The Package Deal: Nine Months to Change His Life / From Neighbours...to Newlyweds? / The Bonus Mum

Yeah, well, that was fantasy as well. His? She was a loner like himself. She wouldn’t be his and he wouldn’t be hers.

But they drifted on and the farther they went the more his plans came together.

This could work. He just needed Mary to think about it dispassionately, without emotion. There were two types of responsibility, he thought. One was tangible, the responsibility for keeping someone secure and protected. He could do that.

The other responsibility was emotional. His mother had demanded her children make her happy. He’d never ask that of anyone, neither would he expect the demand himself. Emotion needed to be set aside.

The problem was that for some reason, right now, emotion was everywhere.

The sun was on their faces. There was a rug stowed with a picnic hamper in the stowage area of the kayak. They could pull into shore, find a bed of pine needles and...

And not.

Today he had to be dispassionate. Today he needed to map out a sensible future for both of them.

Including a baby?

For all of them.

* * *

They ate lunch on the banks of the river, and the magnificence of the surroundings took her breath away.

Not enough, however, for her not to notice the lunch the guys at the landing place had handed them as they’d launched the kayak. Everything was in elegant, boxed containers, carefully labelled. Tiny bread rolls. Curls of golden butter. Crayfish, broken into bite-sized pieces. Tiny tomatoes, slivers of lettuce, radish, carrot, celery and a mouthwatering mayonnaise. Quiche in a container that had kept it warm.

Éclairs filled with chocolate and creamy custard. Strawberries, watermelon, grapes.

Wine if she wanted, which she didn’t. Two types of soda. Beer for Ben.

It should have been cold. They’d been drifting on fast-moving water from the spring thaw, but today...today it was summer.

Today was a day she’d remember for the rest of her life.

She ate the last éclair she could possibly fit in, stretched back on cushions—cushions!—and gazed up through the massive branches of a pine to the sun glinting through.

‘This has been magic,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me.’

‘I could bring you once a month,’ he said. ‘Every time I come.’

It was said matter-of-factly, like a neighbour offering to share a shopping run. Once a month, take it or leave it.

‘So you’d pop an airline ticket in the post for me once a month,’ she managed when she got her breath back. This was fantasy. Maybe it was time they got out of here.

‘I want you to stay.’ He hesitated and then he said it. ‘Mary, I want you to marry me.’

* * *

As a breathtaker it was right up there with the feeling she’d had when she’d looked at the blue line on her pregnancy-testing kit.

Maybe it was higher. She’d suspected she was pregnant. This had come from nowhere.

She’d been almost asleep, sated with the beauty of the morning, the food, the feeling of being with a man she felt instinctively would dive to her protection if a loon suddenly swooped to steal her éclair.

She wasn’t asleep now.

I want you to marry me.

She glanced sharply at Ben, expecting to see him just as dreamlike, making an idle joke that could be laughed off. Instead, she saw a man so tense there might be an army of loons lined up for attack.

‘Wh-what?’ She could barely get the word out. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve spent twenty-four hours thinking about it,’ he said. ‘It’s the only logical thing to do.’

She nodded, forcing herself to sound practical. Nurse humouring lunatic. ‘Logical. I can see that.’

‘Can you?’

‘Um...no.’

‘You won’t be permitted to stay here unless we’re married,’ he told her. ‘American immigration isn’t welcoming to single mothers with no visible means of support.’

‘Right.’ She should sit up, she thought, but that’d mean taking his proposal seriously.

It didn’t deserve it.

‘I wasn’t aware,’ she said at last, ‘that I wanted to live in America.’ She glanced around and felt bound to add a rider. ‘It’s very nice,’ she conceded. ‘But it’s not home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘In Taikohe, of course,’ she said, astounded.

‘Are you happy there?

‘I have a job. I have neighbours. I have Heinz.’

‘I’ve enquired about Heinz. We can get him over almost straight away.’

‘To, what, live in your flash apartment?’ This was the craziest conversation she’d ever had. ‘Ben, what are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about us,’ he said, and his voice said he wasn’t crazy at all. His voice said this was a serious proposal. He’d put all the pieces of some weird jigsaw together and come up with a fully formulated plan. ‘Mary, I’ve spent most of yesterday thinking this through. I would like to help you raise this child.’

Raise this child... That sounded mechanical, she thought. It sounded like following a recipe for making bread, or shifting a wreck off the ocean floor. Raise this child...

‘How?’ she managed, and apparently he really had thought about it.

‘We’re loners,’ he told her. ‘Both of us. We need our own space. That’s a problem in that we need to raise this child together, but it’s also good in that you have few ties to New Zealand. I’ve been trying to figure out how you could move to New York. I’ve run through the options, and the only one that’ll work is marriage.’

‘I...see,’ she managed, but she didn’t.