The Mirror Bride
Robyn Donald
THE MARRIAGE MAKER"A mirror marriage, picture perfect but insubstantial, a mere reflection of the real thing." In marrying Drake Arundell, Olivia Nicholls will secure Simon's future… and condemn her own!Though she yearns for a "real" marriage with Drake, too many secrets, too many lies stand between them and the love, the passion, the substance she longs for in their relationship - but then, perhaps she has a guardian angel on her side!THE MARRIAGE MAKER - Can a picture from the past bring love to the present?
“And who,” Drake asked softly, “is Simon?” (#u0f50116b-7c84-528a-928b-b510dd27e992)About the Author (#uebb27802-0867-505d-b6d1-1eb4d7527407)Title Page (#u1e08e811-2592-5385-a8a7-32b8e3ee60d2)Dedication (#ua7af9d69-23d0-59fc-81fe-5c9ef077859a)CHAPTER ONE (#u86585878-d8ba-5632-956d-9c7847305403)CHAPTER TWO (#uf71b29f8-a0dc-5d89-b267-1229781489b5)CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“And who,” Drake asked softly, “is Simon?”
Olivia damped down incipient hysteria. “Simon is your son.”
Astonishment glittered in the cold eyes before being banished so completely that Olivia wondered whether she had seen alright. Oh, he was a brilliant actor! If she didn’t know better, she thought bitterly, she’d believe he hadn’t known of the child he’d fathered the year she was seventeen.
Olivia Nicholls and the two half sisters, Anet and Jan Carruthers, are all born survivors—but, so far, unlucky in love. Things change, however, when an eighteenth-century miniature portrait of a beautiful and mysterious young woman passes into each of their hands. It may be coincidence, it may not! The portrait is meant to be a charm to bring love to the lives of those who possess it—but there is one condition:
I found Love as you’ll find yours,
and trust it will be true,
This Portrait is a fated charm
To speed your Love to you.
But if you be not Fortune’s Fool
Once your heart’s Desire is nigh,
Pass on my likeness as Cupid’s Tool
Or your Love will fade and die.
The Mirror Bride is Olivia’s story and the first title in Robyn Donald’s captivating new trilogy, THE MARRIAGE MAKER. Look out next month for Anet’s story in Meant to Marry, and in April look for Jan’s story, The Final Proposal, which concludes the trilogy and solves the mystery of the haunting image in the portrait.
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The Mirror Bride
Robin Donald
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Frances Whitehead. Thank you.
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was very young.
Olivia didn’t know her, but the beautiful face was familiar. Something, she thought hazily, about the surprisingly square jaw and the determined mouth—a mouth now set in a straight line.
‘Write to him,’ the unknown woman directed, the ribbons and feathers in her headdress swaying as she gave a swift, decisive nod of her elaborately styled head. Bright blue eyes commanded Olivia’s attention. ‘It is the only thing you can do now. You must write.’
‘I can’t!’
The sound of her own voice woke her. Blearily she lifted her head to gaze with slowly clearing vision around the small, shabby room. Of course no lovely young woman stood there, dressed in the frills and lace and silk of the middle of the eighteenth century. This room was definitely twentieth-century, from the faded, bargain-basement vinyl on the floor to the garishly painted wooden cupboards above and below the sink bench.
While sitting at the battered Formica table and poring over calculations that had kept her awake for nights, Olivia had gone to sleep and dreamed—a remarkably vivid dream, but in reality just a dramatisation of the decision she had already made, a decision she didn’t want to face.
So her subconscious had made her acknowledge it.
Yawning, she pushed a lock of honey-blonde hair back from her face. Her capable, long-fingered hand came down abruptly on the sheet of paper she had covered with figures, then curled, strangely vulnerable. Head bowed, she joined her hands loosely, looking at nothing in particular with great, lacklustre topaz eyes. Almost immediately she firmed her soft mouth, pulled a cheap, thin writing pad towards her and began to write, only to stop after two sentences.
‘Oh, that won’t do; it’s too stupid,’ she muttered, glowering at the stamp she’d already stuck onto the envelope—a tiny rock wren delicately depicted in shades of buff and black and gold.
Her eyes lingered on the words along the bottom: ‘New Zealand’, it said. ‘45c’.
Forty-five cents she couldn’t really afford.
Seed money, she thought, grimacing before she returned to writing the most difficult letter of her life.
Several times she stopped to frown more deeply, chewing on the end of the ballpoint pen and staring blindly through the window. On the other side of the busy street a row of run-down shops was topped by flats like the one she lived in, their windows reflecting blankly back at her.
There was no inspiration to be gained there. Or anywhere. After almost an hour spent crossing out and rewriting, she at last decided on the bare minimum.
Dear Drake,
I need to see you. There is something you should know.
And she signed it his faithfully, Olivia Nicholls.
It sounded faintly sinister, but that couldn’t be helped. Explicitness was impossible because there was always the chance of someone else—a wife, for example—seeing the letter.
Quickly, because although she’d spent days agonising over this she still wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, Olivia sealed the envelope, then ran with it down the rickety outside stairs to the grimy street below. She’d give him a fortnight—no more and no less. If he hadn’t answered by then, she’d have to step up her campaign.
Auckland at the fag-end of autumn was depressing. Autumn meant that winter was not far behind, and winter meant earache and the dreaded Auckland cough, which in Simon invariably turned to bronchitis. Winter meant nightmares about trying to dry and air clothes. It meant expensive vegetables and the pain of seeing Simon go off to school in inadequate clothing.
For the last three years she and Simon had lived in Auckland, and this third winter was promising to be worse than the two previous ones. Only five days ago she’d lost her job as an outworker sewing tracksuits for a factory. It hadn’t brought in much, but the small amount had supplemented the unemployment benefit which was now all they had to live on. Saving money would be impossible. And there was the crushing debt she owed Brett, her next-door neighbour...
And, to cap off the series of disasters, she’d developed a rotten head cold.
She stopped outside the letterbox, looking down at the address on the envelope. You don’t have to send it, a voice reminded her—a cautious, cowardly voice. You can struggle on—nobody dies of starvation in New Zealand.
Her eyes lingered on her hands. Once they had been pampered and smooth, the fingernails polished; now the fingernails were cut straight across and the skin was slightly chapped, marred by calluses from the constant use of scissors. Had she seen them, her mother would have had a fit. Elizabeth Harley had considered it part of her purpose in life to be elegant and well-groomed. She would have thought that Olivia was letting down the side.
But then, Elizabeth had been the indulged only daughter of a rich man, whereas Olivia had no money at all.
A shiver ran down her spine. What she was doing was dangerous, but there was no alternative. Defiantly she pushed the letter into the slot.
Trying to banish the matter to the back of her mind-it was done, she had made the decision and now she’d just have to wait—she set off to pick Simon up from school.
As she came down the street he burst through the gateway like a prisoner released from long incarceration, a too-thin six-year-old in the throes of a growing spurt. Olivia’s eyes lingered on his bony wrists. He’d already outgrown the clothes she’d made for him at the beginning of summer, and although she had shopped carefully the year before at the winter sales, making sure that the two jerseys and the jacket were a size larger than she’d thought necessary, she suspected he was almost too big for them too.
If that letter worked, she thought wearily, she’d no longer need to worry about money to buy the shoes they both needed. If it didn’t work—well, she’d go without, and his would be bought from the op-shop.
The letter had to work.
Banishing the odd little clutch of fear in her stomach, she smiled down at Simon.
‘Hello, Liv,’ he said, incandescently delighted at being freed from school.
‘Hello, young Simon,’ she said, speaking clearly. ‘Have you had a good day?’
A year ago he used to hold her hand down the street, but she knew better than to hold it out now.
‘Mrs Adams sent a note home.’ Although belligerence darkened eyes the same colour and shape as hers, she caught a glimmer of wistfulness before he looked away.
