Price of Passion

by Susan Napier

  ‘How would you like it if I negotiated one of your contracts without telling you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Be my guest, sweetheart, I hate all that hoopla,’ he drawled, taking the wind out of her sails. ‘I could fire my agent and save myself twenty per cent!’

  The next tussle between them was that Drake had decided it was silly for her to continue to pay her holiday rental when she was sleeping nearly every night in his bed. ‘Since you’re spending so much time over here you may as well stay for the next few weeks,’ he tossed out casually. ‘With the high season coming, I think you’ll find you won’t be able to renew your rental for another month, anyway.’

  ‘I think it’s better if I keep my own space. If I can’t, and there isn’t another rental somewhere nearby, I’ll just go home,’ said Kate with firm finality, her heart in her mouth as she rejected his offhand invitation. But she wasn’t going to make any more life-changing decisions based on foolish assumptions. She knew all too well how dangerous wishful thinking could be, and Drake’s offer had been only for her to stay, not to move in with him. There was a subtle, but enormous difference, particularly when the phrase was used by a man whose business was subtle shades of meaning.

  ‘Besides, I know how vital your privacy is to you when you’re working,’ she reminded him. ‘So, thanks for the offer, but it’s better this way for both of us.’

  Fortunately, when she contacted the rental agent, he shuffled his files and came across a note about the unexpected cancellation of his next booking, so to her relief she and Koshka were able to settle in for the duration.

  ‘Why don’t I come and see what the problem is with your water,’ he said now, switching off his computer monitor and lunging out of his chair.

  ‘But your door was shut,’ she said guiltily, following him downstairs with Prince.

  ‘And it would have stayed shut if I hadn’t been stuck in a rut. A bit of he-man stuff on the side might kick something loose,’ he said, fetching a few tools from his garage and stuffing them into his jeans pockets.

  ‘Is it going badly, then?’ she said sympathetically.

  He gave her a slightly defensive sidelong look. ‘No, actually, in general it’s going rather well.’

  Which was more than could be said for her shower.

  ‘Do you know anything about plumbing?’ she asked dubiously as she watched him tinker and curse at the shower head.

  He bristled as if she had challenged his manhood. ‘I helped build irrigation systems in the desert—what do you think?’

  She threw up her hands in surrender. ‘Just asking. Er…I’ll leave you to it, then,’ she said, hurriedly backing out of the bathroom as he pinched the skin between thumb and forefinger in the wrench and swore even more viciously.

  Some time later he sought her out in the lounge, where she was reading with Koshka dozing on her lap.

  ‘It’s no use. You’re not going to have water any time soon. Your pump has packed up.’

  ‘What pump?’ asked Kate, depositing the sleeping cat on the couch.

  ‘You’re on bore-water here. The pump sucks it out of the ground and then pumps it from a tank through to your pipes. It may be a major job to fix it. Even if the plumber gets onto it right straight away he’ll probably have to wait for parts.’

  ‘Oh, so what do you think I should do?’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do at the moment. You obviously can’t stay here without water. Unless you fancy ferrying a bucket from next door every time you want to flush your toilet,’ he added sarcastically as he watched her open her mouth to protest.

  Within an hour he had her packed up and installed in the large, ground-floor bedroom at the front of his house, looking on with folded arms as she hung her clothes in the big walk-in closet.

  ‘This is only temporary—until the pump is fixed,’ said Kate, turning to place a stack of her folded underwear into the chest of drawers and catching the quiet look of satisfaction on his face.

  ‘Of course.’

  She looked at him sharply and he responded with a smile of devilish smugness. ‘Well, I guess I’ll be getting back to work. You know where everything is by now. Make yourself at home…’

  She knew where the smugness came from when she met the laconic plumber who after several postponements was frustratingly vague on an estimate of exactly when she could expect to have running water again, and over a week later she was still totting up the amount of the refund that she would be owed by the landlord.

