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‘Home.’ Anne looked at her hands, foolishly close to tears again. It was so silly. It wasn’t as if she’d never see Ivan again. She was still his aunt…his favourite, only aunt. Whatever happened in her life Ivan would always have a special place in her heart. And for all she knew the grand plans with Dmitri would founder on the rocks of reality and Katlin would be back in a couple of weeks’ time pleading for her to take her nephew again.
‘Anne?’ She refused to look at him in the ensuing thunderstruck silence and he sat down on the over-stuffed couch and lifted her jaw with his hand, his thumb roughly underscoring her brimming left eye. ‘What do you mean, gone home?’ he demanded roughly. ‘His home is here with you.’ He swore. ‘My God, you couldn’t have let that bastard persuade you that you weren’t a fit mother.’
‘But I’m not—’
‘Don’t!’ His fingers tightened, pinching her jaw closed as he ordered thickly, ‘Don’t you ever say that. You bore him in your body, you suckle him at your breast, you love him, lavish him with care…’ He stroked her cheek with the knuckles of his other hand. ‘A more perfect mother I can’t imagine…’
‘But I didn’t do all those things,’ she whispered, half hypnotised by the fathomless black eyes, wondering whether the tenderly knowing touch would turn brutal at the moment of truth. She put her hands over his and eased them away from her face, clasping them unconsciously to her heart. ‘I mean, yes, I love him, but he’s not mine. He never was.’ She took a deep breath and twined her fingers in his. ‘Ivan’s my nephew, not my son.’
Not by the flicker of an eyelash did Hunter show any reaction to her earth-shattering revelation.
Anne cleared her throat anxiously, certain that his unnatural stillness was a bad sign.
‘I’ve been looking after him for my sister who’s been very ill and depressed since his birth…Her home is pretty isolated and we were all very worried about her. The book was going badly and…well…when she begged me to bring Ivan up here with me I couldn’t say no. But then yesterday she just turned up out of the blue saying she missed him and wanted him back…You even met her—the “scatty” baby-sitter? That was my big sister.’ The feeble attempted at levity withered under his fixed gaze.
Her nerves tightened another notch and she had to moisten her dry lips before she could continue. ‘She’s not really scatty, she just comes across that way sometimes. I mean, she was certainly efficient enough to get herself and Dmitri and Ivan skipped up the waiting-list on to a flight to Nelson today. That’s where they’ve gone—so that Dmitri can meet Mum and Dad and spend a few weeks at Golden Bay to see…well, to see how he might fit in if that was the way things could be worked out…
‘I offered to go too.’ She waved her arm vaguely to indicate that she meant away from the flat and continued, even more incoherently, ‘But they said I should stay and see things through. I mean, there’s still the book to finish and the conditions of the grant to meet so I suppose I can’t really let them down…’ Her voice nearly failed her but she forced herself to say earnestly, ‘I’m sorry for deceiving you but when we started out I just thought it would make things less complicated if I let people assume that Ivan was mine—’
‘Assume? Assume?’ For a moment her fingers were trapped in a bone-crushing grip, then they were tossed violently into her lap. ‘And tell me, then, did I just assume that you were breast-feeding?’
She blushed brilliantly, her trembling hands twisting and turning in her lap. ‘I—I don’t know why I said that. It just sort of came out on the spur of the moment. I—Ivan is a bottle-baby, of course, because my sister was too ill to feed him. Really, she had a very bad time of it and there was no one else in the family who could take him…My mother’s back isn’t up to much lifting and Ivan is such a solid baby…’
Anne was aware that she was beginning to babble but she couldn’t help it; she had to get it all out before Hunter exploded. She could read the signs—the dangerously hooded eyes, the building colour, the small tic at the corner of his compressed mouth.
‘It was something I had to do, Hunter, for my sister’s sake as well as Ivan’s. Surely you can understand that? He’s such a darling boy, he deserves the best start possible for his life. And I didn’t mind; I loved him…I didn’t know that things were going to get so complicated…’
As a plea for sympathy her bewildered wail fell on stony ground.
‘And Dmitri? What part does lover-boy play in all this?’
he asked ominously.
‘None! At least not as far as I’m concerned,’ she assured him hastily. ‘They’d split up…Until last night he never even knew he had a son. So that’s what I was doing down at the ship, acting as a sort of go-between in case he reacted badly—’
It was the match to his fuse. ‘So as usual you were the one taking all the risks? Why in hell didn’t you tell me this last night?’ he roared.
‘Because it wasn’t my story to tell!’ she jumped up to inform him at equal volume, prepared to fight a desperate rear-guard action. Her happiness depended on it.
‘You were willing to give your body to me but not your trust, is that it? How much longer did you intend to keep me in the dark? Weeks? Months? Were you ever going to trust me, or was I just not important enough to bother?’ He towered fiercely over her. ‘And now—now that your family plot’s been unexpectedly tied up in this nice, tidy bundle, now you insult me with my own gullibility.’
She’d been afraid he would think that. ‘I wasn’t trying to make a fool of you, Hunter,’ she said gently.
‘Perhaps you weren’t but you managed to succeed magnificently all the same.’ He raked his hand through his hair and gave a bitterly unamused laugh. ‘My God, Anne, have you any idea what you’ve put me through?’
‘A very good idea,’ she said wryly, thinking of her own agonies of doubt.
Their eyes met in a moment of brief accord and for that moment Anne felt almost a part of him, feeling what he felt, knowing what he knew.
Lulled by the false promise of his momentary tranquillity, she smiled slowly, the tender dimple in her left cheek winking at him, innocently provocative. A second later she squeaked in dismay as she was snatched off her feet and suspended by her slim shoulders from two powerful hands.
‘You’re damned lucky I’m not a violent man!’
He didn’t seem to see any irony in the remark and this time Anne didn’t make the mistake of taking it lightly. She tilted her head back, exposing her throat in an instinctive act of mock-submission, knowing that if he wanted to he could hurt her badly.
‘You lied to me.’
She held her chin up. ‘Well, yes, but there were extenuating circum—’
