Robyn Donald - Element Of Risk

Head held high, chin tilted, she waited beside the grave. He’d see the results of her grief, but she wasn’t ashamed of it.

His face was set in lines of harsh restraint. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

She said, ‘I brought flowers.’

He closed his eyes as though she couldn’t have said anything more painful. On a note of bitterness she finished, ‘I loved her too, Luke.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said heavily, looking down at the bunch of cottagey flowers, bright cornflowers and spray carnations in a froth of white gypsophila.

‘She was so kind to me,’ Perdita said.

He jerked his head away but she saw the flash of naked emotion in his pale eyes. Gripped by compassion, she touched his arm. He had rolled up his sleeves, so her fingers were pale and slender against the tanned forearm with its light dusting of hair. The heat of his skin burned through barriers she hadn’t been aware of. Something moved deeply inside her. Snatching her fingers away, she had to resist the temptation to cool them in her mouth.

Hastily she went on, ‘She taught me how to dress and how to behave, that I wasn’t strange because I liked to read. In a funny sort of way she gave me my career. If she hadn’t taken me to Clive’s that Christmas to buy my clothes he wouldn’t have recommended me to the model agency. My life would have been as narrow and circumscribed as my mother’s. Natalie gave me everything, and she did it with such grace and empathy. She never made me feel that I was a gawky nothing.’

‘She groomed you to take her place,’ Luke said bitterly. ‘I wonder what she’d have thought of that.’

His words drove every vestige of colour from her face. Instinctively she stepped back, casting a swift, horrified glance at the mute grave.

His mouth curled into a mirthless, wolfish smile. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She can’t hear you. She’ll never know that you betrayed her love by seducing her husband. She’ll never know that the children she adopted and loved so much were yours and mine. She’s dead, Perdita, and you and I are left to wonder just what would have happened if she hadn’t died. Because you’d have come back just the same, wouldn’t you?’

Perdita’s lips trembled. ‘Yes.’

‘And created even more damage than you did when you crawled into my bed that night.’

She shook her head, but he went on relentlessly, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘I told you. I was asleep when you came to bed. I didn’t expect you home that night,’ she said indistinctly.

The sun summoned auburn fire from his hair. His eyes were as cold as his laugh, as completely lacking in amusement.

‘Even though it was the bed Natalie and I slept in every night?’ He let the pause linger for endless moments, then brought it to an end by saying smoothly, ‘I find that very difficult to believe.’

She had slept in their bed because Luke was due back from three days spent in Wellington, and Natalie had decided to go halfway to Auckland to meet him at the house of friends.

‘He’ll be tired after three days’ arguing with the government,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll meet him at the Gardiners’, and we’ll stay there, then come back tomorrow after he’s had a good night’s rest. You won’t mind staying here, will you?’

Of course Perdita didn’t mind.

‘Just in case you’re nervous, why don’t you sleep in our room?’ Natalie suggested. ‘The phone’s right by the bed. Oh, and if you find it difficult to sleep in a strange bed my sleeping pills will be in the drawer. They’re quite harmless. They don’t knock you out, they’re more like calming pills than sleeping pills, really.’

‘I won’t need them,’ Perdita said.

Natalie hugged her. ‘What it is to be young and able to sleep on the head of a pin! I’ll leave one there just the same. Right, now that that’s organised, I’ll go and ring the hotel so he knows about the change of plans.’

But the anonymous someone in Luke’s hotel in Wellington hadn’t handed on the message, and Luke had driven all the way home, to find Perdita, slightly drugged with the pill because lying in Luke’s bed had given her too much of a secret, forbidden thrill, asleep in the innocent abandon of childhood. She hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t realised until she woke in his arms that he had thought she was Natalie. And by then she had been unable to think…

But she couldn’t tell him that now. After it happened she had tried to explain, and he had refused to believe her, cursing her for stealing something that had been Natalie’s, exiling her to Auckland and her mother, who didn’t want her and had never forgiven her for driving her father away.

‘It’s a bit late to be putting flowers on her grave,’ Luke said curtly. ‘You repaid Natalie by betraying her.’

The words were like fiery arrows, tearing Perdita’s composure to shreds. Stung, still racked by guilt, she flung back, ‘As you did!’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t have to try to make me feel guilty, Perdita. I’ve never been free of it since that night.’

‘It wasn’t your fault you thought I was Natalie,’ she said. It had been Natalie he’d held in his arms, Natalie who was the recipient of his savage tenderness, Natalie…

“That’s no excuse,’ he returned with raw self-contempt.

There was no answer to that. It was no excuse, and neither was the fact that she hadn’t been intent on seduction that night. She could have kicked and screamed and forced him to realise that she wasn’t Natalie, but when she woke it was too late—her sleeping body had been seduced by his practised caresses, and she had yielded without protest, without making a sound.

He said abruptly, ‘You can see the children.’

She turned a radiant face to him, but before she could speak he went on, ‘On one condition. I want you to sign a document saying that you won’t tell them who you are, and that you have no claim to them.’

Perdita hesitated and he said evenly, ‘No document, no visit.’

She understood his caution. Nodding, she agreed, ‘Yes, all right.’

‘Right. Be at the solicitor’s office at four this afternoon.’

PRECISELY at that time Perdita presented herself at the solicitor’s office. She had already contacted the expert in family law in Auckland, and been warned to sign nothing that might prejudice her chances of access to the girls.

Actually, he had suggested very strongly that she forward any documents to him for scrutiny, but Perdita had almost made up her mind to sign. She didn’t want to take her daughters away from the only home they had known; she merely wanted to make sure that they were happy.

And perhaps when Luke realised that she wasn’t a bad influence he would allow her to get to know them properly. Although his accusation still rankled, there was, she had to admit, some cause for it. Gossip columnists had had a field day with one or two of her supposed lovers.

The legal document, short and to the point, was waiting for her. She agreed not to tell the children that she was their birth mother, and she agreed that this meeting constituted no claim to further access or custody.

That seemed fair enough. Ignoring the elderly solicitor’s somewhat censorious attitude, she signed, then got gracefully to her feet.

He said, ‘I would urge you to think of the welfare of these children, Ms Gladstone.’

She gave him a cool, remote glance. He had come out to Pigeon Hill occasionally to parties, seeming older then to a teenaged girl than he did now. Their slight acquaintanceship gave him no right to imagine that he could influence her. He, and everyone else who had known her then, would have to realise that the child who used to stay at Pigeon Hill during the holidays, the recipient of her cousin’s charity, had grown up.