by Susan Napier
‘So you don’t even feel a teensy-weensy bit unfaithful to me whenever you kiss him?’
She gave him her serene, Mona Lisa smile, while inside she was reeling with shock.
‘I don’t feel guilty for loving him, if that’s what you mean,’ she said mildly, and felt proud of her restraint when the mocking light in his eyes abruptly snuffed out. ‘I think Harry would have liked him,’ she added, intending to put a final period to the conversation.
This time it was Duncan who stumbled as he looked down at her in amazement, responding with instinctual speed, ‘Are you crazy? Harry would have hated him.’
‘Harry never hated anyone in his life,’ she scoffed. His tolerant kindness had been one of the things that she had most loved about her husband.
‘Whereas Steve has elevated it to an art form,’ said Duncan, recovering his equilibrium and executing a couple of head-spinning turns to prove it. Breathlessly trying to keep up with him, Kalera could feel the frustration that had him almost jumping out of his skin. ‘You saw what he was like just now. He was really getting off on the idea of having snatched you out from under my nose—’
As if she were a disputed toy rather than an independent woman with a mind and will of her own!
‘You were deliberately trying to provoke him into reacting like that,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not going to listen to you run him down just because you don’t like him. You’re totally unreasonable on the subject of Stephen—’
‘I’m unreasonable—what about him?’
He sounded like a petulant child and her superior look told him so. ‘I suppose the next thing you’re going to say is that it isn’t fair and it’s all his fault,’ she said tartly.
He scowled, injecting a note of pathos into his tone that was utterly unconvincing. ‘Aren’t I even allowed to express a friendly concern for your welfare? I think it’s great that you want to get married again, but anyone with half an eye can see that Prior’s all wrong for you. You haven’t known him very long—I have. Up until a few years ago we were best friends—since our schooldays, in fact—that’s how we got into business together…’
Best friends! Kalera kept her face smooth but her clear grey eyes must have clouded with the effort of masking her reaction to the small bombshell for Duncan immediately pounced on her uncertainty.
‘Ah…I can see he didn’t tell you that—he hates to admit to his failures…perhaps that’s why he never seems willing to learn from his mistakes. Well, it’s true; Steve and I know each other a lot better than you seem to think we do. He’s always been clever at presenting a good image of himself but underneath all the charm and sophistication he is a serious control freak. He’s far too rigid in his thinking for a woman like you. You do realise that he’s still on the rebound from his marriage? His divorce only became final a couple of months ago…would that be around about the time that you two met…?’
Kalera refused to dignify the sly insinuation with an answer and he added, ‘Has he told you how acrimonious the divorce was, and why he hardly ever sees his son—?’
‘Of course he has,’ she interrupted tightly. She wasn’t going to let him frighten her with lurid tales of Stephen’s broken marriage. Thanks to her upbringing she had a deep respect for people’s right to keep their thoughts and feelings private. At the various communes which her free-spirited parents had inhabited, there had never been any real personal privacy, either physically or psychologically, and young Kalera had grown to loathe the ubiquitous group meetings endemic to such places, where everyone was expected to expose their most intimate secrets in the interests of universal ‘truth’ and self-enlightenment. Cruel opinions and petty spite were praised for their ‘honesty’ while those who had no emotional dramas to enact were criticised for ‘holding back’ by repressing their true feelings.
Kalera thought a little repression would have been healthier for all concerned. She didn’t want or expect to know everything that had gone on in Stephen’s past life, just as certain areas of her own past were closed off to him. She certainly didn’t expect him to be perfect. The fact that he still couldn’t forgive his ex-wife for the affair that had destroyed their marriage was understandable—he was a proud man who possessed a touchingly old-fashioned code of morals. She hadn’t met six-year-old Michael as yet, because his mother’s vengeful bitterness over the divorce proceedings was such that, for the sake of his son’s emotional well-being, Stephen had felt it advisable not to insist on exercising his visitation rights under the custody agreement. But Kalera was confident that she would be able to befriend the boy when the time came for the visits to resume.