‘Oh, Simon!’
‘I haven’t been naughty,’ he shouted, kicking a stone. ‘It’s about a trip to the beach. I said I couldn’t go but she said I had to take it home anyway.’
Both of them hated those notes—Olivia because it was so rarely that she could afford the promised trip, and Simon because his absence made him an outcast amongst his peers. Even in this poor area most families were better off then they were.
Until she’d begun saving for his ear operation she had always managed to find the money to send him away with the rest of his class. She had explained why he could no longer go, but when you weren’t much over six, and all your friends teased you about staying behind, it was difficult to comprehend the need to save money. Especially as he didn’t really understand that he was going deaf.
‘Hand it over,’ she said.
He did, but before she had a chance to read it asked, ‘Liv, why do we speak different?’
‘Differently,’ she said automatically. ‘From whom?’
‘Well, everyone. I had a fight with Sean Singleton today ’cause he said I was up myself, talking like the Poms. Are we Poms?’
‘No, we’re not English. You speak the way you do because that’s how I talk.’ She didn’t really know what to say. Although New Zealand believed itself to be a classless society, it was untrue. End up with no money and you were automatically relegated to the bottom of the heap. And if you lived on a benefit with a child and no husband you became a solo mother, the subject of smug, middle-class disdain.
Not looking at her, he mumbled, ‘Sean said I was a dummy.’
‘You know that’s not true. As soon as we get your ears fixed you’ll show Sean Singleton that you’re every bit as clever as he is. Until then, darling, try not to fight.’ A glance at his mutinous expression made her ask with a sinking heart, ‘What else happened?’
Children could be so cruel—little animals picking mercilessly on anyone who was the slightest bit different. A sunny-tempered child, Simon had adored school when he first started, but it was an effort to get him there now. His teacher did what she could, but she had a big class and the school was under-resourced.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t care about Sean Singleton. I can beat him any time. Aren’t you going to read the note?’
The school was planning an overnight trip to the marine reserve at Leigh, sixty miles up the coast. Unless Drake accepted the responsibility he’d avoided these last seven years there was no way she could take money out of her bank account for a school trip. Not now, when she had no job and little hope of getting one.
Unfortunately she couldn’t tell Simon that; if Drake refused to acknowledge his obligations Simon would be all the more shattered for having had the prospect held out to him.
Olivia slipped the note into her pocket.
Simon’s eyes followed her hand. Angrily he said, ‘I knew it would cost too much.’ He hid his disappointment too well for a child of six. ‘We better go home and fold some papers.’
They spent some hours each week folding a variety of advertising pamphlets which he and Olivia delivered around the district. The money it earned used to pay for the meagre luxuries they couldn’t have afforded otherwise, but from now on it would all go towards necessities.
Olivia’s whole being rose up in hot resentment. It simply wasn’t fair that Simon should be denied most of the things his classmates took for granted, that he should live in a grotty first-floor flat with no garden except an unmown stretch of grass cluttered by a clothesline, three car bodies and a lemon tree that struggled to survive from year to year. It wasn’t fair that he had to wear clothes she made from cheap remnants or hunted for in opportunity shops and end-of-season sales. It wasn’t fair that his life should be so circumscribed, that he should be unable to take advantage of the many things New Zealand’s biggest city offered.
But then, she’d learned that nothing in this life was fair. However, she thought, firming her mouth, she had taken the first steps to redress the balance for Simon.
Back home, she sent him to put his bag away while she drew a cup of hot water from the tap and squeezed a lemon into it. Sitting down to drink it, she watched him make a sandwich, and winced at the amount of peanut butter he spread on it. She bit back the unguarded protest. Simon wasn’t greedy.
She wanted to take him places, to buy him books and toys to keep his active mind stretched—she yearned to give him some sort of future. Instead, he took their poverty for granted. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been able to claim the child benefits the country provided, but she didn’t dare.
For Simon she would do anything, even sink her pride, because he was all she had.
Olivia pulled a sheet of newspaper across the table. It was about six weeks old, and she’d been lucky to get it. Brett always handed on his newspapers to her, but he very rarely bought them, preferring to get the news from the radio.
Her eyes were drawn to a photograph. Although she had spent too much of the last three days looking at it, her vision wavered, a sudden rush of blood to her head making her close her eyes.
Drake Arundell. A man she had known all her life, yet this man was a stranger.
Blinking swiftly, she forced her eyes open. Her gaze lingered on the hard face, its blunt contours set in an expression of assured authority. The seven years since she had seen him had added an air of maturity to his strong features. Power radiated from him, a power different from the untrammelled sexuality that had cut such a swathe through Springs Flat while he was growing up. Whatever had happened in those seven years had modified and strengthened the young man’s arrogance into a disciplined self-reliance.
The boldly cut mouth was now controlled into a straight, uncompromising line, while level, enigmatic eyes surveyed the world from beneath black brows that winged up at the outer corners to give a saturnine expression to his face.
Those eyes were grey-green; when he was angry the green predominated, so that they became piercing slivers of crystal. Heavy-lidded, with thick, curly black lashes that didn’t mitigate their inherent aloofness, they were astonishing eyes.
A formidable man, Drake Arundell, infinitely tougher and much more dangerous than the reckless, charismatic young man so vividly delineated in her memory. Just over six feet tall, he was in perfect proportion to his height, with a well-made smoothness of movement that satisfied the eye. He’d be—she made some quick calculations—about thirty-two, eight years older than she was.
Of course he’d be married by now. Men with his particular brand of virile masculine magnetism didn’t stay single. And when they flashed across the motor racing scene like a singularly blatant comet, attracting the attention of film stars and models and any number of beautiful women, marriage usually followed. There were probably children too.
At seventeen, Olivia had responded to his heady, aggressive confidence as helplessly as most other women. More fool her, she thought sardonically.
‘Have you got a headache?’ Simon enquired around his peanut butter sandwich. ‘You look funny.’
‘Darling, swallow everything in your mouth before you talk. No, I’m fine.’
He came over to stand beside her. ‘Who’s that?’
‘A man I used to know.’ Had known all her life. ‘He owns hotels and boats and things.’ Her voice sounded quite normal.
Drake Arundell, the news item said, had announced the opening of the Tero ski-field. Three years ago Arundell had returned to New Zealand to buy the almost moribund FunNZ empire, and with a combination of shrewd, resourceful financial ability and an intuitive understanding of the tourism business had not only brought it back to life but expanded, without setting the powerful conservation movement at his throat.
The item went on to mention his spectacular reign as a Formula One driver, when he had been prevented from winning the Drivers’ Championship only by injury. Drake Arundell had dropped out for five years before emerging to carve out an equally fast-moving career in the business world, being one of the first far-sighted enough to see the opportunity for the now world-famous eco-tours.
An unsteady wind blustered against the windows, streaking them with rain. A truck took its time about going by, changing gear with a jarring thump that rattled through Olivia’s head. Shivering, she rubbed her arms to stir the circulation.
Her eyes returned to the photograph. The last time she’d seen him Drake Arundell had been furious, his striking face cold and unyielding, his eyes narrowed and savage beneath their half-closed lids.
It had happened so abruptly; they’d spent the summer playing a game of flirtation and retreat, and she’d loved it—enjoying the power of her burgeoning femininity enormously, discovering that life could be a fascinating, exhilarating feast of the senses.
Not once had he touched her, but she’d known that he watched her, that there was a different gleam in his eyes when he looked at her, an exciting intensity that wasn’t there when he spoke to the other girls who had spent the summer trying to attract his attention.
And then one night after a barbecue at her parents’ place he’d kissed her. Lost in the wonder of his kiss, she’d pressed against him. In three days’ time he was going back to the Formula One circuits of the world, so this would be her only chance to see what it was like in his arms.
