As she reached the lip of the beach a slight, salty breeze riffled through her sun-streaked, caramel-brown hair, sending a few of the long, layered strands feathering across her slender throat. She paused to brush them back, tunnelling her hand under the rest of the silky-straight mass and flipping it free from the textured cotton bodice of her sundress to ripple down between her tense shoulder blades, welcoming the fan of air against the self-conscious burning at the nape of her neck. Her blue eyes narrowed against the splinters of late-afternoon sunlight reflecting off the shifting sea as she tried to gulp in some much-needed oxygen and ease the tightness in her chest. Boats rocked gently at their moorings out in the sheltered bay and, even though it was a glorious spring day and the tide was fully in, the narrow strip of beach was all but empty.
Oyster Beach was only just being discovered by the eager developers who had swallowed up large tracts of coastal land farther south and regurgitated them as fashionable beach resorts. With Auckland only a few hours’ drive away, the cove was being promoted as the latest ‘unspoiled’ getaway for jaded city dwellers. Expensive new holiday houses sporting double garages and en suite bathrooms were starting to muscle in on the simple beaches and old-style family homes on their large, flat water-front sections and up in the sheltering hills ‘lifestyle blocks’ were being shaved off the fringes of productive farmland.
At present the permanent local population was only a few hundred, but that number ballooned to thousands over Christmas and New Year when the schools were out for the long summer break and the pressure on holiday accommodation and facilities was intense. Kate knew that her timing had been serendipitous because November was exam-time at New Zealand high schools and universities. If she had been a few weeks later she would have had little chance of finding anywhere in Oyster Beach for rent, let alone right next door to her quarry. Even the local camping ground was booked out several months in advance for the height of the summer.
At any other time Kate might have been inclined to linger and drink in the tranquillity of the scene in front of her, but at the moment all she could think about was making it back to the sanctuary of her temporary home.
Half-buried boulders wrapped in plastic netting shored up the grass bank at the edge of the beach, protecting the valuable, low-lying land along the foreshore from being eaten away by storm surges. Kate stumbled as she made the short jump down onto the powdery white sand and discovered that her knees were seriously wobbly. Her hands and feet felt cold and heavy at the end of her limbs and her ears had started to ring. She was, she realised with grim awareness of the irony, suffering some of the classic effects of shock—although she had been the one supposedly delivering the jolt!
She stepped back up onto the coarse, springy grass on her side of the hedge and huffed a sigh of relief when her shaky legs proved equal to the task. Moving a little more quickly, she sought the shadow of the creaking verandah and slipped in through the sliding glass door that she had left open to the fresh air.
‘Gee, that went really well,’ she muttered to the empty house, her fingers whitening around the empty cup as she relived those awful moments of hot humiliation when the door had slammed shut in her face. She had been tempted to storm off vowing never to speak to him again, but she was a mature, twenty-seven-year-old woman, not a sulky, self-absorbed teenager. She had questions to ask and a responsibility to uphold and, as her mother was so fond of telling her, failure was not a viable option!
She put the cup down on the kitchen table and flexed her angry fingers. Realistically speaking, what else had she expected? Drake Daniels had a reputation for freezing off people who became importuning and she had just doorstepped him like a crazed fan, or member of the despised paparazzi. Given his reclusive work habits, she should consider herself lucky that he had opened the door at all.
On the bright side, at least she now had confirmation that she was in the right place at the right time. When she had put her money down for the holiday rental she had been acting as much on gut instinct as on the elusive facts, although her instincts had certainly led her astray in one important aspect: she had not expected to have to cope with a mystery redhead as well as an angry author. Naively, perhaps, she had believed the myth that he crafted his compelling stories in total seclusion.
But that was what she had come here for, wasn’t it? To separate the man from the myth? To explore his true character, not just the parts of him that he wanted people to see. Even if it was a truth she found hard to stomach.
She had to get a grip on herself, and not jump to hasty conclusions. Perhaps the woman was a visiting relative, although her research hadn’t turned up any mention of living family members.
The slippery coils of nervous tension that had been shifting in her belly all day suddenly tightened, and a rush of saliva into her dry mouth gave Kate just enough warning to make it into the roomy, old-fashioned bathroom before vomiting up the small salad roll that she had made herself eat at a roadside café on the drive down. So much for thinking that it would calm her uneasy digestion!
Kate rinsed the sourness out of her mouth at the basin and dabbed a little refreshing cold water onto her face, dewing her cheeks. Without make-up to emphasis her ghostly silver-blue eyes and narrow mouth she should have looked pallid and uninteresting, but the age-spotted mirror above the basin was reassuring. One of the few positive legacies she had inherited from her irresponsible, absentee father was a honey-gold complexion that only needed a slight touch of the sun to deepen to a tawny glow. New Zealand was experiencing an unseasonably hot spring, and the meteorologists were predicting more of the same warm, dry weather in the coming weeks, so, if this holiday proved a disastrous mistake in every other way, at least she could return home with a tan that would be the envy of her work-bound housemates, Kate thought wryly.
She flicked her layered fringe aside from its central parting, smoothing it down from her temples to rest alongside the high cheekbones that gave her pale eyes their faintly feline tilt. She accepted that she wasn’t beautiful, like her glacial blonde mother, but her sharply etched features were nicely symmetrical, and some men found her unusual eye colour attractive rather than off-putting. Her smile was her secret weapon; when genuine it bestowed a warmth that vanquished the natural aloofness of her expression. She practised it now, to give her wavering spirits a cheerful boost. If you look confident, you’ll act confident, was another of her mother’s bracing maxims, along with aggressive creed, Don’t get mad, get even!
Purged of her energy-sapping queasiness, Kate suddenly found herself feeling peckish. She fossicked amongst the fresh supplies she had unloaded into the fridge and ate a pottle of yoghurt and some hummus and rice crackers while she waited at the bench for the electric kettle to boil. As she tried to keep her mind from fretting over her next move her gaze swept around the clean but shabby, open-plan kitchen, a far cry from the upscale, central Auckland town house she shared with her friend Sara, and Sara’s cousin Josh. The appliances here were all basic models, functional rather than stylish, probably installed when the house was built. The green clocked wallpaper, faded Formica bench and patterned vinyl flooring looked original, too, but what would have seemed highly trendy three decades ago were now sadly dated. She had barely given herself time to unpack before she had trotted out on her abortive begging expedition, but her impression was that the whole place could do with a facelift. The three-bedroom weatherboard house was well-maintained but there was no sign of any attempt at expansion or renovation over the years, and Kate guessed that its present owner had inherited or bought it with the intention of keeping it as a landbank.
The kettle burbled and Kate occupied herself with the mundane task of making a cup of tea. She discarded the sodden tea bag in the sink and added a splash of milk, stirring it in with unnecessary force as her thoughts returned to the complicated tangle her life had become. Choices that had once seemed clear and simple were now fraught with danger, she thought, staring out the kitchen window at the gnarled pohutukawa tree whose grey-green leaves blocked out the concrete palace that was in the final stages of completion on the other side of the chain-link fence. She hoped that she wasn’t about to get strangled in the web of deceit she had been busily weaving.
She raised the steaming cup to her lips for her first sip when a sudden, intangible sizzle of tension in the air made her stiffen. She jerked around,