by Susan Napier
‘Clever, but still a forgery!’ He tore it across and contemptuously tossed the pieces aside.
Duncan shrugged. ‘Prove it.’ His smile became a taunt. ‘Come on, Stephen. As the saying goes, we have the technology. We can prove just about anything in a laboratory these days…providing, of course, that we want to prove something that might explode our own speculative theories.’
Only the four of them recognised the challenge for what it was: a veiled reference to the question of Michael’s paternity. Kalera clutched her champagne to her chest. Duncan had told her that out of angry pride Terri had refused to agree to a DNA test. Had she now given up hope that Stephen would ever accept his son—or her word—on trust?
Stephen ignored him, turning on his ex-wife, reminding Kalera of their confrontation on the front steps. ‘How dare you think you can come and go here as you please?’ He vibrated with anger. ‘You no longer live here, remember? And how dare you bring him here and subject us to a scene?’
‘You’re the one making a scene out of it, honey,’ Terri interrupted in a smoky voice. ‘Hi,’ she greeted Kalera pleasantly. ‘I’m Terri, as you might have gathered, and you’re Kalera.’ She held out a beautifully kept hand and Kalera dumbly shook it. ‘Have we missed Stephen’s big speech? Do I offer my congratulations yet?’
‘We’re about to make the announcement shortly,’ Stephen said tightly. ‘But you’re certainly not going to stay for it. This is utterly and completely tasteless behaviour, even for you.’
Terri shrugged, her lamé gown rippling like a waterfall. ‘What do I have to lose?’ She ran her fingers through her bobbed hair and began a sinuous sway to the music. ‘Are you going to offer me a dance?’
Kalera was horribly fascinated by the unfolding scene. Never in a million years would she have expected Stephen to react so intemperately in public.
‘No, I am not!’ he bit out.
‘Not even for old times’ sake?’
‘If you’re doing it for old times’ sake, shouldn’t you be asking Royal to dance?’ he sneered.
Duncan bestirred himself from his lazy-eyed perusal of Kalera. ‘I thought I’d keep your fiancée from feeling lonely while you two took your waltz down memory lane.’
Stephen’s muscles bunched under the sleek dinner jacket. ‘Shut up, you bastard—unless you’re asking for a punch in the mouth!’
Terri laid a gold-tipped finger on his arm. ‘For goodness’ sake, Stephen, all I’m suggesting is that you act like a civilised human being. You’ve already drawn everyone’s attention; what do you want them to see—a boringly amiable encounter between exes, or a knockdown, drag-out fight that will have people gossiping for weeks?’
As a choice it was no choice at all and soon Kalera found herself standing alone with Duncan watching her tense-jawed fiancé and his scheming ex-wife dancing off into the crowd.
‘She does know how to manage him,’ Duncan remarked admiringly. ‘Now if only he could learn to manage himself half as well…’ He paused before adding, ‘Attractive couple, aren’t they?’
The fact that they were rubbed salt in the wound.
‘Ex-couple,’ corrected Kalera tartly, giving him a fulminating look, and he reached over and guided her glass to his mouth, his hand covering hers as he took a sip, watching her over the narrow rim.
Other people were probably watching them, too, and Kalera fought to keep her dainty features serenely unembarrassed. She tried to ease away, but he merely followed, still sipping, until she inadvertently backed into a pillar and knew herself squarely trapped.
‘Delicious,’ he said, smacking his lips as he released the glass, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the champagne. He wore a large ruby stud in the Nehru collar of his shirt and a thick hoop of gold in his ear, and with his long midnight hair and swarthy skin he looked as if he would have been every bit as comfortable plying a nefarious trade in the Spanish Main as he was today at conjuring computers to do his bidding.
‘I’m glad you wore my sexy little dress,’ he told her softly, propping one hand on the pillar above her golden head. ‘I was afraid you might resist the temptation and swaddle yourself from head to toe in something pretty, but sadly unadventurous.’
A perfect description of her blue dress!
