Price of Passion (6 page)

She was disturbed by a chill shadow across her upper body and surreptiously wiped the drool that had gathered at the corner of her sleep-slackened mouth on her arm before she lifted her head to smile at her visitor. Shades of that ramshackle dog!

All her cleverly rehearsed phrases zipped out of her head, her smile lingering as a polite rictus when she saw that the figure looming over her was not the tarnished hero of her life but his deadly Titian princess, dressed neck-to-toe in white. Although the hair was more carroty than artistic auburn, decided Kate in an inward yowl, and the lady was definitely pushing thirty, at the very least. That alabaster brow was positively botoxical, and those luscious lips—that
had
to be collagen!

‘Hi,’ Kate said wittily, pushing the comforting shield of her sunglasses up her nose, while simultaneously trying to untwist the wrap that had got trapped under her side as she tried to gracefully roll over on the uncooperative sun-lounger. The aluminium frame made an ominous creaking sound as her elbow slipped through a gap in the webbing, but she finally managed to wrestle herself free and sit up in reasonable dignity.

‘We haven’t met, have we? I’m Katherine Crawford.’

She held out her hand. Politeness, she had learned from her lethally charming mother, could be very empowering.

‘Melissa Jayson,’ came the clipped reply and some minuscule part of Kate relaxed.
Not
Melissa Daniels, then. She crossed one nightmare scenario off her list.

The jade-green eyes that went with the brilliant hair glittered like glass as the politely proffered hand was rudely ignored.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but why don’t you just get out and leave him alone?’

‘I
beg
your pardon?’ Kate said, sitting bolt upright, Lady Bracknell in a bathing suit.

‘He doesn’t
want
you following him. He comes to Oyster Beach to get
away
from the smothering attention of people like you. You can’t possibly understand his needs. Give him some space, why don’t you?’

‘Let me guess, you and Drake are graduates from the same school of etiquette?’ said Kate drily, when she had got over the sting of the lightning attack.

Under the silk top the over-inflated bosom heaved, revealing a gap between the scalloped hem and the low-rise white jeans, and a strip of winter-pale skin sporting the sparkle of an impressive navel ring. Diamonds, no less…probably from Sierra Leone, thought Kate darkly.

Thinking of navels made her think of her baby and she pleated the folds of her wrap over her tummy. By her calculations she was barely two months along, and the books said it would be another two before her baby bulge began to show, but even now she felt a responsibility to shield her son or daughter from negative experiences in the womb.

‘Drake and I have known each other since before
you
were around,’ the other woman flung at her. She smiled, but only the muscles around her mouth moved. ‘He’s told me all about you, but you have no idea what he and I are to each other, do you?’

Kate’s hormones staged a dangerous mood swing. On the other hand, perhaps it would be good to communicate some fighting spirit from Mama!

‘What are you, his mistress or his muse?’ she dared to ask bluntly. ‘Because I know you can’t be both—Drake doesn’t trust women enough to allow any of them dominance in more than one compartment of his life.’

‘You don’t know him as well as you think you do,’ came the contemptuous reply. ‘You may think you’re special but you’re really no different from any of his other groupies. You like sharing the limelight with a famous author and helping him spend his money, but you have no idea what it takes for him to create his works. Why don’t you stop distracting him and let him get on with his writing—?’

‘While you ply him with cups of coffee and mop the creative sweat from his brow?’ said Kate, watching the green eyes flicker and the collagen lips flatten. ‘
Am
I distracting him?’ she added innocently. ‘I’ve only been here one day. If
I’m
a distraction, why aren’t you?’

She regretted the rhetorical tag when it was rewarded by a nasty little smile. Melissa looked down, manicured red fingernails flicking an invisible speck off the pristine white jeans. ‘Let’s just say that Drake has a particular need that only I can fulfil for him. And we keep each other
extremely
well satisfied between the sheets…’

Kate’s hand, tucked in her lap, balled into a fist.
This one’s for you, kid!

‘Let’s not say that. Let’s try and be discreet and respectful of each other’s feelings, and not start an undignified cat-fight in public.’ Her quiet voice stepped up a decibel. She was used to being a mediator in arguments, not an instigator. Confrontation was not her style, but she had witnessed from the cradle how it worked. ‘Otherwise I might be tempted to say you’re a grade-A, gold-plated bitch who thinks she has the right to run roughshod over other people to get what she wants. But this isn’t about you or what you want. Your shame-and-blame tactics aren’t going to make me run away with my tail between my legs. I wonder if Drake knows you’ve snuck over to try and bully me out of his life?’

The redhead stiffened, her elbows tucking into her sides, her jaw clenching as she half turned away, her white sandals acquiring a freckle of dust from the dry grass. ‘I suppose you’re going to run crying to him telling tales!’

Kate blinked, suspicion curdling in her sour stomach at the subtle body language.

‘
Does
he know?’ she asked sharply.

‘He has been a victim of a stalker before, you know. She wrote him hundreds of letters—a pathetic woman who thought five minutes of conversation and his personal autograph to her in the flyleaf of a book meant they were soul mates.’

She
hadn’t
known, but the evasive reply had the red flags snapping briskly. ‘How tragic. I’ve never even sent Drake a postcard, but if I get an overwhelming urge to buy stamps in bulk I’ll be sure and check myself into a facility. Now, if you wouldn’t mind moving out of my light, I’m trying to get a suntan.’

‘You—’

‘Melissa?’

The older woman spun around and saw Drake stepping around the end of the hedge. She immediately walked jerkily back the way she’d come, the two of them exchanging a terse word as they passed each other on the grass without stopping.

