Price of Passion (15 page)

‘You don’t know how I
feel
,’ he said scathingly. ‘You only think you do. But you made a big mistake if you thought you could talk me round. You’re not going to con me into bearing the responsibility for
your
decision—’

She felt as if he had stabbed her in the chest. ‘If you’re talking about a decision not to terminate, I don’t need anyone else to take responsibility for that,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t care what you or my mother say, I’m not getting rid of my baby just because it doesn’t fit the image of a sophisticated career woman.’

He stiffened at the wheel. ‘Your mother told you to have an abortion?’ He cast her a violent look. But was he any better?

‘I haven’t told her—I wanted you to know first,’ she said, turning her head to stare blindly out the window. ‘But I know that’s what she’ll say I should do. She would have aborted me, if she could have done it legally…even back then she was thinking ahead to what would best serve her professional reputation. I grew up in a one-parent family so I know how tough it can be, but I can do it, I could even afford a house and take in boarders to help with the mortgage and child-care if necessary. There are always plenty of overseas university students looking for quality long-term home-stays. My mother will be furious and scathingly disappointed in me, but then that’s nothing new…’

The thick, condemning silence descended again, reinforcing Drake’s message of brutal uninterest, and this time it lasted until they arrived at the group practice on the outskirts of Whitianga. While Drake parked the car Kate walked inside and explained matters to the practice nurse on the desk, who immediately said she’d show her into an examination room to await the first doctor to become free. As she was leading the way across the hall Drake came striding up to them, eyes raking over Kate, and the nurse hesitated.

‘Oh! Does your hus—um…your partner want to come in, too?’

‘No!’ said Kate firmly, before Drake could open his mouth to say anything hurtful. ‘And he’s not my partner. He just gave me a lift. You can stay in the waiting room,’ she told him with dismissive coldness that blew directly off the frozen wastes in her heart.

She was feeling both hot and cold fifteen minutes later as she stared at the kindly, middle-aged female doctor in a mixture of anger and disbelief.

‘But the test was positive both times I did it,’ she repeated, ‘and it said on the packet that it was ninety-seven per cent accurate.’

The doctor shrugged. ‘Done correctly, yes, but there are a number of things that could give a false-positive result—for instance you may have let the test sit too long before you read it, or, if it happened twice, the kit might have been expired or faulty, or if you’d had a urinary-tract infection you were unaware of at the time, that could have compromised the test—’

‘But I’ve also had all the signs since then,’ protested Kate. ‘I’ve missed two periods, and I’ve been nauseous, and having to go to the toilet more frequently, and my breasts have been sore…’

The doctor’s voice was gentle, but inexorably firm. ‘Well, I’ve done the internal exam and tested your urine and you’re definitely not pregnant. The pain you’re feeling is probably a pulled muscle from your fall, or possibly a little tear—an anti-inflammatory will soon settle that down. I’ll do the hCG blood test for you but I’m sure that’ll just confirm my diagnosis. You said there was some spotting a couple of weeks after your first period was due? You could have had what we call a chemical pregnancy, which is a very early miscarriage.’

‘But I missed another period after that and—and I was so
sure
…’

‘Have you been under any emotional stress at work or in your private life recently?’

‘Well, yes, but no more than usual.’ Kate grimaced. She had always found Drake’s arrivals and departures very stressful—trying to act normal and carry off the appearance of cool acceptance of his wanderings while she was dying inside. Whenever he left she would wonder when they would see each other again, and when he returned she was never certain how long he would stay.

‘You wanted this baby very much, I take it?’ the doctor murmured, as she gently dealt with the splinters embedded in the hand with which Kate had grabbed at the rail.

‘Yes,’ Kate whispered. ‘I did.’ As soon as she had watched that test strip change she had eagerly embraced the miracle, the long-forbidden hope. She had wanted Drake’s baby more than anything else in the world…except his love…

And now she had to face life with neither.

‘Well, sometimes, when we want or believe in something very, very much the mind can cause the body to produce signs and symptoms that can fool a woman into thinking she’s pregnant…’

Fool!
Kate repeated to herself as she left the doctor’s office, hollowed out by grief and the shameful knowledge of her own devastating self-betrayal.

