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.