by Susan Napier
She lay, dazed and breathless in a tangle of bent metal and canvas, the bar that had painfully folded her in two still jammed into her bare abdomen. It took her several attempts to struggle free but she eventually managed to roll over onto her back, weakly pushing away the wreckage of the lounger, wincing at the long scrapes she could feel on her hip, elbow and thigh. Her bikini top had been dislodged and she twisted it back into place, tiny beads of perspiration jumping out on her forehead as she became aware of an ominous, cramping pain low in her belly.
Koshka returned to nuzzle at the shiny pool of hair flared out around her head, and discover the delicious, salty moisture at her temples, and Kate raised her head to escape the gentle rasp of her abrasive tongue, bracing herself on one arm to start pushing herself upright.
Then a big hand was there, cupping her neck, a strong arm supporting her shoulders.
‘My God, Kate—that bloody cat! I had the shutters open—I saw the whole thing. You could have broken your neck!’ Drake knelt down beside her, shooing Koshka away as he helped her sit up, curving her against his supporting chest, brushing the dirt and grass clippings from her damaged side, anxiously tilting up her white face and examining her dazed eyes beneath the damp fringe sticking to her forehead, looking rather grey-faced himself. ‘Just sit here for a moment; don’t try to get up until you feel a bit steadier,’ he said huskily. ‘A knock like that can really take it out of you. Thank God you fell on that lounger and not on your head. Anything broken, you think?’
‘No…’ It was as much an answer as a thread of protest as he gently unfolded the arm that Kate had tucked protectively across her middle.
‘Shall I carry you inside?’
‘No, I want to stand up…I need to stand up,’ she insisted shakily, hoping against hope that when she stretched out she would find that she was just experiencing a muscular spasm from the shock of the fall.
Murmuring reassurances, Drake helped her to her feet, letting her lean on him as she tested her ankles and gingerly flexed her shoulders and wrists. To her relief the pulling pain in her stomach started to fade away, just as she’d hoped it would, once the blood started pumping freely around her extremities again.
They took it very slowly going back up the stairs, and when she limped back inside the house Drake made her lie down on the couch for a few minutes with her feet propped on a cushion. She accepted an offer of sweet tea when the alternative seemed to be having him hover over her or pace up and down. When Koshka wandered back inside innocent of all the commotion she had caused, Kate petted her forgivingly as she sipped her tea, covering the little ears to block out Drake’s dark threats of discipline.
When she felt a little less fragile, she persuaded him to let her go and pull on a tee shirt over her bikini, but when she emerged from her bedroom she was white-faced again, fully dressed, wearing shoes, and carrying her purse.
‘I think you’d better take me to the doctor,’ she said thinly to Drake, who was standing in the kitchen stirring sugar into a mug of tea for himself.
‘Why? What’s the matter?’ He put the mug down abruptly and strode over. Before he reached her side she went even paler, biting her lip and blinking hard as she dropped her purse and pressed both hands to her stomach.
‘Oh, God—’ she choked.
‘What is it?’ He slid his hands over the top of hers, feeling their icy tremor, fearing she was sliding into delayed shock. ‘Come on, Kate, tell me,’ he ordered harshly, to jolt her consciousness. ‘Don’t fade out on me—do you think you’ve hurt something inside?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at him, her silver eyes wild and tormented. ‘The baby…I think something’s happening to the baby!’ She caught her breath on a frightened sob. ‘I feel this pain in my side and all around my middle, like a tearing…I think I must have hurt my baby when I fell. Oh, God, what if I’m losing it? I don’t want to lose my baby—’
‘Baby? You’re pregnant?’ He looked as if he had been hit in the face, but his stunned bewilderment only lasted a split second and then he was as white-lipped as she, his eyes burning black holes in the stony mask of his face as he made all the right connections. ‘You’re carrying a child? My child? That’s why you came to Oyster Beach?’ He read the truth in her agonised expression. ‘You want to have the baby and keep it? Damn you all to hell, Kate!’ he exploded. He spun, slamming his fist against the wall.
She put her hand on the sleeve of his polo shirt, feeling the iron muscle underneath quivering with tension as his fist continued to grind against the caved wallboard. ‘Please, can we talk about it later?’ she begged his averted profile. ‘I need to go to a doctor now and I suppose the nearest medical practice is in Whitianga—I don’t think it’s safe for me to drive. Drake?’
He didn’t move and her fingers curled into the unyielding muscle. ‘Unless you want your baby to die!’ she cried in panicked desperation, shaking at his rigid arm. ‘Maybe you’re thinking that if you delay long enough you can force me into a miscarriage—get rid of the baby and save yourself some grief!’
He tore himself from her grasp and away from the wall, his handsome features for once ugly. ‘If you believe I’m capable of murdering an innocent child for selfish gain, then what in the hell made you think I’d ever be any kind of fit father?’ he said savagely. ‘No, don’t bother to answer that—you were going to sucker me into playing Daddy to your kid and now you know better than to even try,’ he added with incandescent fury. ‘Where are your keys? We’ll take your car—it’ll be quicker.’
