Just Once

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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 smile took on a wickedly sexy smoulder. ‘Ah, an intellectual slut…my kind of woman!’ he growled.

Kate’s nerves skittered at the bizarre sexual imagery induced by his phrase. She didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered.

‘I thought we were here to settle an argument about who played Velda in Kiss Me Deadly,’ she said, glancing at the wide, flat screen hanging on the wall above a sleek, electronic box. ‘You said we could watch it here on DVD.’

‘I have a better idea,’ he said, walking towards her.

‘Oh?’ Her tongue darted out to moisten her dry lips, heat beginning to flush through her belly and breasts at the fierce expression in his eyes. He hadn’t kissed her in the taxi coming over, but he had wanted to, and his restraint had made his desire all the more exciting.

‘We both know Maxine Cooper was Velda, so let’s forget the movie and I’ll show you the real reason I always stay in this particular penthouse…’ he purred, taking her hand and beginning to lead her towards the spiral staircase in the corner of the room.

Oh, God, what height of decadence was he about to reveal? A solid-gold bed with sheets of red silk? A black marble spa pool filled with champagne?

But they kept climbing up past the sprawling main bedroom and stepped out through folded shutters into a magical scene, shaded lights around the high walls illuminating a lush green jungle of plants and a riot of heavily perfumed spring flowers.

‘The roof garden…for my exclusive, and very private use…’he said softly, allowing her to walk ahead of him across the dense fan of green grass that divided into winding pathways of creeping groundcover curving around enclosed thickets of soft ferns and spiky palms.

‘It’s fantastic,’ she murmured, her high heels sinking into the turf as she paused by a shrub smothered in starry-white flowers and inhaling the heady night-perfume of Mexican orange blossom.

‘That’s what I think. Whenever I’m here in town and I start to feel like a victim of my own success, I skip out on the crowds and come up here to mellow out for a while. It’s the perfect cure for mood disorders…a little piece of Eden. And now it has its very own Eve…’ She heard a faint activating beep and turned to the sound of soft music rising from hidden speakers.

To her shock Drake had shed his footwear and his white silk shirt and was stripping the belt from his dove-grey trousers. At her gasp his hands stilled.

‘Have you changed your mind?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to claim that he was assuming way too much. But they would both know it for a lie.

‘No, but—I…should we? Out here?’

‘Why not? It’s warm, the grass is soft and the air is sweet, and we’re literally closer to heaven than anywhere else in town. But if you’re worried we might get buzzed by a police helicopter…’He picked up the remote control he had used to operate the sound system from the glass table beside him and pressed a button. With a low rumble a curved roof of tinted panels extended from the far end of the walled garden and eclipsed the distant stars, finally clicking home against the granite side of the building.

When Kate looked down from this fascinating piece of engineering Drake was stepping out of the last of his clothes, exposing himself without false modesty to her wide-eyed gaze, his large hands, curled into loose fists, hanging quietly at his sides, the angle of the lights painting intriguing shadows in the hollows of his sculpted perfection.

‘I want to make love to you now,’ he told her with arrogant confidence.

‘So I see,’ she said shakily, trying to look and sound blasé rather than panic-stricken by his impressive proportions, the thick nest of dark hair in his groin framing a magnificence that would put any one of his highly sexed heroes in the shade.

He shifted restlessly, the muscles bunching in his thighs. ‘Aren’t you going to reciprocate?’ he murmured, nodding at the classic, sleeveless ‘little black dress’ that she had dressed up for the evening function with cropped blue jacket of oriental design.

Not quite sure how to begin, Kate automatically did what she would normally do at home when preparing for bed, and reached up to pull the pins out of her smooth chignon and let her hair flow like warm caramel through her fingers, shaking her head to fan out the remaining kinks. Then she hesitated, biting her lip as she wondered where she was going to put the pins.

‘That’s it?’ he rasped tightly. ‘That’s all you’re going to do? You’re not even going to take off your shoes?’

She thought he was angry, impatient with her nervousness. ‘Uh, no, I—’ The pins fell from her fingers, spearing silently into the grass around her feet as she realised he wasn’t angry at all…far from it! If it was possible, he appeared to be even more aroused than before, prowling towards her stiff-legged, his eyes gleaming black in the muted light, the tension in his voice purely sexual.

‘You playing the tease, Katherine?’

‘No, of course not!’ she denied breathlessly, hypnotised by the fluid play of light and shadow across the shifting planes of his hard body as he continued his hunting prowl across the grass, masculinity personified. As she watched he unfurled a fist, and showed her a palm full of little foil packets. So many? She felt a thrill of exquisite apprehension tingle through her bones, her confidence overpowered by his physiological perfection, her own physical flaws suddenly magnifying themselves in her mind. She instinctively wrapped her jacket across her breasts as he came to a halt, his body crowding hers.

‘No? The blushing virgin, then?’ he said, tossing the handful of foil to join her scattered hairpins.

She blushed.

‘Hardly!’

‘You’ve been around, then?’ he said slyly, plucking at the lower edge of the jacket where it poked out below her folded arms.

She tilted her nose up at his deliberate crudity. ‘No, I have not “been around”,’ she sniffed. ‘But I have occasionally been in the vicinity,’ she admitted with a prim dignity that made his teeth flash white in the darkness.

‘Not my vicinity, sweetheart, or you wouldn’t be acting so cool.’

Cool? She was practically burning up!

‘It’s just—’ She felt something warm—something hard yet invitingly soft—kiss her belly button through her skirt, but she didn’t dare look down for fear of losing what little remained of her self-control.

