by Susan Napier
‘Nice weather we’re having for the time of year,’ she said.
‘It is indeed…and you’re obviously taking full advantage of it,’ he agreed, taking up the challenge, his eyes stroking across the honey-coloured skin of her shoulders exposed by the spaghetti straps of her sundress.
Kate was suddenly conscious of the pull of the cotton bodice where it was cut straight across the slope of her breasts, notched in the centre of her cleavage by a V-shaped slit. The flower-splashed, chain-store dress was a comfortable old favourite of hers, despised by her mother for its cheerfully déclassé origins. She had never worn overly casual styles in Drake’s company, knowing that it was her classic, understated elegance that appealed to his sophisticated tastes, and set her apart from the trend-setting flamboyance of more beautiful rivals for his attention.
She stopped breathing as Drake’s gaze drifted down to the sliver of pale skin revealed by the straining V. Nor did she usually go braless when she was with him, preferring the protection and provocation of a lacy bra to enhance her slender curves. She hadn’t worn this sundress since last summer, and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of a slight tugging at the side seams, a tightness pressing up under her arms that crowded her breasts forward against the strict cut of the fabric with an unaccustomed boldness. Thankfully the contrasting double-fold of colour that banded the top of the low bodice masked the crushed outline of her painfully sensitive nipples, and allowed her the semblance of indifference as he continued to rudely stare.
Was he making unflattering comparisons…or thinking that she had let herself go? Kate felt faint at the thought. Then she realised that she was still holding her breath and let it out in a little huff of relief, sucking in a fresh supply of oxygen to chase away the dizziness. The sudden reinflation of her lungs caused her breasts to further test their close confinement, and she was mortified to feel a stitch pop.
It wasn’t only the dress, it was her own skin she no longer felt comfortable in, she tormented herself. And if he dared to ask if she had gained weight since he had last seen her, he was going to get a faceful of hot tea!
Perhaps he sensed her violent impulse because he rocked back on the hind legs of his chair with a lazy, placating smile, taking a long, leisurely gulp from his mug before resting it on his chest.
‘Bright, splashy colours suit you rather well in this setting. That dress makes you look very much the part…’ he trailed off suggestively and she obligingly snapped at the bait.
‘What part?’
‘The young, frivolous holiday-maker out looking for trouble.’
‘I’ve never been frivolous in my life,’ said Kate, offended.
He compounded the offence with a mocking grin that creased the sunfolds at the outer corners of his eyes. ‘Sorry, perhaps I should have said “carefree”…’
A lot he knew! ‘And I’m not “looking for trouble”, either,’ she added, far less sincerely.
‘No? What about your handsome young fisherman?’
‘What?’ She took a moment to trace the origins of his non sequitur. ‘That was a joke.’
‘Was it?’
His cynical response make her hackles rise. ‘You know it was!’
‘Do I?’ He lowered his chair with a thud and leaned forward on the table, the amusement wiped from his face. ‘Because it’s not as if there’s anything to hold you back from experimenting. We never promised each other total fidelity, did we, Kate?’
Her heart stuttered. Experimenting? Was that what he was doing?
‘We never promised each other anything at all,’ she forced out evenly. ‘But I think at the very least we owe each other a certain degree of respect and consideration.’
‘You mean we should be discreet about our indiscretions?’ he commented drily, his dark eyes intent on her still face. ‘I thought I was…’ His shrug encompassed their surroundings. ‘A cosy little hideaway “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”…how much more careful can a man be?’
Trust Drake to frame a paralysing statement in a poetic quotation, but Kate was inured to his clever verbal games. She battled the crushing pain in her chest to try and work out what he was playing at, because there had to be an angle. He was brutally honest, but rarely deliberately cruel—and never towards Kate. However, she had never breached the unwritten rules of their relationship before…
It was almost as if he wanted her to be furious with him, to rant and rave like a jealous fishwife and insist on being the only woman in his life. Ah, yes…that would give him the perfect excuse to push her away, to end their affair before it threatened to become anything more complicated.
It struck her that a cosy little hideaway was the perfect place to commit a discreet murder!
‘Well, you could do your—experimenting—offshore,’ she advised, visualising him sinking to the bottom of the bay with an anchor slung around his neck. The satisfying mental picture brought a chill smile to her pale lips.
He shoved away his cup and got restlessly to his feet. She could see that her contrived calm was having the desired effect. ‘Aren’t you going to finish your tea?’
He looked down at her, his heavy-lidded eyes burning with frustration, his mouth smudged with sullen temper. ‘No, thanks. Melissa’s probably waiting for me.’
With or without the robe? Kate nodded understandingly. ‘Right. You’d better hurry home to reassure her, then. You wouldn’t want her to think you were over here firing up your Bunsen burner for an alternative study.’
His eyelids flickered.
‘Of course, I’m sure you’ve already made it clear to her that she’s not unique or in any way important in your life. It’s always best to be up front about these things, isn’t it, Drake?’
Tension pulled the skin tight over the bones of his face. ‘We agreed, right at the beginning, that we didn’t want any messy emotional scenes—’ he grated.
