by Bowes, K T
Logan sensed her unease as they found the Jeep in the car park. “I sent him home in our ute. No sense him being pulled over for this heap. In case you’re wondering, you dropped the letter from the hospital in the yard. Jack found it and got Rawhiti to call me. I knew the only person you’d ask would be Flick.” He sounded so sad when he said it, as though he seriously expected Hana to have invited him.
She felt an odd trickling feeling down the inside of her chest as though her heart cried cool tears for her husband’s loss of mana. She couldn’t think of words to justify herself, knowing inwardly that if she had asked, Logan would have been thrilled to take her to their baby’s first scan. In the honest recesses of her soul, Hana knew she had turned it into an intrigue purely to hurt him. It had worked.
They left the hospital grounds in silence and Logan drove to a local hotel with a restaurant. He didn’t touch Hana at all as they walked inside and she felt self-conscious in her pregnancy-hiding clothes and the lack of contact with her husband burned keenly. She was quiet as they ordered, uncommunicative throughout the meal and unable to eat the soup she had chosen. She picked at the bread roll but her appetite abandoned her.
“You look knackered.”
Hana looked up to see that Logan’s fork half way to his mouth. He didn’t look like he had done much better than her and his plate was littered with the graveyard remains of food, which had only been picked at. He went over to pay the bill and Hana waited patiently, not looking forward to the long journey back to the hotel, undoubtedly conducted in silence. She sat in her seat and closed her eyes for a moment, startled when warm fingers slid into hers. “Come on. Let’s go.” Logan’s voice was gentle and the grey eyes that looked down on her contained only kindness. His face was momentarily the husband she knew and loved and Hana sniffed as ready tears invaded her eyes. Logan smiled wistfully at her and pulled on her arm, willing her to stand and Hana obeyed, hauling herself up on unsteady feet.
But Logan didn’t take her to the car.
“I don’t want to stay in a motel room with you!” Hana was being childish and nasty and she knew it, quailing inside with guilt. “I want my daughter!” The sob was up and out before she could control it and Logan strode over to her. He took her in his arms and held her tightly against him. Hana cried, loudly and without any shred of dignity, crying for her relationship, her marriage and the husband who had been snatched away with a simple knock on the door, claimed as part of another family that did not involve her. “I feel so alone,” she wailed between sobs. “I don’t want to be on my own.”
“Hana please...” Logan’s arms were strong and comforting but something inside Hana couldn’t bring down the solid walls she had spent the last days building. An image of Sylvia’s lips on her husband’s cheek pushed into the moment and Hana shoved at Logan’s chest, driving him away with her fists.
“Get off me! Don’t touch me!” Her green eyes flashed with danger and hurt and she rubbed her hands down her body as though wiping off something distasteful. “How dare you touch me when your hands have been all over her.” Hana’s voice broke, “I loved your hands, I loved every scar and mark and now they’re just filthy to me.” Hana behaved as someone whose flesh crawls with the thought of something insanitary against their skin and Logan’s reaction was one of horror. For the first time in their entire union, his guard collapsed to rubble on the ground. His grey eyes glistened with real fear, all humour and bravado gone. It had all gone too far and Hana saw him unravel in front of her. Usually he would humour her, show his strength and cajole or bully her. He would seduce her, using his body to keep her on his side and Hana saw his tactics stripped away from him. He was the fourteen-year-old boy on the train again, sat before her with his guileless grey eyes and his raw, unshielded heart.
“Hana, I...”
“No!” She backed away as he approached, viewing him with raw open hatred. “It’s all over. We’re over. You can’t have two women, Logan. This isn’t tribal law and it’s not ok. Have her Logan. Enjoy the delectable Sylvia for as long as you live. Make the most of your shiny new son, but you know what?” Hana’s voice became a hiss, the dangerous sound of a woman scorned. Her hands strayed to her rounded stomach, an involuntary contact with her unborn child. “You will never see this baby. Never. Not as long as I have breath in my body. His name will be McIntyre and I will poison him against everything the Du Roses stand for. I’ll rear him to hate the sound of your name. And as for Phoenix. Fine! You try and keep her if that’s your game. But watch out, Logan. Be very careful with your threats because I have money of my own and I’ll fight you through every court in the land for my daughter. I don’t care how big your lawyers are or how strong your case. I am not Aroha and I will never walk away from my child. I’ll waste it all on fighting you and I will love every second of making you pay. Do your worst, you poor excuse for a man, because I will break you without a single moment of regret.”
