by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
If only the nurse had waited for five more minutes, she thought, torn by a desperate anticipation.
Keir returned as she drained the last of her cup of tea, all prowling, lean-hipped male in casual trousers and a cotton shirt that emphasised his height and the width of his shoulders.
‘Oh, wow, what a babe!’ a young nurse collecting the tray growled beneath her breath. ‘You lucky, lucky thing!’ Grinning at them both, she carried the breakfast things out to the trolley.
Keir bent to kiss Hope, a real kiss that choked off her greeting. Flushed, bemused, she stared at him when he smiled, pale eyes gleaming, and said, ‘I’ve just been talking to the obstetrician; you’ll almost certainly be able to go home.’
It was too much; Hope tried so hard to stem her tears that her teeth chattered, only to give way completely when she felt Keir’s arms come around her. He let her weep for a few minutes, then said quietly, ‘The baby’s fine, and so are you. I thought she’d told you?’
Eventually she pulled away, muttering, ‘Yes, she did. I’m sorry.’
He took out a handkerchief and began to wipe her eyes carefully. Things would be much simpler, Hope thought desperately, if he weren’t so thoughtful, so attentive—so bloody brotherly. It was incredibly comforting—and even more depressing. Oh, she wanted his consideration, but she wanted much more than that from this man.
She’d been so careful to avoid any emotional entanglement, yet she’d been ambushed by love.
The obstetrician was even more positive. ‘Sometimes in the first three months there’s a slight tendency to spot and cramp at the time when periods would have arrived,’ she said. ‘From the dates you’ve given me, this is what’s happening. So far there’s absolutely no sign that you’re miscarrying. Rest for a week or so, and no sex until I’ve given you the all-clear.’ She looked meaningly from Hope’s hot face to Keir’s impassive features, then went on briskly, ‘There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t carry this baby full-term.’
Feeling foolish, Hope said, ‘I panicked a bit when I felt the cramps.’
‘That’s understandable. Try not to worry—pregnancy and birth are entirely natural processes, and a calm mind is very helpful.’
Which was all very well, Hope thought later as she watched the green hills and valleys of Northland unfold through the window of the car. She’d like to be calm, but it was difficult when the man next to her only had to look at her to set the blood spinning through her veins, chasing away common sense and prudence and self-control.
Being with Keir was changing her, altering some essential part of her, and she was afraid. The independence that had always been so precious to her had slipped beyond her reach. Keeping her eyes on the shadowy islands marking the silver-blue sea, she wailed in silent desperation, What’s going to happen now?
Keir reached out and took her hand, holding it loosely. Biting her lip, she felt a hidden softening inside her, a slow, irresistible tide of heat and desire and—more dangerous by far—the aching, desperate love that threatened her autonomy.
‘What are we going to do about Aline?’ she blurted.
His mouth compressed. ‘You are going to do nothing,’ he said, the hard note in his voice a subtle warning. ‘Leave her to me.’
Hope shook her head. ‘Keir, don’t be hard on her. You were right, she doesn’t love you, but I think she’s built an awful lot of hopes on you. And this scare had nothing to do with her—her timing was wrong, that’s all.’
He gave her a narrow-eyed glance, then lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re very kind,’ he said against her skin. ‘It’s all right, I won’t be cruel to her. But she’s interfered enough; it’s time she put her house in order and got on with her life.’
Hope looked at him and nodded, dimly aware that she had arrived at a momentous changing point. Four years previously he’d been a rising star on the Pacific Rim business scene, combining an ice-cold brain, lethal energy—and an almost superhuman instinct for the killing deal—in a relentless drive towards success. Now he’d reached it, and was going further, but nothing would change the man who had taken on the world on his own.
The difference was in her. She trusted him, she thought with astonishment, not to crucify Aline.
‘You’re right,’ she said, and yawned.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Hope glowered at Keir. Speaking slowly and distinctly, she said, ‘I am ironing my clothes.’