The gentle kiss had suddenly turned feral; she had gasped at the quick violence of his mouth, the way he’d held her against his hard, taut body, but she hadn’t struggled. Although it frightened her she’d wanted that fierce, heated tension—had wanted it all summer.
But the kiss had ended abruptly. Strong hands pushed her away by the shoulders, leaving her aching with frustration.
‘Don’t offer more than you want to give,’ he’d said in a thick, harsh voice. ‘You’ve had your fun teasing me, but that’s because I’ve let you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that another man would be so easily kept at bay.’
And he had looked at her as though he’d despised her.
It had happened a long time ago, but a long-forgotten fear sent a chill slithering the length of her backbone. Drake Arundell was not a man to be threatened or intimidated.
Unconsciously she angled her chin at the photograph. Why should he have his photograph in the newspapers as an example to other New Zealanders when she and Simon struggled for every cent they had?
Swallowing the last remnant of his sandwich, Simon washed his knife and plate and dried them carefully. ‘I’ve got a new book,’ he prompted as he put the dishes away.
Olivia screwed up the sheet of newspaper and fired it into the rubbish bin. ‘We’d better fold these papers first,’ she said. ‘Then you can read to me.’ Reading time was the one part of the evening that was sacrosanct.
He glanced out of the window and pulled a face. ‘We’ll get wet.’
The rain had settled in now, and was beating with miserable determination against the panes.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to do any more sewing, remember, so I can deliver them tomorrow morning.’
A fortnight later she’d almost accepted that Drake was going to ignore her letter, but after tidying the flat and exorcising some of her anger and frustration by viciously scrubbing the floor, she groaned when she looked at the battered alarm clock on the windowsill above the sink. Still another hour until the mail arrived.
‘I’ll go to the supermarket now, before it rains. And if a letter isn’t waiting for me when I get back,’ she said, baring her teeth at her reflection in the crazed mirror in the bathroom, ‘somehow I’ll come up with a way of making Drake Arundell’s life an absolute hell!’
An hour later she arrived back home feeling completely wretched. Instead of hanging off until the afternoon as it was supposed to do, the rain had dumped icy gallons on her. By the time she made it back to the flat she was coughing, and although she’d fought her head cold with most of the lemons from the spindly tree in the communal back yard she had a horrible suspicion that the infection was sinking to her chest.
Money for cough syrup would be at the expense of food, but, she decided as she hung her drenched umbrella and skirt above the bath, she would deal with that worry when it arrived—if it did. After rubbing her hair reasonably dry with a threadbare towel, she changed into a pair of old pink sweatsuit trousers and sat down with a mug of hot lemon juice and water, listening to her breath rattle in her chest.
If something happened to her, Simon would be completely alone.
‘The mail!’ she said, suddenly leaping to her feet. A hectic dash down to the letterbox through the rain revealed two circulars and the power bill.
‘Right,’ she said through gritted teeth as she pounded back up the unprotected steps, the first cold southerly of the year tearing at her clothes and hair. ‘Tonight I’m going to write you another letter, Drake Arundell, and it’s going to be a lot harder to ignore. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll—I’ll camp in your office until you agree to see me.’
Sudden, shameful tears clogged her throat; she swallowed and stubbornly set her mind to working out ways to apply pressure to a man who was determined to ignore her.
On her way to collect Simon from school she went into the corner dairy and again looked up under the As in the telephone directory. There was only one Arundell there—a D. Unless he was unlisted, it had to be Drake. When she had first seen his address she had been filled with a bitter, unpleasant resentment, because Judge’s Bay was a very up-market suburb on the other side of Auckland.
Surreptitiously she compared the address with the copy she had made before. No, she hadn’t made a mistake. Her mouth compressed into a straight line as she flipped through the pages to the Fs.
Drake Arundell wasn’t going to get away with it. This time she’d write to him at both his address and the FunNZ one.
On her way out she stopped at the rack of brightly coloured magazines by the counter. TV STAR’S LOVE CHILD REVEALED, the headlines on one screamed. ‘I AM DEVASTATED BY HIS INFIDELITY,’ WEEPS MODEL bellowed another, beneath a picture of a woman who looked as though she wouldn’t be able to pronounce any word of more than two syllables.
‘Do you want one, miss?’ the sari-clad owner said, stopping in her task of ripping the covers off several magazines.
Olivia smiled and shook her head, her eyes lingering on the gaudy covers. ‘Are they very popular?’
‘Oh, yes. These two—’ she indicated the biggest headlines ‘—are running neck and neck.’
‘You’d wonder at people who’d discuss their most intimate concerns with a journalist.’
The owner shrugged. ‘I believe they pay well.’
And if you were desperate—as desperate, say, as she was, Olivia thought—then that money might be a good reason for baring your soul to the public of New Zealand.
Impulsively she asked, ‘Could I have a cover?’
The woman looked surprised. ‘Well, I tear them off any that haven’t sold and send them back to the publisher so I don’t have to pay for them.’
‘Oh. I see.’ Olivia looked at the magazines again. ‘I didn’t realise.’ She smiled at the woman, said, ‘Goodbye,’ and left the shop.
The next morning she swept out the flat before embarking on the chore of washing their clothes; with any luck they’d dry enough to air in the hot water cupboard. A month previously the ancient agitator washing machine that lurked in the bathroom had clattered itself to a standstill, and although the landlord’s agent had promised to replace it, a new one hadn’t eventuated yet.
Determined to look on the bright side, Olivia admired the muscles she was developing in her arms as she hung the clothes out beneath a sky that promised at least a morning’s fine weather. After that she boiled up the bones the butcher always gave her on the pretext that they were for the dog—both of them well aware that there was no dog—and added vegetables she had bought yesterday from the bruised bin. Tonight they’d have the meat from the bones for their dinner, and tomorrow they’d drink the soup.
This afternoon, she decided, I’ll go and see the supermarket about a job again. With any luck they’ll respond to a bit of tactful nagging.
She had asked a fortnight ago, and been told that there was no opening. They’d taken her name and address and said they’d contact her, but it wouldn’t hurt to show her enthusiasm. Even though she knew there was no position for her. Possibly never would be.
Soon she’d be twenty-five, and it seemed as though her life had been an endless grind of work and worry and fear. Such dreams she’d had once, such hopes—all shattered.
‘That,’ she said aloud, ‘is enough of that! Self-pity is not going to get you anywhere.’ And then she began to cough, deep, barking paroxysms that shook her frame and hurt her throat and chest.
Unfortunately, telling herself that depression was the usual accompaniment to illness didn’t seem to help much; she still felt oddly lackadaisical.
‘I’ll make Simon a new pair of trousers,’ she said, using a false cheerfulness to force herself to do it. A month ago she’d bought a skirt at the op-shop which would cut up well.
Setting her lips into a firm line, she took out her old sewing machine—one which she’d earned in her wandering days. Another house-truck family owned it then, but the woman hated sewing. In return for making clothes for all the family, Olivia had been given the machine.
Normally she enjoyed the challenge of creating something new from something old, but after laying the material out on the table she put the scissors down and stared at it.
The last thing she wanted to do was sew.
Perhaps, she thought with a quick glance at the clock, she was hungry. However, the sandwich she made was so unappetising that she put it down after a couple of mouthfuls and sat at the table with her head on her arms, trying to block out the grey mist of hopelessness.
Someone knocked on the door.
A religious caller, she thought with foggy lethargy. Go away.
The knock was repeated—this time a peremptory tattoo that brought her to her feet.
Listlessly she opened the door, and to her utter astonishment there stood Drake Arundell—tall, broad-shouldered, his lean, heavily muscled body elegantly clad in a superbly tailored suit—almost blocking the narrow balcony that served as the access along the back of the flats.
On a sharp, indrawn breath she snatched the door back to shield her body, her eyes dilating endlessly as she looked up into a harshly contoured, expressionless face. Colour leached from her skin and a faint cold sweat slicked over her temples.
