The Boat Builder's Bed by Kris Pearson

Koro, and just as scared he’d have to stay with them because Huia and Luca still didn’t want him.  
    As he grew, Koro encouraged him to take utu— Maori revenge.
    “Do everything well, boy. Do it better than them. Be a better rugby player, better at your job. Outshine them everywhere. Tramp on their pride. Go far, and leave them sniveling in your dust.”  
    It had been a big challenge for a gangly twelve-year-old, but it had got him through, and got him ahead. Got him three boatyards, a socialite wife, and a house the talk of the capital city. So why didn’t it feel like enough?  
    He reached out to pour himself more Moet, topped up Sophie’s glass at the same time, and set the empty bottle down.
    “Poor little boy,” he heard her say.
    He shook his head sharply. “I was better off with Nanny and Koro. They wanted me.”
    “Even so...”  
    He cut off her sympathy by adding, “Nanny’s a kuia now— a respected elder of her people. She’s heading for eighty. Getting frail. Almost ready to rejoin John and Koro.”
    He sat forward as the memories washed over him. He didn’t want Sophie seeing his face for a while.

    She glanced across, knowing he’d deliberately moved so his eyes were out of her line of sight. He planted his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, and stared out across the water, still as a statue.
    Able to finally look her fill, she admired his beautiful moonlit thighs. Sinewy, packed with power and lightly furred with dark hair. His calves were long and strong, muscles bunched, tendons tight. His ankles where they met the boots were lean.  
    She saw he still wore the black socks he must have worn with his suit. A narrow cuff showed above each scuffed brown boot. She’d chosen black socks herself because she’d thought them off-putting; how wrong could she be! Rafe Severino had the sexiest legs in the world—even better than her imagination had conjured up when he’d climbed the ladder in her studio.
    She slid her eyes upward again. His smooth golden back sat in semi-darkness, but from this angle the moonlight illuminated the highest bumps of his spine and the impressive breadth of his shoulders.  
    He was sex on a stick, but he was hurting.
    Hardly knowing she did it, Sophie ignored her champagne and walked across to him. She smoothed a hand over his shoulders and said, “Don’t be sad.”

CHAPTER NINE

    His nearest arm enclosed her and drew her against his side.
    “Not sad. Just thinking.” But his voice was not quite that of the confident man she’d become used to, and his arm pulled her very close. The heat of his skin burned through her T-shirt in nano-seconds, and breathing was suddenly much harder.
    “I can maybe understand how a man couldn’t accept a son who looked nothing like him at all,” Rafe continued huskily, “but my mother...my hard-hearted bitch of a mother...she knew I was hers.”  
    He turned away from the sea and laid his face against her breast—so much like a child seeking comfort, so unlike a man hoping for sex—that she raised her other hand and pressed him to her, stroking softly through his hair again and again.
    “I’m sure she wanted you,” she murmured. “It must have been hard for her too? Being without her first-born? No mother wants that.”
    She’d certainly not wanted Camille ripped away from her. Had fought every way she could to keep her. It had been hard enough while Adrian was alive, but they’d somehow survived by working different hours...by leaving Camille in a spare crib in the room behind his mother’s shop for a short time each day...by foregoing casual pleasures they should have been able to take for granted. Life had been tough, but she’d proved they could make it work.
    Then Adrian had slammed into a rock-face in a tangle of fabric and wires, and as Sophie tried to maintain her studies, continue with her job, spend time at his bedside and care for Camille, her life had disintegrated. Camille became