Hana’s tears had dried and courage and determination flowed through her veins like mercury, hot, damaging and chemical, spreading her fire to the four corners of the room. Sweat dripped down her neck underneath her hair and she felt hot and sticky with the flash of temper born from defeat and resignation. The old Hana was back, the Hana whom Vik had crushed underfoot; with his laughter and ridicule of the redheaded fight in her. She was the Hana who sat on a London tube train and understood her life would never be the same again, her strong, Celtic persona dripping down her yellow dress as tears. Twenty-eight years later came a long-awaited revival and nobility flared like her daughter’s namesake. Hana MacIntyre rose from the ashes of her life as an ethereal, radiant thing and she had never looked more beautiful.
Hana’s eyes flashed and her face set hard. She held the trump card and she knew it. Not only did she have his unborn son, she had enough collateral to start a war that Logan Du Rose would never forget. Sylvia could have Logan, but as his wife, Hana was entitled to half of everything else.
Logan slumped onto the bed, his shoulders bowed with defeat and Hana pressed the final knife into his chest and twisted the handle. “By the way, Mr Du Rose, when you settle your debt to me - and you will settle - I intend to sell my half of your miserable legacy to the developers. So just make sure Sylvia knows she’ll be sharing her new Barbie house with a housing estate, won’t you?”
Hana’s smile was ghoulish and dreadful. A voice inside her head screamed at her, stop this! This isn’t you! She ignored it. Logan had pressed down so hard on Hana’s soul that he had found the bottom, littered with shards of glass and nasty, splintered thorns. He had cut himself, but with it, he had destroyed her.
Logan Du Rose withered visibly before his wife as she burned slowly in an ecstasy of victory. She stood in front of him, her hair messed up and curled around her face, her eyes glittering like huge emeralds in their sockets. She glowed with radiance but he couldn’t look at her.
With a, “Pfft,” of pure irritation, Hana turned sporting an ugly a sneer and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. “So this is what happens when someone stands up to the Du Roses, is it?” she muttered quietly to herself, adrenalin from the fight making her feel shaken and unsteady on her feet. Her child stayed ominously still in her womb, coping with the increased blood pressure slamming his mother’s blood against the fine, inner workings of his safe place. Hana leaned over the sink for a while, trying to find her equilibrium, glad Logan hadn’t followed her into the small, windowless room. She couldn’t trust herself not to injure him as days of misery escaped her in violence and bile. Her heart rate slowed and she slumped down onto the toilet seat, wondering which of her threats had rocked her husband the most. Was it the thought of losing his land; having it stripped away in an acrimonious divorce settlement? Or was it the loss of his son and the potential damage Hana could do to any relationship between the child and his father. Would I do that? Hana’s conscience sought validation and with bitterness and regret, Hana knew she would. For Phoenix. She had to get her daug
hter back.
With a surge of misery, Hana recognised she could bury her husband with the things she knew about his business dealings. She had seen and overheard enough to set Bodie on overtime for the rest of his life and make sure Logan had nothing at the end of it. But would she? Could she? “Perhaps I’ve been complicit too long,” she said sadly to her reflection in the glass of the shower cubicle.
The slam of the motel room door shook the cubicle momentarily and Hana knew her husband had left. She sighed and a sense of abandonment washed over her, threatening to take her into a ready pit of misery and self-pity. “No!” she told herself, patting her ashen cheeks to get the blood flowing. “I won’t be going there again, thank you!” She leaned in and turned the nozzle on the shower, running the water until it was hot enough to make her skin red and unattractively mottled. Then she stripped off her dowdy clothes and soaped herself, washing off the stench of another marriage filled with betrayal; until she felt at least partly clean.
