Free Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) by Rosalind James Page B

glance my way, just stalked out beside his father.
    “Whoa,” Karen said into the silence that followed their exit. “I guess I’m glad I didn’t get any words of wisdom. Or a hug.”
    “All right?” Tane asked me.
    “Sure.”
    Koro said, “Sit down,” and I didn’t argue. I sank into the chair Daniel had vacated and thought, Wow.
    Tane said to June, “If I ever do that to one of our sons? Shoot me quick.”
    It was so unexpected, I laughed, and so did everybody else except Koro.
    “Yeh,” Tane told me with a grin. “Never mind. He’ll be far away. The Pacific Ocean’s a wide and wonderful thing.”
    I thought, Thank goodness. And then I thought, Oh, Hemi. And I hadn’t even met his mother yet.

    Hemi

    I didn’t want to hang about and chat with my dad, but he paused at the open door to his car, looked at me with resignation that made my blood boil, and said, “You don’t have to marry her just because she’s pregnant.”
    I was controlled. That was who I was. At least it was the man I had made myself into. “I do have to marry her,” I said. “I’m going to marry her. You’ll be invited to the wedding, because Koro will want you there. And if you get drunk, I’ll be the one chucking you out. Drive safely.”
    “I told you,” he said. “I’m sober. If I’m not safe, it won’t be my fault. It’ll be these tires, because they’re buggered.”
    I held his gaze. “Tell me you don’t have a bet on that All Blacks match. More than one, probably, because somebody’s in form, and the jokers at the TAB haven’t figured it out. You’ve got inside info on who’s likely to score the first try, and you can’t lose, because this is your big chance, and you deserve it. How much? A hundred? How many tires would that buy?”
    A flash of anger in the dark eyes. “Your sister says you’re a cold bastard. Why d’you reckon she’d say that?”
    I breathed in and out. “Because I don’t listen to excuses. Because I expect the same effort out of anybody else that I’m willing to put in.”
    “You don’t understand human weakness. You don’t understand life.”
    “No. I understand it, and I don’t let it beat me. I push back.”
    I left him standing there. Did it feel good? No. But then, it never did.
    Back into the hospital, then. Back to Koro, and a roomful of people I could be grateful for with my whole heart. Back to Hope.
    But first, I had to deal with something else. I walked through the door to Koro’s room, pulled out my wallet, and said, “What did he borrow?”
    June looked at Tane, and my cousin sighed and said, “Fifty.”
    I handed the bills over without a word, and he pocketed them and said, “Sorry, mate. Hard to say no. He’s my uncle.”
    I nodded, and then my gaze fell on Koro.
    “Not your business,” he said.
    “Almost a hundred,” Karen said softly from my side. “Everything Koro had in his wallet.”
    “He’ll spend it on cigarettes and the TAB,” I told Koro. “Next time you see him, he’ll be driving on those same tires, have that same story.”
    He shrugged. “Have to believe, don’t I. No choice. He’s my son.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. I never had.

 
    Hope

    We were in Hemi’s car again, headed north toward Katikati, when Karen said from the back seat, “No offense, Hemi, but your dad’s kind of a jerk.”
    I’d had my hand on his thigh, wanting to help but not knowing how else to do it, and I felt his muscle stiffen for a split second. And then he laughed, and it relaxed under my hand. “Yeh,” he said. “He is. At least he wasn’t drunk. Used to turn up at my rugby games pissed, have a go at the coaches and generally make a nuisance of himself, until he got himself banned for good for charging at the ref. That was a hell of a day. One of many memorable moments.”
    “Whoa,” Karen said. “That’d be majorly embarrassing. Didn’t you just, like, want to sink through the ground?”
    “Maybe at first,” he said. “When I