Hemi glanced down at me with a sardonic look in his eye. “Yeh,” he told Karen. “I would. I can see it now, in fact. Bronze. Silk taffeta, maybe, with a bit of body to it. Clean lines. And if it looks as good as I think? I’ll put it in the line, and you can know that you inspired it. What d’you reckon? Could be that college fund right there.”
“Digging yourself in deeper,” I told him.
“Nah.” He had my hand in his and was turning toward the door. “Marshaling my forces.”
Hemi
I took Hope out of the garage and hustled across to the car with her, got her inside, then slung our bags into the boot.
“You know,” I told her when I was turning the key and switching the heat to full, “you might be more effective in these negotiations if you weren’t wearing polka-dot gumboots.”
She stretched her legs out in front of her and looked with obvious satisfaction at the white dots on their red background. “I think I can be effective. I’ve got a secret weapon. And I love these. They could be my favorite things you’ve bought for me.”
I sighed in resignation, and she said, “Except my bracelet, of course. Do you want to know why I love that so much?”
I thought, Not because it cost over two hundred thousand dollars, I’ll bet, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t ask her what her secret weapon was, either, because I already knew. That I couldn’t resist her, and couldn’t deny her anything. “Can’t wait to hear,” I said instead.
She said, “Because you told me it meant ‘I love you.’ That was the first time you said it.” She wasn’t close enough to suit me, but she had her hand on my thigh all the same as I turned into the road and headed north.
I cleared my throat. “You say I’m unfair promising Karen a prom dress, and then you come up with that. Not to mention putting your hand on me. But since you bring it up—just see how much your engagement ring is going to mean ‘I love you.’ Wait and see.”
“I’m not even going to answer that,” she said. “You appeal to all my lower instincts, that’s my problem. You make me want sparkly things, and expensive wine, and orgasms that half kill me. Not to mention the worst one. To be held and babied and taken care of.”
She didn’t take her hand off my thigh, though, and I didn’t tell her that I wanted to give her all those things, and to keep on doing it. This was meant to be a negotiation, which meant that the winner would be the one who needed it less.
Yeh, right. I was a dead man.
It was still raining hard when I pulled into the carpark of the Oceanside Resort in Mt. Maunganui. “Oh,” Hope said, “it’s on the beach. That is gorgeous.”
I gazed doubtfully at the view before us. “Yeh,” I said. “If it stops raining, we can go for a walk.” Just now, the wind was blowing, the foaming breakers were crashing into the shore, and it wasn’t looking like any kind of lovely walk to me.
Of course, she said, “I don’t care if it’s raining. I want to walk anyway. But we have to do this first.”
When we were finally in our suite, though, she didn’t seem to know how to begin. She looked around after taking off her gumboots and anorak at the door and said, “It’s nice.”
I sat down on a black leather couch that looked out over the view of pounding surf and gray skies, pulled my laptop from its case, and set it on the black lacquered coffee table. If I took control, I might be comfortable again, though I doubted it. I opened my laptop and said, “Come sit by me, and we’ll start this.”
She hesitated, hovering between my couch and the other one, set at right angles to it. “Maybe I should be over here, to stay…strong, you know. I don’t really know how to do this.”
“Luckily,” I said, “I do. You said we had things to decide. Start by telling me the ones you’ve thought of, and we’ll write them down and go from there. But you need to sit by me so you can see what we’ve got, and what I write.”
She took a breath and did it, and I relaxed a fraction.
“Well?” I asked, once I’d opened a new document.
“Uh…” She was nibbling at her full lower lip, her soft hair falling in a pale, tumbled cloud from the humidity, her perfume delicate and floral, and maybe having her beside me didn’t give me as much of an advantage as I thought.
It was that secret weapon. It was a killer.
I waited, practicing calm and stillness, not betraying my weakness, and she finally said, “Money. That’s pretty much it. It all comes down to money. And Karen. Taking care of her.”
I wrote it down, and she said, “What do you have?”
“Sex,” I said. “Appearance.” I added those to the list.
She stared at me. “Appearance? What, I have to look a certain way, or you’re not going to keep me? I’m not a trophy wife, Hemi. I don’t have the body for it, and I’m all done growing.”
“We’ll get to it. No arguing before we get there. We’ll go in order. Yours first.”
“You’re starting out lousy,” she muttered.
I negotiated for the win, and I got it. It was best to have your opponent off-balance, flustered. But this win was different, and to get it, I had a feeling that I had to approach it differently, too. So I told her, “In a negotiation, you don’t tell the other person what you’re actually going for. You ask for everything, and then you work downward. You let them think they’ve won when they get you to accept what you wanted in the first place. But I’m going to break the rules and tell you exactly what I want. I want to put my ring on your finger, and I want you to want it there. I want to change your name, and then I want to go home with you and move you and Karen into my apartment. I want to come home from work and kiss you hello. I want you in my bed every night. And that’s all.”
Her eyes were soft. Her brain, unfortunately, appeared to be completely unaffected. “That’s not all,” she said. “That sounds wonderful—even the name change part, which I should at least be deliberating—but you aren’t telling me all of it. You’re saying you are, but you aren’t.”
She was getting narky, and so was I. What, that hadn’t been good enough for her? “What am I not telling you?”
“How much control you want over what I do.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No? Is it all right with you if I go to lunch with another man? How about dinner?”
“No,” I said immediately.
“See what I mean? You’re possessive, Hemi. Write ‘other people’ down on that list.”
I scowled, breaking another rule—not betraying emotion. “I’m not negotiating that.”
“Fine.” She hopped up. “We can leave.”
I grabbed her hand and tugged her back down with me. “No threatening to walk out. Ground rules. We’re here until we’re done, and we both say that what matters most is being together.”
“Even if,” she said, her blue-green eyes deceptively innocent, “we’re not married at the end of this trip? You’re not saying, ‘My way or the highway?’”