With His Kiss. Laurey Bright

of flowers.

      Shining, pale-honey hair fell forward and hid her face when she stepped up to cast the flower into the grave. Other mourners filed past while she stood nearby, accepting their kisses and handshakes and murmurs of sympathy.

      Steve stooped for a handful of earth. Prettifying the ceremony with flowers didn’t make Magnus’s death any easier for those who had loved and respected him. Those like Steve and the boys—for they weren’t much more—now gathered protectively about the supposedly grieving widow.

      She’d sat in the front row of the church straight-backed and perfectly still while a hulking adolescent beside her sobbed into his hands. Following the coffin out afterward, she had remained pale and composed and apparently unmoved even when one of the youngsters accompanying her burst into a Maori karakia, the lament sending a shiver up Steve’s spine with its haunting passion and forcing him to swallow hard on a suddenly obstructed throat.

      At the graveside she’d appeared more bored than stricken with sorrow, a faraway look in her eyes as though her mind was otherwise occupied.

      Steve was tempted to skip the drinks and food offered after the funeral but Magnus’s lawyer who had phoned him in Los Angeles to give him the news, had seemed anxious to ensure Steve’s presence, saying they needed a private meeting.

      “At the funeral?” Steve had queried.

      “Mrs. Allardyce has agreed we can use one of the rooms at Kurakaha House. She’d like to get the business out of the way.”

      She’d like to get him out of the way, Steve figured. Magnus must have mentioned him in his will.

      He hoped Magnus had protected the House and its work from his wife’s—widow’s—money-grubbing hands.

      Beautiful hands, he had to admit when she extended one to him as he entered the big, carpeted double room, already filled with mourners engaged in muted chatter. As beautiful as the rest of her, which had changed little during the six years since he’d seen her last. She’d cut her hair shorter, just below chin level, and maybe lost a little weight, or possibly the clinging black sheath that she wore without adornment falsely lent that impression.

      “I’m glad you came, Steve.” Her voice was as cool as the smooth fingers he held briefly in his.

      Liar, he thought, biting back a sardonic laugh. She’d have been happy never to have laid eyes on him again.

      Her gaze didn’t quite meet his, focusing instead on the knot of his maroon tie. “Magnus would appreciate your being here. Nigel told you he needs to talk?”

      “He told me. I believe you’ve made a room available.”

      “Yes.” She was distracted by someone at his elbow leaning across to touch her arm. “Excuse me.”

      Steve was sure it was with relief that she turned to the newcomer. Dismissed, he helped himself to a drink from a nearby table and looked about for the lawyer.

      Half a dozen teenagers circulated with trays of finger foods. Residents at the house, no doubt, whom Triss had pressed into service rather than paying caterers.

      Cheap. Presumably the food had been prepared in the Kurakaha kitchen, too. The cook had outdone himself. Or perhaps these days it was a her. Not a young and attractive her, though. Triss wouldn’t stand the competition.

      “Steve?” A burly dark man of about his own age grasped his arm with a large brown hand. “Steve, you sonofa— You come all the way over from America?”

      “I flew in last night,” Steve said. “Late. How are you, Zed?”

      “Blooming,” the big man beamed. “Still working the gardens here, doing a bit of carpentry and stuff. Got a wife and kids now. Two of ’em. Kids, I mean. How ’bout you? Never heard much after you left.”

      “No wife, no kids.”

      “Yeah, that’s the way.” The man punched his arm. “Fancy-free, eh? Got yourself some big house and car in Los Angeles, eh?”

      “An apartment,” Steve said. “And yeah, I own a car. Don’t you?”

      “Ford Falcon.” Zed grinned. “Beat-up old bomb. Bet yours is better.” But his envy wasn’t real, and when his wife joined them with one child in her arms and another clinging shyly to her skirt, Zed glowed with pride as he introduced them, swinging the older one into his arms and planting a smacking kiss on her cheek.

      “This is a bugger though,” he added, sobering as he looked about them. “Old Magnus going like that.”

      Steve could only agree. “I suppose you don’t know what’s going to happen to the House?”

      “I guess Triss will carry on.”

      “You think so?”

      “She’s been holding the place together since Magnus got sick.”

      Protecting her investment?

      Maybe she’d changed. Give the woman the benefit of the doubt, Steve admonished himself. You could be wrong about her being the Wicked Witch of the West. Maybe. He said, “I didn’t know Magnus was ill.”

      “He didn’t want people to know.”

      People? Steve felt a strange, angry pain in his chest. I’m not “people.” Someone should have told me.

      She should have told him. The pain became a burning resentment. He looked across the room at Triss. She was talking to a handsome gray-haired man who looked vaguely familiar. After a moment Steve placed him—a seasoned and prominent politician, a cabinet minister when Steve had left the country. He was holding one of Triss’s elegant pale hands in both of his, and she was smiling at him, making no attempt to draw away, listening intently to what he had to say.

      Steve’s narrowed stare shifted when a former resident of Kurakaha clapped his shoulder and shook his hand, demanding to know what he’d been doing since he’d left New Zealand. Others followed, and half an hour or more passed in social chat.

      Mourners had overflowed into the garden. Steve walked through the French doors thrown open to the long tiled terrace, keeping an eye out for the lawyer.

      Old oaks and an ancient, spreading puriri shaded the terrace. Looking across the lawn and the native evergreens edging it, he glimpsed the curved, poplar-lined drive, and remembered the first time he’d seen the two-storied, sprawling white building from the gateway. Magnus had stopped the car there, letting the engine idle, and turned to the sullen teenager that Steve was then, saying, “This is your new home.”

      In spite of himself Steve had been impressed by the size of the place and its air of well-preserved colonial gentility. Magnus, in his way, was impressive, too. Tall, erect and already gray-haired and perilously close to unkempt, he had been an odd mixture of artist, idealist and pragmatist.

      The young Steve remained suspicious and surly for months. Until it dawned on him that Magnus wasn’t really interested in reforming him. All he cared about was rescuing the raw talent that he’d somehow discerned in this unpromising fifteen-year-old.

      Fourteen years ago. And now Magnus was gone.

      Steve turned to survey the room behind him, and caught sight of Nigel Fairbrother, the lawyer, just inside the French doors.

      “Wait a while,” Nigel said when Steve accosted him. “Triss wants to make sure she’s spoken to everyone first.”

      “I thought it was just you and me.”

      “Best if you’re both there together,” Nigel said. “No hurry, though.”

      After the crowd thinned, Nigel caught up with him again and twitched at his sleeve. “We’re down here.”

      Triss was waiting for them in what used to be called the bookroom toward the rear of the house. Besides shelves of books there were rows of video tapes and CDs, and a large TV screen and video player occupied one corner.