by Natalie Fox
‘Go on,’ Daniel urged abruptly.
His tone said he was hurt and she went on quickly, ‘I felt so sorry for him when I arrived. I had a child of my own and I wouldn’t want Tara pushed from pillar to post and that’s what has happened to him.’
His eyes narrowed painfully. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t have done it any other way if I thought it would have helped? I’ve paid for the best care for him,’ Daniel responded flintily.
‘I’m sure you have,’ Karis relented wearily. But the best care in terms of wages paid wasn’t nearly enough for Josh. She sighed and went to the table to sit across from him. ‘Mr Kennedy, I don’t know your circumstances and I don’t want to pry. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I understand how you feel, finding someone with no qualifications caring for your son, but Fiesta was right. Everyone else gave him up as a bad job and—’
‘So why did you stay?’
‘I’ve told you, my heart went out to him,’ she admitted softly. ‘I couldn’t forsake him before giving him a chance. I suppose it made a difference that I was a mother and could relate to him. If that was my own daughter in those circumstances I would want someone to help her and not give up on her because she was so troubled. It did help being a mother myself.’
‘And, from what Fiesta says, a mother with nowhere else to go and very eager for this job in paradise,’ he said disparagingly.
Karis stiffened, her heart tightening at the truth of that. She remembered being evasive with Fiesta over her personal circumstances when she had applied for the job. Silly really, withholding her background when her very background was so important for the job. But she had been desperate to get away at the time and unable to think clearly and had just hoped that her eagerness to take on the care of the little boy would be enough for Fiesta.
It had as it happened but the fact that Fiesta had taken her on without delving too deeply into her past should have acted as a warning flare, and of course on meeting the irascible young boy she had understood why. Fiesta had been as desperate to sign her up as she had been to start a new life.
Karis shrugged away her hurt. ‘That’s true,’ she conceded quietly. ‘I was more than glad of the job for reasons that are my own but I’m not lying when I tell you I felt drawn to your son. Everyone else had forsaken him and—’
‘And so you keep saying,’ he interrupted wearily, and suddenly got to his feet. ‘The world had rejected him and you were his saviour. What do you want—a damned medal?’ he breathed, on the edge of anger now.
Shocked, Karis stared at him, her lips white. Why was this man being so cruel? Why was he always so angry?
Suddenly he let out a long sigh and raked his dark hair from his brow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he breathed roughly, impatient with himself more than her, she sensed. ‘Of course you don’t expect a medal. Look, this isn’t going to be easy and I’m fully aware of the problems ahead. I want my son with me now. You have a special bond with him and…and…’ His voice faltered slightly but he recovered quickly. ‘I need your help,’ he finished quietly.
Karis licked her dry lips at his plaintive request. It stabbed painfully at her emotions.
‘Insulting me is going a funny way about enlisting my help, Mr Kennedy,’ she said slowly and deliberately. ‘I’ve done my very best for Josh and you’re right, I don’t want a medal; I don’t even want your praise or your thanks. It’s enough for me that he hugs me tightly when he says goodnight, it’s enough that he trusts me. All I’m concerned about is Josh’s future—the one you are preparing to offer him.’
Slowly Karis got up from the table and faced him. She really had nothing to lose by baring her thoughts and feelings to him. Very shortly her job here on the island would be over and done with. She dared not even think of her own circumstances when that day came because Josh filled her mind at the moment.
‘I know I’m speaking out of turn here,’ she started, ‘and I apologise up front, but this needs to be said before we go any further. With your attitude I doubt if your son will have a very happy future. He needs care and attention and time and love and from what I’ve seen of you and your fiancée I doubt you could rustle up a fraction of any one of them.’
There, it was out, exactly how she felt about him and that awful Simone.
He was leaning back against the work surface, his arms folded across his chest, and looking at her with eyes narrowed warningly. But Karis wasn’t put off. She had more to say and concern and love for Josh made her brave enough to say it. ‘All I’ve seen of you so far is a broody menace where I’m concerned, Mr Kennedy. I don’t know why you attack me so when you have seen for yourself Josh is well cared for. I’m doing my best and I always have done and Josh has responded to my love and caring. If I didn’t think the idea ridiculous I’d take it that you were….’ Her voice suddenly went as if it had been switched off.