He stopped, not looking at her as he demanded harshly; ‘Are you bleeding?’
‘No,’ she said, breathing shallowly, ‘but I have these sharp, low-down, stabbing pains…’
This time there was no supportive arm around her shoulders. He escorted her out and into the car without touching her, or even glancing at her until she temporarily emerged from her desperate anxiety to remember, ‘Oh, could you make sure that the kitchen window’s open before we go, so that Koshka can get out when she needs to—there’s plenty of water and dry food down but no litter box inside…’
With a curse and a black look of angry incredulity, he got out of the car again with violent, jerky movements and slammed into the house. When he came back he jammed the key into the ignition and grimly started to drive.
Wrapped up in her pain and fear for her baby, and the bitter knowledge that her sins of omission had caught up with her, totally damning her in her lover’s eyes, Kate hugged herself in silent despair until Drake’s question pierced her mental anguish.
‘How pregnant are you?’ he asked with ferocious reluctance, the words seemingly torn from deep in his chest.
‘I think about eight or nine weeks by now—’
‘You think? What does your doctor say?’
She didn’t want to tell him she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. She knew her GP didn’t handle pregnancies so she would have to ask him to recommend a specialist or midwife as her lead carer. She hadn’t been ready to take any of those official steps—not until she herself had felt ready to accept the giant changes that it would immediately bring to her life.
‘I—it must have happened just before you left—’
‘Happened? A pregnancy doesn’t just happen when you take the kind of serious precautions we do! At least I thought we were both on the same page about contraception. When did you stop taking the pill?’
She had known he would accuse her of trying to trap him, but it was still a blow. ‘I didn’t—not until I missed my period the week you left, and the pregnancy test came up positive…twice,’ she emphasised, twisting to look at him and biting her lip against another sharp spasm of pain. ‘I might have occasionally missed taking a pill, but never deliberately, and you always use condoms, so tell me how I could have planned this. And why would I, knowing how you feel about children—?’
‘You don’t know how I feel,’ he said scathingly. ‘You only think you do. But you made a big mistake if you thought you could talk me
round. You’re not going to con me into bearing the responsibility for your decision—’
She felt as if he had stabbed her in the chest. ‘If you’re talking about a decision not to terminate, I don’t need anyone else to take responsibility for that,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t care what you or my mother say, I’m not getting rid of my baby just because it doesn’t fit the image of a sophisticated career woman.’
He stiffened at the wheel. ‘Your mother told you to have an abortion?’ He cast her a violent look. But was he any better?
‘I haven’t told her—I wanted you to know first,’ she said, turning her head to stare blindly out the window. ‘But I know that’s what she’ll say I should do. She would have aborted me, if she could have done it legally…even back then she was thinking ahead to what would best serve her professional reputation. I grew up in a one-parent family so I know how tough it can be, but I can do it, I could even afford a house and take in boarders to help with the mortgage and child-care if necessary. There are always plenty of overseas university students looking for quality long-term home-stays. My mother will be furious and scathingly disappointed in me, but then that’s nothing new…’
The thick, condemning silence descended again, reinforcing Drake’s message of brutal uninterest, and this time it lasted until they arrived at the group practice on the outskirts of Whitianga. While Drake parked the car Kate walked inside and explained matters to the practice nurse on the desk, who immediately said she’d show her into an examination room to await the first doctor to become free. As she was leading the way across the hall Drake came striding up to them, eyes raking over Kate, and the nurse hesitated.
‘Oh! Does your hus—um…your partner want to come in, too?’
‘No!’ said Kate firmly, before Drake could open his mouth to say anything hurtful. ‘And he’s not my partner. He just gave me a lift. You can stay in the waiting room,’ she told him with dismissive coldness that blew directly off the frozen wastes in her heart.
She was feeling both hot and cold fifteen minutes later as she stared at the kindly, middle-aged female doctor in a mixture of anger and disbelief.
‘But the test was positive both times I did it,’ she repeated, ‘and it said on the packet that it was ninety-seven per cent accurate.’
The doctor shrugged. ‘Done correctly, yes, but there are a number of things that could give a false-positive result—for instance you may have let the test sit too long before you read it, or, if it happened twice, the kit might have been expired or faulty, or if you’d had a urinary-tract infection you were unaware of at the time, that could have compromised the test—’
‘But I’ve also had all the signs since then,’ protested Kate. ‘I’ve missed two periods, and I’ve been nauseous, and having to go to the toilet more frequently, and my breasts have been sore…’
The doctor’s voice was gentle, but inexorably firm. ‘Well, I’ve done the internal exam and tested your urine and you’re definitely not pregnant. The pain you’re feeling is probably a pulled muscle from your fall, or possibly a little tear—an anti-inflammatory will soon settle that down. I’ll do the hCG blood test for you but I’m sure that’ll just confirm my diagnosis. You said there was some spotting a couple of weeks after your first period was due? You could have had what we call a chemical pregnancy, which is a very early miscarriage.’
‘But I missed another period after that and—and I was so sure…’
‘Have you been under any emotional stress at work or in your private life recently?’