‘If there’s anything else I need to know, I’d rather find it out from Stephen, thank you very much,’ she said, to forestall any more tale-bearing.
Her stubborn loyalty caught Duncan on the raw. ‘Dammit, Kalera,’ he exploded. ‘I’m only trying to help!’
‘Yes—to help make trouble between Stephen and I so you won’t have to suffer the inconvenience of training another secretary to withstand your tantrums!’ she blurted out.
Duncan stopped dead, ignoring the couples who cannoned into them. ‘Is that what you think this is about?’ he growled.
‘Well, isn’t it?’
An unholy expression crossed his face and Kalera hastily decided that her question could remain safely rhetorical. Arching her upper body away from him, she gingerly tested his grip by pushing lightly against his chest. The broad, flat plane vibrated beneath her palms, the thin silk of his shirt no barrier to the throb of his vital life force. Her own pulse accelerated in response to the quick, hard beat and she fought to quell her unruly awareness. ‘Uh—maybe we should go back to the table now—I’m sure my dessert must have turned up by now…’
‘Not sweet enough, Kalera?’ He purred the sickly cliché, his arm sliding more securely around her waist as his torso tracked hers. ‘I beg to differ; if anything your problem is that you’re too sweet. But by all means let’s continue our little chat in front of Stephen—I’m sure he’d be fascinated…’
He bent one knee and Kalera suddenly found herself in a deep dip, arched over his arm in a classic posture of feminine submissiveness, her hair almost sweeping the floor. For an instant she felt as if she was falling through time and space, her only connection to reality a pair of smouldering blue eyes that challenged her to enjoy the ride. A few chuckles tinkled in her burning ears, confirmation—had she needed it—of the exhibition they were making of themselves.
‘Kind of makes you think of the phrase “it takes two to tango”, doesn’t it?’ Duncan murmured, his back taking the strain of their combined weight as he slowly eased them both upright again. He raised his eyebrows at her delicately flushed face. ‘So…do you really want to involve Stephen, or should we just keep dancing while we settle our unfinished business?’
Kalera bit her lip. As far as she was concerned there was nothing to settle, but Duncan in this dangerously volatile mood was impossible to predict. If she attempted to thwart him, heaven knew what mischief his fertile brain might hatch.
‘He’ll be wondering where I am…’
His shrug was magnificently uncaring. ‘He knows you’re with me.’
‘Precisely.’
Her arid reply made him chuckle in rich delight. He threw back his head, the sable hair blending invisibly into his collar as he closed his eyes and began to move to the music again, drawing her into the sinuous, syncopated rhythm as if she were an extension of his own body. Both his arms were now loosely linked around her waist and, looking up at his darkly attractive face, Kalera was struck by a shivery premonition of disaster.
‘You wouldn’t really, would you?’ she murmured, tearing her eyes away from his narrow mouth before she was tempted to wonder whether he would taste the same, or whether, like a superior vintage, he had matured with age…
His eyelids flickered but didn’t lift. ‘Wouldn’t really what?’
Her husky voice was even deeper than usual. ‘You im
plied you were going to tell Stephen about what we—about what happened.’
‘No—I said I thought he ought to know.’
Her fingers pleated the black silk shirt-front in an unconscious attitude of pleading. ‘Why? Because you want to hurt him? If this is to do with an old quarrel between you and Stephen, why can’t you leave me out of the argument?’
‘Because you, my dear, have planted yourself firmly in the middle of it.’
Exasperation conquered her desire to appease. ‘I am not your dear!’
‘Not for want of trying.’ His eyes opened to mere slits of glittering wickedness. ‘But no…I suppose you’re right; in bed it was darling that you begged me to call you—’
‘That was a long time ago,’ she gritted, the endearment short-circuiting her memory banks, throwing out a shower of white-hot sparks which coalesced into the haunting spectre of a man in the throes of violent passion, his thick, straining limbs gleaming like polished teak against rumpled white sheets…
‘Eighteen months, two weeks and three days and—’ he tilted their entwined hands so he could look at the jewelled gold watch strapped to his wrist ‘—eleven hours…darling.’