Chapter 12
Hana checked her wallet and made sure she still had Logan’s credit card. It sat in its usual pocket, nestled behind her other cards, rarely used. “I’ll have to pay for the room somehow,” she told herself as she used the motel’s assortment of face creams to make herself feel more presentable. Then she did something she had never done in her life; she called room service.
Hana snuggled up in the motel robe while her clothes drip dried over the heated towel rail. The washing powder which the motel owner brought up, smelled heavily of chemical scents pretending to be floral but she didn’t care. She had washed and scrubbed her clothing in the sink until her hands were red. Hana had no intention of going back to the hotel for now and quelled the ache in her heart for her daughter. She would get her; she just didn’t know how yet. Hana peered at the screen of her cell phone, watching Flick’s number summoned to the screen from her contacts list. She observed as it sit there like an unspoken question and then with shaking fingers, she sent it away again, back to rest amongst the other people she couldn’t call for help either. The stockman could definitely get Phoenix for her; he had promised. But it would be harrowing for the child and risky for him. Hana knew he would do anything for her, just for a smile of acknowledgement or a chance to be in her presence. It was the one reason she couldn’t ask anything more of him.
Hana tipped her phone back onto the plush sheets and watched it sit there, pink and vibrant against the white linen. Her brain worked overtime. Hana chewed her thumbnail trying to second guess her husband. Strategising gave her confidence and distracted her from the Phoenix-sized hole in her heart. Logan would be back home by now and welcomed into the bosom of the lovely Sylvia. He would batten down the hatches and cover off every rescue plan Hana could come up with. Everyone would be loyal to him and Flick would get himself killed. Her mental image of Logan smiled sweetly from his constructed body, handsome and dangerous as he closed off another access gate to Phoenix. Hana buried her face in the pillows and concentrated on her breathing, one hand over the pacemaker for protection against her complaining body. Her unborn son remained silent and still.
The sandwich which the waitress from the restaurant brought to the door, sat on the dressing table uneaten. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Watercress poured out of it like a green waterfall and bile rose into Hana’s gullet as soon as she bit into it. “Maybe not then,” she said to the empty room and left it there, the cheese melting underneath the heat pump and the bread hardening to concrete. Hana curled up on the bed with the DVD she had requested. She watched Dirty Dancing, speaking out all the words like a mime, crying in all the usual places and feeling sad and empty at the end. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” she said in a gruff imitation of Patrick Swayze’s masculine voice and started the movie right back at the beginning.
Hana nodded off during the third re-run, sinking into the soft pillows as sleep claimed her, her frazzled brain working hard to repair the damage done during her temper tantrum. The click of the motel door shocked her awake as gasping, she clawed her way to the surface, clutching a pillow to her breast. Her heart pounded like a jackhammer, the curse of the abruptly woken.
Logan closed the door behind him and pulled out the stool from under the dressing table. He lowered his body down onto it as though it hurt him to move. Hana’s assumptions about her strong husband had turned him into a monster in her head and so caught completely unawares, she pushed her bottom up the bed and eyed him like a rabid dog.
Logan ran his hand over his eyes and placed both palms carefully on his thighs with extraordinary precision. He splayed his long fingers over his jeans like a fan and then closed them again. Blood adorned the front of his shirt in lengthy tracks and short spatters and Hana traced the source to his bleeding nose. You don’t care, she reminded herself, blocking out maternalism and compassion with a force of will. Either he had gotten into a fight, or stress had caused the little blood vessels in his nose to burst and his haemophilia had cashed in on the opportunity to further Hana’s cause.