‘Well, yes, but no more than usual.’ Kate grimaced. She had always found Drake’s arrivals and departures very stressful—trying to act normal and carry off the appearance of cool acceptance of his wanderings while she was dying inside. Whenever he left she would wonder when they would see each other again, and when he returned she was never certain how long he would stay.
‘You wanted this baby very much, I take it?’ the doctor murmured, as she gently dealt with the splinters embedded in the hand with which Kate had grabbed at the rail.
‘Yes,’ Kate whispered. ‘I did.’ As soon as she had watched that test strip change she had eagerly embraced the miracle, the long-forbidden hope. She had wanted Drake’s baby more than anything else in the world…except his love…
And now she had to face life with neither.
‘Well, sometimes, when we want or believe in something very, very much the mind can cause the body to produce signs and symptoms that can fool a woman into thinking she’s pregnant…’
Fool! Kate repeated to herself as she left the doctor’s office, hollowed out by grief and the shameful knowledge of her own devastating self-betrayal.
She knew now why she had convinced herself there was no rush to have her pregnancy professionally confirmed. At some deep level of her subconscious she had known the truth and not wanted to face it. The phantom pregnancy had been a way for her to break out of the prison of her ‘no strings’ affair with Drake, to force herself to take action and challenge the very nature and balance of their relationship.
To make a horrible situation worse, when she got back out to the reception desk she found that she had left her purse lying on the floor back at the house, and had to ask Drake to pay for her consultation.
‘Well?’ he said curtly as they walked to the door.
She swallowed. She wasn’t going to parade her guilt and shame in front of a roomful of interested patients. ‘Quite well.’ She stretched her mouth into a meaningless smile. ‘The doctor said I must have pulled a muscle in my fall.’
Drake stopped outside the doors. ‘So the baby’s all right, then—it wasn’t hurt?’ he said, his voice tight with hostility at having to ask.
Kate’s dry eyes ached. Fool! She lifted her chin. ‘It was all a stupid false alarm,’ she forced herself to confess.
‘In that case, here.’ Drake stunned her by slapping her car keys into her hand.
‘You want me to drive home?’
‘I don’t care where you go. As long as I’m not there. I can’t do this. I’m out of here.’ He turned on his heel and headed along the pavement towards the township.
‘But—I have to explain—We need to talk—’ she called after him.
‘No, we don’t. There’s nothing you could say that I want to hear. Anyway, they say actions speak louder than words.’
And with that he walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
KATE was building a sandcastle on the beach when the little girl whose lopsided lump she was busy turning into a fairy-tale structure complete with flying flags of fuzzy pussy willow grass suddenly popped her thumb out of her mouth and extended it in a skywards spike.
‘Man!’
Kneeling in the hard-packed sand just below the high-water line, Kate squinted against the low angle of the sun in the direction indicated by the moppet’s soggy salute and sat back on her bare heels with a little breathless grunt of shock.
Drake was back!
Her sandy fingers unknowingly clenched, scrunching a hole in the side of a tower and endangering the route of the heroic fairy prince she had been explaining to the child was about to clamber up to rescue the enchanted maiden, aka a pod of seaweed whose green hair owed its inspiration to Rapunzel.
‘Hah!’ Her little companion seemed to think it was all part of a new game, and cheerfully bashed down another of Kate’s painstakingly crafted towers with its pretty mosaic of shells.
‘Oh, no, darling, we’re building them up, not pushing them down,’ choked Kate, hastily blinking away the tears she blamed on the needle-sharp jab of the sun and spreading out her hands to protect the flank of her castle from an enthusiastic little fist.
The man, who had been padding steadily along the beach towards them, came to a halt at the edge of the shallow moat on the seaward side of the castle, crouching down to survey the damage, his knees splayed, the dark trousers that had been rolled up to his calves pulling tight across the tops of his thighs, his long bare fe
et melting into the wet sand.
‘Looks like you could do with some help,’ he said, pushing up the sleeves of his pale grey knitted-silk sweater, revealing the golden brown hair on his tanned forearms.
‘No, thanks, we’re doing fine without you,’ said Kate, just as another tower got a smashing makeover, sending a spray of damp sand into her mouth and down the top of her scoop-necked top.
‘Hey, sweetheart, how about you and I fill this bucket with some more sand?’ said Drake, picking up the bright plastic pail with its turret-shaped base lying by his feet and holding out the matching spade.
To Kate’s disgust the little girl trotted obediently over to his side and began digging, while Drake scooped up mounds of sand with his cupped hands and rapidly filled the pail.
‘You’ll get your clothes dirty,’ said Kate sourly, wiping the grit from her mouth with her arm, noting that it definitely wasn’t beachwear he was sporting. Who had he dressed to impress? she wondered.
‘Like yours?’ he said, his mouth curving as he looked at her sand-clogged striped top and water-stained shorts.
When she didn’t smile back, his own faded, his brown eyes unflinching as he weathered her wintry stare.
‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ he commented, sinking down onto his knees and turning his attention back to his task, smoothing over the compacted sand in the bucket and inverting it to produce a smooth-sided release from the bucket with a sharp rap on the top, far more perfect than Kate had obtained.