And then Karis knew. It swept over her, all-enveloping, all depressingly sad. She saw it all now—his attitude problem, his abrasive reaction towards her starting from the time he had stepped ashore and seen that she, a supposedly wild and unkempt teenager, held his son’s love and trust in her hand. It must have torn through him like a serrated knife.
‘Jealous,’ he finished for her, in a tone that was dull and weighted.
Karis lowered her lashes. Her heart was thudding at his being brave enough to make such an admission. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured faintly. ‘I didn’t really understand at first and then, just now, I couldn’t even say it because it’s so awful.’ She lifted her face and looked at him, her eyes wide and apologetic. ‘You are jealous of me because Josh loves and trust me, aren’t you?’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. His hand came up and tore through his hair as if that admission had taken the strength out of him. ‘In the short time I’ve seen you both I can see how you are together,’ he went on roughly. ‘Yes, I’m jealous of the hold you have over my son.’
Karis shook her head, realising that the snap of sympathy she had felt just now could be abruptly vaporised away by just one ill-chosen word. Did he mean to say the things he did? she wondered.
‘Just a minute. The word is bond, not “hold”, Mr Kennedy,’ she corrected him firmly. ‘I do not have a hold on your son. I do not like the menacing implication of that word.’
His eyes held hers stoically and he didn’t retract the word or apologise for how Karis had taken it—as another insult. ‘Hold or bond, whatever, it will pass when my son learns to love and respect me. It’s what I’m here for after all. Then your services will no longer be needed and you will be out of his life and that is the way it should be.’
His sudden cool, calculated plans for Josh’s future and her swift, cruel dismissal shook Karis to her very roots. She almost physically shrank away from him and in fact must have moved because his hand shot forward and grasped at her wrist as if he recognised she was about to tear out of the room before he was finished with her.
‘That’s the way it must be,’ he said quietly, ‘and you must have known that when you took the job on. Nothing is for ever. Now, if you have anything more to say on the subject of my son I would be pleased to hear it. Do you have anything more to say?’ he asked, as if her life depended on her giving him a satisfactory answer. His eyes held a curious challenging glimmer.
Suddenly the firm grip on her wrist eased slightly as he waited for a response from her. Unwittingly she gave it as his thumb ran erotically over her pulse point, backwards and forwards, tiny strokes of fiery pressure that sent her blood whooshing through her veins. She felt sure he could feel it. Karis stared at him in mute confusion. Why was he doing this—touching her so intimately? And why on earth should the blood rush in her veins this way?
Suddenly she couldn’t bear the close contact a second longer and she snatched her hand away. He didn’t protest. Her eyes flamed with indignation as she rubbed at her wrist but his eyes suddenly sparkled teasingly and it was such a sudden mood swing it shocked her.
‘I
’m glad you did that. I was beginning to think you were enjoying it,’ he said smoothly.
Karis didn’t need this sort of teasing banter to follow an intimate touch that had unsettled her so deeply. She lifted her chin because she wasn’t going to take it.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ she asked directly, considering attack to be the best defence. He only smiled enigmatically, which was no answer either way. To her surprise she found her mouth suddenly had a will of its own. ‘You did it so you must have wanted to. Your motivation puzzles me, though. Past experience has taught me that small, intimate gestures like those are usually connected with sounding the ground for further exploration but so far you have done little else but insult me so you can’t possibly like me. So why did you do it? Heaven forbid it was a test of my morality.’
‘Let me put your fluttering heart at peace, then,’ he mocked, and Karis felt her temperature rise. ‘Fluttering heart’, of all things! ‘I thought you were about to leave in a hurry and I wasn’t finished with you. I realised I must have come across as a bitter father and I wanted to smooth it with you. Then I felt your pulse and it intrigued me because it raced so at my pressure. I wondered why.’