‘Maria—’
‘Has her own work to do.’ Hope pressed the iron into a cuff, concentrating on making the pleat crisp and neat. ‘Keir, I am perfectly well. I haven’t had another cramp since the one just before we arrived at the clinic, and that was a week ago. The doctor is very happy with my progress.’ She’d even said they could resume marital relations again.
If it hadn’t hurt so much Hope would have laughed in the woman’s face. Since they’d come home from the clinic Keir had been friendly and considerate, a fascinating, interesting companion, and he hadn’t come near her.
Obviously she’d put far too much emphasis on that enigmatic remark Don’t go back to Australia. It had meant nothing.
She picked up the ironed shirt and slid it carefully onto a hanger.
‘I presume,’ Keir said, watching her, ‘that you still have a rooted objection to getting married before the baby arrives?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped. Strange how so much could change in a short time. Now she’d bargain her soul away for a chance to win his love.
‘Why?’
Goaded, she hung the coathanger up in the cupboard. ‘There’s a possibility that I might lose the baby. Why bother with a wedding—?’
‘I said that I didn’t ever want to hear anything like that again.’
The flat, lethal note in his voice should have warned her but she persisted, ‘Keir, it’s silly to—’
‘I know you don’t want to marry me,’ he said silkily, ‘but just think of it as an ongoing revenge.’
Suddenly exhausted by the war she’d been fighting with herself, she turned and faced him. ‘Damn you,’ she whispered. ‘I did not sleep with you to be revenged on you. And, if you must know, I didn’t sleep with you because I wanted to get you out of my system, either.’ She leaned over and switched the iron off at the wall. The homestead had a huge laundry, clean and well painted, but the years of washing and ironing had left it with a faint, musty, old soap smell.
‘Then why?’ he asked, pale eyes glinting as he watched her, his angular face cold and hard.
‘Because I never stopped loving you,’ she spat. She took a step towards him, her fists clenching at her sides, and jerked her chin up to flick damp strands of hair off her face. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? I spent four years obsessing about you, so hung up on you that I couldn’t fall in love with anyone else, and I didn’t even know why!’
His laughter was low and savage, as scornful as the twist of his mouth. ‘You don’t know what love is. You’ve cuddled and nurtured your grievance to your heart for four years, and when you saw me again you couldn’t wait to unload it, make me pay for something that never happened.’
‘I heard—’
‘You heard half a conversation! For the last time, Hope, I did not make a deal with your father.’
Her anguished eyes searched his face, met nothing but a cold pride. She said in a voice from which all expression had been banished, ‘How can I believe you?’
In a voice as cold as his face he said, ‘I can’t prove it. You’ll have to trust me.’
She closed her eyes. Instinct buzzed wordlessly inside her, warning her, chiding her.
Keir said grimly, ‘Is it so difficult to take that final step? You say you love me—if love isn’t based on trust, then what is it worth?’
Her eyes flew open as he came across the room. He didn’t touch her, but she flinched at the violence of his emotions, the ferocious will-power that barely caged them.
As though she’d hit him, he stopped
just out of arm’s reach.
‘How long do I have to keep proving myself?’ he asked in a low, raw voice. He didn’t wait for an answer, but muttered in words stripped of everything but a stark, violent need, ‘I loved you four years ago, even though it was impossible because you were so young. I loved you when I saw you in that shop in Noosa, when we made love on that bloody uncomfortable bed underneath your landlady’s room—I loved you when you told me that you’d only slept with me to get me out of your system.’
‘I thought that—but I was wrong,’ she said steadily.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them they were burning. ‘I love you now,’ he said. ‘You carry my heart in your hand. That’s what love is for me—not just passion, or flirtation, or companionship. Or even this driving, compulsive need. It’s a combination of them all, and something extra that is yours alone, and only yours. Hope, I will give you anything you want, agree to anything—you can even live in another house if you want to. I don’t want to cage you, take your freedom away. I’m not like James Sanderson. But I need to have you close so that I can prove it to you. I don’t care how long it takes, but don’t run away again.’
