The #1 Bestsellers Collection 2011

by Catherine Mann

  As he’d driven himself to the top of his field, he’d learned to recognise weakness in all its forms and to identify his opponent’s Achilles’ Heel. He’d honed the ability into a sixth sense and become a master at capitalizing on it, using it to his advantage, then driving home an unbreakable deal.

  Now, suddenly, he identified weakness in himself. And he hated admitting he’d allowed himself to become vulnerable to the one woman he couldn’t love.

  Twelve

  Holly stepped back from the curtain she’d just straightened—her heart swelling with pride. She’d painstakingly learned to sew and she’d made them herself, just like she’d made the comforter for the crib and the layette for the bassinette right down to the miniature sheets. She reached forward and gave the drapes a tiny flick, smoothing an imaginary hitch in the fall of the fabric.

  Seven months ago she’d never have imagined she could turn into such a homebody let alone furnish an entire nursery. Once Connor’s contractors had finished wallpapering and painting the room, she’d had carte blanche to use whichever interior designer she wanted to create the baby’s room. Yet, for some reason, it had become more important than she’d ever imagined to leave an indelible print behind her. To leave a piece of her heart.

  She reached for the framed picture of the baby’s first sonogram that Connor had placed on the tallboy, trailing her finger across the tiny form captured in black and white. She could still see the wonder that had spread across his face when he’d caught his first glimpse of his child, still see the unsettling and uncharacteristic shine of tears in his eyes. Up until then, she’d hardly had the nerve to look at the radiographer’s screen, yet the love that shone from him as he viewed his baby had forced her to turn away from him and look for herself. It was easier to look at the object of his love than to admit that love could never be shared with her.

  Holly took a final look around. While she’d been oddly loath to finish the room, taking her time on small details no one but herself would notice, Connor’s reluctant yet urgent departure for the States a week ago had been the catalyst that drove her to complete it.

  This would be the last time she would come in here. Her end of the deal was all but finished. As if to acknowledge her hard work a tiny foot pressed against her rib cage. Absently she massaged her swollen belly.

  With the baby’s due date only three weeks away, the days now stretched emptily before her. Holly turned and walked out. A ragged sigh dragged past the sudden tightness in her chest as she closed the door behind her. The day she’d have to leave the island, leave Connor, permanently drew closer with every cross on the calendar.

  He’d miss her checkup tomorrow she realised with a pang. He’d made all her doctor’s visits thus far, hovering like a worried shadow at every stage of the pregnancy. The baby was everything to him. She’d given up hoping he’d forget for just one moment that she was carrying his baby and see her as a woman with needs and desires again. Sleeping with him every night was fraught with hopes of what might have been, but still he made no attempt to touch her, unless it was to feel the baby’s vigorous reminders of its existence. Now, more than ever before, Holly felt incredibly and desolately alone.

  She missed him. Even as remote as he’d been, he’d imbued a sense of security—made her feel protected. Now she felt vulnerable. Afraid. She shook her head and sighed. Must be hormones, she reasoned. Either that or she was going completely nuts, as she’d been to think she could ignore the life burgeoning within her.

  Tears pricked at her eyelids as Holly hung her head. She was a useless overemotional wreck. Her feet were swollen, her figure nonexistent, even her moods swung as wildly as the New Zealand flag atop of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. She was about as attractive as an overblown blimp. No wonder Connor didn’t want her. Although why he still insisted on sleeping with her she couldn’t understand. Maybe she’d move her things into the nanny’s bedroom while he was away, she thought, then cast the idea out of hand. She no more wanted to sleep without Connor’s solid presence behind her in the bed than she suspected he’d let her indulge in her fit of pique.

  The constant ring of the telephone downstairs interrupted her miserable soliloquy. She waited for Thompson to answer it but obviously he was busy elsewhere in the house. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. But what if it was Connor? She reached out again and lifted the receiver, at the same time hearing a breathless Thompson pick up from downstairs. She knew she should hang up, but when she heard the caller identify himself as the private investigator she’d engaged, she stayed on the line waiting for him to ask for her.

  A flash of hope lit inside her at the sound of his voice. Finally he had some information. The investigation had remained at a frustrating stalemate for far too long, with little more information available other than what she’d grown up knowing. How someone could give birth and raise a child for three years then disappear should have been impossible in a country the size of New Zealand, but somehow, her mother had managed it.

  When Holly replaced the receiver a few minutes later she was shaking. The call hadn’t been for her. It had been for Connor—to let him know a final report was on its way by boat and, more important, that it held urgent information that Connor had been waiting for.

  Holly drew in short sharp breaths through her nose, feeling her chest rise and fall with each intake and exhalation and willed herself to calm down. Had Connor had her investigated as he’d investigated Carla, his ex-wife? Why? And since when?

  Anger lit within her, burning with a steady glow. It stood to reason that he’d want to know some background for his baby’s lineage. But to order an investigation behind her back? And all along the investigator had been working for both of them—had even deliberately been stonewalling her own repeated requests for more information.

