Queenstown was showing off. I hadn’t seen this kind of natural beauty since I’d been in Switzerland.

The room itself was bigger than my entire apartment in Sydney. Since Christmas, I had been utterly spoiled with lavish accommodations, but realising that made me think of Josh.

James. James. James.

He tipped the bellboy as I admired the view. The trip was his gift to me, I knew that, but I wasn’t going to let him pay for everything. I’d be buying us dinner and drinks and whatever else he would let me pay for.

Maybe he’d let me take him to play mini-golf—if we had time and if he didn’t think it was a completely idiotic idea. I liked mini-golf and Queenstown apparently had an incredible indoor course. But I wasn’t sure if James was a mini-golf kind of guy. I’d have to play it by ear, so to speak.

I sensed him behind me, then his arms wrapped around my waist as he nuzzled my neck. “What do you think of the view?” he asked needlessly.

“It’s hideous.” He chuckled. “No, really. I thought you said it was nice here.”

“You are very naughty sometimes, aren’t you?”

Why yes, I was, but usually when I was accused of being naughty it didn’t turn me on and send shivers down my spine. I bit my bottom lip, not trusting myself to reply. I didn’t have a clever retort to hold up my end of the repartee and, besides, it would be bad manners to rip his clothes off less than five minutes after arriving.

“So, do you want to go for a walk and see the town, or would you like to stay in for a bit?” he asked. Was that a come on? His hands started to caress me, and the neck nuzzling turned to neck kissing. Yes, that was a come on. Maybe it wasn’t bad manners to want a shag five minutes after checking in.

*

We did eventually go on a walk to see the town. I’d seen it from the air—incredible, by the way—and some of it on the drive to the hotel, but the walk along the waterfront and through the small, neat streets revealed far more about Queenstown’s personality.

It was very pretty for one thing. Low buildings hugged the shoreline, the backdrop of pine-covered mountains dwarfing them. It reminded me a little of alpine towns in Austria or northern Italy, but there was a more relaxed architectural thread in Queenstown, more variety.

I could see the influences of English colonialism in the austere white government buildings, and modernists had stamped their aesthetic onto the skyline with glass and timber meeting at odd angles. Then there were the homages to other styles—a giant hotel that looked like a French château, smaller buildings with gabled, shingled roofs, as though they’d been lifted from Cape Cod, and of course, Alpine-cottage-inspired restaurants and shop fronts. There were also some ghastly concrete blocks that had obviously been built in the 70s. And peppered amongst the streets and buildings were trees—conifers, oaks, and willows—and carefully manicured, brilliantly-green lawns.