Quick as she was, he was quicker, and of course he was infinitely stronger. Without visibly exerting pressure he pushed the door open and walked into the room. Olivia fell back before him.
Foreboding washed through her, a hallow nausea caused by shock and dread. When her heart started up again she found it difficult to breathe.
Moving with the feline grace she remembered so well, he followed her across the room, his eyes revealing nothing but sardonic amusement. Even if she hadn’t seen the forceful features she would have recognised Drake Arundell by his gait alone. After all, she had known him all her life—although it wasn’t until she was fourteen and he was twenty-two that she’d noticed him with the inner eyes of her burgeoning womanhood.
He’d walked down the main street of a little town a lifetime away, and everyone in Springs Flat had watched him—some appreciatively, and some, the parents of young, impressionable daughters, with acute foreboding.
It was the sort of walk that had persuaded the elders of uncounted tribes the world over and down the centuries to look around for a war, or for big game to be hunted, or for an exploratory trip—anything to get that lean-hipped, lithely graceful saunterer out of the district and away from their wives and daughters.
Already famous, earning big money on the Formula One circuit, he was a certainty, her stepfather had said admiringly, to win the World Drivers’ Championship soon.
Brian Harley used to enjoy teasing Drake’s father, who worked in his accountancy firm, because Stan Arundell had resisted his son’s ambitions. A conventional, hardworking man, he’d wanted Drake to take law at university, and he had used Mrs Arundell’s long battle with illness to restrain his son. It had been Brian who had persuaded him to give Drake his blessing. Immediately Drake had left school, and within a remarkably few months had been racing his snarling monsters.
The situation was laden with ironic overtones; however, there was no irony in the expression of the man who was stalking her across her own room. All she could read in his face was a predatory, cold threat.
Compelled by some absurd conviction that the only way she’d retain control of the situation would be to stop retreating, Olivia came to a sudden, stubborn halt in the middle of the room, hands clenched stiffly at her sides.
He stopped too, just within her area of personal space.
Olivia’s eyes travelled reluctantly to his face. At twenty-two he had been amazingly magnetic in a potent, bad-boy way that had set the fourteen-year-old Olivia’s heart thumping erratically whenever her eyes had met those wicked grey-green ones. By the time she was seventeen the raffish appeal had altered to a tougher, more formidable fascination. Now time and experience had curbed and transmuted his raw intensity into a self-sufficient, hard-edged maturity.
He had always been disturbing; now he was dangerous.
Endeavouring to swallow her nervousness, she said crisply, ‘Hello, Drake.’
His unwavering eyes were instantly hooded by thick black lashes. The meagre light from the central bulb splintered into red-black sparks on his hair, refracting through the light mist of rain there; devil’s colouring, her mother used to say.
No, she wouldn’t think of her mother now.
‘Hello, Olivia.’ His deep voice was abraded by an attractively rough, sensual undemote that brought a world of memories flooding back—most of them tarnished by subsequent events.
Expediency dictated a polite response. ‘How are you?’
Distrusting his smile, resenting the leisurely survey that ranged the five feet six inches from her old slippers to the top of her honey-blonde head, Olivia had to suppress a swift angry reaction as he said suavely, ‘Curious, as you intended me to be. Your letter was practically guaranteed to bring me at a gallop.’
‘But it didn’t. I wrote over a fortnight ago.’
He smiled—not a nice smile. ‘I’ve been overseas. I came as soon as I could.’
She held out her hand, willing it not to tremble. After a taut moment his engulfed it. The brief, warm grip sent electricity up her arm and through every nerve cell in her body.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply, discovering that it was impossible to retrieve any composure while pinned by the steady, inimical gaze of those perceptive eyes, emotionless as quartz.
He looked around, his brows climbing as he took in the room. Stolidly Olivia suffered that unsettling scrutiny. She knew exactly what he was thinking: What on earth was Olivia Nicholls doing in a place like this?
Well, she’d done her best and she wasn’t ashamed of the flat. Nevertheless she braced herself for the comment she could see coming.
‘Sewing, Olivia?’
‘I’m very good at it,’ she said. ‘Until a couple of weeks ago I was a professional seamstress.’
‘What happened?’
‘The factory is moving to Fiji. It’s a lot cheaper to hire labour there.’ Losing her job had been the final straw; that was when she’d admitted she had no hope of saving the money she needed so desperately. Until then she’d thought she might make it. She tried not to let her bitterness and fear show in her voice, but his perceptive glance revealed that she hadn’t succeeded.
He continued his leisurely perusal of the room, and when she was so angry that she knew her cheeks were fiery, said evenly, ‘You still look just like a cheerleader.’
‘A—what?’
His mouth pulled up at the corners, but there was no amusement in his eyes. With a speculative irony that further ruffled her already shaky composure, he said, ‘A cheerleader. You must have seen them on television. In America they cheer the local teams on. Long-stemmed and open and vivacious, they look healthy and nice and sexy and athletic all at once. When you were seventeen I used to think you were cheerleader material.’
No cheerleader had a pale, thin face and hair that hung lankly around her neck because she couldn’t afford to get it cut.
‘It must be my Anglo-Saxon genes,’ she said, not hiding her resentment well enough. She hesitated, then went on without quite meeting his eyes, ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ he said without expression, adding with suspicious gentleness, ‘But married or not, Olivia, I won’t easily be blackmailed.’
She shook her head indignantly. ‘That’s not what I—’
Something quick and ugly behind the screen of his lashes made her inhale sharply and lose the track of her reply. Although it took all of her courage she stood her ground, holding his gaze with a lifted chin and straight back, calling on a recklessness she hadn’t even known she possessed.
‘I’m not actually looking for a wife at the moment, if that’s what you had in mind.’ His tone was insulting, as was the look that accompanied it.
Of course she didn’t want to answer a slur like that, and of course the tide of colour that gave fleeting life to her pallor probably convinced him that that was exactly why she had written to him.
Since his sixteenth year Drake Arundell had been chased unmercifully—and not just by women his own age or impressionable adolescents. Now, with his potent, hard-edged appeal only slightly smoothed by superb clothes and an aura of power and sophistication, he probably had to shake women out of his sheets every night.
She was casting about for some suitable answer when he continued blandly, ‘What happened, Olivia?’
A meaningless smile pulled her lips tight. ‘My mother died.’
He displayed no emotion. All that could be said for him was that he was no hypocrite.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said distantly, the words a mere conventional expression of regret. ‘Why is Elizabeth Harley’s daughter, and Simon Brentshaw’s granddaughter, reduced to living like this?’
‘One of my grandfather’s pet hobbyhorses was his belief that it was extremely bad for young people to grow up knowing they had a cushion of money behind them. He thought it corrupted them. He told me right from the start that there wouldn’t be anything for me. I don’t know whether he left anything to my mother, but if he did none of it was handed on to me when she died,’ she said unemotionally.
He frowned. ‘I see. Well, it’s none of my business. Why did you write me that rather enigmatic letter?’
‘Simon was just over a year old when my mother died,’ she returned, leashing her anger and disillusion because she had to keep a cool head.
‘And who,’ he asked softly, ‘is Simon?’
She tamped down incipient hysteria. ‘Simon is your son.’
Astonishment glittered in the cold eyes before being banished so completely that she wondered whether she had seen aright. Oh, he was a brilliant actor! If she didn’t know better, she thought bitterly, she’d believe he hadn’t known of the child he’d fathered the year she was seventeen.
‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘No wonder you wanted me married! Not that it would have made any difference.’ His cold gaze wandered her body as he said scathingly, ‘I might have kissed you when you were seventeen, Olivia, and even done a little groping, but I never took you to bed. And nowadays, fortunately for me, I can prove that he’s no child of mine. If you persist with this farrago of lies I’ll have your bastard DNA-tested, and then I’ll prosecute you for attempted extortion.’
