by Susan Napier
It was a shock to hear the ugly story laid out so casually on a sunlit step. His almost clinical detachment made it sound as if he were discussing a plot in one of his books, but the underlying bleakness in his voice exposed it for the painful truth. No wonder he didn’t like to talk about his childhood.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said, carefully reining in her sympathy. She looked out at the yacht, rocking now as the dinghy tied up alongside, fighting down her desire to pepper him with questions, trying to act as if his personal revelations were an everyday occurrence. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Few do…fortunately I’d legally changed my name as soon as I was old enough, so my past stops there. The press find PR rumours more interesting anyway; no one cares about tracing some kid called Richardson.’ He shrugged, following her gaze to the activities of the oarsman in his bright orange life-jacket. ‘You know what the real kicker was?’ he murmured, after a moment.
She remained silent, afraid of stemming the dark tide of words.
‘When her husband left her, my mother thought that she could use me to keep him tied to her for ever. But instead he simply cut his losses, and immediately had another son, to replace the one he’d left behind. While my mother was telling me to set a place for Daddy every night, he was creating a whole, shiny new family for himself in Australia—two boys and a girl. So when he finally found out his crazy ex-wife had killed herself he wasn’t interested in being foisted with the product of her tainted love. And since there was no one else to claim me, I went into the foster-care system…’
‘Her husband’…She noticed how he never said ‘my father’—and Kate couldn’t blame him. Since her parents had separated even before she was born she had not been a witness to any emotional carnage. At least she and her genial, happy-go-lucky father had had some contact with each other over the years—mostly letters exchanged behind her mother’s disapproving back, and the occasional visit to the islands when she had been old enough to afford to pay, since Barry Crawford was chronically short of money and could rarely be bothered to bestir himself from beneath his beloved palm trees. Her father hadn’t wanted the rights or responsibility of custodial parenthood, but he hadn’t ignored her whole existence!
She darted a look at the chiselled perfection of Drake’s profile, her heart aching for him, and for her baby. No longer did it surprise her that Drake had always been so bitterly opposed to having a family. In his experience love and marriage were associated with obsession and abandonment, with children merely pawns or weapons in their parents’ hands.
He turned his head, capturing her sideways glance, and raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Shall we say six o’clock for dinner?’
‘Yes, all right,’ she murmured, taken off guard by the sudden switch from the momentous to the mundane.
‘We keep country hours here in Oyster Beach,’ he said, and strolled away while she was still grappling with her new perspective on his life.
Had that little bout of unaccustomed openness been a bribe or an enticement? she wondered as she watched him go. A warning or an invitation? Either way he must know he had her hooked.
She approached his house that evening with some trepidation, but, to her surprise, Kate enjoyed the dinner, and the company. After some slight initial stiltedness the atmosphere had relaxed as the conversation had inevitably turned to books and become wide-ranging and general. Drake looked askance at her when she refused a glass of wine, but he readily accepted the excuse of her illness earlier in the day, and when her offer to help Melissa in the kitchen was snapped up he seemed bemused.
‘I didn’t know you could cook,’ he said as she expertly whisked up a sauce for the vegetables.
‘You never asked.’ He knew damned well that he had been careful to steer well clear of cosy, domestic settings. They had always dined out or at his hotel when they were together. ‘Actually, I’m a superb cook.’
She was slightly smug when she saw that Melissa had taken the easy way and crumbed the scallops but the meal was delicious and her compliments sincere.
By the time she wended her way back home under a star-pricked sky she was well pleased with her performance. She had played it low-key with Drake and not made any attempt at intimacy, conspiring tacitly with Melissa to keep the conversation away from the personal and firmly focused on more entertaining issues.
After dinner, instead of sophisticated banter they had engaged in an argumentative game of Scrabble in which Kate had been ignominiously crushed by the two fiercely competitive professionals. However, a round of Trivial Pursuit had given her the chance to trounce them both and restored her buckled self-esteem.
The perfect ending to a slightly traumatic and wholly enlightening day.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE next week was a curious mixture of good and bad. For two days after Melissa left Kate didn’t see hide nor hair of Drake, but she did see a great deal of his hairy companion.
‘What’s the matter, Prince, is he ignoring you, too?’ she asked on the third morning, putting down a plastic bowl with the meagre trimmings of the meat she had cooked the previous night, mixed with some boiled rice.
After finding the light rubbish bin outside the kitchen door tipped over and the scallops chewed out of their newspaper wrapping and left scattered on the grass, she had roundly scolded the dog, who had managed to look so downcast at being accused of the crime that she had relented and started feeding him more substantial snacks.
If Drake objected to her suborning his dog he could come over and complain about it but, as he had pointed out, Prince was a shameless scavenger and was probably fed by locals up and down the beach.
Since she had always lived in places with restrictions on owning animals Kate had never had a furred pet, but she was determined her child would have more than a goldfish to cuddle and love. Not an energy-sucking giant like Prince, but something suitable for a small yard. Trained to be careful with money, Kate had saved up more than enough for a deposit on an older do-up in one of the outer suburbs, or a town house with a back garden in one of the newer intensive-housing developments. She knew she couldn’t expect emotional or financial support from her mother, and she still had no idea what to expect from Drake. Things might be tough for a while if she had to go it alone, but she would cope.
