“Should he do that?” Kier asked Shahna, but didn’t wait for her answer. Obeying some instinct, he stooped to pick up the child, holding the small body awkwardly between his hands before he hooked out the chair again with a foot and sat down.
Instead of subsiding on his knees, Samuel straightened his legs and waved his arms, making encouraging noises. He wanted to bounce.
Fumbling a little, Kier soon got the idea, and Samuel giggled, enjoying the game.
Kier’s rigid expression gradually relaxed. He looked bemused and almost startled. Shahna very nearly giggled herself.
“He’s strong,” Kier said, surprised, as Samuel pushed off once more against his thighs, waving his arms enthusiastically.
Shahna smiled, proud of her son. There had been a few anxious weeks after his birth, but now he was full of energy and had even begun trying to walk around the furniture, looking terribly pleased every time he hauled himself to his feet. But he still found crawling a more efficient means of locomotion.
Tiring of the game, Samuel plumped down on his bottom and tipped his head back to study Kier’s face, lifted a dimpled hand to pat the man’s cheek, and said something incomprehensible in a satisfied tone. Then he took a fistful of Kier’s T-shirt and began sucking on it.
“Hey!” Kier tried to gently disengage the death grip on his shirt. “That’s not edible.”
“Give him one of those,” Shahna suggested, indicating the coconut cookies on the table.
Kier obliged, and Samuel grabbed the proffered treat, losing interest in the shirt. He bit a piece off the cookie, then offered the remainder to Kier. “Uh?”
“No, thanks.” Kier shook his head. He was staring at Samuel as though the child were an alien species.
“Uh?” Samuel persisted, generously.
Shahna got up. “Here, I’ll take him.” She pulled a wheeled high chair from its corner by the fridge, where it had been hidden from Kier’s view, and popped Samuel into it, fastening the tray.
Kier didn’t seem able to take his eyes off the baby. The grim look had returned and his face was paler than normal.
Shahna picked up Kier’s mug. “Do you want anything more?”
“I could use another coffee.”
There was no point in refusing that now. She poured it and put it in front of him, then fed Samuel a bowl of cereal and some milk in a plastic baby cup.
By the time Samuel had finished and she’d wiped his mouth and hands and lifted him down, Kier was rinsing his coffee mug at the sink. Samuel crawled efficiently to the settle and pulled himself up, banging on the lift-up seat and saying, “Ta, ta.”
“All right.” Shahna moved Kier’s backpack to the floor so that she could open up the storage compartment and extract a basket of toys. “There you are.”
Samuel was easily bored, and after painfully twisting an ankle Shahna had realized the danger of having small objects scattered throughout the cottage’s limited floor space. Now she restricted him to a few toys at a time, but choosing from the lot would keep him occupied.
Attracted by the novelty of the backpack, Samuel had discovered the plastic buckle on the end of a nylon strap and was chewing on it.
“Does he eat everything?” Kier asked, frowning.
“Pretty much. He’s teething.” She’d had to pick him up in the early hours this morning, in the end giving him a spoonful of prescription medicine. He would have been up for breakfast well before eight but the interrupted night had disrupted his sleep pattern.
She handed him a toy tractor from the basket to distract him from the backpack, then made to heave the pack onto the settle again.
“I’ll do that!” Swiftly Kier strode across the room and took it from her. His hand brushed hers and she quickly stepped back, a rush of sheer physical pleasure leaving her shaken and dismayed.
“What have you got in there?” she queried to distract herself. The pack was heavy.
“My laptop, among other things. And a mobile phone.”
“That won’t be much use around here.”
“So I discovered last night. Then Timoti told me they don’t work in the Hokianga.” He directed a searching look at her. “If you’re not hiding, why pick this godforsaken spot?”
Shahna kept her voice steady. “It’s a good place to bring up a child. And I can live cheaply here.”
“Are you short of money?” he enquired sharply.
“No, I have some savings and the money from the sale of my apartment. But I want to make it last while I build up my business.”
“Your jewelry. Can you earn a living from that?”
“I hope to.” Her work was becoming known to discerning buyers, and it didn’t sell cheaply. It was intricate and time-consuming, each piece unique, and worth every cent.
“A good place to bring up a child?” Kier sounded skeptical. “The middle of nowhere?”
Shahna smiled inwardly. Naturally the remoteness of the area horrified him. He was totally out of his normal element. “There’s a village a few miles away, with a store that sells milk and bread and groceries, even a daily paper.”
“What happens if he’s sick, or you are?”
“The hospital at Rawene runs a nurses’ clinic over here, and a doctor comes across once a week. Or I can drive to Kaitaia hospital in about an hour.”
“Drive?” Kier looked out the window where, beyond the neat A-frame henhouse, a couple of telephone and power wires ran alongside a barely discernible farm track, overhung by trees. “I don’t see any car.”
“I keep it next door at the farm.”
He pulled his gaze from the crowded trees. Somewhere in the distance a bull roared. “This is a far cry from Sydney.”
“Yes,” Shahna agreed. “I don’t expect you to understand.” Born and bred in Sydney, Kier was a king of the concrete jungle.
His gaze went back to Samuel, who was lifting toys from the basket to discard them on the floor, occasionally pausing to try one for taste. “I don’t understand any of this.” Kier lifted hard eyes to hers. “You didn’t deliberately get pregnant, did you?”
Shahna drew a deep breath. The question bought long-denied emotions to the forefront of her mind. Guilt, grief, shame and a tearing, exquisitely painful regret.
He had asked for the truth. She would give it to him. “Actually…yes.” The bare truth with no excuses or explanations, unvarnished by the complexities surrounding her reckless decision.
In hindsight it hadn’t been the wisest thing to do, but she couldn’t find it in herself to regret giving birth to Samuel.
Again anger smoldered in the blue depths of Kier’s eyes. “And planned to bring him up without a father?”
Planned? How could she reply to that? “Not…exactly,” she hedged.
“Then why didn’t you contact me? Don’t you think I had a right to know?”
Shahna went cold, despite the summer-morning heat creeping into the cottage. Sun-wakened cicadas shrilled in the trees outside.
Her hands clenched, clammy with sudden sweat, and Kier’s face seemed to recede and then swim into focus. She’d never thought she’d have to confront him with this. It was like a bad dream. “No,” she said, looking at him steadily. “He’s not yours, Kier.”
Kier