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ she demanded, suddenly imbued with a strength she’d lacked during the past few months. ‘I wouldn’t have slept with you—’
‘You damned near did everything but sit up and beg for it! In the end I had to tell you that I wasn’t interested.’
She said in a quick, unsteady voice, ‘Simon is not my child! You know he’s my half-brother—and you’re his father!’
CHAPTER TWO
A TENSE silence enfolded them both. Stealing a glance at his face, Olivia could read nothing there except a chilly contempt.
‘And how do you know that?’ he asked in a lethal, silky tone.
‘Because my mother said so,’ she retorted, masking the rapid gut-punch of fear with scorn of her own. ‘She also told me that you knew about him, so it’s no use trying to pretend you had no idea of his existence.’
Olivia had been in love with Drake that long-ago summer when Simon was conceived, and even after his cruel rejection of an offer she hadn’t known she’d made she’d carried the memory of his kiss in some hidden, guarded place in her heart. Foolish and naive of her, but then at seventeen surely one was allowed to be foolish and naive about one’s first love?
It had taken the revelation of Simon’s parentage to destroy both. While she had been shyly, secretly falling in love with Drake, while he had been flirting with her, he had been sleeping with her mother.
Perhaps she could have forgiven him that, for Elizabeth had been radiantly beautiful, possessing a charm and sweetness that had drawn people to her all her life. But after that summer affair Drake had left them all to go to hell in their respective ways. His rejection of his son, his desertion of her mother, had set the seal on Olivia’s disillusion.
Even now he was refusing to admit that he had a child. Although his features were clamped into immobility, his eyes frozen beneath half-closed lids, she could feel his rejection like a palpable force in the room.
‘Start at the beginning,’ he said in a voice that made her jump, ‘and tell me exactly what she said.’
She hesitated, because that meant reopening scars she had hoped were healed. However, one glance told her that there was no disobeying the implacable command in his gaze. In a controlled, flat voice she said, ‘Simon was born about seven months after you left Springs Flat.’
‘I see. What makes you think he wasn’t your stepfather’s child? And don’t tell me he couldn’t have children. He had a daughter by his first wife. Ramona Harley left him and took her daughter back to America long before you came on the scene, but I remember her.’
Olivia looked down at her hands. ‘My mother said that she hadn’t slept with him for over a year,’ she said tonelessly.
‘She could have lied.’
Her head moved in sharp denial. ‘No. That’s what they were quarrelling about—he knew Simon wasn’t his.’
For all the interest he showed she might have been reciting her times tables. ‘How did your mother die?’
She turned her head away from those intimidating eyes. ‘She—she fell one night and hit her head on the corner of the table.’
‘So how did that lead to her daughter ending up in a place like this with her half-brother? Your stepfather is still alive, I believe.’
‘Yes.’ Shocked by the whispering feebleness of her reply, she stiffened her spine. Damn him, he had no right to interrogate her as though she were on the witness stand! ‘He—was unkind to Simon, so after my mother was—died—I took Simon away.’
His brows drew together. Astute eyes scanned her face in a merciless, unhurried survey. ‘And he let you go? Just like that? A seventeen—no, you’d have been eighteen—’
‘Does it matter?’ She glowered down at her hands, so tightly clasped that the knuckles were white. Her body language, she thought mordantly, couldn’t have been more explicit. Carefully she loosened her grip. He noticed, of course, those narrowed eyes following the betraying little movement.
Swiftly, defiantly, she said, ‘I was nineteen, actually. But however old I was, Simon is your son! As you’ll discover when you have him DNA-tested.’ She tried to hide the disdain in her tone, but feared she’d made a bad fist of it.
Although his eyes rested on her face with insulting indifference, she was sure that she could hear the smooth meshing of gears as his brain sorted out the information he needed. When he spoke she almost jumped again.
‘Tell me why you left your stepfather. And this time no rubbish about him not liking the child. I want the truth.’
Every muscle in her body tensed, but because she had rehearsed the answer the words came easily. ‘He resented Simon. I was afraid he’d hurt him.’
She held her breath, letting it out in a small huff of surprise when he demanded no further explanations. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Why have you waited until now to contact me?’
‘You made it very obvious you didn’t want anything to do with either my mother or your son. Anyway, I didn’t know where you were. After your accident you dropped out of sight completely.’
‘So how did you find out where I was?’
She set her teeth. ‘I saw your photo in the paper.’
‘And you thought, Aha, here’s a pigeon ripe for the plucking—’
‘No! Simon has glue ear, damn you. Do you know what that means? He’s going deaf, and he can’t hear the teacher—can’t understand what she’s telling him, or the sounds she’s trying to teach him in reading. He needs grommets put into his eardrums to drain the ears and every day he waits he drops a little further behind at school.
‘They didn’t pick it up until he’d been at school for a year, so he’s already lost a lot of ground. His behaviour is getting worse too. He used to love school, but now he hates it because the other kids say he’s stupid and call him a dummy. He gets into fights and is disruptive, simply because he can’t hear and can’t keep up. The waiting list to have grommets put in is over a year, and I can’t afford to get it done privately.’
She knew she should tone her aggression down, sound moderate and demure and appealing, but when she thought of Simon’s bewildered suffering during the past year it was all she could do not to swear and shout and throw a tantrum.
‘Your devotion to the child is exemplary.’ He was watching her, his hard mouth compressed into a straight line, grey-green eyes opaque and unmoved. When he continued it was with unnerving precision. ‘But you’ve chosen the wrong man, Olivia. I’m not so conveniently weak I’d let you foist your child on me.’
‘He is not my child.’ Taking in a deep breath, she unclenched her tight jaw and said pleadingly, ‘Drake, please. You can’t turn away from your own son!’
‘You’re right,’ he agreed calmly. ‘I wouldn’t turn away from my own son. It was a nice try, Olivia, but you went about it the wrong way. If you’d written the usual begging letter I might have helped for old times’ sake.’ His eyes wandered openly down her body, returned with cool, speculative contempt to her pale face. ‘I don’t blackmail easily.’
Desperation drove her to say fiercely, ‘If you won’t help him I’ll go to the newspapers and tell them—’
His hands snaked out, catching her wrists in a grip so strong that she winced and cried out. Long fingers relaxing slightly, he said with a soft sibilance that was infinitely more frightening than a loud bluster could ever have been, ‘Stop right now.’
The tumultuous words died on her tongue. She dragged in a shaky breath, suddenly aware that she didn’t really know this man, that they were alone and she was weakened by illness.
Gripped by a sickening fear that she might have done something so irrevocable that all their lives would be marked by it, Olivia’s senses were on full alert; the skin across the back of her neck prickled and tightened, made preternaturally sensitive by her acute awareness of Drake Arundell’s fingers around her wrists. Shocked, she realised that she could smell him—a faint, infinitely troubling scent that set her nerve ends tingling.
Fight or flee, she thought, trying to calm the violent beating of her heart. She couldn’t flee, and intuition warned her that she risked more than she understood if she fought; no wonder tension iced her stomach and clouded her brain.
And then she heard Simon’s voice. ‘Liv!’ he shouted, clattering up the outside staircase. ‘Hey, Liv, guess what? There’s a cool Jag outside! I wonder...’
No! I’m not ready for this! Olivia thought feverishly, wrenching her hands free. Bending so that her face couldn’t be seen, she pretended to pick up a piece of thread from the floor, only straightening when Simon came tearing into the room, honey-gold hair tossing in the wind of his progress, golden-brown eyes sparkling with unaccustomed vitality.
‘...whose it is!’ he finished, skidding to a halt as he took in the tableau in front of him.
‘What are you doing home?’ she asked too sharply. ‘School hasn’t finished yet.’
‘Yes, it has so.’ He flushed, jutting his bottom lip.
Not now! she thought. He had gone through the ‘terrible twos’ with no sign of tantrums, but since his hearing had deteriorated they came frequently.
