‘Of course.’
She looked at him sharply and he responded with a smile of devilish smugness. ‘Well, I guess I’ll be getting back to work. You know where everything is by now. Make yourself at home…’
She knew where the smugness came from when she met the laconic plumber who after several postponements was frustratingly vague on an estimate of exactly when she could expect to have running water again, and over a week later she was still totting up the amount of the refund that she would be owed by the landlord.
And loving living with Drake.
At first she was restless and edgy and very conscious of the need not to encroach, but that feeling eased when he casually asked if she would mind doing a little research for him and she plunged eagerly into the task of combing his extensive library and using his extra laptop to pull down information from the internet on the geopolitical history of the Balkans. He was first amused by her enthusiasm, and then taken aback at the speed at which she synthesised the facts.
‘This is duck-to-water stuff for you, isn’t it?’ he murmured when he sat down to lunch to find yet another concise fact-sheet sitting by his plate. ‘This’ll save me a hell of a lot of reading. I’m sorry if I’ve turned this into a bit of a busman’s holiday for you.’
‘I’m happy to sing for my supper,’ she told him readily.
His brown eyes glowed. ‘You do that already, in much more exciting ways.’
Colour touched her cheekbones. ‘I’m glad you like my cooking,’ she said primly, deliberately reading an innocent meaning into his provocative words. ‘Perhaps I should be charging you—Marcus did suggest I might take on a private commission.’
‘Maybe that’s because I hinted to him that I could benefit from your expertise,’ he admitted with laughter in his eyes. ‘He practically fell over himself at the thought he might get a book out of me a second sooner. And if you want to hear me sing, sweetheart, you only have to touch me the way you did last night…’
She loved the nights even more than the days, and not just for the intimate dinners and excitement of his love-making, but for what came afterwards, when they would lie in each other’s arms in the dark, talking.
That was when he gradually expanded on the details of his life with his mother, and the jealous possessiveness that had grown like a cancer, distorting her love into the sick obsession that destroyed her life, turning him from a son into a whipping boy for the man who bred him, and then into an enemy as he had tried to fight against her long slide into drug-addiction.
It was in the still of the night that Kate’s unspoken love and serene acceptance were rewarded by the secrets of his guarded heart. He seemed to find it easier to talk in the dark and she certainly found it easier to listen.
One evening he came back from a trip to the store with a package under his arm.
‘It’s from Marcus,’ he said, sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar to slit the large envelope and extract a note and a smaller, striped airmail envelope.
Kate froze in the act of slicing vegetables for dinner. ‘I thought he didn’t know where you lived?’
‘He does now—at least he knows about the post box at the store,’ he murmured, studying the writing on the front and the back of the envelope.
‘Well, he didn’t find out about it from me,’ she said quickly.
‘No, from me.’ He glanced up and smiled ruefully at her expression. ‘Part of our trade-off for your extra month: satisfying his curiosity and making myself a little less inaccessible.’
Kate was stunned. ‘I thought all the arm-twisting was the other way around. And so you just told him?’ she said, her heart swelling. ‘For me?’
He shrugged as if he had dropped a damp squib rather than a bombshell. ‘It was inevitable I’d tell him soon, anyway. I’m thinking of getting off the merry-go-round and moving down here permanently. Now that I have a solid backlist and financial security for life, I can concentrate more on the writing and scale back on the tours and the high-profile personal publicity.?
?
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?