by Susan Napier
'Hooks… hundreds of them,' he despaired thickly. 'This damned erotic piece of underwear is a chastity belt!' He punished her with another bite on her breast, this one hard enough to sting and make her cry out involuntarily. He soothed it immediately with his tongue, suckling the place until she cried out in another kind of pain—his kind—the pain of frustration. His hand moved to the dome of her jeans. 'Clare?'
A faint cry came from the bedroom. Then another, louder. David swore in two languages, continuing to hold her down for a moment. 'Dammit. You see? I told you this would happen.'
'David—' It was a sigh and a plea. He knew there was no contest and wasn't about to argue. He shoved himself to his feet, his knee wedging briefly, with shattering deliberation, hard against the secret woman's heart of her as he did so.
'Go, dammit, go!' he ordered, backing away on stiff legs when it seemed she hesitated, fighting both her own desire and his.
The cry became a shrill scream of terror, and Clare's body was doused in an icy chill of dread. She and David made it to Tim's bedside simultaneously, the boy was sitting bolt upright, screaming and clawing at his throat, his eyes wide open and unseeing.
'What is it? Another asthma attack?'
'A nightmare.' Clare sat on the bed and took Tim's petrified shoulders in her hands and began to shake him gently. 'Wake up, darling, it's only a dream. Tim? Wake up! Mummy's here, Tim. You're at home in bed, your bed.'
'Heavens, does he have this kind of thing often?' David asked, appalled.
Clare was concentrating on waking Tim as gently and quickly as she could. 'Not as much as he used to. He dreams of being buried alive, of being trapped some-where-and not being able to breathe… often in a hospital bed. I told you, his father's death worried him.'
'But I didn't realise it was to this extent.' Tim was awake now, shivering uncontrollably, and he began to cry. He didn't even hear or see David, only his mother holding him safe and tight, helping him to breathe. 'Has he been counselled, seen a psychologist?'
Clare stiffened, alert to the implied criticism. Did he think she was such a poor mother that she wouldn't seek professional help when it was needed?
'I think you'd better go. It'll take a while to settle him down again.'
David drew his own conclusions from her stubborn evasion. 'Perhaps I can help—'
'No!' Already she. was beginning to feel appalled at what she had almost allowed to happen, on the floor, for goodness' sake! It was David who had worried about Tim; she hadn't spared one thought for her son, she had been too deeply in the grip of conscienceless passion. She tempered the violence of her objection with a placating gesture. 'I mean, I don't think Tim would like to have you seeing him like this. He has his pride too, you know.'
'Perhaps you allow him too much pride. But then, you have an awful lot of it yourself, don't you? You have to do everything yourself in case people should see you as a less than perfect mother.'
She turned her face down to her son. David-was so quick to sense her areas of vulnerability that she felt defenceless. 'Please, can we talk about this another time?'
David's mouth twisted wryly, feeling all the ground he had made during the evening slipping away beneath his feet. 'All right, Clare, but we will talk. I'll see you in the morning.'
Tim's pyjamas were drenched with sweat, so Clare changed them and gave him a drink of water before she tucked him back in. He was slightly feverish but, not surprisingly in view of his exhaustion, he lay down without a murmur and closed his eyes. Clare sat, stroking his head for a few minutes, and then frowned as she heard sounds in the lounge. Evidently David hadn't left, after all. For an instant she felt a rush of gratitude. She longed to go out there and fling herself at him, sob out her real feelings on his broad shoulder and trust him to make everything right with her world. But common sense prevailed. She must make him see that tonight had been a regrettable mistake.
She was into the lounge before she realised that the sounds were a conversation. To her horror, Tamara, her face flushed and mutinous, was standing by the half-open door, and it was obvious from David's taut expression and low, controlled voice that they were having an argument.
Tamara saw Clare first. Her eyes widened in shock, swiftly followed by a black contempt that struck Clare like a blow. Clare clutched at the edges of her blouse. She had been so absorbed in Tim and her guilty thoughts that she had forgotten to rebutton it. She quickly remedied the omission, but it was too late. Tamara had seen the white lace basque and the damning evidence of reddening on the creamy pale skin. She knew exactly what Clare and her father had been doing. Tim wandering out would have been bad enough, but Tamara, chock-full of more adolescent conflicts than she could cope with, was even worse. Knowing that her father had lovers was quite different from coming face to face with the emotional reality of a woman who, even if only briefly, had usurped her beloved mother's place.
'I… I thought you had gone,' Clare said faintly to David.
'Don't get dressed on my account,' said Tamara cuttingly, glaring in disgust at the swollen mouth that Clare couldn't possibly hide. 'I've been ordered back to my room so you can carry on with your—'
'Tamara!' It was the first time Clare had heard that musical voice crack.
'I suppose you're going to try and tell me that you were playing cards,' Tamara sneered defiantly. 'What were you playing? Strip poker?'
'That's enough, Tamara.'
