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‘We keep country hours here in Oyster Beach,’ he said, and strolled away while she was still grappling with her new perspective on his life.
Had that little bout of unaccustomed openness been a bribe or an enticement? she wondered as she watched him go. A warning or an invitation? Either way he must know he had her hooked.
She approached his house that evening with some trepidation, but, to her surprise, Kate enjoyed the dinner, and the company. After some slight initial stiltedness the atmosphere had relaxed as the conversation had inevitably turned to books and become wide-ranging and general. Drake looked askance at her when she refused a glass of wine, but he readily accepted the excuse of her illness earlier in the day, and when her offer to help Melissa in the kitchen was snapped up he seemed bemused.
‘I didn’t know you could cook,’ he said as she expertly whisked up a sauce for the vegetables.
‘You never asked.’ He knew damned well that he had been careful to steer well clear of cosy, domestic settings. They had always dined out or at his hotel when they were together. ‘Actually, I’m a superb cook.’
She was slightly smug when she saw that Melissa had taken the easy way and crumbed the scallops but the meal was delicious and her compliments sincere.
By the time she wended her way back home under a star-pricked sky she was well pleased with her performance. She had played it low-key with Drake and not made any attempt at intimacy, conspiring tacitly with Melissa to keep the conversation away from the personal and firmly focused on more entertaining issues.
After dinner, instead of sophisticated banter they had engaged in an argumentative game of Scrabble in which Kate had been ignominiously crushed by the two fiercely competitive professionals. However, a round of Trivial Pursuit had given her the chance to trounce them both and restored her buckled self-esteem.
The perfect ending to a slightly traumatic and wholly enlightening day.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE next week was a curious mixture of good and bad. For two days after Melissa left Kate didn’t see hide nor hair of Drake, but she did see a great deal of his hairy companion.
‘What’s the matter, Prince, is he ignoring you, too?’ she asked on the third morning, putting down a plastic bowl with the meagre trimmings of the meat she had cooked the previous night, mixed with some boiled rice.
After finding the light rubbish bin outside the kitchen door tipped over and the scallops chewed out of their newspaper wrapping and left scattered on the grass, she had roundly scolded the dog, who had managed to look so downcast at being accused of the crime that she had relented and started feeding him more substantial snacks.
If Drake objected to her suborning his dog he could come over and complain about it but, as he had pointed out, Prince was a shameless scavenger and was probably fed by locals up and down the beach.
Since she had always lived in places with restrictions on owning animals Kate had never had a furred pet, but she was determined her child would have more than a goldfish to cuddle and love. Not an energy-sucking giant like Prince, but something suitable for a small yard. Trained to be careful with money, Kate had saved up more than enough for a deposit on an older do-up in one of the outer suburbs, or a town house with a back garden in one of the newer intensive-housing developments. She knew she couldn’t expect emotional or financial support from her mother, and she still had no idea what to expect from Drake. Things might be tough for a while if she had to go it alone, but she would cope.
‘You should tell your owner that all work and no play makes Drake a very dull boy,’ she suggested to Prince as he wolfed down the food in two bites and overturned the bowl to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
She wondered if she had made a mistake in thinking that Drake’s confidences of the other day might herald a promising new phase in their relationship.
‘But dull is relative, I suppose,’ she told the dog.
No doubt Drake was deeply engaged in some death-defying heroics via his latest alter-ego. His thrillers weren’t written as a series linked by the same central characters, as many other, highly successful thriller-writers chose to do. Drake rebuilt his world from the ground up with every book. Each featured a new cast, new country, new conflict…and a new girlfriend to betray the hero, or to be kidnapped, tortured, murdered or otherwise threatened in an attempt to subvert his desperate cause. Innocence was no defence in Drake Daniels’ novels. It always seemed to presage disaster for the woman when any of Drake’s cynical heroes began developing tender feelings towards her, and making plans for the future.
The way he dumps his girlfriends in real life when they start getting too close, and demanding too much of his attention, she mused.
‘Perhaps I’m better off with him being wary and suspicious,’ she said to Prince. ‘Do you think I should just tell him about being pregnant and brazen it out, or lead up to it gradually and risk him accusing me of trying to trick him?’
Prince thought she should wear a plastic bowl on her head and roll around on the grass, and then dash down to the beach and dig holes.
Kate declined, but she did allow him to tag along when she went for her afternoon walk, and on the
way back around the flat, rocky point she met Drake coming towards her.
‘So this is where you are!’ he declared, halting. He was wearing faded khaki hiking shorts and a Hawaiian shirt hanging open over his tanned chest, the sheen of perspiration on his skin indicating that he had been walking briskly.
‘Are you talking to the dog, or to me?’ said Kate, looking up at him from the shade of her straw hat. ‘I thought you were busy working.’
‘I’ve been working since six a.m. I’m taking a short break.’ He picked up a stick of driftwood and threw it towards the sea. Prince sat and watched it arc over and hit the wet sand just in front of the waves, then trotted over and gummed it up, delivering it back to Drake with an air of patient long-suffering that made Kate snicker.
‘I’ve never seen a dog be sarcastic before. I didn’t ask him to come, you know, he just followed me,’ she said, warmed by the thought that he had missed either of them.
Drake turned and fell in beside her as she picked her way through the scattered stones. ‘You don’t “ask” Prince to do anything, he’ll do just what he damned well pleases—how do you think he got his name?’
She knew from the offhand warmth in his tone that ‘Prince’ was a term of affection, not derision.