  And loving living with Drake.

  At first she was restless and edgy and very conscious of the need not to encroach, but that feeling eased when he casually asked if she would mind doing a little research for him and she plunged eagerly into the task of combing his extensive library and using his extra laptop to pull down information from the internet on the geopolitical history of the Balkans. He was first amused by her enthusiasm, and then taken aback at the speed at which she synthesised the facts.

  ‘This is duck-to-water stuff for you, isn’t it?’ he murmured when he sat down to lunch to find yet another concise fact-sheet sitting by his plate. ‘This’ll save me a hell of a lot of reading. I’m sorry if I’ve turned this into a bit of a busman’s holiday for you.’

  ‘I’m happy to sing for my supper,’ she told him readily.

  His brown eyes glowed. ‘You do that already, in much more exciting ways.’

  Colour touched her cheekbones. ‘I’m glad you like my cooking,’ she said primly, deliberately reading an innocent meaning into his provocative words. ‘Perhaps I should be charging you—Marcus did suggest I might take on a private commission.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because I hinted to him that I could benefit from your expertise,’ he admitted with laughter in his eyes. ‘He practically fell over himself at the thought he might get a book out of me a second sooner. And if you want to hear me sing, sweetheart, you only have to touch me the way you did last night…’

  She loved the nights even more than the days, and not just for the intimate dinners and excitement of his love-making, but for what came afterwards, when they would lie in each other’s arms in the dark, talking.

  That was when he gradually expanded on the details of his life with his mother, and the jealous possessiveness that had grown like a cancer, distorting her love into the sick obsession that destroyed her life, turning him from a son into a whipping boy for the man who bred him, and then into an enemy as he had tried to fight against her long slide into drug-addiction.

  It was in the still of the night that Kate’s unspoken love and serene acceptance were rewarded by the secrets of his guarded heart. He seemed to find it easier to talk in the dark and she certainly found it easier to listen.

  One evening he came back from a trip to the store with a package under his arm.

  ‘It’s from Marcus,’ he said, sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar to slit the large envelope and extract a note and a smaller, striped airmail envelope.

  Kate froze in the act of slicing vegetables for dinner. ‘I thought he didn’t know where you lived?’

  ‘He does now—at least he knows about the post box at the store,’ he murmured, studying the writing on the front and the back of the envelope.

  ‘Well, he didn’t find out about it from me,’ she said quickly.

  ‘No, from me.’ He glanced up and smiled ruefully at her expression. ‘Part of our trade-off for your extra month: satisfying his curiosity and making myself a little less inaccessible.’

  Kate was stunned. ‘I thought all the arm-twisting was the other way around. And so you just told him?’ she said, her heart swelling. ‘For me?’

  He shrugged as if he had dropped a damp squib rather than a bombshell. ‘It was inevitable I’d tell him soon, anyway. I’m thinking of getting off the merry-go-round and moving down here permanently. Now that I have a solid backlist and financial security for life, I can concentrate more on the writing and scale back on the tours and the high-profile personal publicity.�
�

  He was thinking of moving to Oyster Beach! Kate felt the shock of it move through her body. Where would that leave her?

  ‘When are you thinking of moving?’

  ‘I haven’t got that far in my planning,’ he said, with discouraging brevity.

  Her eyes fell to the envelope he was turning over and over in his hands.

  ‘Why don’t you open it?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I know who it’s from.’ He tossed it down so that she could see the return address. It was from Perth, Australia.

  James John Richardson.

  Richardson?

  She raised her eyes to his face. ‘Is that—?’

  He smiled grimly. ‘I’m sure there’s more than one James John Richardson in the world, but Marcus says that this particular one claims to be my long-lost father. He sent Enright’s a letter asking for this one to be passed along.’

  ‘Do you think he is?’

  ‘I know he is. I made sure I always knew where the bastard was, and that he never knew who I was.’

  ‘Are you going to read it?’