Although shock held her silent, he must have read her incredulous joy—her overwhelming, heart-shaking relief—in her eyes, because his mouth curved dangerously, and he rasped, ‘You little witch. Why didn’t you tell me?’
But he gave her no time to answer; his head came down and they kissed, a deep kiss of commitment, piercingly satisfying as they allowed the passion they’d kept under such restraint its full freedom.
Keir yawned, and kissed the top of her head.
‘Mmf,’ Hope groaned, stretching, welcoming the erotic slide of skin against skin, the heat and the flash—followed by the slow burn—of renewed desire. ‘Satisfied now that I love you?’
His voice was lazy, richly textured with a love he no longer tried to hide. ‘I won’t ever be satisfied. You’re like a drug I can’t get enough of.’
She looked up into molten eyes. ‘You know, I was incredibly blind. I can’t believe how blind I was! I was so sure I couldn’t get you out of my system because we hadn’t actually made love. I was positive that if we had an affair I’d get rid of such an inconvenient passion.’
‘I really object to being thought of as some sort of disease you can immunise yourself against.’ But he was smiling, his gaze tender.
Sighing, Hope rubbed her toes up the inside of his leg, enjoying the way his calf muscles flexed. ‘I should have known I’d never be able to vaccinate myself against you. As it was, making love with you really drove me over the edge, but I still wouldn’t admit that I loved you.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ he said judicially. ‘You overheard a pretty damning conversation.’
‘Yet you didn’t behave like the demon I’d believed in all these years—and I must have known, deep down, that you weren’t, because I wouldn’t have trusted you with a place in the baby’s life if I’d believed that.’
‘I hope not,’ he said grimly, ‘but I was under no illusions. I’d put you in a hell of a position—pregnant, with no money, no job, no prospects.’
She responded to the fleeting note of self-contempt in his voice with a vigour that startled her. Kissing his shoulder, she muttered, ‘I’d have managed.’
‘I know,’ he said, sounding surprised. His chest lifted in wry laughter. ‘I’m learning not to think of you as that unsure eighteen-year-old I fell in love with. When I arrived back in Noosa to find you gone—I knew then that I’d never get over you. If you wanted revenge for the way I dealt with your father’s offer four years ago, Hope, you had it then. I damned near tore the place apart, only to find that no one had heard from you—even the Petries had no idea where you were. I made them promise to contact me the minute they heard—and wondered how the hell I was going to find you if you didn’t write to them.’
His voice broke; he tilted her face and kissed her with unleashed male power.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, touching his face lovingly.
‘It served me right. Until I got to the Gold Coast and actually saw you I had nightmares, where I searched for you, knowing in that bloody awful way you do in nightmares that you were desperate and lost and calling for me.’
Hope hugged him tightly and kissed him. ‘I won’t ever run away again.’
‘Good.’ His smile was tinged with irony. ‘Your mother was right—you needed to get away. But even at eighteen you were strong enough to stand and face anyone. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you—amongst others,’ he murmured, and began to tell her what those other reasons had been, his voice sinking and the faint raw note in it intensifying.
Hope gave up trying to clear the sensual fumes from her head. ‘I do love you,’ she said, and shivered.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I wonder whether I’d have gone through life waiting for you if you hadn’t happened to arrive in Noosa.’
‘I didn’t happen to arrive,’ he said calmly. ‘I knew you were there.’
Her head jerked up, catching him on the chin. ‘Sorry,’ she said, and kissed him there, but lifted her face immediately and scanned his, seeing the truth in his eyes. ‘How?’ she breathed.
‘Just after…’ He paused, then said deliberately, ‘After Aline and I made love, I got a letter from your mother’s lawyer. She’d asked him to send me your address a year after her death.’