She knew now why she had convinced herself there was no rush to have her pregnancy professionally confirmed. At some deep level of her subconscious she had known the truth and not wanted to face it. The phantom pregnancy had been a way for her to break out of the prison of her ‘no strings’ affair with Drake, to force herself to take action and challenge the very nature and balance of their relationship.

To make a horrible situation worse, when she got back out to the reception desk she found that she had left her purse lying on the floor back at the house, and had to ask Drake to pay for her consultation.

‘Well?’ he said curtly as they walked to the door.

She swallowed. She wasn’t going to parade her guilt and shame in front of a roomful of interested patients. ‘Quite well.’ She stretched her mouth into a meaningless smile. ‘The doctor said I must have pulled a muscle in my fall.’

Drake stopped outside the doors. ‘So the baby’s all right, then—it wasn’t hurt?’ he said, his voice tight with hostility at having to ask.

Kate’s dry eyes ached.
Fool!
She lifted her chin. ‘It was all a stupid false alarm,’ she forced herself to confess.

‘In that case, here.’ Drake stunned her by slapping her car keys into her hand.

‘You want
me
to drive home?’

‘I don’t care where you go. As long as I’m not there. I can’t do this. I’m out of here.’ He turned on his heel and headed along the pavement towards the township.

‘But—I have to explain—We need to talk—’ she called after him.

‘No, we don’t. There’s nothing you could say that I want to hear. Anyway, they say actions speak louder than words.’

And with that he walked away.

K
ATE
was building a sandcastle on the beach when the little girl whose lopsided lump she was busy turning into a fairy-tale structure complete with flying flags of fuzzy pussy willow grass suddenly popped her thumb out of her mouth and extended it in a skywards spike.

‘Man!’

Kneeling in the hard-packed sand just below the high-water line, Kate squinted against the low angle of the sun in the direction indicated by the moppet’s soggy salute and sat back on her bare heels with a little breathless grunt of shock.

Drake was back!

Her sandy fingers unknowingly clenched, scrunching a hole in the side of a tower and endangering the route of the heroic fairy prince she had been explaining to the child was about to clamber up to rescue the enchanted maiden, aka a pod of seaweed whose green hair owed its inspiration to Rapunzel.

‘Hah!’ Her little companion seemed to think it was all part of a new game, and cheerfully bashed down another of Kate’s painstakingly crafted towers with its pretty mosaic of shells.

‘Oh, no, darling, we’re building them up, not pushing them down,’ choked Kate, hastily blinking away the tears she blamed on the needle-sharp jab of the sun and spreading out her hands to protect the flank of her castle from an enthusiastic little fist.

The man, who had been padding steadily along the beach towards them, came to a halt at the edge of the shallow moat on the seaward side of the castle, crouching down to survey the damage, his knees splayed, the dark trousers that had been rolled up to his calves pulling tight across the tops of his thighs, his long bare feet melting into the wet sand.

‘Looks like you could do with some help,’ he said, pushing up the sleeves of his pale grey knitted-silk sweater, revealing the golden brown hair on his tanned forearms.

‘No, thanks, we’re doing fine without you,’ said Kate, just as another tower got a smashing makeover, sending a spray of damp sand into her mouth and down the top of her scoop-necked top.

‘Hey, sweetheart, how about you and I fill this bucket with some more sand?’ said Drake, picking up the bright plastic pail with its turret-shaped base lying by his feet and holding out the matching spade.

To Kate’s disgust the little girl trotted obediently over to his side and began digging, while Drake scooped up mounds of sand with his cupped hands and rapidly filled the pail.

‘You’ll get your clothes dirty,’ said Kate sourly, wiping the grit from her mouth with her arm, noting that it definitely wasn’t beachwear he was sporting. Who had he dressed to impress? she wondered.

‘Like yours?’ he said, his mouth curving as he looked at her sand-clogged striped top and water-stained shorts.

When she didn’t smile back, his own faded, his brown eyes unflinching as he weathered her wintry stare.

‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ he commented, sinking down onto his knees and turning his attention back to his task, smoothing over the compacted sand in the bucket and inverting it to produce a smooth-sided release from the bucket with a sharp rap on the top, far more perfect than Kate had obtained.

The little girl clapped her hands.

‘More!’

Drake obliged until there was another square of perfect towers, which he joined up with mounded walls. Kate doggedly worked on the original castle as he and his helper dug a moat and filled it with buckets of sea water.