  She felt invaded. Violated. And fiercely determined to get to the report before he did. For the first time in days she was glad Connor wasn’t around. In fact, right now she wondered if she ever wanted to see him again.

  Later, instead of taking her usual afternoon nap, Holly anxiously watched and waited from the master suite’s sitting room as Thompson met the courier at the end of the private jetty and accepted a large white envelope. Her heart plummeted. It wasn’t very thick. It didn’t seem right that something that possibly held the key to her past—her life—could be so insignificant as that single large envelope.

  As Thompson made his way back to the house, she shot silently down the back stairs that led to the informal sitting room. Beyond that lay Connor’s office. She hid, poised behind the open door, and listened as Thompson came back inside. He went straight into Connor’s office where she heard the telltale snick of a key in a lock and the faint slide of wood as he opened then closed a drawer.

  That was it? She listened carefully as Thompson left the office again. She replayed the sounds she’d just heard in her head. There’d been no sound of a key being turned in the lock to secure the drawer. Connor would have to beef up his home security if he thought one little drawer would keep her from finding out what secrets lay inside that envelope. A new and more startling thought occurred to her. Had he even planned to share his findings with her? She seriously doubted it.

  For an infinitesimal moment she wondered how different her life would be now if she hadn’t made love with Connor that night and, even if they had, if she hadn’t fallen pregnant? She’d still be at her desk, doing her job better than anyone else could. Still being his trusted right-hand person, instead of someone he now endured only for as long as completely necessary. Holly sighed and pushed her hand against the ache in the small of her back. All the what-ifs in the world wouldn’t change anything. She wasn’t good enough for Connor Knight. She never would be.

  The sound of the French doors being pushed closed caught her attention. Thompson was stepping out for his afternoon walk—a trip she knew would take him at least thirty minutes. Now was her opportunity.

  Her heart pounded as she retraced Thom
pson’s steps. If he came back sooner than expected, she’d be clearly visible through the French doors. Holly’s hands trembled as she opened the drawer. To her surprise, there was not one, but two identically addressed envelopes. She frowned as she tried to remember exactly what she’d seen from the window upstairs. No, there was nothing wrong with her eyesight. Thompson had definitely received only one. That could only mean one thing—Connor already had a report on her. Holly swiftly removed both envelopes and jammed them under her loose, long-sleeved shirt before heading for the stairs.

  On the day bed in the baby’s room, she slid her finger under the flap of the already open envelope. Now she had it in her hands, she almost dreaded what the news would disclose, but she had to know. Her hands shook uncontrollably and her heart thundered in her chest, filling her ears with the cacophony, as she tipped the papers from the envelope where they fanned haphazardly onto the lemon-coloured bedcover. She gathered up the loose-leaf typewritten sheets.

  The report dated back to just after Christmas and listed, in minute detail, her financial dealings including the regular payments she’d made to the hospital for Andrea. How dare he? He’d obviously requested this information before they even knew she was pregnant. What had he been playing at? She wanted to scream and rant and hit something. Preferably Connor Knight. Holly threw the information back down on the bed in disgust.

  All his concern for her when Andrea had died suddenly rang unbelievably false. All along he’d been playing her for a fool. There was only one thing on his mind and that was the baby. Right now, she hated him more than she could have believed, and deep inside, her heart splintered into bleeding shards. Holly’s anger drove her to snatch the sealed envelope from the bed. What other secrets had been exposed? Her eyes scanned disappointedly through the first few pages. It was nothing she didn’t already know. Summaries of social workers’ reports detailed how difficult she’d been to place in a foster home after the incident with the Mitchells’ son. Was this all he’d been able to find out?

  Holly turned to the next page and instantly her heart shuddered erratically in her chest as she saw the faxed copy of a Police report, dated the twenty-seventh of December nearly twenty-four years ago. Three days after she’d been abandoned.

  She sank to the bed, her throat choked with trepidation, and forced herself to continue to read the investigating officer’s coldly clinical description of the discovery of a teenage girl’s body, dead from a suspected drug overdose, under a motorway overpass. She’d been found wrapped in a bunch of newspapers. A low-resolution copy of the crime scene photo brought a cold metallic taste to Holly’s mouth. The dead girl couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. What a waste of a life.

  Apparently she’d been found wearing a locket which, when the photo inside was publicised, lead the police back to her family. A family she’d run away from three and a half years earlier.

  Fingers shaking, Holly flicked to the report. It was believed the dead girl was Holly’s mother—the clue lying in the newspapers that had surrounded the body, many of which shouted the headlines of Holly’s abandonment on Christmas Eve in the downtown shopping complex.

  Holly pored over the photo again. She could faintly distinguish the headlines he referred to. A gaping sense of loss penetrated her chest and with it a sense of hopelessness. She would never know her mother—could never ask her the million and one questions that had plagued her as a child.

  This bereavement felt different from when Andrea had died. This time her sorrow was threaded with frustration and anger at the young woman who’d taken her life and left Holly to a future no one could have known. And yet, the young woman’s desolation was painted clear and strong in the picture. Alone and wrapped in the evidence of what had probably been the hardest thing she’d ever done. What could have driven her to such a lonely death? She must have used support services when Holly was born—why hadn’t she called for help when she could no longer cope on her own? How had she slipped through the cracks?

