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It wasn’t until she’d forced down a cheese and pickle sandwich in order not to make even more of a liar of herself that she remembered the scallops she had left in the front seat of her car.
She went to fetch them and stowed them on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Then, worried they might have already gone off by sitting for more than an hour in the hot sun, she took them out to put them to the sniff test. They seemed fine, but to risk eating spoiled seafood was foolish when any toxic reaction had the potential to hurt her baby. Anyway, she had gone off the idea of a dinner party, she thought as she wrapped the scallops in newspaper and placed them in the rubbish bin outside the kitchen door.
So she was stunned when, later that afternoon, Drake knocked at her door and asked her over for dinner, hastening to add that he wasn’t doing the cooking.
‘Melissa’s going to do scallops—she always insists on doing the cooking when she’s here; it’s the only way she claims she can get a decent meal,’ he said, unknowingly rubbing salt in her wounds.
‘I don’t think I—’
‘It’s in the nature of a farewell dinner. Melissa goes back home tomorrow.’ The casualness of his words were belied by the sensuous awareness in his eyes. Tomorrow one source of upheaval between them would be gone. Melissa would go back to her husband and Drake would…what? Retreat? Or advance?
‘She’d really like you to come,’ he said, strolling back to the verandah steps and turning to say, ‘And so would I.’
‘The two women in your life at the same table?’ she said drily, following him out.
‘I quail,’ he admitted, but with a slight smile that was infinitely reassuring.
So much so that Kate decided to take the gamble: ‘Or are there perhaps a few other women in your life that we should invite, to forestall any future
confusion about who fits exactly where?’
‘Well, there’s always your mother,’ he replied lightly. ‘You could say she fits around the fringe of my life—by way of producing you.’
He and her mother had only met a few times when their paths had crossed socially, and to Kate’s secret relief they had cordially disliked each other. Drake didn’t like the way that her mother tried to dominate him with her relentless, battering logic, the way that she had hectored Kate as a child and still continued to denigrate her hopes and dreams as an adult, and Jane Crawford had hated that she couldn’t influence his opinions or command his attention and respect and thus prove her superiority over the male sex. As a consequence she had been contemptuous of Drake’s success, expressing cold disappointment that Kate should let her silly public infatuation for a ‘chain-store novelist’ destroy any hopes of her being taken seriously as a career woman.
But if Drake had been the kind of man to kowtow to her mother, Kate wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.
‘No, thanks.’ She used the mocking offer as the springboard for her retaliation. ‘But I am sorry that I’ll never get the same chance of inviting the woman who produced you to dinner,’ she said, just as lightly. ‘That might have been interesting.’
His mouth twisted. ‘No,’ he said tightly, ‘it wouldn’t.’
‘Of course not,’ she sighed, half turning away to watch a dinghy being rowed out to one of the moored motor yachts.
‘Because she only had one topic of conversation.’
‘And what was that?’ she asked carelessly, looking back at him, still expecting to be greeted by one of his usual witty evasions.
‘Her husband. He was everything in the world to her, quite literally. Even though he dumped her for another woman when I was six—walked out, divorced her, moved overseas to remarry and never contacted her again—she still clung to the fantasy that he was going to come back. She loved him therefore he must love her, and when the truth began to seep through the cracks of her obsession she blotted it out with drugs. She committed suicide when I was a teenager, not because she wanted to die, but because, according to the twisted reasoning in her note, she was proving to him how much she loved him, by showing that she couldn’t live without him…’
It was a shock to hear the ugly story laid out so casually on a sunlit step. His almost clinical detachment made it sound as if he were discussing a plot in one of his books, but the underlying bleakness in his voice exposed it for the painful truth. No wonder he didn’t like to talk about his childhood.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said, carefully reining in her sympathy. She looked out at the yacht, rocking now as the dinghy tied up alongside, fighting down her desire to pepper him with questions, trying to act as if his personal revelations were an everyday occurrence. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Few do…fortunately I’d legally changed my name as soon as I was old enough, so my past stops there. The press find PR rumours more interesting anyway; no one cares about tracing some kid called Richardson.’ He shrugged, following her gaze to the activities of the oarsman in his bright orange life-jacket. ‘You know what the real kicker was?’ he murmured, after a moment.
She remained silent, afraid of stemming the dark tide of words.
‘When her husband left her, my mother thought that she could use me to keep him tied to her for ever. But instead he simply cut his losses, and immediately had another son, to replace the one he’d left behind. While my mother was telling me to set a place for Daddy every night, he was creating a whole, shiny new family for himself in Australia—two boys and a girl. So when he finally found out his crazy ex-wife had killed herself he wasn’t interested in being foisted with the product of her tainted love. And since there was no one else to claim me, I went into the foster-care system…’
‘Her husband’…She noticed how he never said ‘my father’—and Kate couldn’t blame him. Since her parents had separated even before she was born she had not been a witness to any emotional carnage. At least she and her genial, happy-go-lucky father had had some contact with each other over the years—mostly letters exchanged behind her mother’s disapproving back, and the occasional visit to the islands when she had been old enough to afford to pay, since Barry Crawford was chronically short of money and could rarely be bothered to bestir himself from beneath his beloved palm trees. Her father hadn’t wanted the rights or responsibility of custodial parenthood, but he hadn’t ignored her whole existence!
She darted a look at the chiselled perfection of Drake’s profile, her heart aching for him, and for her baby. No longer did it surprise her that Drake had always been so bitterly opposed to having a family. In his experience love and marriage were associated with obsession and abandonment, with children merely pawns or weapons in their parents’ hands.
He turned his head, capturing her sideways glance, and raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Shall we say six o’clock for dinner?’
‘Yes, all right,’ she murmured, taken off guard by the sudden switch from the momentous to the mundane.