‘I wore this for Stephen,’ she said quickly. ‘Not for you.’
‘You wore it for the man who gave it to you, whoever you might have thought it was—and that’s me,’ he said with satisfaction, hooking a glass of champagne for himself from a passing waiter. ‘I spent ages hunting for exactly the right one…one that would warm your skin and furl your body like a half-opened rose…perfumed, velvety-soft, sensual, and alluring…’
God, he was so good with words! Kalera took a deep, steadying breath and his navy eyes dropped to her breasts, the upper curves so pale that the blue veins were visible through her translucent skin. ‘I think I can see your heart beating,’ he murmured in quick fascination. ‘See that little throb there, just below that tiny freckle…’
Kalera was amazed her heart wasn’t leaping out of her chest. ‘Will you stop leering at me like that?’ she choked, blushing like the rose he had described. ‘People will notice.’
‘I wasn’t leering, I was looking.’
‘Well, look somewhere else, then!’ she hissed.
He grinned down at her. ‘You’re rather asking for trouble inviting me to do that, aren’t you? There are all sorts of delectable parts of you that I’d love to stare at for hours. Like your cute little—’
‘Duncan!’ She passed off a weak smile to a passing legal bigwig, hoping he hadn’t heard that last remark.
He touched her hair, lightly, as if he couldn’t help himself, and then her drop-pearl earring, making it swing from her velvety lobe. ‘Well, how about a dance, then, if you don’t want to talk?’ he invited huskily. ‘Then I won’t be able to look any further than your face. Or we can both just close our eyes and hold each other.’
The idea filled her with panic. The few times he had got his arms around her she had completely lost her head and ended up in a turmoil of guilt and self-contempt.
‘Look, I know you’re just playing an agent provocateur—’ she began raggedly.
‘Is that really what you think of me?’ he interrupted. ‘You think I’m the kind of man who would tempt you to illegal acts solely in order to disgrace you?’
He actually sounded hurt. ‘Not illegal, but certainly immoral,’ she said, shaken by the thought of her causing him pain.
‘There’s nothing immoral about love—it’s one of the truly great splendours of life…’
Kalera’s grey eyes clouded as she fought off the seductive notion of Duncan splendidly in love. He was talking about the physical act between lovers, not the deep emotional commitment between two people, she reminded herself, and it was an attitude she would never let herself share. ‘There’s a personal sense of right and wrong that governs everything we do…’
She looked away, trying to escape the hypnotic intensity of his concentration, and her whole body tensed with alarm.
‘Oh, God!’
Duncan followed her gaze to where Stephen and Terri were squaring off again, this time in the middle of the dance-floor.
‘Oh, no!’
Duncan caught her elbow as she tried to dart past him.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Look at them! We have to stop them—’
He shook his head, his grip tightening. ‘Stay out of the way. This isn’t your fight. Don’t get involved.’
‘Don’t get involved?’ She twisted her arm free and flashed her ring angrily in his face. ‘What do you think this is? I’m already involved!’
‘Not in this you’re not. Look at them, Kalera—they’re too wrapped up in themselves to give a damn about anything else right now. They don’t care what they’re doing to you. You know what happens when you try to separate fighting dogs—you’re likely to get a mauling yourself!’
&n
bsp; Kalera shrugged off his callous advice, thrusting her glass into the hand that was trying to detain her and not looking back. He would love it if Stephen made a complete idiot of himself; that was probably why he had brought Terri along. God knew what they were saying to each other over there, but it was probably nothing Stephen wanted other people to hear. If he was thinking straight he wouldn’t dream of washing his dirty linen in public. She owed it to him to stop their argument escalating before the whole room became aware of what was going on. He would never forgive himself if he turned this evening of supposed joy into a domestic tragicomedy.
Kalera threaded her way towards them, trying to pin on a sophisticated smile of wry amusement but aware that it kept slipping into a grimace. Just as she reached the ring of people closest to the combat zone there were gasps as Terri slapped Stephen’s face, swung on her heel and fled out onto the terrace and down the steps, a glimmering wraith disappearing into the garden.
