Just Once. Susan Napier
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she had never breached the unwritten rules of their relationship before…
It was almost as if he wanted her to be furious with him, to rant and rave like a jealous fishwife and insist on being the only woman in his life. Ah, yes…that would give him the perfect excuse to push her away, to end their affair before it threatened to become anything more complicated.
It struck her that a cosy little hideaway was the perfect place to commit a discreet murder!
‘Well, you could do your—experimenting—offshore,’ she advised, visualising him sinking to the bottom of the bay with an anchor slung around his neck. The satisfying mental picture brought a chill smile to her pale lips.
He shoved away his cup and got restlessly to his feet. She could see that her contrived calm was having the desired effect. ‘Aren’t you going to finish your tea?’
He looked down at her, his heavy-lidded eyes burning with frustration, his mouth smudged with sullen temper. ‘No, thanks. Melissa’s probably waiting for me.’
With or without the robe? Kate nodded understandingly. ‘Right. You’d better hurry home to reassure her, then. You wouldn’t want her to think you were over here firing up your Bunsen burner for an alternative study.’
His eyelids flickered.
‘Of course, I’m sure you’ve already made it clear to her that she’s not unique or in any way important in your life. It’s always best to be up front about these things, isn’t it, Drake?’
Tension pulled the skin tight over the bones of his face. ‘We agreed, right at the beginning, that we didn’t want any messy emotional scenes—’ he grated.
‘I’m not the one making a big scene,’ Kate cut him off before he said anything irrevocable. She got up and began rinsing out the mugs under the running tap, speaking to him over her cold shoulder. ‘I just asked for some sugar, remember? You were the one who came haring after me bristling with ridiculous suspicions and flinging out all sorts of dramatic allegations. You should chill out, Drake, and stop making such a big deal of it. Instead of wasting all that energy worrying about what I’m doing just go back to living your own life. We’ll be neighbours for a month, that’s all. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse…you’ll hardly even know I’m around…
‘And if you wouldn’t mind leaving the rest of that sugar—I think I feel like pancakes for dinner!’
CHAPTER THREE
‘MUMMY, look at me!’
The chain on the swing squeaked as Kate swung higher, rocking her small body on the splintery wooden seat to get more speed, stamping her shoes against the hard-packed ground on the down-swing to propel herself up into the wild blue sky.
‘Look at me, Mummy!’ Her white dress fluttered, her hair spraying out around her head as she rushed through the air, her excited squeals mingling with the squeak and rattle of the chain as she went higher and higher towards the impossible goal—doing a complete loop over the steel support bar. What would happen when she was upside down, she wasn’t sure, she only knew that her mother would be proud of her for doing something that only the big boys dared to try.
‘Mummy!’ She looked for her mummy’s proud face but she couldn’t see her against the blur of scenery. She suddenly couldn’t see any of the other children or mummies and daddies, either—she was all alone in the big, empty park and it was getting dark. There was no one cheering or clapping her brave effort, only the rusty squeak of the chain to accompany her hysterical cry as she realised that she was going too fast and there was no one there to catch her if she fell, or to stop her from flying off into space and being lost for ever. ‘Mummy? Mummy!’
Kate jerked into wakefulness, her eyes flying open, her hands clutching for the dissolving chains and finding only wrinkled sheets. Morning sunlight filtered in around the dark curtains, painting bright stripes on the faded wallpaper. The breath rattled in her chest and the haunting squeak from the disturbing dream still echoed in her thick head.
She groaned. She didn’t need a psychiatrist to interpret the meaning of that little vignette. Her accidental conception hadn’t stopped her mother from ruthlessly applying herself to her studies and graduating from university with first class honours. Money had been very tight and, except for during term-time lectures, there had been none to spare for day-care. Childish demands for attention had often been greeted with impatient dismissal or an instruction to play extra quietly. Before she’d even known what exams were Kate had learned to dread their approach. Her earliest memory was of lying under the bed in their cramped, one-roomed apartment whispering stories to herself because Mummy had been studying for something more important than silly games.
Kate rolled her head on the pillow, trying to rid herself of that haunting squeak. Except it wasn’t coming from inside her head, she realised, but rising up from the skirting-board where it ran along behind the bed. And it wasn’t a hard, metallic kind of squeak, either; there was a certain warm furriness about it that suggested some form of rodent. She grimaced at the thought of mice scampering around the house while she slept. She listened for the tell-tale scuffling of tiny feet in the woodwork, but the squeaking was too loud. Far too loud. More like…
Rats!
Kate shot bolt upright in the bed, too late remembering that she should have moved with more care. She grabbed at the package of crackers she had left open on the bedside table and stuffed one into her mouth, but even as she chewed she knew what was coming and, showering a trail of crumbs, she fled into the bathroom.
For the second time in just over twelve hours she inspected the hazed porcelain of the toilet bowl at close quarters.
Kate was never sick. Never. Until a month ago her biological mechanisms had been in perfect sync with her busy lifestyle. Then she had bought that wretched little box in the chemist and her world had gone haywire.
‘Damn you, Drake Daniels,’ she moaned, in between retches that produced little but burning bile. ‘This is all your fault!’
If only it were, she might be able to work up a decent case for hating him. But the truth was that Drake had always been absolutely scrupulous about using birth control. Even though Kate had started on the pill the day after their first time together, he had insisted on using a condom every time they made love. ‘No contraception is one hundred per cent perfect,’ he had told her bluntly, ‘so if we use two methods with optimum effectiveness we lessen the chances of a malfunction.’
Well, Kate was certainly malfunctioning now!
She cleaned up and staggered back to bed.
At least she seemed to have frightened away the mystery squeaker, she thought, lying flat on her back and nibbling cautiously at another cracker, glad to be able to push aside at least one of the problems in her life.
She put a hand on her flat stomach. Here was a problem that wasn’t going to go away any time soon. In fact it was growing bigger by the day, although it was still only very tiny—less than half the length of her little finger, according to the books she had read.
How incredible, to have something so physically minuscule yet so all-encompassingly large invading her life! The shock, the dismay, and the sheer, blind panic that had first assailed her when she had stared at the plus sign on the home pregnancy test strip had long since changed to awe.
It was an awe that she could be fairly certain that Drake wouldn’t share. He didn’t want children. Not ever. He didn’t want any physical ties that would compromise his emotional independence. He needed to be alone to write, he had told Kate when they had first met, and nothing and no one took precedence over his writing. As a researcher at Enright Media, Kate was ideally placed to understand the demands of his particular genius. Caught up in the thrill and excitement of being desired by such a fascinating and complex man, she had walked into the affair with her eyes wide open. She had accepted that Drake was not the marrying kind. As their affair had matured into an ongoing relationship she had known that if she objected to his periodic disappearances or acted concerned by his restless