  He stood up, his body stiff with rejection. ‘He’s nothing to me. I have no interest in communicating with him—ever.’

  ‘But it could be important—’

  ‘No!’ He turned on his heel. ‘You read it if you’re so interested. I have work to do….’

  Kate contemplated the envelope for a long time after he left before she picked it up and ran her knife along the flap. The letter inside was a single sheet, typed.

  When she went up to his office, Drake was standing on the balcony, looking over the beach, his arms braced against the solid rail. He didn’t look at her as she quietly came up beside him, the letter open in her hand.

  ‘He wants money, of course,’ he told her harshly.

  She had done his research, now he needed her précis. ‘He said he saw your photograph in a bookshop and knew who you were because you look just like his other sons. He did some digging and says he thinks the press would be very interested in the pitiful story he has to tell, if you won’t help him out of his financial difficulties. He says you owe him for putting up with your mother’s craziness long enough to have you. That you’re rich enough for a few hundred grand not to make any difference to you. How did you know?’

  ‘Because it was never going to be a letter of reconciliation and remorse.’ His smile was a rictus of bitterness. ‘He never had any remorse for what he did. He can rot in hell for all I care.’

  ‘But if he sells his story—?’

  ‘Let him,’ he ground out. ‘All publicity is good publicity according to Marcus—right? The scandal might even sell me a few hundred more books.’

  ‘Drake—’ She put her hand on his shoulder and he shrugged away her sympathy with a violent jerk of his body.

  ‘My name was Michael James Richardson. I was taught to be very proud of my father, to do everything I could to be a good son. But not good enough. Because after he left my father had another son, and he christened him Michael James Richardson. He took even my identity from me, wiped me out as if I didn’t exist. So I wiped him out. Let him bring on the world—he’s getting nothing from me!’

  That night, he took her with an almost painful ferociousness and afterwards, their bodies spooned together, his palm resting heavily on her belly, he told her about his little brother, Ross, who was born when he was nine.

  ‘I don’t know who the father was, but it was probably one of my mother’s dealers, I suppose—she was taking everything she could by then and would do pretty much anything for a fix—or one of her coke-head friends. She claimed James had come back and wanted her to have his baby, and that made her try to clean up for a while, but it didn’t last much past the birth. So I was the one who looked after Ross. I fed him and changed him, lied to the welfare and stole to get him clothes.’ The darkness made Kate super-sensitive to the rising tension in his body and voice and she closed her hand around his strong wrist, anchoring him to her warmth as she realised what must be coming. ‘Only I couldn’t be there all the time,’ he said thickly, ‘and when he was four he got sick and my mother was too high to notice anything wrong. By the time I got home from school it was too late; he had a big rash that turned out to be meningococcal disease. He died the next morning.’

  Kate felt the first tremor and rolled over, wrapping him in her arms as he buried his face in her hair.

  ‘God, Kate, it happened so fast.’ She felt the wetness on her neck, the echo of agonised bewilderment in his voice. ‘One day he was there, the next he was gone as if he’d never existed. Just like my father. Just like my mother when she killed herself six months later. Ross had had one chance for life, and that was me, and I wasn’t there for him. I was his surrogate father and I let him die. Do you wonder that I couldn’t cope with the thought of being responsible for another child?’

  Kate held him in her arms as he silently wept, whispering her love in her heart, and perhaps, in her effort to give him solace, she might even have whispered it into the dark hair that brushed against her cheek as he bowed his head on her breast. It was no time to point out that Ross might have died anyway, that meningococcal was a fast and ruthless killer that even medical personnel sometimes failed to recognise in time.

  In his mind he knew that but his heart still harboured that thirteen-year-old’s bitter grief. Drake had taken the guilt upon himself and it had petrified over time into a stony barrier to love, pushing out anything that might threaten to make him revisit that traumatic sense of loss.