And because his eyes were loaded with mischief now she couldn’t bear it. Her eyes narrowed warningly. ‘Let me put your fluttering heart at peace, Mr Kennedy. My pulse races in defence of my feelings, not in excitement of them. I am your son’s carer and just because I am on my own with two small children to look after that doesn’t mean I suffer from a fluttering heart and the vapours when a man touches my wrist. In future we talk and think only of your son’s welfare and future. I would like you to keep your lightness of touch and your suspect innuendoes to yourself. Now, you think on all that before you dare speak to me again!’
With that she turned her back on him and was down by the edge of the water on the beach before she had herself fully under control. The warm water lapped her ankles, cooling her feet deliciously.
His touch had nearly broken her. That small, intimate, tender caress, so completely unexpected, had very nearly broken her. She didn’t even like him but it just went to show her state of mind when a stranger could make her pulse race so easily and effectively.
Karis crumbled to the sand in the shade of a dense palm and hugged her knees to her. Human contact, a man touching her, him touching her. No one had for so very long. She was always with the children, Tara and Josh, all day, every day, at all times. And when they slept she sat alone. Never anyone for her to turn to for comfort. No one to wrap his arms around her and just hold her. She ran a handful of sand through her fingers. Her life was just this, she thought ruefully: sand slipping away. No passion, nothing for her own lonely heart, just her life trickling away.
His touch, for whatever reason, had burned her loneliness into her soul like a branding iron. It felt like a searing, agonising scar on her senses and all because of a small, intimate caress of her wrist of all things. Imagine the effect of more, she thought desperately. The touch of his lips and…
She felt a light hand on her shoulder and she jumped in alarm, her heart thudding. Daniel was looking down at her and she felt her cheeks burn because of what she had just been imagining. He couldn’t know but all the same she looked away from him and trickled more sand through her fingers.
He sat next to her under the palm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said sincerely. ‘Deeply sorry for hurting you the way I do. None of this is easy for me.’ He shrugged slightly. ‘You aren’t at all what I expected. That first sight of you on the beach threw me completely when I arrived. You looked so young and natural, barefoot and with the breeze tossing your hair wildly around your shoulders, a baby on your hip and my son clinging to you for comfort. He was afraid of me and needing you and it tears at my heart for what I’ve lost.’
Karis drew painfully on her bottom lip as she stared out to sea. Yes, it must have cost him a lot of pride and pain to make such an admission. Already she had gathered that he was a proud man, a hard one too, a man with a past that had caused his son such misery, but here he was going partway to opening up his heart to her and making it right for his son.
‘I need you to help me get to know my son,’ he went on softly. ‘I need your co-operation; what I don’t need is you fighting me all the time. I’m partly to blame for that, I admit, and again I apologise, but meet me halfway, please. As you said we know nothing about each other and false impressions have been formed and that isn’t a good thing. I do appreciate what you have done for the boy but I’m going to need more, much more from you.’
Oh, he might have apologised and he had sounded sincere but did that man have a heart beating within that impressive chest of his? He’d abandoned his son, after all, and now he was here to claim him back again and it wasn’t going to be easy. Oh, no, not with his attitude and Josh’s fear and her stuck in between the two of them, working towards losing the child she cared for so very deeply. Her emotions were flustered, to say the least, as she turned her head to look at him.
‘Yes, I will help you,’ she told him softly. ‘I was never in any doubt that I would and you shouldn’t have been either. If I argue with you it’s because I know Josh and I have an opinion to air on his behalf. I want the best for him and I’ll go along with anything you suggest—if I think it is right for Josh,’ she added quickly.
He nodded and murmured, ‘Good,’ and they both sat for a while, staring out to sea, each with their own thoughts on what was best for the boy, though Kans’s were punctuated with the awareness of Daniel sitting next to her. Such a strong, hard man, both charismatic and infuriatingly arrogant at times, and yet a small boy had the power to reduce him to a wreck of worry and concern. He cared for Josh, she now knew, and it was a relief.
