Just Once - Susan Napier

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persuaded herself that she was content with the status quo. She was a realist—a practical, self-sufficient, modern woman. She had a fabulous lover, a demanding job with a good salary, and plenty of friends to pal around with when Drake was out of town. No ties suited her just fine. And up until now she had been far too absorbed in her career to even think about having babies…

      Dry flakes of cracker stuck in her throat, forming a lump that refused to budge.

      Drake had been in Auckland for three whole months prior to taking off to work on his new book—the longest continuous period they had spent together. Kate had dared to hope it indicated that they were reaching a new level of trust. At first she had put down her persistent feeling of nausea after he had left to depression, then to the remnants of a late bout of winter flu combined with a rush-job involving a biographer who needed help reconstructing hand-copied notes that a drunken ex-wife had tried to flush down the toilet. But her weight gain and the tenderness in her breasts were less easy to dismiss and when she’d counted back and realised that she was ten days overdue she had rushed out and bought a test-kit from the pharmacy. Her hands had been shaking so hard when she’d used the dipstick that it had taken a while to confirm the earth-shattering truth.

      She was pregnant with Drake Daniels’ baby!

      She had stopped taking the pill immediately, but it had taken days for the reality of her situation to sink in, and when it had she had set about tackling it with her usual pragmatism. She’d worked out that she was unlikely to be more than a few weeks pregnant. Unlike her mother, who had married a fellow university student for the sole purpose of exploiting a loophole in the student allowance scheme, Kate had discovered her accidental pregnancy early enough to give her a full range of options.

      She had made herself carefully consider them all, before choosing the only one that was ever going to be acceptable to her woman’s heart.

      She was not going to have an unwanted child.

      This baby was already an indivisible part of her, a symbol of her love, a triumph of hope over pessimism. Her baby had conquered almost impossible odds to be conceived; it was now up to Kate to take over the fight for the best of all possible futures.

      She didn’t fool herself that Drake was good father material. But he was going to be a father, and she had to decide whether she wanted him in her baby’s life. She had suffered too much from her own parents’ selfishness to want to burden another child with the pain of constant emotional rejection. Until she had made that decision she vowed to tell no one of her condition, her confidence in her ability to be a good mother still too fragile to risk exposing it to the opinions of the wider world.

      So she had tracked Drake down to his lair in a desperate attempt to try to establish a better understanding between them before her secret was exposed by her burgeoning body. She had to decide when and how to tell him about the pregnancy, and discover just how much involvement he might want—and she could bear—after the baby was born.

      The morning was cool but with the promise of later heat, so Kate pulled on a gauzy skirt and loose tee shirt and caught her hair up into a jaunty pony-tail. She ate a dry piece of toast with a smear of honey and, when she was confident it was going to stay down, indulged the sharp onset of hunger by slicing up a banana and a kiwi fruit into a bowl and spooning over a generous dollop of low-fat vanilla yoghurt. Carrying the bowl in one hand and a cup of green tea in the other, she wandered out to the verandah and perched on the step to eat a leisurely breakfast. The water out in the bay was like shimmering glass, the only movement the gentle ripple of wavelets overturning at the edge of the beach and the swoop and splash of a pied shag arrowing into the water and re-emerging with a squirming fish, which it swallowed with a few flicks of its long neck before flapping off to dry its wings on a rocky outcropping. Licking the last of the yoghurt off her spoon, Kate left the bowl on the step and strolled down to the beach with her green tea. The sand was cool under her bare feet and the crystal-clear water shockingly cold as she paddled out to ankle depth.

      As she turned to wade back to shore she saw a lone male figure standing on the upper deck of the house next door. He was shirtless, his dark mahogany chest smooth and glossy in the sunlight, his tapering torso cut off at the waist by the solid balcony wall, making her wonder if he was fully nude. Drake didn’t own any pyjamas and was totally unselfconscious about his body when he wasn’t intent on using it for pleasure. The first night they had made love she had been shocked by his lack of inhibitions, and very aware of her own hesitancy in flaunting her nakedness. She had tried to disguise her embarrassment, but to her amazement he had been powerfully aroused by her reticence.

      If she hadn’t had a few more drinks than usual at the book launch, she probably wouldn’t have had the courage to accept Drake’s invitation back to his hotel room.

      She felt an electrical tingle in her veins at the memory of the weight of his hand on the small of her back as he had unlocked the door to his room. Once inside she had drifted out of his reach, surveying the huge, split-level suite with assumed amusement that had hid a glittering rush of nervous excitement.

      ‘Rather over-the-top for one person, isn’t it?’ she commented, eyeing the polished black marble pillars, jewelled rugs and luxurious furnishings.

      He grinned, tossing his black leather jacket over the back of an antique chair and snagging her evening purse to drop it on the seat. ‘Marcus works a great contra-deal for me with the international owner, who’s a big a fan of my books.’

      ‘You mention his hotels in your books in exchange for free rooms?’ asked Kate dubiously.

      ‘Bite your tongue, sweetheart; I don’t play the sap for no one,’ he sneered, in a passable Bogie imitation. Given his reputation for laughing criticism to scorn, she was surprised when he added: ‘Contrary to what the intellectuals say, I do have some artistic ethics. I don’t abuse my readers with subliminal advertisements buried in my text. It’s an up-front arrangement—I do all my press conferences and interviews in his hotels worldwide, and I autograph first editions for him. And the rooms aren’t free, I still pay something—but nothing like the rack-rates, so why not enjoy the best on offer? I happen to like the extravagant contrast to the austerity of my other life—my writing life,’ he added when she tilted her head quizzically. ‘The months when I shrink my world to the size of a keyboard and screen and live like an ascetic. That’s why I need to let off steam every time I emerge from my monastic cell—to reduce the risk of a creative meltdown.’

      ‘Writers have a much higher than average occurrence of mood disorders, especially depression,’ Kate murmured, wondering whether she was being naïve to hope she was more than just a convenient escape valve. Not that it mattered. In the space of a few hours the intense euphoria she felt when they had briefly shaken hands during their introduction had developed into a relentless craving; a single, stolen kiss in an empty corner of the crowed room merely confirming her addiction.

      ‘Do we really?’ he drawled.

      She smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry—occupational hazard for a researcher.’

      ‘You must have a great deal of interesting information squirreled away in odd corners of your brain, waiting to spring out of your subconscious,’ he said, his brown eyes narrowing in a fleeting moment of abstraction that made her feel totally invisible.

      ‘Yes, but it’s what you do with it that matters,’ she said with a wry shrug. ‘A lot of it is very esoteric or trivial. Don’t confuse memory with intelligence.’

      His attention snapped back with uncomfortable intensity. ‘What makes you think you’re not intelligent?’

      She thought of her endless struggles with hated school exams, and her mother’s coruscating lecture when Kate had secretly interviewed for a job instead of applying for university.

      ‘Not unintelligent…’ That was what had so infuriated her mother. She had viewed Kate’s abysmal marks as a wilful act of rebellion. ‘Just…um…intellectually unfocused.’ This was definitely not the time to be worrying about what her mother might think! ‘I suppose I tend to be a Jill of all trades and mistress of none,’ she finished lightly.

      His

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