He thought better of it this time, though. ‘We had a concert and then they sent us home,’ he said, directing sideways looks at the man who was watching him impassively.
Later she’d make sure Simon hadn’t bunked school, but at that moment all she could say was, ‘This is Mr Arundell, Simon.’
‘Hello,’ Simon said, suddenly wary as a half-grown wolf cub. ‘I’m Simon Harley.’ He advanced into the room and looked uncertainly at Olivia.
Drake said, ‘How do you do, Simon?’ and held out his hand.
Cautiously Simon shook it. ‘How do you do?’ he replied, staring up in awe. ‘Is that your car down there?’
Olivia looked from the smooth childish features to the guarded face of the man who had just repudiated his son, and wondered whether she could see some resemblance.
No, none. Like her, Simon bore Elizabeth’s stamp.
And yet... An elusive tingle of memory teased her mind before escaping into oblivion.
‘It is,’ Drake Arundell said, all grey leached from eyes that were now pure green.
Olivia said quietly, ‘Darling, go and wash your hands—they’re filthy.’
‘What?’
She repeated the command in the clear, slightly nasal tone that seemed to get through best to him.
‘OK.’
He gave a respectful smile to Drake Arundell, who waited until the door into the bathroom had closed firmly behind him before saying in a low, level voice, ‘You can’t even claim he looks like me. He’s—’
In an equally muted voice Olivia interrupted, ‘We can’t talk now.’
His head came up as though she had struck him on the jaw. Inwardly quailing at the icy lack of emotion in his eyes, Olivia refused to back down; she stared him directly in the face, silently forbidding him to upset the child who was noisily splashing water over his hands in the bathroom.
‘We aren’t going to talk at all,’ he said curtly. ‘I fight dirty, Olivia. If you annoy me any more I’ll find a painful way to clip your claws.’ He swung around and strode out, long legs moving fast, the set of his broad shoulders and the way he held his head expressing anger and contempt.
Olivia’s breath hissed through her lips. She stood listening to the sounds of the neighbourhood, so familiar that for years she had barely heard them. Cars changed gear and swung around the corner, impatient brakes screeching on the wet tarseal. A siren wailed down the motorway, its imperative command only slightly muted by the houses between.
Her stomach felt as though it had been kicked by a rugby forward. Even though she had rehearsed their meeting ever since posting the letter, she hadn’t been prepared.
But then, nothing would have prepared her for this version of Drake Arundell.
He’s not going to get away with it, she thought fiercely. I’ll find a way...
‘Oh, he’s gone?’ Simon appeared at the bathroom door. Somehow the statement came out as a question heavily underlined with disappointment.
‘Yes.’ Olivia walked across to the sink, drew a glass of water and drank it down.
‘Who is he?’
Although she’d also rehearsed a couple of answers to that question, now that it had been asked neither seemed appropriate. ‘Someone I knew when I was seventeen,’ she said lightly, hoping that it didn’t sound too evasive.
Simon nodded, but she hadn’t stifled his curiosity. They had very few visitors, and none who drove Jaguar cars. ‘Is he coming back?’
‘Possibly,’ she said vaguely, setting the glass down. ‘Make yourself a sandwich, darling, and then I’ll hear you read.’
He pulled a face, but he knew the rules. At least, she thought wearily, she didn’t have to worry about television’s influence on him; they didn’t have a set. As he was beginning to point out more and more frequently.
Simon was clever and quick, but in spite of all her efforts he was rapidly losing ground. Olivia was determined that he should have his chance; he wasn’t going to be sentenced to a life like hers, held back by circumstances.
Facing down Drake Arundell was a small price to pay, and why should he refuse to accept his responsibilities when so far he’d got off scot-free?
Later, as she prepared dinner, she tried to work out another plan of campaign for dealing with the man. She hadn’t expected him to be so—so intimidating, she decided after searching for the word. However, it was too late to worry about that now. If he refused to take a DNA test she’d simply raise such a fuss that he’d have to.
After they’d eaten and done the dishes she dragged out the cheap writing pad and a pen.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Writing a letter,’ she said casually.
Simon’s eyes rounded. They never wrote letters—or got them for that matter. ‘Who to?’ he asked with a guarded curiosity that hurt. A year ago he’d have been filled with eager interest.
‘A man,’ she said, narrowing her eyes mysteriously as she dropped her voice to a significant whisper. ‘And I’m not going to tell you who he is—you’ll just have to wait.’
Grinning, he left her to it, sitting on the sofa which was also her bed to ‘read’ a school library book. Listening to him stumble over words, she thought wearily that these first years at school were vital. If he lost too much ground it could take him years to catch up. And he might become so convinced of his inferiority that he’d never make up the gap.
She finished the letter. But although she had made it much more emphatic, she read it with a furrowed brow. There was nothing in it to stop Drake dismissing it with a flick of those lean, strong fingers.
Absently she touched the place on one wrist where he’d held her fast. He hadn’t hurt her, but she’d known she wasn’t going to be able to escape that grip. A frisson of sensation shivered across her nerves, heating them with a forbidden fire.
What would he be like as a lover?
Immediately the dreamy sensuality was replaced by shocked indignation. No doubt her mother had shivered to the same deliciously sinful sensation, asked herself the same wicked question. But Elizabeth Harley had found the answer—and the knowledge had cost her happiness and peace of mind, and ultimately her life.
Look at it whichever way you liked, Drake owed Simon, and it was time that he did something about it.
Setting her jaw, Olivia tore up the letter and wrote another.
Dear Drake,
I’m sure you wouldn’t like to appear on the cover of something like this. I’ll contact this one if that’s the only way I can find the money for Simon’s operation.
Tomorrow she’d buy an old copy of one of those magazines from the secondhand book shop at the end of the row opposite. Drake would discover that she could fight dirty too, when it was necessary.
The next morning she and Simon went off to school, where she discovered that he had been telling the truth about his early arrival home. Only then admitting to herself how afraid she had been that he’d bunked, she returned home with a marginally lighter heart.
On the way, still inflamed with fury and righteousness, she bought a magazine with the most outrageous and embarrassing headline she could find, tore off the cover, folded it into four and stuffed it into the envelope with her letter, then posted it.
Scarcely two hours after the mailman had collected the mail from the box outside the dairy she realised that Drake could quite easily contact her stepfather and tell him where she was.
At first such terror enveloped her that she collapsed into a chair, her stomach quivering with panic, her mouth moving as she said aloud, ‘He wouldn’t—surely?’
Of course he wouldn’t.
No one, not even a man who had repudiated his son, would willingly put a child in jeopardy.
Not even Drake Arundell.
But although she tried to reassure herself, she couldn’t. The loss of her job meant that her days, once busy to the point of bursting, were now long and too full of empty hours—hours in which she could spin fantasies of Simon being torn from her arms by a vengeful Brian Harley. She even went so far as to get all their clothes out onto Simon’s bed and make them into parcels in case they had to flee from the flat.
Reason prevailed and she put them away, but she began to look nervously about her, seeing a threat in every stranger.
There followed two of the most worrying days of her life. In the evening of the third day after she’d sent the letter the knock she’d been expecting came. Swallowing, deliberately steadying her voice, she said, ‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Open the door, Olivia.’
Wiping suddenly damp palms down her thighs, Olivia did as she was told. Cool, clammy air rushed into the flat, its petrol-scented breath evocative of too many people trying to get home through the rain. Drake loomed in the entrance, yet it wasn’t so much his size that disturbed her as that mysterious thing called presence. Drake had too much, and in his case it was spiced with enough danger to impress even the most foolhardy.
Her eyes flicked across to the child who had curled up on the old sofa-bed and fallen asleep with the unexpectedness of childhood. It was too late now to turn back. All she could hope was that she didn’t show just how nervous she was; Drake would pick up any signs and use them to his advantage.
