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“Did you live here when you were a kid?” Mick asked, reaching with his free arm to pull a hanging branch out of her way. “It must have been a great place to grow up.”
“My parents bought the Cheesery and the house plot when I was seven,” Sophy answered. “Before that, we lived just down the street from the house in Queenstown. I remember our first house, just, but I think of Silver Leigh as home. I always used to arrive back for school holidays, come out here by the stream and just breathe.”
“You didn’t go to the local high school, then?”
“No, Melissa and I both went to boarding school in Dunedin.” And there was five years of her life she would never get back. “Unfortunately.”
Mick raised an eyebrow.
“That bad?”
“To be fair, at thirteen the image I had of boarding school was entirely based on old Enid Blyton books from the fifties. You know, midnight feasts, pranks played on teachers, lots of sandwiches and lemonade, the odd game of lacrosse. So I wasn’t completely opposed to the idea and several of my friends from primary school were going. There are more options for secondary schools in Dunedin.”
“But your illusions were shattered?”
“It was just regular old high school. Only you never got to leave.” Sophy shuddered. “And you had to share a room with seven other teenage girls and go to bed at nine o’clock.”
The confidences seemed to be piling up on her side of the balance sheet, so she ventured a query that seemed harmless enough.
“Where did you go to school?”
Her gaze turned slightly speculative when he named the highly exclusive boys’ prep school in Auckland. Other than the swanky car and one of those James Bond gadget-style watches that looked as if it could activate holograms and shoot poison darts in its spare time, there was nothing about Mick that advertised aggressive wealth and privilege. But that particular school was a colonial younger cousin to the likes of Eton and Harrow, a bit of an anomaly in a country that claimed not to be class-conscious. It was mostly attended by the sons of politicians and millionaires, with the boys dressed like they were on their way to an Oxford regatta or a party in The Great Gatsby.
Try as she might, she could not picture a young Mick Hollister in a striped blazer and straw boater.
“And have you worked for Ryland Curry since you left school?” she asked a shade tentatively, waiting to see if the gates came slamming down.
Mick adjusted his grip on her hand. She hoped her palm wasn’t damp.
“No,” he said. “I joined the Army when I was eighteen. Did a couple of peacekeeping tours in the Pacific and the Middle East.”
That accounted for the excellent posture, then. Sophy wasn’t sure what to say to that. She always felt a bit overwhelmed talking to people with careers that could actually be life-threatening. Complaining about the times she’d stabbed herself in the hand with a sculpting chisel seemed rather petty by comparison.
“Did you…I mean…did you enjoy it? Army life?” she ventured lamely.
“Well, I was pretty disappointed at first. It was nothing like my Boys’ Own adventure book,” he teased her, and she landed a pointy elbow in his ribs.
“No, they were decent enough years,” he went on thoughtfully. “It wasn’t the route I’d intended to take, but I wouldn’t trade a lot of the experiences I had. Made some lifelong friends.”
“What did you want to do before that?” Sophy asked curiously, and this time a hint of aloofness washed over his face.
“University, I suppose,” he said evasively. “I…let a situation influence me into changing paths.” His demeanour discouraged further prying as he went on more lightly, “But I did end up back in study in the end. I started to get sick on duty. Exhausted, anaemic, gut problems. The military docs thought I’d picked up a virus abroad. I couldn’t get a handle on it and eventually I had to take personal leave and then invalid out. It was shortly after that I was diagnosed with Coeliac; they’d tested for it in the past, but the early test came back with a false negative. Once I changed my diet, things improved pretty rapidly, but by that time I’d been headhunted by William Ryland for his private security detail in Europe. His cousin was my commanding officer. I had some initial doubts, but…” Mick shrugged, one corner of his mouth twisting wryly. “Ryland is a difficult man to refuse. He hears the word ‘no’ as a starting point for negotiations.”
Sophy was quiet, taking that all in.
“You said you went back for study?” she asked after a moment, and he nodded.
“I made it a clause in my first contract that I would have time to complete a commerce degree.”
Sophy blinked.
“So you managed three years of those bloody awful statistics and marketing papers while you were holding down a high-stress, full-time job?”
He shrugged again.
“Some of quite liked those bloody awful papers,” he said, smiling.
God.