Kate took a long pull from her drink bottle and stood up as he came to a halt at the end of the sun lounger. He wore the same disreputable blue jeans that he had worn the day before, with battered workman’s boots and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The decadent, city-dwelling Drake Daniels who wore expensive designer-casual with careless flair was nowhere in sight. Until you looked into his cynical eyes—then the rumpled, down-home, easygoing country-boy was revealed to be the sham. Or perhaps the double life he lived had actually split him off into two distinct personalities. In which case, both of them were in the doghouse with Kate!

She took off her sunglasses to blister him with her naked scorn. ‘Next time do your own dirty work.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ His Lady Bracknell wasn’t a patch on hers, she thought.

‘Either you sent her over, or you primed her to go off in my direction,’ she accused.

He tipped his head down, scowling. ‘What did she tell you?’

She gave him a brittle smile. ‘That you were fantastic in bed, but since I knew that already the conversation sort of stalled out.’

A trace of discomfort shifted in the dark eyes. ‘Kate—’

She didn’t want his pity, or his remorse. ‘Oh, don’t ruin the callous, two-timing image she sketched out so vividly. Just be grateful that I know you don’t really believe I’m a bunny-boiling psychotic, or you wouldn’t have let your trash-talking girlfriend come within a mile of me. My own father is mooching his life away on a dot in the Pacific because he couldn’t handle the responsibility of a relationship with me. You needn’t worry that I’m the type to slit my wrists just because a man I respected turns out to be a self-absorbed idiot and coward to boot—’

His face paled, eyes burning in their sockets. ‘Don’t even say it!’ he said harshly, grabbing her arm and jerking her into silence. ‘Look, if Melissa went too far, I’m sorry—she thought she was helping…’

‘Helping herself to you,’ she joked warily, easing her arm out of his painful grip as he seemed to go into physical lockdown.

He looked sick as he watched her massage the blood back into the pale streaks his strong fingers had left on her forearm. She had hormones to blame for her disruptive urges; what made his behaviour so strangely contradictory? For a moment she had had a brief awareness of his potential emotional depths, and realised for the first time that perhaps this journey was going to be more painful for him than it was for her.

In the midst of her own turmoil she felt an irresistible urge to make him smile, to banish that disquieting bleakness from his eyes.

‘Gee, and to think Oyster Beach came across as such a pleasant little backwater when I was planning this holiday,’ she mused. ‘Who knew it would be such a hotbed of passion and intrigue? Inspiration must bite you at every turn—lucky you have your best writing-boots on.’

His mouth twitched, his eyes falling automatically to his feet, which unfortunately brought the book she had been reading into his purview. Face up on the grass, the cover blared its author’s first mega-seller in its third reprint. With seven books published in the last six years, in a multitude of languages, each successive blockbuster had guaranteed a surge in new sales for his backlist.

His mouth relaxed into a knowing grin. ‘Been reduced to finding your thrills vicariously these days, have you, Kate?’ He bent to pick it up, and frowned when he turned it to read the classification code on the spine. ‘You got this from a
library?
’

‘Don’t say it as if it’s a dirty word, libraries are wonderful. They’re one of the foundations of civilisation—’

‘I thought you said you
had
all my books,’ he interrupted her, staring broodingly at his younger image on the back cover. ‘You work for the publisher, for God’s sake. Bloody hell, you could have asked me if you wanted a copy! What happened to the one you had?’

He looked so annoyed that she wasn’t going to tell him that her own Drake Danielses were far too precious to her to risk taking to the beach. Better to lose or damage a library book than one of her own first editions, all of which had his slashing signature on the title page, thanks to Marcus’ practice of asking every one of his authors for a dozen signed copies to distribute around the office.

‘First novels often aren’t worth keeping. They’re too disappointing when comparing them with an author’s later, more refined techniques at work,’ she murmured glibly.

For a glorious moment she thought he was going to fall for it. At least the healthy colour had returned to his face, she thought as he teetered on the edge of an explosion. Then he caught himself.

‘Why, Kate, you never complained about my lack of refinement before,’ he said, arranging the placement of the book back in her hands so that she had two pairs of identical brown eyes drilling her with their sexy mockery. ‘In fact, I thought you liked it. I certainly don’t ever recall you saying you found my technical skills disappointing.’

‘I know how sensitive you artists are to criticism,’ she said acidly, and this time he did laugh out loud.

They both knew his professional ego was bulletproof. He made no secret of the fact his formal schooling had been spotty and at eighteen he had been working as a labourer to save enough money to begin years of travelling. He had worked his passage from port to port around the world on short-haul cargo ships, stopping off to do unskilled labour wherever he could pick up a job, living and working in dangerous environments because they always paid the best money. Curious and observant, he had kept journals throughout his travels, using them as the basis of his first novel. After it had been snapped up for publication he had continued to write because he had stumbled on the purpose of his life. He’d discovered that he had a natural talent for tapping into the popular imagination of millions of people from all cultures and all walks of life, an instinctive gift for words that could make grown men weep and ladies brawl.

‘If this is a library book, you must be expecting to be back in Auckland fairly soon?’ His eyes ran up and over her, but to her chagrin he didn’t seem to notice the knockout bikini, partly because she was hugging his book against her chest, but mostly because he was too busy running through his mental checklist.

‘Knowing how much your mother’s daughter you are when it comes to the letter of the law, I can’t see you deliberately flouting the rules and running up a fine, even if it’s only a library fine, so maybe you never planned on staying the whole month here after all,’ he worked out, with the convoluted logic of a highly creative mind. ‘Maybe you expected to be able to do whatever you came here to do fairly quickly, and be back in town in time to return the book.’

Kate could have told him she had far more pressing concerns weighing on her conscience than late library books. ‘That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it, even for you? The loan is for three weeks and you can renew at least twice by phone or online—’