Price of Passion (16 page)

Kate stood frozen, inwardly reeling with shock.

He didn’t know there was no baby! She’d thought he had understood—outside the clinic when she’d told him it was all a false alarm—she had thought he’d realised that she meant the whole pregnancy. But he had obviously thought she meant the threatened miscarriage!

He still thought that she was pregnant.

And he didn’t want her to abort his baby.

No, not
his
…‘your baby’, he said, not ‘my baby’ or ‘our baby’. He was firmly separating mother and child from any connection with himself.

‘But it is my decision,’ she said cruelly. ‘Unless you want to go to court and fight over the right to the foetus—drag out our past, present and future for the world to gloat over…’

He flinched, but stood his ground, the muscles grinding along his jaw. ‘Kate, don’t make any decisions on the basis of the hurt and anger you’re feeling right now. Believe me, I know how badly that goes—how irrevocable some acts of bitterness can be. Every life is precious, because life is so fleeting we have to treasure it while we can…I came back because you’re important to me, and this baby doesn’t change that.’

Again, it was ‘this baby’ not ‘his’, thought Kate, growing icier with every word.

‘The fact that it was unplanned by either of us doesn’t have to be a disaster.’

So he was prepared to concede that she hadn’t tried to trap him with the oldest trick in the book. How generous!

‘I’m a wealthy man, I can set up a trust fund to support you and the baby for the rest of your lives, so there’ll be plenty of money for child-care if you want to continue your career.’

Ah, there it was, the pay-off!

‘And we can buy you a house, one with plenty of room that you won’t have to share.’ He was growing uncharacteristically nervous at her silence, speaking more quickly and persuasively. ‘It’ll be much more convenient than your town house and more private than my hotel—no need to be self-conscious if you ask me to stay overnight…’

If?
That big, fat, horribly pregnant ‘if’ sent a huge chunk of fractured ice shearing off her glacial heart.

Now
he was prepared to take on her and the baby, albeit stashed in an expensive love-nest somewhere? Now, when it no longer mattered! If he had once mentioned love instead of ticking off his convenient boxes she might have reacted differently, but this was too little and too late.

She marched out of the bedroom and threw open the front door in a furious gesture of repudiation.

‘Get out!’

‘Kate, I’m only trying to make you see—’

‘Get
out
of my house!’ She would have liked to have told him that she wanted him to never darken her door again, but as well as being horridly clichéd it would have been a lie.

He hesitated and she thought that if he pointed out that it wasn’t actually her house she would hit him, but fortunately he brushed past her, turning on the doorstep to warn her.

‘OK, I’m going—but I’m not going away, Kate. Not again. And you’re not leaving Oyster Beach, either, until we work things through. Sooner or later you and I are going to have to deal with the consequences of our actions—
together
, rather than individually. Our baby is as much a part of me as it is of you, because, after two years,
you’re
part of me…’

He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to play on her conscience.

After vowing to be honest in all her future dealings with him she had just been vindictive and cruel. She had let him go away thinking she was holding his baby hostage in her barren womb.

Kate paced the house as the sun sank lower in the sky, running her hands constantly through her hair, as if she could brush away the sticky tendrils of guilt clinging to her mind and disordering her thoughts. She couldn’t stomach the idea of food, but since her strange cravings and loathings had vanished with the baby she made herself a good, strong, black and bitter cup of instant caffeine.

Taking her coffee out to the verandah, she couldn’t help glance wistfully up at Drake’s shuttered office window. The light was on and the shutters were slanted open, a motionless black silhouette standing, staring down at her through the tilted slats, a lonely, brooding figure who sent a hot needle of pain searing through the ice encasing her emotions.

A boy who had been abandoned by his father, suffered the ultimate fatal rejection from his mother; shadowed by a teenager who had been bounced from pillar to post in foster care; shaded by a man who had never had—or permitted—anybody but a mangy dog to possess a piece of his soul. How could she condemn him to mental torture for merely being the product of his environment?

Leaving her half-finished coffee steaming on the kitchen table, Kate put a bowl of canned cat-food down for Koshka and walked around to Drake’s front door.

Her knock was answered so quickly she realised he must have seen her coming. She also realised that she was still barefooted and wearing the sandy, salty clothes she had worn to the beach whereas Drake had obviously not been brooding so hard that he hadn’t taken the time to shower and shave, and change into clean jeans and a short-sleeved white linen shirt.

‘Come in,’ he said, his deep voice quiet and inviting as he stepped back and to one side, but she didn’t move.

‘There is no baby.’ She could hardly hear herself over the thunder of her heart in her ears.

‘I beg your pardon?’ He greeted her bald announcement with a puzzled tilt of his head, as if he thought he hadn’t heard her correctly.

‘I’m not having a baby. That doctor confirmed it. I’m not pregnant. That’s what I meant when I told you it was a false alarm.’ She lifted her chin when she saw a red flare in his eyes, an instant before they turned as black as pitch. ‘So you see, you can stop worrying—there are no consequences for us to deal with after all,’ she continued in a steady monotone. ‘I just came over to tell you that—’

‘Oh, no, you didn’t,’ said Drake, grabbing her around the waist as she turned to leave. He hauled her inside the door and slammed it shut, engaging the dead-bolt.

His arms caged her against the door on either side of her sun-flushed shoulders, his face a series of jagged angles under the flare of the overhead light in the vaulted entranceway, his velvet voice as abrasive as sandpaper in his bewilderment.

‘I don’t understand. Explain it to me, Kate. Are you saying the initial test was
wrong
? And that your own doctor never noticed?’

So she was forced to drag it out, to tell him all the gory, embarrassing details that had been picked over by the doctor in Whitianga, including the damning fact that she had never consulted her own doctor.

