The Sister Swap Read online

  That was such a masterly understatement that Anne almost smiled. She closed her eyes and sighed wearily. It had been a trauma-filled twenty-four hours and now, it seemed, there were still more rough waters ahead.

  ‘Somehow I don’t think it would do much good in the mood he’s in, even if I could find him…Hunter’s had a lot of practice at being elusive.’

  She opened her eyes and met Dmitri’s frowning gaze. ‘I’m sure I can clear it up quietly with him later. Make it right with him,’ she added firmly, when it appeared that the slang was alien to interpretation.

  He must have perceived the despair underlying her steadfast optimism. ‘He was angry to see you with another man. He means a lot to you, I can see that. Go. I have waited this long to see Katlin again, I can wait a little longer…’

  They had a brief argument but Anne’s practicality won over Dmitri’s forced gallantry. As she pointed out, she had plenty of time to pound sense into Hunter’s hard head, while Dmitri’s ship was due to sail in three days’ time.

  Dmitri had to clear his absence with the duty officer, and while he went briefly down to his quarters Anne waited by the top of the boarding steps, refusing to risk the possibility of running into Hunter again and facing down his hostility in public. He had been jealous. She held the knowledge to her bruised heart. He had not just been angry; there had been a deeper thread of emotion that had added to his bitterness, his disappointment at what he perceived to be a betrayal. He had believed her loyalty was due to him. He had been prepared to protect her, to fight for her. She had yet to be allowed to prove that she was prepared to do the same for him.

  As she had wryly presumed, she was somewhat superfluous to requirements once Dmitri had been introduced to a snoozing Ivan and the awkward conversation between the two ex-lovers began to limp uncomfortably towards a kind of reconciliation. At first Katlin, wary and defensive, wouldn’t let her go to bed, and Dmitri too seemed to prefer to channel his questions and answers through a third party, but after a few cups of coffee and a growing, irritable awareness of how they were tiptoeing around the central issue Anne took herself off with the firm opinion that she was not cut out to be Cupid. It was up to Katlin and Dmitri to sort themselves out.

  She lay awake for hours listening to the indistinct murmurs in the other room, pretending to herself that she was anxious for her sister when really she was waiting for the familiar bumps and rustles of movement that signalled Hunter going to bed. When they came at last it was nearly two in the morning by Anne’s luminous watch dial and there were a lot more thumps and stumbles than usual, and a string of ragged curses that indicated a less than sober occupant of the bed next door. She turned on her stomach and put a hand against the wall, pressing hard so that she could feel the vibration caused by his tossing and turning. Finally she could stand it no more. She crouched up and cupped her hand around her mouth, sealing it to the wall so that her visitors, and Ivan, bubbling sweetly in the corner, wouldn’t hear.

  ‘Hunter?’

  The restless nudging of his bed against the wall stopped.

  ‘Hunter?’

  Utter stillness and silence. Shivering in the warm night air, Anne crawled back under her thin sheet, tears stinging her eyes. She had never felt lonely before she’d come to the city. She had never felt real isolation until she had met Hunter. Whoever said that war, hunting and love had a thousand pains for one pleasure was right…only she hadn’t even been granted the one pleasure yet!

  She bunched the sheet around her face to muffle a sniff, and then another. ‘Go to sleep.’

  The slurred directive brought her head sharply up from the pillow. ‘Hunter?’

  ‘I said go to sleep, dammit!’

  It was a snarl, but quite a nice one as snarls went, Anne decided as she snuggled down again, the hollow feeling in her chest easing. At least he was prepared to acknowledge that she was still alive. She sniffed again, just to let him know that she wasn’t totally cowed, and there was a corresponding growl that degenerated into a drowsy rumble. Her eyes closed and the gentle rumble continued and she smiled. He was snoring. It was something to tease him with and, God knew, she would need every advantage she could rake up to handle their next encounter.