  Kate didn’t know whether the night was cathartic for Drake, for he was already up and working when she woke the next morning, but for her it made her next action essential.

  There was one thing they hadn’t ever touched on in the past few weeks, and that was their first, cataclysmic coming together upstairs in his bedroom, when Drake had violated his most fundamental rule.

  Just once.

  Perhaps Drake still didn’t realise his inexplicable oversight, or had forgotten or blocked it from his mind, but for Kate the lapse had begun to loom increasingly large in her thinking. And now it had assumed a critical significance.

  Which was why she sloped off to Whitianga under the guise of a shopping trip, to re-visit the doctor. She still had not had a period, and this time she was leaving nothing to chance. At the risk of making a fool of herself she was going to get herself thoroughly checked out.

  Just once.

  Just once without a condom or any other form of contraception. What were the chances for a woman whose over-stressed body had already stopped menstruating? she lectured herself on the road. Minuscule. At best. She had turned out not to be pregnant last time, and this time would be no different.

  Just once.

  Just once she would like to feel that she wasn’t at the mercy of some malicious fate that took delight in ransacking her life.

  Just once.

  Yes, the doctor agreed cheerfully as she handed over a prescription for prenatal vitamins. It only took once. That was why there were so many teenage pregnancies.

  ‘At least that gives you an exact date to work with—some women like that because it helps give them ideas for the baby’s name,’ she told Kate briskly, obviously not sure whether to be amused or sympathetic at her patient’s shell-shocked reception of the news. ‘You’re only four weeks along so it’s early days yet, but there’s no reason to think that this pregnancy won’t progress normally. You must be pleased after what happened last time—you did say that the baby was very much wanted.’

  Kate looked at her blankly and burst into tears.

  Many tissues and much embarrassment later Kate slunk out of the clinic, congratulations ringing in her ears. Still in a daze she drove into the centre of town, hardly even aware of the light bustle of lunch-time traffic, and did the shopping that would provide the excuse for her trip. All in a strange state of suspended emotion.

  Fortunately, when she arrived back and used her front door key to snea
k in, it was to discover a note from Drake to say he’d received a reminder to take Prince for his annual vaccination, so she was relieved to find herself with some valuable breathing space. Time to calm down and recover her composure.

  She carried her shopping bags into her bedroom and put them on the bed, frowning at the unexpected profusion. Had she really bought so much?

  Koshka, whom she had found squeaking at the front door, prowled in and jumped up on the cream bedspread to nose into the interesting crackle of a brown paper bag.

  ‘Oh, you want to have a look, do you?’ Kate up-ended the bag and showed the cat the pale lemon-and-white striped top and leggings and the knitted hat that went with it. ‘That’s because we don’t know whether it’s a girl or a boy,’ she said, carefully folding up the tiny outfit, size 0000, and putting it aside to dive into another bag. ‘But I do have one or two pinks and a few blues…’

  Soon the bed was awash with baby clothes and Koshka was lying down with her tail thumping back and forth on the bedspread looking mightily bored with the colourful array. Unable to resist, Kate pulled a cute little bobble hat over the velvety black ears and laughed at the squeak of offended feline dignity. She began to feel it…that long, slow, fizz deep inside, the inner fuse that was about to release an explosion of feelings.

  ‘I suppose I did go a bit mad,’ said Kate, whisking off the hat as the cat rolled over on its back. ‘A lot mad,’ she corrected herself, stacking everything into piles. She fetched an empty suitcase from the bottom of the walk-in wardrobe and unzipped it on the bed. ‘Totally insane, in fact.’

  ‘Kate?’ The call coincided with a door slamming somewhere in the house, and by the click of claws on the kitchen tile.

  Kate gasped in horror. Quickly she scooped up everything on the bed and stuffed it into the suitcase, slamming the lid shut and turning her back on it, just as Drake burst into the room.

  His eyes immediately went to the suitcase. ‘What’s that? What are you doing?’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly, for fear he would try to look.