Mired in her guilt, she waited stoically for a celebratory cheer of relief, followed by a justifiable outburst of anger and contempt, but Drake’s response was so muted it could have been called a non-response.

‘So you
could
have been pregnant a few weeks ago, but we’ll never really know,’ he said quietly when she had mentioned the chemical pregnancy theory.

She shrugged, her bare shoulder blades rubbing against the wood of the door. ‘The doctor said that apparently around half of first pregnancies end in a miscarriage, sometimes so early that the woman doesn’t even know about it.’

‘But
you
knew,’ he said, dropping his arms and straightening up.

‘I
thought
I knew,’ she said, free to move past him into the big, unlit living area where she could safely avoid his all-seeing gaze. Someone had lit a bonfire at the far end of the beach and through the big picture windows she could see the fiery sparks leaping up into the sky, reaching out for the cool sprawl of stars that were just beginning to prick through as dusk teetered on the edge of night. ‘As it turns out I was only pretending…’

‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was soft as the night as he came up behind her.

The breath shivered out of her lungs and she wrapped her arms around herself, wishing she were one of those sparks, dancing up into nothingness. ‘Why? You never wanted the baby—’

‘Not for the baby. For you. For
your
loss. Because it was so much more than a pretence for you, wasn’t it, Kate? For weeks you thought you were having my baby…’

She bit her lip, but the self-inflicted pain didn’t help banish the tears that stood in her eyes, blurring the dance of the sparks. She opened them wide and blinked, but then a strong pair of enfolding arms slid around and over hers, chasing away the chill, drawing her gently back against a warm column of hard flesh, and the tears spilled over her cheeks and dripped down into the crease of a tanned elbow.

The arms tightened and she felt Drake’s square chin skim over her shoulder at the nape of her neck, his head dipping and turning so that he could push his face into the side of her throat, his hard forehead nudging up under her jaw, his lips moving against her soft skin.

‘Ah, Katherine…I’m sorry…’ He began to rock her from side to side, his big hands compressing her upper arms, his hips directing but also passively supporting the sway of her willowy body.

A sob burst from her chest and she briefly struggled against his unbreakable grip.

‘Kate…’ he whispered against her throat. ‘Katie…’

It was the first time he had ever used the sweet diminutive of her name and that he should do it now just seemed too much. A second sob tore loose, and then another, and then the tears just wouldn’t stop. When she stopped fighting his hold he slid his arms down to her hips and turned her around, pulling her hands around his waist, drawing her head against his chest and rubbing the knuckles of one hand up and down her spine, continuing to rock her in rhythm to her sobs.

‘I don’t know why I’m crying; there’s nothing to cry about,’ she wept, her voice muffled in the folds of his linen shirt. ‘It’s not as if I’ve really lost a baby…just a silly delusion…What made me think I could be a good mother, anyway? I suppose you think I’m totally mad—’

‘Shh, Kate,’ he soothed, ‘you’re the sanest woman I know—you’re the one who anchors
me
to my humanity.’ He rested his cheek on the top of her tousled head. ‘You lost something precious to you this week, and even if it
was
just an illusion, why shouldn’t you be allowed to grieve for it?’

Her fingers clenched into his shirt, the beat of his heart against her jaw reverberating through her bones. ‘You don’t really care,’ she choked, lifting her head. ‘You’re happy that your life can go back to the way it was before…’

‘Not happy…sad.’ He tilted her chin up so that she could see the truth of his words in his sombre face. ‘In all the time I’ve known you I’ve never seen you cry, except at a movie. That made me feel safe. I don’t like to see you hurting.’

She looked up at him with drowned eyes, a ghostly silver in the half-darkness. ‘Then
why
…why did you walk away from me like that?’ she said rawly.

He brushed back the hair from her forehead, dislodging several grains of sand, which he stroked away from the top of her furrowed brows. ‘Because I’m a flawed human being, sweetheart. Sometimes I let the past get in the way of my better instincts. But I do learn from my mistakes and I’m here for you now, so you don’t have to bear this alone.’

He pressed his lips to her crumpled forehead, smoothing it out with a string of gentle kisses that drifted to the corner of her damp eyes, and down to her salty cheeks and bite-swollen lips. His soft murmurs of tender reassurance and the rocking cradle of his arms, the feather-light touch of his mouth stroking her reddened eyelids closed, and the achingly sweet brush of his cheek against hers both lulled and enticed her into a dreamy state of contented acquiescence.

So that when she found herself upstairs in Drake’s luxurious grey and blue bedroom, being divested of her clothes, she was only mildly curious.

‘What are you doing?’ she murmured through tear-thickened vocal cords as Drake’s comforting arms withdrew so that he could pick up a remote control to draw the blue silk drapes and dim the squat bedside lamps to an intimate glow.

‘Getting comfortable,’ he said, pulling the white shirt over his head without undoing the buttons, and discarding it carelessly on the thick silver-grey carpet. He did the same with her top and was deftly drawing her salt-stained shorts down her legs when she bestirred herself to weakly protest.

‘I haven’t had a wash. You can’t look at me; I’m all grubby—’

‘I don’t mind. Hop out,’ he ordered and threw the shorts on top of the pile of clothes when she unthinkingly obeyed.

‘I do. I always have a shower before I see you,’ she fretted, trying to hide herself behind her arms. ‘I need to feel that I’m clean, and look my best, and smell beautiful…’

He took her hands, gently saluting the one that still showed signs of bruising from the extracted splinters, and placed them over his shoulders, spanning her slender waist with his big hands and nuzzling her pouting mouth with more of those butterfly kisses. ‘You’re just as appealing to me au naturel,’ he murmured reassuringly. ‘You smell like a real woman; I like that better than any artificial fragrance…a woman of the sun and sea and beach.’