earth did this come into your possession? There’s been a ban on exporting Maori artifacts for more than twenty years. The only ones to leave the country have either been stolen or smuggled out.”
“Whoa! Back up there. I’m no thief! No smuggler, either, unless you count bringing Te Ruahiki back home where it belongs. I do have letters of provenance, also one from William Ruawai, the chief of my grandmother’s subtribe.
“She was the last of her family and living in Auckland during the war when she met my grandfather, a GI, and part of the American contingent in New Zealand. After they married, naturally she took Te Ruahiki with her to the States. That would have been 1946, long before the law came into force.”
Bennett and the female officer crowded the desk. Ngaire’s shoulder ached from holding out the mere, but she hoped the sight would do more to further her cause than laying it down. “Can you understand why I wanted to reveal it in private? William warned me that some people will do anything to get their hands on it.”
Paul Savage included. The man had become obsessed with owning the Te Ruahiki. Obsessed, it seemed, with being forewarned of his death. She remembered the gleam in his eyes the last time he’d made her an offer, thinking she’d never refuse such a large sum.
He’d been wrong.
Wrapping the mere inside the silk scarf once again, she eyed the others in the room one by one. “Apart from William Ruawai, there are only four people in New Zealand who know what I’m carrying, and they’re all in this room.”
Thirty minutes had passed since Ngaire had been led away. Thirty minutes of talking and persuading them she wasn’t running a black-market scam, until finally a call to William Ruawai in the South Island had secured the release of herself and the mere.
Thirty minutes, time enough for all the other passengers on her flight to be in Auckland by now. No, she was wrong. One still remained.
A rush of overwhelming tiredness had replaced the excitement she’d felt on her arrival at Auckland. There was much more to the mere’s return to the land of her ancestors than she could have explained and still hoped to be believed.
Maybe one person in that cold gray office would have believed her life depended on the trip she would make to the South Island. Yeah, for all his modern haircut and clothes, Manu Pomare would fit right into a painting of a Maori warrior. All that was missing was the moko, the face tattoo.
He would know about breaking a tapu, and the curse it could bring down on a family. But would he believe that if her quest wasn’t successful then she only had six more weeks to live?
Ngaire didn’t know whether to be pleased or worried as she saw Kel approach. Her first reaction had been a slight lifting of her spirits at the sight of a face she knew, followed by the lead-weighted anxiety of wondering if Paul Savage had sent Kel to follow her. Yet, slow starter or not, he had tackled the thief.
A laugh, half hysterical, half foolish, forced its way through lips dry from talking her way out of a tense situation. It had made her see spooks where there couldn’t possibly be any.
It was hardly logical to blame Kel for her problems, yet she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that everything in her world had been working perfectly until she’d laid eyes on him.
She turned her face away, pretending she hadn’t noticed him, hadn’t noticed the supple grace of his stride, or that he looked remarkably fit and cheerful for someone who’d sat in the same cramped seats as herself for more than six hours.
Weakening, she let her eyes draw back to him. Darn, he was still coming her way. The air left her lungs in one short, sharp huff. Disapproval, or a way of releasing the tingling feeling inside her? She couldn’t make up her mind.
Kel was an outstandingly attractive guy. Some woman’s dream man. “Handsome is as handsome does.” The thought produced a picture of him hesitating as her case disappeared, rather than his sexy smile. Why couldn’t she shake the feeling he had let her down even before they met?
The glint in his eye told her she would have to be rude to get rid of him. But she couldn’t very well say “Beat it! I need time to get my mind round the assumption that one of my ancestors is alive and well, if only in spirit, and I’m carrying him inside my case.”
The feeling of having a stopwatch running down the seconds of her life wasn’t quite as new. She’d learned to live with it, which might qualify as an oxymoron when what had really happened was that she’d discovered she’d likely die with it.
“So, Ngaire, we meet again,” he said, stopping less than three feet away, not quite invading her space but hovering on the outskirts.
Again, his crooked smile tugged at a memory, a bittersweet one that hinted at the refrain, long ago and far away. She refused to let it affect her. Refused to let hope surface where there was nothing to sustain it, except tiredness and a feeling of being alone and vulnerable. So she answered, “What I’m wondering is, why? I thought you’d have taken off ages ago. Were there no shuttles into the city?”
“It was a question of having to check in with my travel agent. All my arrangements were made in such a rush that I didn’t know which hotel she’d booked. Just one of the drawbacks of acting on the spur of the moment.”
“So you’re all fixed up now?”
“Yeah, but I was hoping to catch you before I took off. What took you so long?”
His teeth cut a white slash in his features. Another time, another place, that smile would have made her toes curl. But too quickly it disappeared as he came out with “They catch you trying to smuggle something into the country?”
Ngaire felt heat flame in her face as her sense of humor took a nosedive. His joke struck closer to the mark than was comfortable. “Just a small problem with my declaration form. I put a cross in the wrong place and the customs guy took some convincing of it. This is my first overseas trip and some of those questions are pretty ambiguous.”
“Your first? I’d never have guessed.” His gaze skimmed her body, breaching the space she’d thought protected her. “You look pretty experienced to me.”
Thanks for the nudge. Kel was so hot a woman was apt to lose her perspective. She shrugged. “A jerk’s a jerk no matter where you find him.”
Let him make what he would of that remark.
Ngaire accompanied the statement with a stare that should have made him back off, but he was obviously too full of his own appeal to take the hint.
“Tell me about it. In my line I must have met them all.”
“And what is your line?” Apart from hitting on strange women in airports. Tiredness, it seemed, had caught up with her again, making her feel disgruntled.
“I’m a sales rep for a software company.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Kel, but I’m not in the market for software.” Or soft looks. Or anything else he was selling, even if his eyes did look like melting chocolate and she was a chocoholic from way back. From this moment on, she was a recovering one.
“No problem. I’m on leave at the moment. Taking a vacation around my old stomping grounds before I head back to Australia. I cover the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia.”
“Did