‘Terri? Come back here! Terri!’ Without hesitation Stephen dived after her, almost pushing Kalera over in his haste, completely ignoring her attempt to talk to him, his furious gaze passing straight through her as if she didn’t exist.
Standing there, staring after the fleeing couple, Kalera could feel the bubbling black acid of humiliation burning up in her throat. She could hear the groundswell of shocked whispers and feel the scorch of pitying stares. Her slender back stiffened to the point of snapping and, very carefully placing one foot in front of the other, her head held high, she began to walk back the way she had come.
At some point Duncan joined her on the endless journey through the void of her embarrassment and with his arm around her back she found the strength to obey his instruction to talk and smile and even laugh with him as if nothing were wrong.
‘Great, you’re doing great; we’re almost there,’ he praised as their shoes clicked across the marble foyer towards the massive oak front door.
‘Almost where? What are we doing?’ she said, her steps beginning to falter.
‘Leaving.’
Some vestige of social conscience in her baulked as the dinner-jacketed security guard opened the door. ‘I can’t run out on my own engagement party!’
‘Why not? Stephen did. And he left you standing there to face the fallout.’
The scalding embarrassment rushed back in full measure and with it a healthy, invigorating anger.
He tossed his car keys lightly in his hand. ‘Besides, do you really want to hang around like a good little girl, meekly making nice-nice to all his guests and his friends while you wait for him to deign to remember that he has a fiancée?’
She reached out and caught the falling keys. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said crisply. ‘Let’s go. And this time I’ll do the driving!’
His face blanched and a surge of cleansing humour bubbled through her veins, diluting the hurt. She tossed the keys under his nose before she fisted them and sauntered past him out of the door.
Let him find out something of what it was like to find your life recklessly careering away with you at high speed with no sense of control over the outcome!
CHAPTER TEN
ARRIVING at the office on the Monday morning after her disastrous engagement party, Kalera found herself walking into a whirlwind. At first she thought the turmoil meant there must have been a fire alarm.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked Luke, one of the software engineers, as he staggered down the hallway with an armload of portable hard-disk drives and cartridges.
‘We’re bugging out,’ he grinned.
‘Moving?’ she asked incredulously. They couldn’t have been evicted because Duncan owned the building! ‘What—everyone?’
‘Nah. Just the A-team.’
That meant Bryan Eastman’s lot.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Dunno…the roof first, then no one’s saying. A distant galaxy far, far away is my guess.’
‘The roof!’ Kalera hurried down to her office, which was in equal chaos, but not because of any moving.
‘What’s going on, Bettina?’
‘I don’t know; no one tells me anything,’ the young woman complained, rummaging in the files, yelping when she almost broke a nail. ‘Hey, have you seen the Bredon disk? I was sure I put it somewhere in here on Friday.’
‘Have you checked under B?’
Bettina looked at her blankly and Kalera left before she gave in to the overwhelming desire to fire her on the spot. Her feet slowing, she headed towards Duncan’s door. There was no sense in putting off this confrontation any longer.
Duncan was pacing up and down insulting someone over his mobile phone, darting over every now and then to punch an addition into the open laptop on his desk. His light grey suit would have been numbingly plain but for the effect of the lime-green shirt and an electrifying fluorescent green tie sprinkled with little orange lightning bolts. When he looked up and saw Kalera something flared in his eyes and he hastily ended his call and slammed the phone down on the desk.
‘You’re late!’ he barked.
It was not the manner of greeting she had expected, and it immediately put her on familiar ground.
‘I had trouble with my car,’ she said mildly.
‘I thought you weren’t going to turn up at all,’ he growled, explaining his ill humour, his eyes running over her as if to make sure she was all there. She had her neat, practical office garb on again and looked a world away from the woman she had been on Saturday night. His world, he thought, with a gloating surge of satisfaction.
He gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Not the twins again?’
