was another of her mother’s bracing maxims, along with aggressive creed, Don’t get mad, get even!
Purged of her energy-sapping queasiness, Kate suddenly found herself feeling peckish. She fossicked amongst the fresh supplies she had unloaded into the fridge and ate a pottle of yoghurt and some hummus and rice crackers while she waited at the bench for the electric kettle to boil. As she tried to keep her mind from fretting over her next move her gaze swept around the clean but shabby, open-plan kitchen, a far cry from the upscale, central Auckland town house she shared with her friend Sara, and Sara’s cousin Josh. The appliances here were all basic models, functional rather than stylish, probably installed when the house was built. The green clocked wallpaper, faded Formica bench and patterned vinyl flooring looked original, too, but what would have seemed highly trendy three decades ago were now sadly dated. She had barely given herself time to unpack before she had trotted out on her abortive begging expedition, but her impression was that the whole place could do with a facelift. The three-bedroom weatherboard house was well-maintained but there was no sign of any attempt at expansion or renovation over the years, and Kate guessed that its present owner had inherited or bought it with the intention of keeping it as a landbank.
The kettle burbled and Kate occupied herself with the mundane task of making a cup of tea. She discarded the sodden tea bag in the sink and added a splash of milk, stirring it in with unnecessary force as her thoughts returned to the complicated tangle her life had become. Choices that had once seemed clear and simple were now fraught with danger, she thought, staring out the kitchen window at the gnarled pohutukawa tree whose grey-green leaves blocked out the concrete palace that was in the final stages of completion on the other side of the chain-link fence. She hoped that she wasn’t about to get strangled in the web of deceit she had been busily weaving.
She raised the steaming cup to her lips for her first sip when a sudden, intangible sizzle of tension in the air made her stiffen. She jerked around, her heart leaping up into her throat as she realised she was no longer alone.
Standing silently in the arched opening between the kitchen and the living room, looking no more friendly than he had a few minutes earlier, was Drake Daniels.
She hoped he put her little choke of dismay down to the hot tea that had spilled onto her fingers. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she demanded, switching hands to shake off the burning droplets, disgusted to hear that her voice was high and breathless rather than cool and clipped.
‘The door was open,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the verandah. ‘I took it to mean that you were expecting me to follow you…’
‘It’s open because the house is hot and stuffy,’ she snapped. She knew she should play it cool, but the sarcastic words came spilling from her lips before she could stop them: ‘What the hell do you want?’
His dark eyes glinted. He placed a small plastic container down on the Formica table, centring it with a mocking precision. ‘I brought you the sugar you said you needed.’
‘Oh.’ Kate hugged her tea defensively to her chest as she wrestled with her conscience. ‘Thank you,’ she said begrudgingly, knowing full well that his meekness was a sham.
Sure enough, as soon as she had humbled herself, he unsheathed his sword.
‘So, tell me: are you going to leave when you find out you’re wasting your time here? Or is it going to take men in white coats and a restraining order to get rid of you?
‘Are you stalking me?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘STALKING you?’ Kate widened her eyes in amused disbelief. ‘You do fancy yourself, don’t you?’
Her teasing tone made Drake’s mouth thin. ‘Stop playing games, Katherine,’ he growled. ‘How did you find me?’
She sipped her tea and mused on the question. ‘I’ve always found you to be borderline paranoiac, and now it looks like you’ve inched over the line. Maybe the men in white coats should be coming for you…’
‘Very witty—and very evasive.’
She might have known that he’d notice. Words were his business, his strength and his talent…interpreting nuances and assigning subtle layers of meaning to every line of dialogue and paragraph of prose. He would tie her up in verbal knots if she let him. Her best chance was to make simple statements that could be neither proved nor disproved, and then just stick to her guns. Or better still, say nothing at all.
‘You’re surely not going to claim that it’s just pure coincidence that you turned up on my doorstep?’ he accused, taking an aggressive stance, legs astride, hands fisting on his hips, a poster-boy for one of his disaffected heroes. ‘What’s going on, Katherine?’
A tremor of weakness shimmered through her bones. Oh, if only you knew! She looked into his moody countenance and felt the familiar, powerfully seductive tug of physical attraction that was the source of all her current turmoil. She still found it amazing that such a bold, passionate and charismatic man had reacted with such intensity to her ordinary, unremarkable self. That it had also taken him by surprise was evident from his hypersensitivity to any hint of possessiveness, and his thinly veiled restlessness whenever they had been together for any length of time. Sophistication had been the name of the game, and for a while she had actually carried it off.
She caught herself up before she could begin to wallow in bittersweet memories, her determination hardening. Oh, no, she wasn’t going to let herself fall back into that trap! She was no longer that woman—willing to pander to his genius at the expense of her own needs and goals.
‘What’s going on is that I’m taking a long-overdue holiday,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ve accrued so much extra leave over the past two years that my boss was forced to point out a clause in my contract that says I have until next month to use it or lose it—’
‘Marcus?’ he interrupted sharply, latching onto the notion that his New Zealand publisher was involved. His eyes kindled with fury at the treachery. ‘Enright sent you to find me?’
‘Nobody sent me to find you—Marcus has no idea where I am,’ she insisted with perfect truth. Her reputation as a dedicated employee who could always be relied upon to work above and beyond the call of duty to support good client liaisons had taken a knock with her abrupt decision to take all the accumulated weeks owing on such short notice, and it had dived even further when she had rejected Marcus’s belated offer of a compensatory bonus if she sacrificed the accrual. Enright Media was a very tightly run ship, and it had entailed a lot of fast juggling of favours to get others to take on her responsibilities as well as their own while she was away, but as a researcher she was in a good position to know where the bodies were buried, and how and on whom to apply pressure. A disgruntled Marcus had been forced to concede that he had no legal grounds for insisting she break up her holiday allowance into smaller units, particularly as it meant she would be on deck over Christmas, when staff with young families were clamouring to jump ship.
‘I told you, I’m on a holiday. That’s when normal people take a break from their workaday lives to rest, travel or zonk out on a beach somewhere.’
‘And you expect me to believe that of all the holiday homes in all the beach resorts in all the world, you walk into this one?’ he demanded, his deep, velvet-smooth voice steeped in sarcasm.
The paraphrase of the famous line from Casablanca struck a painful chord. It had been Kate’s ability to recognise quotes from old movies and obscure film noir classics that had