‘I think I need to hire a decorator,’ he said to Kate, noticing her sneaking sidelong glances at the expansive grey walls. ‘Would you like to help?’ He picked up a single strand of pussy willow from the bunch of grasses she had gathered in the sand-dunes earlier and held it out to her, the delicate, pale golden catkin at the end of the stalk quivering and dancing in the gentle sea breeze.

It was too reminiscent of an extended olive branch and she opened her mouth to coldly refuse, but then she saw the girl’s innocent blue eyes, alight with eagerness, fixed on her face.

She reached out to reluctantly accept the offering.

‘I suppose I could.’ Her voice was like broken glass but the little girl listened to the words, not the jagged tone, and as Kate poked the stalk into the top of one of the new towers she began pulling her precious collection of shells from the sagging pocket of her shorts and handing them over one by one for Kate to press into the base of the walls.

Watching her crawling around on her hands and knees, Drake said with a curious edge, ‘Should you be doing that? What about your pulled muscle?’

She didn’t understand his concern. After all, he had been the one to turn his back on her grief-stricken admission. He must have realised how shocked and upset she was, how devastated by her humiliating mistake. He hadn’t cared
then
what she was going through.

‘The doctor gave me an anti-inflammatory. The pain relief was pretty well immediate.’

He frowned. ‘Don’t those things have harmful side-effects?’

‘I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t have prescribed it if it was dangerous,’ Kate told him tartly. ‘But if you were so worried about it perhaps you should have asked me about it at the time instead of running off like that. But then, that’s fairly typical behaviour for you, isn’t it?’

She hadn’t meant to let that slip out, but when she saw the skin tauten over his cheekbones she was glad. There was no reason now to hold back, no secret baby to protect. She was on her own.

‘Oh, yes, that’s a pretty one, isn’t it, darling?’ she said as the little girl poked a small paua shell with its pearlised blue and green interior under her nose.

‘Here, Kristin, put it in your bucket,’ said Drake, handing it over with the spade tucked inside, startling Kate with his use of the girl’s name.

‘You know who she is?’

‘Of course I do, they’re locals. Look, Kristin—your mother’s getting ready to take you back up for your tea.’

The woman whom Kate had briefly spoken to earlier had repacked her beach bag and was shaking out her towel. Seeing them looking towards her, she waved, yelled out a greeting to Drake and her thanks to Kate, and called to her daughter, who skipped off without a second glance at the result of all their hard work when she heard the words ‘spaghetti’ and ‘ice cream’ floating on the breeze.

‘There’s gratitude for you,’ murmured Drake as she got stiffly to her feet. ‘Never mind, the tide’s still on its way out and the local school kids should be getting off the bus about now. Your monument will get plenty of admiration before the sea comes back to demolish it. Here…’ He sought and found a stick from amongst the heaps of seaweed strewn along the high watermark and wrote ‘Kate and Kristin did this’ in large capitals alongside the crenellated towers.

Kate found it interesting that he had added the little girl’s name without prompting, but not his own.

‘For someone who doesn’t want any children, I’m surprised you’re so good at handling them,’ she said, unable to curb her resentment. ‘Most people who haven’t had much contact with children find it hard to relate to them.’

Herself included. She had never been interested in babies or young children until she had thought she was pregnant, then they had turned out to be the subject of a profound, and hitherto inadmissible fascination. Again she felt that deep, wrenching sorrow, the sense of loss that she had no right to feel. She began to walk quickly back along the beach towards the house.

Drake had tensed at her words. ‘In the kind of group homes I was in there are always plenty of kids coming and going.’ He shrugged, turning to follow her, easily keeping up with her swinging strides. ‘It’s supposed to be part of the “family experience” to get the teenagers to help look after the younger ones.’

His voice petered out, as if he expected her to interrupt with a question, but Kate merely quickened her pace, the breeze against her face making her eyes sting as she pulled ahead.

‘I came back, didn’t I?’ he said roughly, digging his feet into the sand to regain her shoulder. ‘That must count for something.’

‘You think?’ she said sarcastically.

‘I was only gone a couple of days.’

