AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She raised her eyes to his face. ‘Is that—?’
He smiled grimly. ‘I’m sure there’s more than one James John Richardson in the world, but Marcus says that this particular one claims to be my long-lost father. He sent Enright’s a letter asking for this one to be passed along.’
‘Do you think he is?’
‘I know he is. I made sure I always knew where the bastard was, and that he never knew who I was.’
‘Are you going to read it?’
He stood up, his body stiff with rejection. ‘He’s nothing to me. I have no interest in communicating with him—ever.’
‘But it could be important—’
‘No!’ He turned on his heel. ‘You read it if you’re so interested. I have work to do….’
Kate contemplated the envelope for a long time after he left before she picked it up and ran her knife along the flap. The letter inside was a single sheet, typed.
When she went up to his office, Drake was standing on the balcony, looking over the beach, his arms braced against the solid rail. He didn’t look at her as she quietly came up beside him, the letter open in her hand.
‘He wants money, of course,’ he told her harshly.
She had done his research, now he needed her précis. ‘He said he saw your photograph in a bookshop and knew who you were because you look just like his other sons. He did some digging and says he thinks the press would be very interested in the pitiful story he has to tell, if you won’t help him out of his financial difficulties. He says you owe him for putting up with your mother’s craziness long enough to have you. That you’re rich enough for a few hundred grand not to make any difference to you. How did you know?’
‘Because it was never going to be a letter of reconciliation and remorse.’ His smile was a rictus of bitterness. ‘He never had any remorse for what he did. He can rot in hell for all I care.’
‘But if he sells his story—?’
‘Let him,’ he ground out. ‘All publicity is good publicity according to Marcus—right? The scandal might even sell me a few hundred more books.’
‘Drake—’ She put her hand on his shoulder and he shrugged away her sympathy with a violent jerk of his body.
‘My name was Michael James Richardson. I was taught to be very proud of my father, to do everything I could to be a good son. But not good enough. Because after he left my father had another son, and he christened him Michael James Richardson. He took even my identity from me, wiped me out as if I didn’t exist. So I wiped him out. Let him bring on the world—he’s getting nothing from me!’
That night, he took her with an almost painful ferociousness and afterwards, their bodies spooned together, his palm resting heavily on her belly, he told her about his little brother, Ross, who was born when he was nine.
‘I don’t know who the father was, but it was probably one of my mother’s dealers, I suppose—she was taking everything she could by then and would do pretty much anything for a fix—or one of her coke-head friends. She claimed James had come back and wanted her to have his baby, and that made her try to clean up for a while, but it didn’t last much past the birth. So I was the one who looked after Ross. I fed him and changed him, lied to the welfare and stole to get him clothes.’ The darkness made Kate super-sensitive to the rising tension in his body and voice and she closed her hand around his strong wrist, anchoring him to her warmth as she realised what must be coming. ‘Only I couldn’t be there all the time,’ he said thickly, ‘and when he was four he got sick and my mother was too high to notice anything wrong. By the time I got home from school it was too late; he had a big rash that turned out to be meningococcal disease. He died the next morning.’
Kate felt the first tremor and rolled over, wrapping him in her arms as he buried his face in her hair.
‘God, Kate, it happened so fast.’ She felt the wetness on her neck, the echo of agonised bewilderment in his voice. ‘One day he was there, the next he was gone as if he’d never existed. Just like my father. Just like my mother when she killed herself six months later. Ross had had one chance for life, and that was me, and I wasn’t there for him. I was his surrogate father and I let him die. Do you wonder that I couldn’t cope with the thought of being responsible for another child?’
Kate held him in her arms as he silently wept, whispering her love in her heart, and perhaps, in her effort to give him solace, she might even have whispered it into the dark hair that brushed against her cheek as he bowed his head on her breast. It was no time to point out that Ross might have died anyway, that meningococcal was a fast and ruthless killer that even medical personnel sometimes failed to recognise in time.
In his mind he knew that but his heart still harboured that thirteen-year-old’s bitter grief. Drake had taken the guilt upon himself and it had petrified over time into a stony barrier to love, pushing out anything that might threaten to make him revisit that traumatic sense of loss.
Kate didn’t know whether the night was cathartic for Drake, for he was already up and working when she woke the next morning, but for her it made her next action essential.
There was one thing they hadn’t ever touched on in the past few weeks, and that was their first, cataclysmic coming together upstairs in his bedroom, when Drake had violated his most fundamental rule.
Just once.
Perhaps Drake still didn’t realise his inexplicable oversight, or had forgotten or blocked it from his mind, but for Kate the lapse had begun to loom increasingly large in her thinking. And now it had assumed a critical significance.
Which was why she sloped off to Whitianga under the guise of a shopping trip, to re-visit the doctor. She still had not had a period, and this time she was leaving nothing to chance. At the risk of making a fool of herself she was going to get herself thoroughly checked out.
Just once.
Just once without a condom or any other form of contraception. What were the chances for a woman whose over-stressed body had already stopped menstruating? she lectured herself on the road. Minuscule. At best. She had turned out not to be pregnant last time, and this time would be no different.
