-y-r-e-e?”
“No, N-g-a-i-r-e.”
“That’s Maori, isn’t it? I thought you were an American.”
He leaned closer, interested, maybe too interested. And, with the response he’d wrung out of her gone-haywire body, dangerous. Before she knew it she’d be spilling her guts about the package she had to deliver. Too dangerous.
She shrugged, dropping her gaze to hide the lie. “I guess my mother read it in a book.” A book with her grandmother’s name in the flyleaf.
She decided to turn the tables, ask questions and let him do the talking while she got ready to leave. “Are you a native of New Zealand?”
“Yes, but it’s been a long time since I was home.” Kel put the bottle back to his lips and took a long swallow.
The movement in his throat, the earthy slide of his Adam’s apple while he downed the rest of his beer in one, hypnotized her. Keep away from there, girl, she scolded herself. This isn’t a pleasure trip you’re on. It’s more important than sex. A life depended on it.
Her own.
Leaving her unfinished juice on the table, she stood. “I need to freshen up. You have a nice visit back home. Bye, now.”
He stood. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“I doubt it. We’re just two planes who had a near miss, never to waggle wings again.”
“Take care, now.” He held out his hand. It hurt to ignore it, but the cost of touching him was way too high.
“Don’t worry, I will.” She’d take care not to run into him again before her plane left. Ngaire glanced around, her eyes seeking the nearest rest room and safety. It was one thing to shake a man off physically, emotionally it was a whole other ball game. She didn’t need anyone taking her mind off her goal. That track led to trouble.
Kel’s time was running out. A pleasure though it had been talking to Ngaire as he gave the other passengers the once-over, his target needed identifying before he got onboard that plane. Not that her back view wasn’t as easy on the eye as the front as she strode away with her small navy day pack swaying above her hips.
Ngaire’s unwitting remark about near misses reduced his sex life to a metaphor. Brief encounters were his specialty, a quick fumble beneath the covers, a halfhearted satiating of the soul, then back to work. That’s how he liked it, with nothing to come between him and his career—no wife, no family, not even a relationship. Not anymore.
Yeah, he had no regrets about watching her walk away. Not that she would be alone for long. Something about her set men’s mouths drooling. Even the guy on the phone broke off his conversation, holding the receiver at chest level as he watched her go by.
“Thank you, Ngaire,” Kel muttered as an idea struck him that put a wide cat-that-got-the-pigeon grin on his face. She’d given him the perfect solution simply by walking out on him.
He didn’t feel so bad now about the distraction. One look at her braid swinging behind her chair, like a come-hither signal, and he’d been lost, driven to speak to her.
Having rescued her sunglasses from the gutter seemed the perfect excuse, but the second he got within sniffing distance of her honeyed scent, all had been forgotten.
It was her eyes, he thought, as he opened his cell phone. Those blue irises, with their unusual tinge of green, were out of kilter with her skin and hair coloring. The long lashes framing them made them look as if a coal miner had set them in her face. He knew she was American, she’d told him so, but there was something exotic, different, to the cast of her features, as if they’d been culled from different parts of the world and put together to make her look like a houri, all temptation and forbidden delights.
But enough speculating. She had it right, they’d never meet again. Unless they were on the same flight. Nah, the gods couldn’t be that kind, or that cruel.
Kel punched the Faa’a airport’s number into the high-tech pad of the cell phone and asked for the information desk. Once the clerk came on line he fixed his problem by asking her to page Mr. Two Feathers McKay, traveling on flight ATN 104.
Simple.
The best plans always were. All he had to do now was wait and see which man in the passenger lounge answered the call.
The announcement filled the terminal for the third time, and still no one had moved. The best laid plans, et cetera…
He began sweating on it.
From the corner of his eye he caught sight of Ngaire, pack in hand, her braid like a pendulum counting the seconds as she headed straight for the nearest hospitality phone. In no time at all, Kel heard her incredulous, “Hello. You wanted me?”
Kel hung up.
Yeah, he’d wanted her, but not anymore. Now he knew what the initial N. stood for. Ngaire.
Ngaire Two Feathers McKay.
He’d aced her features: Maori, Native American and Scottish, an eclectic mix and a damn beautiful one. She reminded him of a pup he’d had as a kid. Bitzer, he’d called it. Cute as all hell. But the moment his back was turned, it would creep up and sink its little, sharp teeth into the back of his heel.
So, Ngaire had rung his bell and he hated her for it. Hated being wrong about her. But she was wrong, too.
She would be seeing him again.
Chapter 2
Ngaire couldn’t believe she was here in the flesh instead of her imagination. As the plane circled before landing she’d had her nose glued to the window, would have been halfway through the thing if she’d been able to open it.
Paradise, her grandfather had called it as he’d told her stories of his time here as a GI during World War Two. From on high it had all looked so beautiful, the sea blue, the lakes silver, the snow-capped peaks like models from some school project. This was where George Two Feathers had met her grandmother, this land of myth and legend. Like the ones he’d read her from books her grandmother had brought to America. They’d been her fairy tales, and the one that leapt to mind was the Maori god Maui, and fishing up the North Island using a whale’s jawbone as a hook. Ngaire did a mental eye roll as she headed for the escalator down to immigration, grinning wide enough to make her jaw ache.
“Kia ora.”
Ngaire handed her passport to the immigration officer, wishing she could return her greeting without making a mishmash of the language. “Hi.”
Her passport was stamped New Zealand and passed back to her with “Enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks, I will.”
Less than fifteen minutes later Ngaire’s case went through the X-ray machine. She caught the operator’s frown as his chair swiveled away from the monitor, pointing something out to the customs officer towering over the end of the conveyer belt.
“Is there a problem?” Pretending she hadn’t a notion what might have caught his attention, she smiled,