'I'll say it is! You know, I was really beginning to think that you might be a friend,' she flung at Clare's tongue-tied humiliation, 'but you were only being nice to me so that you could crawl into my father's bed without me making a fuss.'
'Well, she certainly failed on that score, didn't she?' said David with a bitter sarcasm that offended both woman and girl.
Clare found her tongue at last. 'Tamara, that's not true. I—'
'You were pretending to like me and pretending to hate Dad, and I nearly fell for it,' the girl charged on, completely ignoring her father. 'Well, you can stick your stupid gym and you can stick your bloody two-faced friendship and your creepy son—' The genuine agony behind the fury made Clare's heart weep for her, but David was made of sterner stuff.
'All right, Tamara, you've made your point,' he said icily. 'Now, I suggest you go back to our suite before you make a greater fool of yourself. I won't have you insulting Clare, or insulting me by presuming to make judgements about an adult situation you know nothing about.'
'Oh, right. It's nothing to do with me, right?' Tamara yelled at him. 'Why should it be? I'm only your daughter. Your boring, stupid, ugly, talentless daughter who you can't even stand to have around! Well, that's fine, because I can't stand being around you, either. Why should I care, if you don't?' She turned her fury back on to Clare, although her words lashed out at her father. 'You think he cares about you, either? He'll dump you just like he dumped all the others, like he dumped me. So you better just enjoy the celebrity screw while it lasts—' She might have said something else, even more crude, but she glimpsed the building tidal wave of her father's rage out of the corner of her eye and broke off to flee, slamming the door behind her. There were no tears, but Clare didn't doubt there would be floods of them when she got back to her room.
'I'm sorry, Clare—' David began tightly. 'She woke and saw the time, and thought Tim might be worse. When she saw the dinner things, she started acting like a betrayed wife. Hell, what a mess…' He ran a hand through the hair that only a short time ago Clare had ruffled in the freedom of desire. 'I knew that Tamara could be a vicious-tongued cat, but—'
'She's hurt and cornered, and feels the only way out is to fight,' Clare defended tiredly. 'Don't be too hard on her.'
David's anger slipped a cog. Tamara was temporarily out of his reach, but Clare was a standing target. 'And you're too damned soft! You'd have me let her get away with murder. You won't listen to the slightest criticism of your family relationship, and yet you're quite free in criticising mine. What the hell makes you such
an expert? You have problems of your own that you can't solve, though it may please you to believe you have all the answers.'
'I never said that—'
'No? You think this nightmare problem of Tim's is just a phase? After two years! You don't think that there's something suspiciously manipulating in these timely asthma attacks of his? Your son is an extremely clever child. What do you think all this 'there, there, Mummy will make it better' stuff is teaching him? That only you can make it better! That he can't rely on anyone else. You treat the symptom, not the illness, because you're too pig-headed to seek out the proper advice. I admit it—all right?—I admit it! Tim wouldn't be happy at the Music School, because there he would be just one of many with very special talents. Here he can be a genius. You think that by making him battle on here you're doing him a favour. You're not. Here he's one of a kind, out of step with his peers and probably suffering for it more than you know. At the Music School he'd be encouraged to develop his individuality, to interact with kids who are on much the same wavelength. But of course that would mean someone other than you influencing the boy, and you can't have that, can you? He must want what you want.'
David's anger, once released, built from strength to strength until he was raging up and down the room like a bear, his disgust evident with every word. Hands on hips, Clare smouldered under the unjustified attack, marshalling her own angry ammunition. David came to a halt in front of her, staring down his arrogant nose, his black eyes savage with frustration.
'Oh, yes, you're just aching to order me out again, aren't you? To pretend that nothing happened. Well, I happened, Clare Malcolm. And I dare you to try and deny my words, or the fact that ten minutes ago over there on the floor, you gave me the right to say them!'
Clare faced him proudly. 'I gave you the right to nothing but the use of my body!' She ignored his dangerous, hissing breath. 'And as it happened I have sought the proper advice for Tim. He had several months of therapy with a child psychologist, whose final diagnosis was that Tim would naturally grow out of his fears, given a stable living environment. And over the past six months he has improved dramatically. It's only when he's under par that he has a tendency to revert.'
'Then why in the hell didn't you tell me that when I asked?' David roared, outraged at being cheated of the satisfaction of being right.
'Maybe if you had asked the question without implying you already knew the answer,! might have,' Clare retorted.
'Hell, you can be an aggravating bitch!'
'If you're going to insult me, have the courtesy to do it in a language I don't understand. Tamara isn't the only vicious-tongued Deverenko.'
David wasn't about to let her consolidate her victory. 'But I was right about the rest, wasn't I? I can talk until I'm blue in the face, and you won't budge an inch. I wouldn't put it past you to keep Tim buried down here just to spite me,' he said sullenly.
'You're not so important in my life that I would bother,' said Clare loftily, but she couldn't resist dipping a flaming torch to the bridge she had just mentally doused with accelerant. 'Although as it happens I've decided that the school might be best for Tim, after all.'