‘I’m not the one making a big scene,’ Kate cut him off before he said anything irrevocable. She got up and began rinsing out the mugs under the running tap, speaking to him over her cold shoulder. ‘I just asked for some sugar, remember? You were the one who came haring after me bristling with ridiculous suspicions and flinging out all sorts of dramatic allegations. You should chill out, Drake, and stop making such a big deal of it. Instead of wasting all that energy worrying about what I’m doing just go back to living your own life. We’ll be neighbours for a month, that’s all. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse…you’ll hardly even know I’m around…
‘And if you wouldn’t mind leaving the rest of that sugar—I think I feel like pancakes for dinner!’
CHAPTER THREE
‘MUMMY, look at me!’
The chain on the swing squeaked as Kate swung higher, rocking her small body on the splintery wooden seat to get more speed, stamping her shoes against the hard-packed ground on the down-swing to propel herself up into the wild blue sky.
‘Look at me, Mummy!’ Her white dress fluttered, her hair spraying out around her head as she rushed through the air, her excited squeals mingling with the squeak and rattle of the chain as she went higher and higher towards the impossible goal—doing a complete loop over the steel support bar. What would happen when she was upside down, she wasn’t sure, she only knew that her mother would be proud of her for doing something that only the big boys dared to try.
‘Mummy!’ She looked for her mummy’s proud face but she couldn’t see her against the blur of scenery. She suddenly couldn’t see any of the other children or mummies and daddies, either—she was all alone in the big, empty park and it was getting dark. There was no one cheering or clapping her brave effort, only the rusty squeak of the chain to accompany her hysterical cry as she realised that she was going too fast and there was no one there to catch her if she fell, or to stop her from flying off into space and being lost for ever. ‘Mummy? Mummy!’
Kate jerked into wakefulness, her eyes flying open, her hands clutching for the dissolving chains and finding only wrinkl
ed sheets. Morning sunlight filtered in around the dark curtains, painting bright stripes on the faded wallpaper. The breath rattled in her chest and the haunting squeak from the disturbing dream still echoed in her thick head.
She groaned. She didn’t need a psychiatrist to interpret the meaning of that little vignette. Her accidental conception hadn’t stopped her mother from ruthlessly applying herself to her studies and graduating from university with first class honours. Money had been very tight and, except for during term-time lectures, there had been none to spare for day-care. Childish demands for attention had often been greeted with impatient dismissal or an instruction to play extra quietly. Before she’d even known what exams were Kate had learned to dread their approach. Her earliest memory was of lying under the bed in their cramped, one-roomed apartment whispering stories to herself because Mummy had been studying for something more important than silly games.
Kate rolled her head on the pillow, trying to rid herself of that haunting squeak. Except it wasn’t coming from inside her head, she realised, but rising up from the skirting-board where it ran along behind the bed. And it wasn’t a hard, metallic kind of squeak, either; there was a certain warm furriness about it that suggested some form of rodent. She grimaced at the thought of mice scampering around the house while she slept. She listened for the tell-tale scuffling of tiny feet in the woodwork, but the squeaking was too loud. Far too loud. More like…
Rats!
Kate shot bolt upright in the bed, too late remembering that she should have moved with more care. She grabbed at the package of crackers she had left open on the bedside table and stuffed one into her mouth, but even as she chewed she knew what was coming and, showering a trail of crumbs, she fled into the bathroom.
For the second time in just over twelve hours she inspected the hazed porcelain of the toilet bowl at close quarters.
Kate was never sick. Never. Until a month ago her biological mechanisms had been in perfect sync with her busy lifestyle. Then she had bought that wretched little box in the chemist and her world had gone haywire.
‘Damn you, Drake Daniels,’ she moaned, in between retches that produced little but burning bile. ‘This is all your fault!’
If only it were, she might be able to work up a decent case for hating him. But the truth was that Drake had always been absolutely scrupulous about using birth control. Even though Kate had started on the pill the day after their first time together, he had insisted on using a condom every time they made love. ‘No contraception is one hundred per cent perfect,’ he had told her bluntly, ‘so if we use two methods with optimum effectiveness we lessen the chances of a malfunction.’
Well, Kate was certainly malfunctioning now!
She cleaned up and staggered back to bed.
At least she seemed to have frightened away the mystery squeaker, she thought, lying flat on her back and nibbling cautiously at another cracker, glad to be able to push aside at least one of the problems in her life.
She put a hand on her flat stomach. Here was a problem that wasn’t going to go away any time soon. In fact it was growing bigger by the day, although it was still only very tiny—less than half the length of her little finger, according to the books she had read.
How incredible, to have something so physically minuscule yet so all-encompassingly large invading her life! The shock, the dismay, and the sheer, blind panic that had first assailed her when she had stared at the plus sign on the home pregnancy test strip had long since changed to awe.