‘Come in,’ she said quietly.
He looked around, once more taking in the landlord’s cheap furniture, the total lack of anything that looked as though money had been spent on it. His eyes came to rest on Simon, snuggled under the blanket Olivia had draped over him. He frowned. ‘Is that where he sleeps?’
‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘He has a bed in the bedroom.’
‘With you?’
Biting off the words, she retorted, ‘I sleep out here on the sofa-bed.’
Astonishingly he said, ‘The last time I saw you, you were seventeen years old, gleaming golden with the gloss that money and confidence and a good school gave you. Your stepfather was the town’s only accountant—and comparatively rich—and you intended to go to university and become a lawyer. You’ve come a long way from there.’
She pressed her lips together.
He said impatiently, ‘You can tell me about it tomorrow morning at eleven in my office.’
‘I can’t come in to your office—’ she began, indignation edging the words.
‘Keep your voice down. You’ll wake the boy.’
‘His name is Simon, and he won’t wake.’
‘It makes no difference what his name is,’ he returned curtly. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a wallet and opened it, removing a card. ‘Eleven tomorrow morning,’ he reiterated, setting it down on the table. ‘Make sure you’re on time. If you don’t turn up, Olivia, the next person on your doorstep will be a policeman with a warrant for attempted extortion. That second letter was not a good move.’
He turned and went down the stairs, moving swiftly and gracefully. Shivering, Olivia switched off the inside light and walked out to the edge of the balcony.
‘His car was parked in the light of a streetlamp. As she watched he opened the door and got in beside a woman clad in some crimson material. Blonde hair gleamed like satin as she turned a smiling face away from Olivia. Then the car door closed behind Drake and the internal light blinked out.
Shaken, Olivia turned and went back inside.
The next day was fine, one of those brilliant days when the sky was a cool, polished blue so deep that it seemed like a lapis-lazuli bowl inverted over the city. After leaving Simon at school, Olivia set off to walk as far as she could into Auckland before exhaustion forced her to catch a bus.
Five minutes early, she presented herself outside Drake’s office in Grafton, her feelings raw with outrage, her head held so high that her shoulders ached. The building was an elegant block guarded by security men and glossy receptionists, all of whom looked at her with variations of the same smug astonishment.
She knew why Drake had insisted she come here. He’d wanted to intimidate her. And after she’d trekked over an acre or so of slippery marble she had to admit that he had succeeded.
‘This way, please,’ murmured his secretary, a rather large but superbly groomed woman of middle age, as she headed off across more expensive flooring, this time a carpet whose close velvet pile made Olivia’s hot, tired feet curl.
Seated behind a huge, dark wooden desk, Drake was checking through a sheaf of papers. He got to his feet and said, “Thank you, Maria.’ After a narrow-eyed scrutiny of Olivia he added, ‘Bring a tray, please, with something to eat.’
When the door had closed with an expensive lack of noise behind the woman, he said, ‘Sit down, you look worn out.’ He waited until she’d obeyed before resuming his seat behind the desk.
‘I am,’ she snapped, furious with him for making her come all the way here.
That unpleasant smile curled his mouth. ‘Bad night, Olivia?’
‘Not particularly,’ she lied, wondering what he’d say if he ever found out that her sleeplessness had been caused more by the glimpse of the woman beside him than by his threats.
He’d probably laugh; he’d certainly use such knowledge against her.
Her letter and the torn cover of the magazine were in front of him, a jarring, tawdry note in that expensive, restrained room. Drake’s lean, tanned forefinger didn’t quite touch the cheap sheet of writing paper. He said, ‘You have nerve, Olivia, but extortion is a serious crime. And I’m starting to get just a bit sick and tired of this harassment. Push me any further, and I’ll see you in gaol.’
He meant it too. Olivia knew that she’d let her anger override common sense, but she couldn’t back down now. She looked at him steadily.
‘If that’s all you wanted me to come in for, you’ve wasted both my time and yours,’ she said, making no attempt to hide her disdain as she got to her feet. ‘I despise men who think they have some macho right to get women pregnant and then abandon them. Simon needs your help now more than he’ll probably ever need it again. If you never do anything else for him, you can do this. You had your chances; you had loving parents who did their best for you. Simon only has me.’
‘Sit down,’ he said without any inflection.
She shook her head.
‘Sit down, Olivia, or I’ll call the police right here and now.’
She looked into eyes so lacking in anything but an inflexible determination that they froze her right through to her soul. With an enormous reluctance—and only, she told herself, because she was so tired—she sank back into the chair.
‘And if I do this for him,’ he said coldly, ‘what will you want the money for next time? Because blackmailers never stop, Olivia. Even when they believe their reasons for extorting the money are impeccably moral.’
Maria came in with a tray, setting it down in front of Olivia.
‘Thank you,’ Drake said, waiting until the older woman had left the room before commanding, ‘Pour yourself a cup of tea. And eat something, for heaven’s sake. You look like death.’
‘I’ll just have milk,’ she said. ‘I don’t drink coffee or tea.’
‘Still?’ His smile was thin and too perceptive. When she had poured a cup of milk he resumed, ‘Go on, have a sandwich. They’re very good.’
‘How do you know?’ They looked delicious, but pride forbade her to eat anything that he’d paid for.
He laughed softly. ‘I quite often have them for lunch.’
Hoping sourly that one day he’d understand how lucky he was to be able to afford them, Olivia drank some milk. The cool liquid slid down her throat, but instead of soothing the rawness it inflamed it. She took a deep breath and had to hold it to stop an incipient cough; when she finally breathed out, her chest wheezed faintly. Hoping that it wasn’t too audible, she took another sip of milk. She didn’t want to betray any weakness at all—not even physically.
‘All right,’ Drake said calmly, ‘exactly how did you come to be looking after Simon? Why didn’t you go on to university as you planned?’
She finished the milk and looked down at her hands. The sandwiches intruded into her line of sight. Firmly ignoring their seductive appeal, she said with enormous reluctance, ‘I couldn’t leave my mother.’
‘Why not?’
‘She—relied on me. She needed me. She was ill.’
It told the relevant details; it hid so much more.
Eyes the wind-driven grey of an arctic sea scanned her face. ‘Your mother told you that I was the boy’s father?’
‘No,’ she said stiffly, holding herself erect. ‘I overheard her tell my stepfather.’
Drake’s eyes were fastened on hers, as though he could chisel out the truth by merely looking at her.
She had washed her hair and put on lipstick for this interview, and something had driven her to don her one reasonably good skirt and blouse and put up her hair in a French knot. Disgust at the realisation that she was primping for him had made her brush her hair out of the knot so briskly that tears had stung her eyes, and tether the long locks into their usual ponytail.
When he spoke it was in a voice that was cool and dispassionate. Yet she sensed steel beneath the judicial words—the leashed strength of emotions held rigidly in check.
‘You seem to do a lot of overhearing. Why are you so convinced that your mother was telling the truth about Simon’s father?’
‘Because she was my mother,’ she retorted, angry at the slur on her behaviour. She had overheard one quarrel of many. ‘Don’t you believe your mother?’
He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I’d believe my mother if she said I was born an alien on Mars—but then, she has an obsession with the truth. I’ve never known her to perpetrate even a white lie, whereas your mother had a fund of pleasantries she didn’t expect her listeners to believe. How did your stepfather react when your mother flung this bombshell at him?’
‘How would you react?’ she asked bleakly, hating him for his merciless assessment of Elizabeth Harley—an assessment that was, alas, almost true. Her mother had been a superb hostess, eager to make sure that everyone enjoyed themselves in her home. Sometimes that had meant she’d welcomed people she’d disliked. Yet her sincerity had never seemed forced.
‘Badly,’ he said.