‘Just what?’ he goaded. ‘Just that you’re getting cold feet?’

Damn it, if he backed off now she would kill him! She forced her arms to loosen. ‘No!’

‘No,’ he echoed with gritty satisfaction. ‘So it must be that you’re just too prim and proper to get naked on a first date,’ he taunted cockily, his heavy hands settling on her bony hips, his long thumbs massaging the slippery fabric over the smooth skin of her lower belly. ‘You’ve already decided on letting your hair down with me…’he leaned forward to brush his face through the shiny curtain veiling the side of her neck, and inhale the subtle scent of her shampoo mingled with the faintest trace of musky feminine arousal ‘…mmmm…but the lady obviously wants to be warmed up a little before the main action. You don’t want to take them off, ergo you want me to make love to you with your clothes on…’

Her silver eyes widened. ‘You can do that?’ she blurted foolishly.

Her scepticism made him purr like a sexy tiger.

‘Oh, baby, I can do anything you want…’

His big hands slid caressingly down her flanks and slipped under the knee-length hem of her dress, raking up the skirt with his forearms as his hands stroked slowly back up her legs to span her hips.

‘Hmm, stockings…that makes things easy…’ he discovered on the way up. ‘Oh, no…stay-ups,’ he corrected himself as his fingers found the delicate band that encircled the silky-fine skin of her upper thighs. ‘Even easier…’

He sighed when he found the narrow strip of lace drawn tight over her hip-bones. ‘Rippable?’ he murmured wistfully, winding one stretchy ribbon around a questing finger, drawing the whisper of satin passing between her legs ravishingly tight against her moistened core.

She squeaked and he laughed, pulling her flush against his scalding nakedness, letting her feel the urgent insistence of his arousal, the rough thicket in his groin catching against her smooth panties. He widened his stance, cupping her bottom as she trembled in a fever of eagerness. ‘Never mind, we’ll work around them,’ he promised in a throaty growl, gathering her tight between his hair-roughened thighs, tipping her off balance as he lifted one of her legs and draped it around his hip. ‘I love a challenge…’

He ducked his head and nuzzled aside the jacket to find the outline of her bra against the smooth fabric of the dress, navigating his skilful way to the press of her nipples.

Kate tilted her head back, closing her eyes as she felt the rake of his teeth through the cloth and the simultaneous hot slide of his hardness rocking against her creamy centre, unable to believe this was really happening…She was allowing herself to be ravished by a naked stranger on a rooftop—and she was loving every wicked moment of it!

In a night of glorious firsts she learned that Drake Daniels was very much a man of his word. He delivered on his sensual promise, making love the same way he wrote his books—with fierce concentration and meticulous attention to detail, and a dedication to delivering a climax worthy of his wildly thrilling build-up!

After they had made love several times under the stirring palms they moved inside to the palatial bedroom, and later down to the main part of the suite where they fuelled their sensual excesses from the lavishly stocked bar fridge, and resumed their sexy badinage through a much-interrupted viewing of Kiss Me Deadly.

Neither of them slept and in the morning Kate was staggering slightly as she fumbled into her crumpled clothing, aware that having to go home to change was going to make her horribly late for work.

Sitting in the middle of the bed, his lower body swathed in a white sheet, looking very much like a dissipated Greek god, Drake followed her preparations to flee with hooded eyes. His watchful silence made her even more self-conscious.

‘I’m never late,’ she muttered, stuffing her laddered stockings into her purse and sliding her feet into her grass-flecked heels, uncertain of how to stage-manage a graceful exit.

‘This was not a good idea…’ She meant lingering overlong in his bed, but to her dismay Drake took up her theme.

‘Neither of us was thinking—it was nothing to do with choice, it was pure sexual chemistry,’ he said abruptly, the dark growth of beard giving his face a saturnine look. He braced himself on one arm, the folds of the sheet pooling in his lap. ‘Don’t worry, it’s like fireworks—dazzling but essentially ephemeral. If we let it alone it’ll fizzle out.’ The melting brown eyes hardened with cynical resolve. ‘But you’re right—this can’t happen again. It would be a mistake to try and turn it into something that it’s not. As it happens, I’m off to LA the day after tomorrow, for an extended book tour across the States…’

Kate disguised her sudden pallor by turning to the full-length wardrobe mirror and raising her arms to fold her hair into a neat self-knot at the nape of her neck in the absence of most of her pins.

He was telling her not to make any plans that included him. They had no future together.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Drake’s partial reflection past her bent elbows. He was rubbing the centre of his chest with the heel of his hand, as if massaging an ache. He wasn’t half as relaxed as he looked, she decided, noting the tension in the set of his head and the fist at the end of his braced arm. Perhaps he expected her to throw a tantrum at his frank rejection of any emotional connection between them, or, worse, to pout and insist on a long-drawn-out discussion of their feelings.

She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she had believed they had something special.

Lesson number two in dealing with the unpredictable Drake Daniels:

Never give him what he expects.

She brightened her expression and turned around. ‘Right. A mistake. Well…I’ll be off, then. See you around. No, don’t bother to get up and see me out.’ She waved a casually dismissive hand as he made a sharp movement under the sheets. ‘I’m quite happy to make my own way. I’ve been doing it for some years now,’ she pointed out with only the barest hint of sarcasm.

‘Oh, and if you find yourself in need of another chemistry lesson…feel free to give me a whistle.’

Before he could recognise that vague allusion she had reached the spiral staircase, where she paused to look provocatively back over her shoulder, and hit him square between the eyes with a husky rendition of classic exit-line.

‘“You know how to whistle, don’t you,” Drake?’