‘How do you mean to start this bonding with your son?’ Karis asked at last, her voice low and concerned because perhaps he didn’t realise just what a formidable task was ahead of him.
‘I thought you might have some ideas on that.’
‘I don’t have the qualifications, remember?’
‘Nor do I, remember?’ he countered.
She turned and smiled at him and found he was already smiling at her. Karis wasn’t surprised to find she did suffer from a fluttering heart but she was sensible enough to reason that it had come about because of more relief. It was better to be friends with him than enemies.
‘We’re going to get a long way fast, then, aren’t we?’ Karis said ruefully.
He grinned. ‘Let me make a suggestion, then. Let’s start by you bringing Josh over to the plantation house first thing in the mornings and—’
‘Uh-uh,’ Karis uttered negatively, shaking her head. ‘First hurdle to be overcome. Josh doesn’t go to the plantation house. I won’t take him. If Fiesta wants anything she comes to us.’
He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Why don’t you take him to the house? I would have thought it was part of his life, mixing with people.’
‘No one’s ever sober there!’ Karis protested. ‘Is that what you really want for Josh? Association with a load of inebriate vacationers? No way. I won’t allow that’ She got up from the sand and brushed her sarong down. ‘If there is any bonding to be done between you it’s not going to be done in that den of iniquity.’
He caught her arm before she swung away. He was frowning darkly. ‘I thought you had agreed to co-operate?’
Karis stared up at him, wondering what the cause of his sudden about-turn in attitude was. She was only doing her best for the boy. ‘Co-operating doesn’t mean blind submission to your every whim,’ Karis argued firmly. ‘Of course I’ll co-operate if I think it is in Josh’s best interests. I don’t think you entertaining Josh at the plantation house every day, surrounded by a lot of old soaks and languid, leggy blondes, is the right way to go about it.’
He let her go, lowered his head and raked a hand through his hair. Then he looked directly at her and nodded. ‘OK, I agree,’ he surprised her by saying. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I honestly had
n’t seen it that way. So what suggestions have you got?’ he asked.
Karis wasn’t sure she wanted the ball in her court. It was his son after all. But she knew Josh better. He hated the plantation house. He was always much more comfortable at the cottage, which was his home of course.
‘I presume you and…and Simone are staying in the main house?’
He nodded. ‘Could you take one of the cottages in the grounds instead?’ she suggested.
‘They are all taken, and besides, Simone wouldn’t—’
Karis looked at him when he stopped abruptly. ‘Say no more,’ she said lightly. ‘Wouldn’t have put you down as henpecked,’ she added cheekily.
Because she was smiling he did too. ‘Simone would delight in that remark,’ was his only comment. Then he got back to the subject in hand. ‘Yes, all the cottages are taken. What had you in mind?’
‘I’ve left Josh sulking long enough. Let’s talk about it on the way back,’ she murmured as she turned to head back to the cottage. Daniel fell into step alongside her and as they strolled along the beach she said, ‘Well, I was just thinking that it would be better if you and Simone were away from the vacationers, away from the main house. On your own, in a cottage maybe, it might be easier to handle Josh, but if they’re all taken then—’
‘I agree, but I hadn’t planned on introducing Josh to Simone quite so soon,’ he interrupted.
‘Oh,’ Karis murmured, surprised and relieved all at the same time. ‘Yes, I think you’re wise.’ She turned her head and smiled, hoping to lesson the sting of the truth. ‘It’s going to be bad enough with just you.’
Daniel smiled ruefully without looking at her and nodded his good-humoured agreement.
‘Josh feels more secure in his own environment,’ she went on, feeling braver knowing that Daniel was warming to her suggestions. ‘He has a routine that gives him confidence.’ Daniel nodded again. ‘I think it would upset him terribly to have that routine broken. I think we need a softly, softly approach. Firstly, of course, you must win his confidence, which is what all this is about really. I mean, the fact that you are taking him away won’t matter in the end; when you have won his love he’ll go off and…and…’ Oh, God, her throat was drying up with emotion. Josh would go off with his father and forget she and Tara had ever existed in his life.