A note in his voice sent a shiver chasing across Olivia’s skin. Brian Harley had shouted and blustered and hit her mother with his clenched fist at least once before Olivia had rushed into the room, but at this moment she was more afraid of Drake Arundell than she had ever been of her stepfather.
Contempt cut through the slight roughness of his voice. ‘I wonder why she hated me so much.’
Fire gleamed beneath Olivia’s dark lashes. ‘Perhaps because you abandoned her,’ she said between her teeth. ‘You left her to my stepfather’s tender mercies—’
‘Why the hell did she stay?’ he interrupted, looking at her with an oblique, shuttered watchfulness. ‘Why didn’t she go home to her father?’
Olivia had asked herself the same question a hundred times. But when Drake had abandoned her something had gone out of Elizabeth Harley; it had been as though she’d embraced her life with her husband as a penance.
Shaking her head, Olivia said, ‘My grandfather was ill—he died a couple of months after Simon was born. I don’t know why she stayed at Springs Flat. She just—withered away, lost the will to live.’
‘So what made you run? And the truth this time.’
She sent him a fleeting glance. There was no softness in his face, nothing that gave her any hope that she might be able to fool him.
‘I think my stepfather killed her,’ she said baldly. ‘And I was afraid he would kill Simon.’
The words resounded with ugly significance in the spacious, elegant room. The last time she’d said them had been when she’d asked for refuge with her best friend in Wellington.
She had expected to shock him, but no muscle moved in the harsh, austere face. ‘What makes you think he killed Elizabeth?’ he asked.
‘Two nights before she died he—he came home slightly drunk; I wanted to stay up, but my mother made me go to bed. I heard them quarrelling downstairs and then she came up alone. She was crying and I didn’t go into her—she hated me to see her cry. In the morning I found her unconscious on the floor. She died a couple of days later. At the post mortem it was decided that she’d fallen and hit her head on the bedside table.’
‘You didn’t tell anyone about the quarrel?’
She said, ‘No. I didn’t think then that he’d killed her, otherwise I would have. And the doctor said that although the blow had been enough to send her into a coma, he was surprised that it had been bad enough to kill her.’
‘But—?’ he prompted.
She swallowed and drank a little more of the milk. ‘After the inquest I cleaned up her bedroom and found his tie—the one he’d worn that night—curled up under the bed. I remembered he’d had it on that night because it was his school tie. So I knew he’d been in her room.’
‘There are a hundred different reasons why he could have taken his tie off in her room,’ Drake said.
‘Not the way things were with them,’ she said, knowing that it was hopeless, but compelled to continue.
Her belief in her stepfather’s viciousness was based on much more subtle evidence than the brutal results of a blow, or a tie in the wrong place. But a look, an expression, wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. And it wouldn’t convince Drake.
Nevertheless, she had to try. ‘Anyway—about a fortnight after the funeral, I went in to check on Simon, and my—stepfather—he—’ She stopped, her throat working as she tried to get the words out.
‘Go on,’ Drake said mercilessly.
She looked down at the hands writhing in her lap. It took considerable expenditure of willpower to stop their involuntary movement.
In a remote, brittle voice she said, ‘He was standing by the cot with a pillow in his hands. I said, “Was he restless?” And he said, “Yes. I thought he might like a pillow.” But Simon was never restless; he slept like a log every night. He still does. And there was a look in my stepfather’s face... I knew he didn’t like Simon, but I never knew he hated him. A little boy, and he hated him...’ With an effort she kept her voice steady. ‘So I took him and ran away.’
‘Did he follow you?’
She shivered. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘To a friend—my best friend from school. She was going to Victoria University. In Wellington.’
‘I know where Victoria is,’ he said, smiling lethally. ‘I didn’t go to university myself, but I do read newspapers. And some of my best friends graduated from Victoria.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said, feeling exactly the way he wanted her to—as though she’d tried to patronise him. ‘Emma has a brother, Neil. He was there that night. They didn’t believe me at first, but Emma knows me; she knew I wouldn’t lie. So she suggested that I hide in Neil’s house-truck with Simon while we went across Cook Strait on the ferry. That way my stepfather wouldn’t know we’d left the North Island.’
‘Where did you go then?’
‘I decided to stay with Neil,’ she said. ‘He wanted someone to look after the house and cook meals while he made jewellery.’
It had worked perfectly. For two years she and Simon had wandered with Neil, a kind, gentle man who had made no demands on her. He’d taught her how to cook and she’d earned a frugal living by picking fruit and doing other seasonal jobs. Gradually she learned how to survive legally in a world where she couldn’t risk claiming any benefit other than unemployment for fear of having Simon returned to the man who hated him.
‘And what ended this idyll?’
She flashed him a suspicious glance, but he looked merely a little bored. ‘Neil wanted to go to Australia,’ she said stiffly. ‘I couldn’t go—I didn’t dare get Simon a passport.’
And she had longed for a settled home. Here, in New Zealand’s biggest city, she’d been sure they’d be safe. The flat had been her dingy little haven.
‘I see,’ he said, giving nothing away. ‘So you’ve been here—how long?’
‘Three years.’
Winged black brows lifted. ‘And clearly things are not going well for you.’
‘We’ve managed until now.’ She endeavoured not to sound defensive.
His smile was cold and cruel and pitiless as he homed in on her weak spot. ‘Tell me, Olivia, why did you wait for—it must be eight years, surely, since we saw each other last?’
‘Seven,’ she said, controlling a sudden, baseless fear with an effort.
‘I’m flattered you remember so accurately.’
‘It’s not difficult,’ she said, unable to hide a note of bitterness, although she managed to keep her expression composed. His departure had marked the beginning of the end of her world.
‘So why didn’t you try to contact me five years ago, when you ran away, your babe in your arms in the traditional manner?’
She met the bland enquiry of his gaze with something close to anger. Clearly he wasn’t going to make this easy, but Simon’s future was at stake—and for Simon she would put up with this barely hidden insolence.
Bluntly she said, ‘I’ve already told you. By then you’d gone into hiding after your accident, and anyway I never planned to contact you. But he needs to have his ears done straight away. And you owe him a future, Drake.’
He watched her with half-closed eyes in which all trace of green had been swallowed by an icy grey. ‘You must have known of this rather minor condition of his for some years.’
‘It is not minor!’ she flared. ‘Already Simon’s starting to get bored because he can’t really hear what the teacher is saying. How well would you have done at school if you’d heard everything as though you were six feet under water? His behaviour is deteriorating. These first few years of school are vitally important—’
‘You’ve already had a go at wringing my heart with this spiel,’ he interrupted, the languid tones sharpened now by an edge of steel. ‘Why now, Olivia? Why not five years ago, when your mother died? Why not when you found out about his ears? I want the truth.’
‘Five years ago you were swanning around race tracks enjoying yourself by spraying huge bottles of champagne over anyone who’d stand still for it.’
‘I got hurt the season Simon was born,’ he said, deflating her righteous indignation.
‘Yes, well, I didn’t contact you because I was certain you’d deny it, and I didn’t know there was a way of forcing you to admit paternity,’ she said, not trying to hide her contempt, even though common sense screamed that she should not antagonise him further. ‘But when I read about the DNA test I knew I could make it stick.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
She stared at him, meeting eyes that were cold and pitiless. Something moved in her stomach—a clutch of genuine fear. Slowly she shook her head.
How could a mouth like his—sexy, sensually sculptured—smile so unpleasantly? ‘When were you going to tell me that you need two thousand dollars, Olivia?’ he asked silkily.
Bitterly ashamed, she said, ‘I only want to borrow it...’
‘I’m sure. Tell me how you wound up owing two thousand dollars.’
‘Simon woke up one night with abscesses on his eardrums. I borrowed my next-door neighbour’s car—he was too drunk to drive, but he said it would be all right to use it to take Simon to the hospital. It would have been too, only someone hit me on a roundabout, and neither car had insurance. Brett’s car was totalled.’
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