Oh, God, he remembered the exact date, even the precise time, for goodness’ sake! And all this time she had thought that she was the only one to be cursed with perfect recall of her fall from grace…
It had been a very bad day; the culmination of a long string of bad days. Her family and friends had been enormously kind immediately after Harry’s death but as the months crawled by they had all moved on with their own lives and expected practical, down-to-earth Kalera to buckle down and do the same. She had done her best to justify everyone’s confidence in her ability to ‘get over’ the awful tragedy that had shattered her life, reasoning that eventually the calm acceptance that she was projecting would become a reality. But the opposite had proved true and the serene façade had become increasingly fragile. She’d felt hollow inside, scoured out by an awful sense of helplessness that rendered her horribly vulnerable to the loneliness that constantly ached in the marrow of her bones.
For a whole six months she had managed to convince herself and everyone else that she was coping magnificently well and then the whole fragile edifice had crashed to the ground—over something as ridiculous as a simple typing error.
It had been late one afternoon and Duncan had called her into his office to query some missing words in a confidential memo which completely altered his intended meaning. In typically extravagant fashion he’d gone on to proclaim that her fetish for editing his colourful language was in danger of ruining his business, that she was turning his correspondence into drab, grey, conformist tracts which were boring his clients into questioning his creativity.
In the middle of this silly piece of teasing Kalera had horrified them both by bursting into tears, and Duncan had practically leapt over the desk to get to her before she could flee for a dark corner in which to hide her embarrassing attack of emotion.
‘I know, I know…I miss Harry too,’ he said hoarsely, sweeping her shuddering body against his large frame, devastating her with his instant empathy and willingness to tackle the subject that everyone else had been tactfully avoiding. ‘It still hurts, doesn’t it, baby? You can tell me. You just cry it all out…’
She had no choice; once started, the flood of grief was impossible to stop. All the horror, all the fear, all the anguish of the day that Harry died came pouring out as Duncan sat beside her on his couch, alternately patting her back and warming her cold hands between his, dabbing at her soggy face with his brightly checked handkerchief and doing far more good with his vague, nonsensical murmurs than had the intrusively helpful woman from Victim Support or the bland psychologist paid for by the Accident Compensation Commission.
Not that there had been anything accidental about Harry’s death. She still found it difficult to believe that her quiet, modest, slow-talking, unadventurous husband had died a national hero.
He and Kalera had been lunching at a peaceful, open-air tourist spot when a madman had started spraying gunfire, killing five and wounding a dozen others, including several children. While panic-stricken patrons had cowered behind flimsy wooden tables or attempted to flee the chaos of blood and screams, Harry had launched himself into the firing line to protect a mother and her baby daughter, saving their lives at the cost of his own.
Bleeding from a massive chest wound, he had somehow still found the strength to grab the barrel of the gun as the blank-eyed gunman stepped up to deliver the coup de grâce, and the police psychiatrist had speculated afterwards that perhaps Harry’s action had jolted the man out of his automaton-like state long enough to realise that there could be only one escape from the consequences of his actions, for he had suddenly turned his weapon on himself, ending his murderous spree with a bullet to the brain.
It had all happened so fast that there had barely been time to react and yet as Kalera had crawled out from behind the metal rubbish drum where she and Harry had taken cover time had seemed to slow almost to a stop, her movements seeming painfully sluggish and ineffectual as she’d frantically pushed at the dead gunman’s heavy body in an effort to free her husband from its macabre embrace. In what had seemed like an interminable wait for the police and emergency services to arrive, Harry’s life-blood had gushed through her fingers and soaked into the gravel on which he was sprawled. In typical fashion he had whispered to her not to worry and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she had watched helplessly as the life quietly leaked out of his torn body, had leaned over him and smiled into his rapidly clouding eyes, talking desperately about the future even as she felt an ominous clenching in her lower abdomen.