'What?'
Clare was unnerved by the brightness of the conflagration she had caused, and hurriedly backed off. 'I said might. I'd have to know a lot more about it first…before I made my final decision…'
CHAPTER EIGHT
Clare sipped her glass of wine and smiled warmly at the handsome but tiresomely intense young man who had been talking her ear off for the past half-hour. It was tough appearing fascinated when she was in danger of dropping off to sleep, but it was a matter of pride as well as gratitude that she conceal her boredom. The young man had rescued her from the intimidating curiosity of all those who had seen her arrive at the elegant soiree on David Deverenko's arm. The guest list was a who's who of music in Auckland, and so far the boring young man, an accountant, was the only other person Clare had met who shared her tenuous connection with the main topic of conversation of the evening—his girlfriend of two weeks was a cello player with the NZSO. The rescue, Clare sensed, was mutual… two philistines adrift in a sea of culture.
To give the devil his due, David had stayed by her side for the first hour, introducing her to all and sundry, but Clare was at her worst in large crowds of strangers. Although she knew she was looking her best in the hurriedly bought black dress, she feared that she had come across as the archetypal dumb blonde with hardly a word to say as the informed discussions about music and musicians ebbed and flowed around her. It would have eased her tongue-tied shyness if she had known that, far from thinking her dumb, the grapevine had already labelled her an intriguing mystery, cool and serene and so confident of her hold on the guest of honour that she could afford to be laid back.
Clare nodded vaguely at something the young man said, her eyes discreetly seeking out David's dark head. She found him in his natural element, surrounded by a trio of adoring women. As if she had touched him he looked up and, across the heads of the chattering groups of people between them, Clare felt the impact of his accusing stare. She felt a renewed stirring of resentment. What did he have to be annoyed about? She was the one who had had this sprung on her at the last moment. She was the one who had had to put up with his impossible moodiness during their brief trip to Auckland. Defiantly she raised her glass to him in a cool toast, and smiled even more warmly at the young man, so that he momentarily lost the thread of his long-winded story.
Clare had expected David to be all charm on this visit. After all, he was supposed to be persuading her in favour of his school, not infuriating her to the point that she wished never to see him again. Well, almost to the point.
He had certainly been quick enough to capitalise on her surprising change of mind about the Music School. No one could accuse David of procrastinating. Hardly were the words out of Clare's mouth before he had organised this weekend. It was impossible just to describe his school, it seemed; one had to see it in action. And this weekend was the perfect time. Usually most of the children went home at weekends, at least the ones whose homes were within reasonable distance, but a series of special weekend concerts by the pupils had been organised to coincide with the Auckland Arts festival. Clare's own feeble attempts at procrastination—how could she leave Tim when the doctor had pronounced a bad cold? How could David leave Tamara when she was still wrapped in furious, silent hostility towards both of them?—were summarily dismissed. Miles was back. He would do her job for her and keep an eye on Tim and Tamara, and lend them the Dauphin and a pilot into the bargain. Clare had been literally swept off her feet, and in no time at all was waving out the window of the helicopter's luxurious passenger cabin at a very stiff-upper-lipped Tim as he stood in the curve of Miles's arm. He hadn't said much when she'd told him about the purpose of her trip, but she could see that he was both excited and disturbed by the possibilities. He was too intelligent not to realise that there was a price attached to the dream. David's autobiography had dealt in detail on the Music School, and Tim knew that residence was one of the rules. How would he react if possibility became reality? Clare didn't know, and neither did Tim, and she sensed that was something that bothered him. Tim was usually quick to make up his mind. Indecisiveness was not something he subscribed to, particularly when it involved anything to do with his musical obsession.
Clare had to swallow a lump in her throat as she watched the figures recede in a swirl of cross-winds from the rotor blades.
'He'll be all right. Miles will keep him busy. And he knows where to get in touch with you,' David had told her abruptly, reading her thoughts. He had been strangely curt all through breakfast. Perhaps he was worried about his daughter, who had predictably been absent from the farewell.
'Did you talk to Tamara?'
He shook his head broodingly. The girl had been avoiding everyone since the confrontation in Clare's suite two nights before. 'I talked at her. I don't know if she took any of it in. She didn't even ask if she
could come.'
'Perhaps you should have brought her, anyway.'
'And have her sabotage the whole weekend? Clare, I could reason with her until Kingdom-come—she'll hear only what she wants to, those things that reinforce her prejudices about you, about me, about the world of conspiracy that stops her being happy. We'll be back tomorrow evening, and perhaps by then she might have calmed down enough to open the lines of communication. I want her to realise that it's herself she's punishing, more than me, with this silent treatment.'
'You…you did tell her that nothing happened…' Clare began, trailing off unhappily when he measured her with a look.
'But something did happen, Clare.'
'Well, I hope you told her that we wouldn't be… I mean that I'll be staying at Virginia's while you're at the school.'