‘When I left home I promised her I’d tell the solicitor whenever I changed my address,’ Hope murmured, tears stinging behind her eyes. ‘Every so often she reminded me of that, and asked me to keep on notifying him no matter what happened. I thought she just wanted someone to know where I was, but I’m so glad I did it.’
‘So am I.’ He kissed the place where her hair swept back from her brow, his mouth lingering. ‘I organised the meeting with the Chinese delegation and came over. I told myself I needed to be sure that you were all right.’
Hope didn’t know that she liked this.
He said wryly, ‘I lied, of course. You’d haunted me ever since you left New Zealand. I had to find out what sort of woman you’d become; at twenty-three you were old enough to make some decisions about your life.’
He had let her go to find her own freedom. She couldn’t imagine James Sanderson setting anyone free to find her own life. In him the lust for power had burned too fiercely.
Keir might be a dominant man, but not a dominating one.
‘But when I got there you looked at me as though you didn’t recognise me. It was like being kicked in the heart.’ His kiss was almost a punishment. When it was over, he murmured against her lips, ‘I stood in the door of that jeweller’s shop and I wanted you so much I could feel the hunger clawing through every cell in my body. I felt damn near bent double with it. I knew then that I wasn’t going to be able to turn my back and leave you, so I used everything I could to persuade you to go out with me, to get used to me again. And then you threw me by telling me what sort of man your stepfather was, and I realised that it wasn’t going to be simple to gain your trust. Making love to you wasn’t going to be enough, even though you blew my mind with your passionate response.’
‘I’m surprised you persevered,’ she said wryly, running an exploratory finger down his spine.
‘I was in too deep by then to think of giving up. But I swear I didn’t plan on getting you pregnant.’
He stroked across her newly sensitive breasts, cupping them, his long fingers darkly dramatic against her pale, satiny skin.
‘Of course you didn’t!’ She sighed and snuggled closer, then sat up abruptly and glared at him. ‘Why did you wait so long to tell me this? It’s been a week since I came home from the clinic!’
His smile was self-derisory. ‘I wanted you well and strong enough to hear it.’ And then he laughed beneath his breath. ‘The truth is that I was afraid to push my luck. Materially I can give you everything you want; you’d even admitted to loving me—but you s
till didn’t trust me.’
She gave him a quick glance, and said sombrely, ‘It is so—huge a thing, to be dependent on someone else for your happiness.’
‘As long as it’s a two-way process, does it matter so much?’ His eyes kindling with naked need, he held her hand over his heart. ‘I’m scared, too, Hope, because I love you more than I can even admit to myself. With you I’m vulnerable. You have the power to hurt me beyond anything I’ve ever endured.’
He did understand. Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she nodded.
‘So I tried to show you that you could have your independence as well as my love, that real love doesn’t involve capitulation.’
Beneath her palm she felt the slow driving beat of his heart. A swift flare of emotion held her silent, until she smiled and with tear-filled eyes said shakily, ‘So, we’ll be scared together.’
His smile was tender. ‘You’re a lot stronger than you think. You wouldn’t let anyone terrorise you.’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought loving a man meant giving up everything that made you a woman—giving up your pride and your independence and your right to any freedom, even of the mind. That’s why I didn’t want to love anyone, ever.’
Stone-faced, he said, ‘I wasn’t ever going to tell you this, but I think you need to know. Your mother told me that James Sanderson threatened to take you away from her if she left him. She suspected that that’s why he adopted you—it gave him legal leverage over her. She might have loved him to begin with, Hope, but she stayed because of you.’
Hope went white. ‘I see. Yes, of course,’ she said numbly.
Keir’s arms tightened around her. She relaxed into the warmth and strength of his body, before lifting her head. ‘I don’t approve of revenge,’ she said between her teeth, ‘but it strikes me as entirely suitable that he should be unable to control anything in his life now.’
‘You don’t have to worry about him ever again.’
A shiver scudded the length of her spine. ‘I’m not afraid of him; I just don’t want anything to do with him. And if that seems terrible—well, I’m terrible.’