Eternity times two. He was very efficient at his disappearing act, though, for he had even arranged for a man in a pick-up to come and collect Prince and lock up the house. When Kate had seen that happening she had wished that falling in hate was as easy as falling in love. At least she had still had Koshka to stroke and to hold, and to lick away her tears. The little cat had slept on her bed, curled up on the turndown of the sheet, her soft motoring purr a comforting reassurance that Kate had not been left entirely alone in the world.

‘Yes, that’s quite a record turn-around for you. I thought you’d be away much longer,’ she said truthfully. ‘But I forgot that you have a work in progress. You had to come back for that—you have a lot of writing to do. And of course that always takes precedence over everything else!’ She could hear herself getting shrill and was relieved to see her front lawn. She almost broke into a run.

‘Kate—That’s not why I came back.’ He leapt up on the grass and shadowed her to the scene of her fall. ‘I only went as far as Craemar—the Marlows’ holiday place—Steve put me up there—’

‘Oh, I see, and I suppose you told him all about me,’ she said with one foot on the step. ‘Cried into your beer and gave chapter and verse on how I almost tricked you into having to behave like an ordinary human being—’

‘God, Kate,
no
,’ he said, snagging the sleeve of her top to hold her back, ‘it wasn’t like that—his whole family were there—’

She had thought her humiliation was complete; now she discovered there was fresh reason to cringe. ‘You mean
they
all know about it, now, too?’ she cried in horror.

‘I haven’t told
anyone
, Kate. I didn’t go there to get drunk and rave; I just needed to get away to
think
.’

She pulled her sleeve out of his grasp. She didn’t know what to believe any more. She didn’t trust him—or herself—to know what was really true. ‘Excuse me, I think I’m going to go inside and be sick,’ she flung at him, and rushed up the stairs, hoping that would be enough to make him think twice about harassing her with his unwanted attention.

Unfortunately her words had the opposite effect and after scarcely a moment of hesitation he charged into the house behind her, following her trail of sandy footprints right into the sanctuary of her bedroom where she had fled to shed bitter tears.

‘What are you doing in here?’ she said thickly, backing away from him, glad that she hadn’t yet succumbed to the building pressure behind her eyes.

‘You said you were going to be sick.’

Just as the doctor had predicted they would, the physical symptoms of her pregnancy had vanished, so she couldn’t blame her savage burst of fury on a hormonal mood swing.

‘And you wanted to what? Enjoy watching my misery?’

‘I thought you might need some help.’

She was infuriated by his strained gentleness. ‘You haven’t been much help so far—why start now?’

‘Calm down, Kate, it isn’t good for you to get all wrought up over trifles.’

Trifles?
Kate’s mouth fell open at his sheer gall.

He looked around the room, which was in a defiant mess very different from her normal, fastidious requirements, and frowned.

‘Are you packing?’

She recovered from her momentary speechlessness. ‘You wish! Unlike you I don’t choose to run away from my problems.’ No, she ran
to
them. That was
her
problem!

‘Then what’s all this?’ He nudged a foot against a stack of carrier bags by the door.

‘Just some things of mine I’m putting out for the rubbish.’

One of the packages slumped, spilling out books, and he bent to tuck them back in the bag, jerking upright as if he had been burnt when he saw the colourful titles.

‘You’re throwing out your books on child-care?’

She gave a bitter laugh at his fierce frown. ‘Well, I won’t need them now, will I? Do you think I should give them away to charity? Feel free to take as many as you like.’

His body took on a dangerous lean. ‘What do you mean you won’t need them, now?’ he said warily.

He wasn’t usually so obtuse. ‘Well, if I’m not going to be a parent, I don’t need to read books on how to develop good parenting skills,’ she choked.

Did he think she would want to keep the reminders of her foolishness around for next time she thought she was pregnant? She was twenty-seven, and in love with a man who had brutally rejected the very essence of her womanhood—at this rate there would never be a ‘next time’.

His wariness gave way to stark tension. ‘What are you going to do? Give the baby up for adoption?’

Kate gasped, shaking her head helplessly.

His face greyed. ‘God, you haven’t decided to go for a termination after all?’ He heeled his chest with his hand, as if massaging the flood flow through his heart. ‘Kate, you’re not thinking straight. You can’t abort your baby…you’ll never be able to live with yourself. It’s not the right decision for you—’

He didn’t know!