‘You should tell your owner that all work and no play makes Drake a very dull boy,’ she suggested to Prince as he wolfed down the food in two bites and overturned the bowl to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
She wondered if she had made a mistake in thinking that Drake’s confidences of the other day might herald a promising new phase in their relationship.
‘But dull is relative, I suppose,’ she told the dog.
No doubt Drake was deeply engaged in some death-defying heroics via his latest alter-ego. His thrillers weren’t written as a series linked by the same central characters, as many other, highly successful thriller-writers chose to do. Drake rebuilt his world from the ground up with every book. Each featured a new cast, new country, new conflict…and a new girlfriend to betray the hero, or to be kidnapped, tortured, murdered or otherwise threatened in an attempt to subvert his desperate cause. Innocence was no defence in Drake Daniels’ novels. It always seemed to presage disaster for the woman when any of Drake’s cynical heroes began developing tender feelings towards her, and making plans for the future.
The way he dumps his girlfriends in real life when they start getting too close, and demanding too much of his attention, she mused.
‘Perhaps I’m better off with him being wary and suspicious,’ she said to Prince. ‘Do you think I should just tell him about being pregnant and brazen it out, or lead up to it gradually and risk him accusing me of trying to trick him?’
Prince thought she should wear a plastic bowl on her head and roll around on the grass, and then dash down to the beach and dig holes.
Kate declined, but she did allow him to tag along when she went for her afternoon walk, and on the
way back around the flat, rocky point she met Drake coming towards her.
‘So this is where you are!’ he declared, halting. He was wearing faded khaki hiking shorts and a Hawaiian shirt hanging open over his tanned chest, the sheen of perspiration on his skin indicating that he had been walking briskly.
‘Are you talking to the dog, or to me?’ said Kate, looking up at him from the shade of her straw hat. ‘I thought you were busy working.’
‘I’ve been working since six a.m. I’m taking a short break.’ He picked up a stick of driftwood and threw it towards the sea. Prince sat and watched it arc over and hit the wet sand just in front of the waves, then trotted over and gummed it up, delivering it back to Drake with an air of patient long-suffering that made Kate snicker.
‘I’ve never seen a dog be sarcastic before. I didn’t ask him to come, you know, he just followed me,’ she said, warmed by the thought that he had missed either of them.
Drake turned and fell in beside her as she picked her way through the scattered stones. ‘You don’t “ask” Prince to do anything, he’ll do just what he damned well pleases—how do you think he got his name?’
She knew from the offhand warmth in his tone that ‘Prince’ was a term of affection, not derision.
‘I thought it was because of his regal bearing,’ she said, as Prince ‘wuffed’ into a pile of rotting seaweed, his three legs scrabbling madly as he skated on the slimy mass.
Drake laughed. ‘You wouldn’t believe it now but he can actually look almost respectable when that coat has just been groomed. The problem is, it only lasts five minutes—until he can find the nearest pile of dirt.’
‘That’s because he doesn’t want to be respectable, he wants to have fun.’
‘Don’t we all?’ said Drake with a silky nuance, sliding his hand down his bare chest in a way that reminded her of that day in the car. Her temperature shot up and she failed to look where she was going.
‘Careful!’ Drake caught her elbow as her sneakered foot skidded into a rock pool.
‘Oh!’ Kate lifted her dripping foot and then looked into a pool. ‘Oh, look—hermit crabs.’ Her sundress fluttered around her knees as she crouched down for a closer look at the tiny creatures, humping their houses on their backs. ‘They remind me of you,’ she teased, testing one with her finger and watching him retreat back into the depths of the spiral shell.
‘Clever, adaptive survivalists?’
‘Hard-shelled and soft-centred.’
‘You think I’m soft-centred?’ He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to be amused or appalled, his hand remaining on her elbow as he tugged her back to her feet to resume their walking.
‘You must be, or you wouldn’t need such a hard shell,’ she teased. ‘Well, semi-soft, anyway,’ she amended to hide the shock as she realised the stunning truth of her words. As cynical and tough as he made himself out to be, at his core Drake felt himself vulnerable; that was why he erected so many defences.
‘Actually, at the moment, I’d class myself as semi-hard,’ he said, pointedly looking at the sway of her breasts against the low-cut dress.
‘Drake!’ She looked furtively around the beach, resisting the urge to place her hands across her chest like a Victorian maiden.
‘Oh, look, cat’s eyes!’ He diverted her from her confusion, stooping to pick one of the convex shells up from a shallow pool, holding it for her to see the iridescent trapdoor at the bottom pulling into place, before gently putting it back in the water. ‘It reminds me of you,’ he mimicked her teasing tone.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Great, I’m like a sea-snail.’
‘Beautiful and functional, what more can you ask?’
‘I’m not beautiful,’ she denied. ‘Not like my mother.’
‘No, thank God—she’s like a perfect line drawing, sharp and flat, whereas you’re like a watercolour—delicate and subtle, yet vibrant with colour and life, with deeper shades of meaning than appear at first glance.’