When Logan’s grey eyes rested on Hana’s, she was shocked enough at their appearance to betray the flicker of concern she tried so hard to shut down. They were pale and lacklustre, his pupils tiny dots in exhausted irises and dark shadows had stamped their mark underneath. Logan held his hands out, palm upwards in defeat. “You win,” he said, resignation dripping from every syllable. “Take whatever you want. Have half the land. Take Phoe, but in return, I want one thing.” Logan’s eyelashes flared around pain filled orbs that resembled a tortured, Pacific Ocean. He waited until he saw Hana’s tiny nod of acceptance, although she was wary of that one condition. “Please let me still see my kids?” The last was a plea and Logan barely got it all out. He gulped with a rush of emotion and to her alarm, Hana saw a single tear drip vertically down from her husband’s eyes. It touched nothing on the way. It plopped onto the dark carpet and became invisible. Then it was joined by another and another.
Victory was hollow for Hana. Her chest felt tight as though a tug of war was in play for her heart, pulled by two strong teams clutching a metal wire. It ached inside her, worse than the pain of the heart attack which had rendered her temporarily dead last year.
“Please don’t poison my kids against me,” Logan begged and his voice was laden with grief and thickened by his tears. “Not that, Hana. I have to trust you not to do that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb and Hana felt brittle inside.
Many times she had wished Logan would let go and show her who he really was. He hid under a facade of the strong, silent alpha male, able to bend the world to his iron will. She had been trampled underfoot often by his pig-headedness and backbone of steel. But she never foresaw this.
Logan’s body convulsed as he failed to hold himself together. His bearing dropped and his elbows sank to his thighs, as everything he had worked for slipped through his fingers like sand. The weight of his legacy bore down on him and failure ebbed from every pore. Hana climbed to the end of the bed and sat facing him, their knees almost touching. She laid her hand gently on his thigh, alarmed when he jumped as though she hit a reflex. “I won’t,” she whispered. “I promise I won’t do that.”
Logan’s shoulders heaved and shook as sobs rocked his body with relief. Hana’s promise withdrew the blade from his heart and removed the overt threat from above his head. Hana knew what she’d done and its outworking sickened her. She had used her husband’s fractured childhood against him, turning the mirror of mind games and deceit on him again; but the victims this time would have been his children. I wouldn’t have followed through, Hana promised herself, but the thought of Sylvia’s pouting lips and silky tongue on Logan’s body, said different. Children are not weapons. Shame bent Hana like a bow and her own mental agony roiled within her stomach, bringing sickness as far as her throat.
Blood dripped onto the carpet from Logan’s tears but it was dilute and faint. He ran his nose across his sleeve, leaving a pink streak in the materia
l and he fixed his grey eyes on Hana’s face. “Thank you,” he said and with absolute sincerity. It broke her heart like nothing else ever had and tears coursed down her cheeks from her own empty well, until she had no idea where they came from.
Any woman who has ever watched a strong man break his heart knows the consequences. It ruins something in both of them which can never be recovered, laying them bare in ways previously unknown. Logan didn’t know what to do with himself, writhing in his own skin as an unwilling participant in its destruction. Hana felt powerless, knowing she had caused this catastrophe with her barbed words, but acknowledging in the deeper recesses of her mind; she was not sorry.
Logan couldn’t bear to be touched at first, thrashing out years of grief and anguish in weeping and writhing but once he calmed, he accepted Hana’s embrace like a drowning man. She stood next to him and he cried tears and blood into her motel robe, his arms fixed around her as though she were driftwood in a hungry sea. She cried with him and for him, her tears dropping onto the top of his head, shedding some of them for herself. Time had shifted once more and history clicked. Nothing could return to what it was.
“Do you want me to leave?” Logan’s voice sounded muffled and Hana heard the hitch in his chest.
“No,” the mother in her responded, feeling responsible for her husband now she had reduced him to this. Logan seemed ashamed of his weakness, refusing to get eye contact with her once the crying ceased and he went to the bathroom on shaking legs, to blow his nose and splash cold water on his face. When he came back to the room, he didn’t seem to know what to do, loitering by the bathroom door awkwardly as though nervous about an audience with royalty. Hana sat on the end of the bed, twirling the cord from her robe between her fingers. “We should probably sort some things out,” she said quietly. She sought Logan’s eyes but failed. “I don’t have the energy to argue anymore.”