Harry had lapsed into unconsciousness and died before they reached the hospital…died believing that at least part of him would live on in the long-awaited child that nestled in her womb. To Kalera it seemed bitterly ironic that she’d survived the vicious hail of bullets without a physical scratch, only to miscarry her baby two days later. A coincidence, the doctor had assured her, but she’d chosen to add the loss of her tiny daughter to the list of the gunman’s victims. It was easier to accept that the miscarriage had been caused by trauma and stress than by the fact that the precious life that she and Harry had conceived out of their love might have been too flawed to survive.
Sometimes, in her darkest hours, she even blamed her husband for his fatal act of heroism, for choosing to abandon those he loved to protect two total strangers.
‘Why? Why did he have to play the hero like that?’ she had sobbed into Duncan’s chest.
‘He wasn’t playing, he was just being true to himself.’ The deep voice rumbling in her ear was for once calm and measured. ‘Guys like Harry—decent, compassionate men who hate to see other people hurt and have the courage to act on their convictions—are life’s real heroes, you know, not the macho, aggressive, fearless warriors that you see glorified in big-budget action movies. What he did was instinctive to his nature—he was trying to help someone more vulnerable than himself.’
‘But what about me?’ It was a bewildered cry of angry betrayal. ‘He left me alone, and I was his wife…I was vulnerable too!’ Her hand clenched unknowingly over her empty womb. ‘He had nothing to defend himself with—how did he expect to stop a man with a gun?’
Duncan swallowed her cold fist in his warm grip, prising it away from her stomach to rest against his reassuringly solid breastbone. ‘He must have believed you were safe where you were—out of sight, whereas that young woman was right there in the killer’s path, struggling to get her baby out of her broken push-chair. You said there was no time to think, so Harry wasn’t worrying about consequences, he was just reacting to his gut feelings…’
‘All I felt was fear. I froze up—’ She choked, her head sinking with shame as she remembered how she had shivered at Harry’s side as they had crouched behind the painted bin.
A forceful hand cupped her delicate jaw, lifting her tear-str
eaked face so that she was looking directly into dark blue eyes ablaze with a fierce emotion that was startling in its intensity.
‘I’m glad you did. It probably saved your life. If you’d followed Harry you would have been shot too. You might have died, or been badly maimed like some of the others. Don’t expect me to be anything but grateful that it didn’t happen.’
His palm shaped her pale cheek, his fingertips resting on the throbbing pulse at her temple, making her vividly aware of the life that coursed through her veins. No, she hadn’t wanted to die, and she didn’t regret surviving, being whole…
‘But I should have tried to stop him,’ she whispered. ‘One moment he was beside me, the next he was gone. I could have stopped him…’
‘You had no control over the situation at the time and you can’t assume it in hindsight. There was nothing you could have done, Kalera, and no amount of torturing yourself over futile what ifs is going to change that fact. Only one person is responsible for what happened that day.’
‘He deserved to die,’ she grated bitterly, still unwilling and unable to feel any compassion for the man whose refusal to take medication for his depressive illness had resulted in such senseless carnage. ‘Harry didn’t.’
‘No.’
Braced for a response that preached the healing qualities of forgiveness, Duncan’s simple acknowledgement of her right to bitterness reopened the floodgates.
‘Today would have been our sixth wedding anniversary,’ she admitted in a wobbly voice as the tears dripped down her face, gathering in the V-shaped dam formed by the web of his thumb and forefinger and spilling over the back of his hand.
‘Ah, Kalera…’ There was a wealth of understanding in his voice as he bent to rest his forehead against hers, rolling it slowly back and forth, ironing out her crumpled brow. ‘No wonder you’re feeling so alone…’
‘And tomorrow—tomorrow is the day that my baby was due to be born,’ she wept, abandoning herself to his sheltering strength.