‘You are quick with your similes this afternoon,’ she said, trying to prick the dangerous bubble of joy that threatened her determinedly casual façade. ‘Does that mean you’re still working? I hope you brought your notebook with you.’ She tilted her head back to see and laughed, because—sure enough—there was a tell-tale rectangle outlined in the back pocket of his shorts.
His fingers intertwined with hers, giving them a faint punishing squeeze.
‘You don’t like being compared to your mother, do you?’
‘We’re all a product of our parents; I suppose we can’t avoid it,’ said Kate, her voice softening as she thought of their baby. Was this the moment to broach the subject?
‘But, as Shakespeare said, “comparisons are odorous”—’
‘I thought they were odious.’ Kate was pleased to have caught him out, still smarting from her drubbing at Scrabble.
‘That was John Donne, not Shakespeare,’ he topped her for smugness. ‘He actually said: “She, and comparisons are odious”, which sums up your mother even better!’
‘For someone who’s dyslexic, you sure read a lot,’ she complained, unoffended. She remembered an interview where he’d said that, when working way out in the boonies, reading had been one of the few forms of safe entertainment, the only other options for a bunch of misfit males thrown together for the duration of a dirty job being drinking, gambling and fighting. He’d seen a few men die from their choice of amusement.
He grinned. ‘I cheat. I have a book of quotations lying on my desk. Some of my heroes have fought some very erudite villains,’ he informed her.
Kate laughed and he continued, after a slight pause, to say offhandedly: ‘I never had any help with my dyslexia as a kid—we moved around too much, and after the drug-taking started my mother never bothered whether I was at school. But when I was older I found out for myself how to get around the barriers, and I read whatever and wherever I could.’
‘Is your dyslexia inherited from your mother or your father?’ she asked without thinking.
There was only a brief falter in his stride. ‘I have no idea.’
‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to pry,’ she said, feeling the mental shutters start to come down.
‘I don’t remember being read to as a child, if that means anything,’ he said abruptly. ‘But there were plenty of other explanations for that—my mother always scurrying around, frantically making sure we had everything just so for her husband, so that he wouldn’t lose his temper when he got home, tired out from work and found that everything wasn’t perfect—or, rather, he was tired out from his mistress as my mother found out on the day he left—’He came to a dead stop in the sand, stiffening, and Kate thought he was angry at having said more than he had meant to and was about to storm off, but then she saw he was watching Prince, who had rushed into the chilly sea to snap at the small rush of waves generated by the wake of a passing launch, and was now heading back towards them at a rolling clip.
‘No, Prince—!’he ordered sternly, dropping her hand and stepping forward as the floppy ears started to rotate, but it was too late and the dog’s whole body went into violent convulsions, the shaggy wool letting fly a hail of cold sea water mixed with gritty sand that made Kate shriek.
‘Damn dog!’ cursed Drake, mopping down his spattered chest with the corner of his shirt.
‘He was only doing what comes naturally.’ Prince’s inherent instability had toppled him backwards into a heap on the sand and Kate started forward to help him up. ‘Oh, you poor—’
Drake flung up a barring arm. ‘Don’t—you’ll hurt his pride,’ and they watched the dog roll over and bounce up as if falling over had been his intention all along.
Kate looked at him wryly. ‘Don’t tell me—it’s a guy thing!’ She brushed at the grainy wet spots on her dress and took off her hat to shake it out.
‘You look as if you have freckles,’ said Drake, running his thumb across her bare collar-bone, smearing a row of dots. He bent and put his mout
h where his thumb had been, his tongue dipping into the sensitive crease between her collar-bone and slender throat. ‘Mmm, you taste much saltier than usual.’
‘What are you doing?’ Kate shivered, pushing his head away, his dark hair silking against her palm.
‘Trying to help you clean up,’ he said innocently, his eyes anything but innocent. ‘Why don’t you come up to the house and I’ll dry you off properly?’
She had been so absorbed in their conversation she hadn’t realised that they had walked all the way back.
‘Thank you, but I have a perfectly adequate towel at my place,’ she said, clutching her hat to her breasts.
The sultry look in his eyes kindled into wicked amusement. ‘I wasn’t thinking of using a towel.’
She gave him a haughty look. ‘I know, and, as I said, I can look after myself. You need to get back to work and I—I—have things to do.’ He had said he was taking a short break and she didn’t want to give him any further excuse to accuse her of being disruptive to his writing routine. She knew from his own description of his methods that he worked in sustained bursts of intense concentration. It was important that he know she knew the difference between her presence being distracting and being destructive. Then he might even start to see that she could be a positive, supportive element in his working life…
‘What things?’ Strong legs planted in the sand, arms akimbo, bright shirt flaring around his gorgeous bare torso, he was an almost irresistible temptation. She firmly beat it down. For all she knew, this seductive teasing might merely be a test on his part, to see how much of his attention she intended to demand.
‘Just…things. Female things,’ she added cunningly—words to make most men blanch and run.
He didn’t budge, his eyes on her hands, nervously scrunching her hat. ‘Are you afraid of me, Kate?’ he murmured, half curious, half taunting.