  No matter what the answers, it was all too late now.

  Holly swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. She would not cry. Not again. She’d shed a lifetime of tears for her mother already.

  She continued to read, damming all emotion behind an invisible wall, until finally she reached the end and put the papers back into the envelope. Hope flickered like a timid ember in her mind. A woman named Queenie Fleming lived at a coastal holiday spot, about half an hour north of Whangarei. If the investigator’s deductions were correct, she could be Holly’s grandmother. Her sole surviving relative.

  How long would Connor have kept this information from her, Holly wondered. Would he ever have told her?

  She had to meet Queenie Fleming, although she knew Connor would never sanction such a meeting. Finally, she thought with grim realization, fate was on her side. With Connor away she’d have no difficulty slipping away after her obstetric appointment tomorrow. She could withdraw the money that had been accumulating in her account over the past few months and pay untraceable cash for a rental car. A quiver of excitement ran up her back. Tomorrow she had a date with her past.

  “You look tired this morning, miss. Didn’t you sleep well?” “A bit unsettled,” she admitted, stifling a yawn.

  With forced steadiness, she reluctantly accepted the cup of tea Thompson had poured for her, taking it over to the bay window to look out on the early spring morning. Last night she’d been too excited to sleep, fearful with every creak of the house that Connor had returned. By the time the sun breached the horizon, she’d already been up and dressed and made a last-minute check on the few toiletries and personal items she’d stowed in her bag.

  While she’d waited for the next hour to tick past on the bedside clock, she wondered how Connor would react. He’d be livid. By leaving him she was effectively kidnapping his baby. He’d be after her as soon as he could, which was why she had the reports rolled up and secured in the bottom of her bag. Once he discovered she had them, he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. He couldn’t force her back here if he tried, and with luck she’d gain a head start of at least a few days.

  She didn’t doubt he’d come after her, well the baby at least. He loved the baby already with a single-minded intensity she envied. How could he be so certain that he wasn’t opening himself up to heartache?

  Holly put the cup on the breakfast table and stretched her lower back. She’d been so achy these past couple of days and the baby felt as though it sat lower than before. She’d have to watch her fluid intake today or she’d be forever stopping at rest-rooms on the way up north. She had to be as invisible as possible. Every stop would leave another imprint of where she’d been and make her easier to find. She’d go light on the liquids.

  “The usual toast today?” Thompson asked.

  “Yes, please, but I feel like something a bit more substantial. Some scrambled eggs would be lovely.” Who knew when she’d next stop to eat?

  Thompson hid his surprise well. Since the early days of her pregnancy when she’d suffered with all-day morning sickness so violently, she’d barely stomached anything heavier than a slice of toast or some fresh fruit for breakfast. But instead of questioning her, he only smiled.

  “Coming right up. The helicopter will be here at nine to collect us for your appointment. Mr. Knight will be sorry he missed it.”

  “He’s been busy. I’m sure he’d have been back by now if he could have.”

  “For certain,” Thompson agreed vigorously. “He’s so looking forward to the baby.”

  The enormity of what she was about to do today shafted through her. She couldn’t wait until after she’d had the baby, even though she’d given her word to stay until after the birth. In doing what she was about to, she was not only burning her bridges, she was systematically destroying all the roads that led to them, too. Roads that could never be rebuilt at any price. He would never trust her again.

  It was a price she was prepared to pay.

  Th
irteen

  Holly swung the car gently around yet another winding curve, her knuckles white, her fingers clenched around the steering wheel.

  It had been years since she’d driven, and this road was certainly taking it out of her. Her shoulders sagged in relief as she reached a short straight stretch of road. To the right, a general-goods and fast-food store perched on the corner of an intersection. That must be her turn. She forced her fingers to relax and turned off to the right. As she wound down the hillside, she left banks of green bush behind her as the manuka and native ferns gave way to pasture and the occasional house.

  Her back was killing her from sitting so long, but she’d been too scared to pull off the road and take a walk. Driving straight through had been the most sensible thing to do, if not the most comfortable. It had taken three hours by the time she’d deciphered the map and had had to turn back a few times, but finally she was here.

  Butterflies buffeted at her stomach as she drove down the main road and straight towards the beach. The road curved to the left, and a tall stand of ancient pohutukawa trees guarded a reserve on the right-hand side. Holly grimaced as a cramp started in her calf muscles. She had to stop and stretch it out before she crippled herself. Thankfully, there were plenty of places to park.

  Despite the sunny day, a cool wind blew in off the ocean. Unintentionally she compared the strand of beach, stretching from left to right for a couple of miles, with Connor’s secluded private beach on the island. They were nothing alike.

  Just as she and Connor were nothing alike, she reminded herself forcefully.

  The cramp was getting worse. Holly climbed out of the car and turned to lean against it, stretching out the aggrieved muscles. Despite his aloofness, Connor had taken to massaging her lower legs before bed when he’d realised it helped to prevent the painful cramps that sometimes had her shooting out of bed at night.