My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 4



TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2012

I’ve never understood the ‘fine dining followed by great sex’ thing. Who wants great sex on a full stomach? Luckily Robbie agrees with me on this. So we had great — actually, we had excellent — sex and then we dug into our instant pasta meals with almost as much appetite as we’d had for each other. When the sex is excellent even microwave spaghetti bolognese forked straight out of the plastic container tastes mighty fine. As a bonus I got to watch Robbie eat naked. He rested his pasta on the pillow in his lap and scooped forkfuls into his mouth between grins. Robbie had the most spectacular grin of anyone I’d ever seen. It hitched up effortlessly on each side like the house curtain at an old-fashioned movie theatre, hijacking his entire face. And it doesn’t take much to make that grin appear either. As a habitual frowner, I liked that about him. There was heaps I liked about this man and that grin was right up there in the top three.

Don’t ask.

I filled him in on my meeting with Karen and my imminent trip to Auckland. He said he was happy to look after Wolf while I away. As an ex-police dog handler Robbie would have been an ideal dog-sitter anyway, but even without their shared occupational background my dog and my boyfriend had developed a relationship of some depth and complexity. A few months earlier I had been kidnapped by a nutcase who thought I should pay for what he perceived my sister had done to him. I was missing for days, during which time everyone thought I was dead. I know I did. By the time I was found, alive though not entirely undamaged, Robbie and Wolf had seriously bonded. I suspect they had spent several days comforting each other; which was fine with me.

That Robbie had also bonded with my ex-husband, Sean, during this time — not so fine. As far as I could tell, Sean and Robbie had just three things in common: they were both cops, they both loved Wolf and — well, me. They had me in common. Now I lived in fear of them becoming gym buddies, which just goes to show the level of my paranoia since neither of them belonged to a gym. Not as far as I knew, anyway.

‘I’ve got a rostered day off tomorrow so I can take you to the airport and then I’ll just keep him with me,’ Robbie said. ‘And he can come to the station with me on Thursday, Friday. He’ll enjoy being back in a cop shop. The boys’ll like it too,’ he added, leaning sideways to put the empty spaghetti container on the floor. ‘You know, once a police dog and all that.’

I watched the way the muscles in Robbie’s stomach bunched as he stretched over and then relaxed as he settled back on the bed. He caught me eyeing him and grinned in response. Cocky. Wolf waited obediently for a sign that he could lick the spaghetti container clean. Robbie deliberately kept him waiting. It’s part of the training. It occurred to me he might be using the same technique with me.

‘Sean came round this morning—’

Robbie interrupted. ‘How’s he going with the Conway case? He’s been working long hours on that with not much result.’

I didn’t want to discuss Sean’s latest case with Robbie. Anyway, Sean didn’t share that stuff with me any more. Robbie finally made a small hand gesture to Wolf who launched himself at the container. I was determined to show more restraint.

‘He wants me to sell the house,’ I said.

Robbie dumped the pillow on the floor. ‘I guess that’s fair enough. He must need the money with the little kid and all.’ Without waiting for a response, he padded through to the bathroom. Instead of admiring his naked butt, which I would normally do, I pulled a face at his back. Childish, I know, but I’d have preferred him to say Sean’s request was unreasonable. I’d have liked him to commiserate with me, not understand Sean. I wanted him to take my side so that I could be the gracious and generous one to say that Sean wanting me to sell the house was fair enough. Grumpily, I finished off my spaghetti while Robbie peed. He came back into the room as naked as he had left it.

‘So. You’ll be buying a new place, eh? Any chance you’ll be moving over the hill to the ’Mata?’ It was a joke. Wainuiomata, where Robbie worked in the local cop station, didn’t have a lot going for it apart from its proximity to a regional park and its low-priced housing. The high local crime rate was probably a plus for him, professionally.

‘Yeah, well it might come to that, depending on how much we get for this.’

He climbed back onto the bed and placed my empty spaghetti container on the floor for me. ‘We’d make such good neighbours,’ he said, sliding his body alongside mine. ‘I could drop by for a cup of sugar.’ He grinned that ridiculously hitched grin at me.

While Wolf chased the plastic containers around the room, licking every corner of them, we did something similar. Robbie tasted of spaghetti bolognese. I guess I did too. Maybe there’s something to be said for fine dining followed by great sex after all.