It was an awe that she could be fairly certain that Drake wouldn’t share. He didn’t want children. Not ever. He didn’t want any physical ties that would compromise his emotional independence. He needed to be alone to write, he had told Kate when they had first met, and nothing and no one took precedence over his writing. As a researcher at Enright Media, Kate was ideally placed to understand the demands of his particular genius. Caught up in the thrill and excitement of being desired by such a fascinating and complex man, she had walked into the affair with her eyes wide open. She had accepted that Drake was not the marrying kind. As their affair had matured into an ongoing relationship she had known that if she objected to his periodic disappearances or acted concerned by his restless comings and goings she would have been rapidly shunted out of his life. So even as she had fallen ever deeper in love with him she had persuaded herself that she was content with the status quo. She was a realist—a practical, self-sufficient, modern woman. She had a fabulous lover, a demanding job with a good salary, and plenty of friends to pal around with when Drake was out of town. No ties suited her just fine. And up until now she had been far too absorbed in her career to even think about having babies…
Dry flakes of cracker stuck in her throat, forming a lump that refused to budge.
Drake had been in Auckland for three whole months prior to taking off to work on his new book—the longest continuous period they had spent together. Kate had dared to hope it indicated that they were reaching a new level of trust. At first she had put down her persistent feeling of nausea after he had left to depression, then to the remnants of a late bout of winter flu combined with a rush-job involving a biographer who needed help reconstructing hand-copied notes that a drunken ex-wife had tried to flush down the toilet. But her weight gain and the tenderness in her breasts were less easy to dismiss and when she’d counted back and realised that she was ten days overdue she had rushed out and bought a test-kit from the pharmacy. Her hands had been shaking so hard when she’d used the dipstick that it had taken a while to confirm the earth-shattering truth.
She was pregnant with Drake Daniels’ baby!
She had stopped taking the pill immediately, but it had taken days for the reality of her situation to sink in, and when it had she had set about tackling it with her usual pragmatism. She’d worked out that she was unlikely to be more than a few weeks pregnant. Unlike her mother, who had married a fellow university student for the sole purpose of exploiting a loophole in the student allowance scheme, Kate had discovered her accidental pregnancy early enough to give her a full range of options.
She had made herself carefully consider them all, before choosing the only one that was ever going to be acceptable to her woman’s heart.
She was not going to have an unwanted child.
This baby was already an indivisible part of her, a symbol of her love, a triumph of hope over pessimism. Her baby had conquered almost impossible odds to be conceived; it was now up to Kate to take over the fight for the best of all possible futures.
She didn’t fool herself that Drake was good father material. But he was going to be a father, and she had to decide whether she wanted him in her baby’s life. She had suffered too much from her own parents’ selfishness to want to burden another child with the pain of constant emotional rejection. Until she had made that decision she vowed to tell no one of her condition, her confidence in her ability to be a good mother still too fragile to risk exposing it to the opinions of the wider world.
So she had tracked Drake down to his lair in a desperate attempt to try to establish a better understanding between them before her secret was exposed by her burgeoning body. She had to decide when and how to tell him about the pregnancy, and discover just how much involvement he might want—and she could bear—after the baby was born.
The morning was cool but with the promise of later heat, so Kate pulled on a gauzy skirt and loose tee shirt and caught her hair up into a jaunty pony-tail. She ate a dry piece of toast with a smear of honey and, when she was confident it was going to stay down, indulged the sharp onset of hunger by slicing up a banana and a kiwi fruit into a bowl and spooning over a generous dollop of low-fat vanilla yoghurt. Carrying the bowl in one hand and a cup of green tea in the other, she wandered out to the verandah and perched on the step to eat a leisurely breakfast. The water out in the bay was like shimmering glass, the only movement the gentle ripple of wavelets overturning at the edge of the beach and the swoop and splash of a pied
shag arrowing into the water and re-emerging with a squirming fish, which it swallowed with a few flicks of its long neck before flapping off to dry its wings on a rocky outcropping. Licking the last of the yoghurt off her spoon, Kate left the bowl on the step and strolled down to the beach with her green tea. The sand was cool under her bare feet and the crystal-clear water shockingly cold as she paddled out to ankle depth.
As she turned to wade back to shore she saw a lone male figure standing on the upper deck of the house next door. He was shirtless, his dark mahogany chest smooth and glossy in the sunlight, his tapering torso cut off at the waist by the solid balcony wall, making her wonder if he was fully nude. Drake didn’t own any pyjamas and was totally unselfconscious about his body when he wasn’t intent on using it for pleasure. The first night they had made love she had been shocked by his lack of inhibitions, and very aware of her own hesitancy in flaunting her nakedness. She had tried to disguise her embarrassment, but to her amazement he had been powerfully aroused by her reticence.
If she hadn’t had a few more drinks than usual at the book launch, she probably wouldn’t have had the courage to accept Drake’s invitation back to his hotel room.
She felt an electrical tingle in her veins at the memory of the weight of his hand on the small of her back as he had unlocked the door to his room. Once inside she had drifted out of his reach, surveying the huge, split-level suite with assumed amusement that had hid a glittering rush of nervous excitement.
‘Rather over-the-top for one person, isn’t it?’ she commented, eyeing the polished black marble pillars, jewelled rugs and luxurious furnishings.
He grinned, tossing his black leather jacket over the back of an antique chair and snagging her evening purse to drop it on the seat. ‘Marcus works a great contra-deal for me with the international owner, who’s a big a fan of my books.’
