Authors: Susan Napier
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 sneak 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.
His eyes flashed back to her face, seeing the lie. ‘Packing your bags? You’re leaving, Kate?’
‘I—’
‘Leaving me? Just like that? No discussion…no right of reply?’ he said savagely. ‘What were you going to do, prop a Dear Drake letter on my desk?’
‘No—’
‘How could you? After last night? After what I told you?’ His face changed, went as flat as his eyes, his beautiful voice: ‘Or is that it? Are you afraid I might have inherited my mother’s mental instability?’
‘
No
—’
‘Or my father’s sheer, cold-blooded inhumanity?’
‘No, Drake, it’s nothing like that.’
He grabbed her hands and pulled her away from the bed to face him. ‘Then tell me. What is it? What have I done wrong?’
She sighed. ‘Nothing. You haven’t done anything.’
Her sigh seemed to alarm him more than anything else. He laced his fingers through hers, securing her more completely to his cause.
‘Don’t go. Whatever it is, Kate, don’t leave me,’ he said, sending a piercing arrow of sweetness through her heart. She had never heard him plead before. Even last night, raw and bleeding with emotion, he had not spoken with such fierce desperation. ‘Talk to me. Please. Just tell me what I can do to stop you. I’ve let you know the worst of me, but you can’t judge me solely on what I’ve been. I can change, Kate…haven’t these past few weeks shown you that? I let you into my life; don’t turn around now and shut me out of yours! You can tell me anything. What is it you think I can’t handle to hear?’
‘That I love you, for one thing,’ she said, taking her heart in both hands.
He looked stricken. ‘I know. You told me that last night. But that’s not the only thing, is it?’
It was her turn to be stricken. ‘You know?
That’s
all you have to say?’
His fingers tightened on hers as if he feared she was going to snatch them away. ‘I’m not good with words—’
Her eyes widened. ‘Drake—you’re a
writer
.’
A muscle flickered along his jaw at her gentle scorn. ‘I mean at
saying
them…to you. Other people don’t matter.’
His discomfort made her heart stutter, then soar. ‘You’re also famous for your wit.’
‘Wit is a weapon. Love is…It’s dangerous…loving people,’ he said, twining and re-twining their fingers.
‘I know, but sometimes you have to do it anyway.’
He hunched his shoulders, his face flushing. ‘For God’s sake, Kate, you must know well enough by now I love you,’ he admitted roughly. ‘I told you I won’t want any woman but you, and I’ve practically been doing handstands to impress you all month. You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted to have permanently in my life, to live with. You like it down here at Oyster Beach, don’t you? We could move here together, you could freelance and I could write, we could be free—you and me…’
‘And baby makes three,’ she murmured, expecting the inevitable recoil.
He looked down into her upturned face. ‘Are you saying that you won’t marry me if I don’t give you children?’