She sighed. He probably wouldn’t give up until he had dragged it out of her. ‘I ran out of petrol.’
His eyes widened. ‘On the way to work? You? Mrs Organisation herself?’
‘I used the car a lot over the weekend,’ she said unsmilingly, ‘and I had other things on my mind.’
His frown was swift to reappear. ‘Yes, where were you yesterday? I tried you at home, and at your parents’. I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
Shades of Stephen! ‘I was fine,’ she said, with a little tilt of her chin that told him it was a lie. ‘I went for a drive.’
‘All day and night?’ His scowl deepened. ‘I even rang Steve’s place but I never got anything but the answering machine. I thought you and he might have been meeting somewhere…?’
‘Well, we weren’t. I drove lots of places, and I stopped at a motel for the night.’ As an anonymous traveller—out of reach of people or telephones, and free of sympathy, advice or any kind of pressure. ‘I just wanted some time on my own.’
His dark brows lifted. ‘So…’ He moved towards her, tense with expectancy. ‘Have you and Steve settled things between you?’
She shook her head and gestured helplessly with her hands, bringing him to a halt as his eyes zeroed in on what Anna had seen.
‘We hardly had a chance for more than a few words, when I went to pick up my car.’ And those composed of futile counter-recriminations, with Stephen even suggesting that she was the one who had overreacted on Saturday night. ‘Stephen was rushing out to the hospital because apparently Michael fell down some stairs early yesterday morning, and got a slight concussion and a badly broken arm. Maybe Stephen spent all day at the hospital; I don’t know.’ Perhaps the trauma had succeeded in jolting him into recognising the unbreakable emotional bond he shared with his son. For both their sakes, Kalera hoped so.
Duncan picked up her right hand, thumbing the ostentatious ring. ‘He never did get to make that announcement, did he? So you could say you’re not formally engaged at all…’
‘We’re not formally disengaged either,’ she said warily.
His grip tightened. ‘But you will be soon?’ he insisted.
A familiar look of stubbornness entered her grey eyes as she resisted his coercion. She had no intention of telling him that the ring was on her finger simply because it was the safest place to keep it. She didn’t
want to make herself any more vulnerable than she was already.
‘I can’t say,’ she prevaricated, firmly extracting her hand. ‘I need to see Stephen first. In fact, I’m going to go over there this evening,’ she decided.
‘You can’t!’ he rapped out.
The command made her raise haughty eyebrows. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Anna’s head poked around the corner. ‘Hey, Chief, Bryan says you’d better suit up—it’s zero-minus-ten and counting.’
‘All right, all right—’ He waved her away and began grabbing things off his desk and slinging them into a briefcase.
‘What on earth is going on?’
He snapped down the catches on the briefcase and spun the combination lock. ‘Get your laptop and come with me.’
‘What for?’ she asked, relieved to turn her mind to more impersonal matters.
‘Just do it, OK?’ he said impatiently.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there—like all the rest.’
There was safety in numbers, she reminded herself. ‘Are we going to be away long?’
‘Probably.’
‘You’re going to leave Bettina in charge of the office for the whole day?’ was her first appalled thought.
‘Anna’ll keep her in line. Now can you get a move on? Everyone else is waiting…’
He hustled her into the lift and pressed the button for the top floor.
On the windy roof Kalera stared in dismay at the helicopter being loaded up by Bryan and his four coworkers, all of whom, she noticed ominously, had roll-bags or suitcases of personal gear.
‘Exactly how long is long?’ she demanded as Duncan added his briefcase and laptop to the load.
He shrugged. ‘However long it takes. Look—’ he tersely cut off her burgeoning protest ‘—your soon-to-be-ex-fiancé—’ the emphasis was crushing ‘—has suddenly started boasting about a speech-recognition program which bears a suspicious resemblance to ours, so I’m cutting off any possible source of information. I’m going to sequester this team in a leak-proof fortress and maybe, without any outside distractions, we can accelerate our final debugging and bring this baby home early enough to pre-empt a coup.’