  Ivan woke her out of a deep sleep at six and she staggered out to the living-room, bleary-eyed, to find Katlin and Dmitri holding hands on the couch, still talking, their voices as rusty as old cans. While Dmitri played with his son, Katlin followed Anne into the kitchenette and, while she started getting breakfast for them all, told her some of the plans that the two of them had made in the night. Anne was vastly relieved to discover that none of them included her.

  Dmitri was due some leave and he thought that he could take it immediately on compassionate grounds, by pleading that he wanted to spend some time with his newly discovered New Zealand son, and rejoin his ship in Sydney in a fortnight’s time. If that could be done, he and Katlin would go back to Golden Bay together, to sort out what they wanted to do long-term and so that Dmitri could begin to learn to know his son, although he was already talking about applying for residency and building a new life for himself in the peaceful, evergreen country he had so admired on his last visit.

  On a more practical note, he had pointed out that he could help care for his son, so that Katlin could have the bonus of a little more writing time.

  ‘I’m not just using him either, if that’s what you think,’ murmured Katlin when Dmitri was occupied with Ivan. ‘It was never just the casual fling I pretended it was. He was my first, you see, and it’s a pretty traumatic thing to give your virginity away at my age. I just panicked when Dmitri started getting too intense and I didn’t know how to handle it so I scuttled home…and then when I found I was pregnant…! I really didn’t think there was room in my life for anyone…Maybe Dmitri will be able to show me differently. I hope so. He’s nice, isn’t he…?’

  He looked even nicer when he returned in jeans and a sweater, carrying his captain’s permission and—as indication of his sincerity as well as his efficiency—a sheaf of immigration forms and leaflets.

  Meanwhile Katlin had checked flights and frantically tossed out most of her clothing from her old battered suitcase and crammed in Ivan’s, parcelled up his toys in a large plastic shopping bag and folded up and secured his port-a-cot and high chair in a tight bundle.

  An hour after that Anne was alone and wondering what had hit her. The hollow feeling had returned with a vengeance and so had the self-pitying tears. Trailing back up the stairs after waving the taxi off to the airport, she could hardly see where she was going, so it was not surprising that she walked into the solid wall of muscle hovering outside her door.

  ‘My God, what’s happened? That worthless bastard’s run out on you again, hasn’t he? I told you not to trust him. And now I suppose you expect me to pick up the pieces!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘I HOPE you used some form of protection this time.’

  Anne froze in the act of handing back the snowy white handkerchief, now crumpled and damp. She must look a mess—a headache from her tears and lack of sleep, her hair in a half-hearted ponytail, her nose pink and shiny as it always was when she cried, her swirling floral print skirt bunched up around her legs where Hunter had plonked her on the couch after literally carrying her into the flat.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she wavered, unnerved by the ferocious expression on his face, the waves of silent anger she could feel beating the air between them as he crouched down in front of her, his eyes glittering with some fiercely repressed emotion. She noticed with a detached part of her brain that those black eyes were definitely bloodshot, his hair was uncombed and his denim shirt only half tucked into his jeans. All in all he had the aura of a man who was distinctly frayed around the edges.

  ‘There’s a vital difference between sexual liberation and sexual irresponsibility,’ he told her forbiddingly. ‘You were lucky with Ivan. You have the support of your family and the talent and drive to make somethi
ng of yourself in spite of the handicaps of solo parenthood.’ He plucked the used handkerchief from her astonished hand and tossed it aside as he frowned critically at her.

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you’ve been too insulated from the consequences of your actions to realise the risks you’re taking. Reckless behaviour doesn’t just lead to accidental pregnancy…For God’s sake, Anne, indiscriminate sex can also be a sentence of death. And don’t look so shocked,’ he added roughly. ‘I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about him.’

  He jerked to his feet and began pacing up and down in front of her. Anne, whose jaw had dropped open when she’d realised she was being delivered a stern lecture on sexual responsibility, closed it with an audible click as Hunter abruptly veered from his tone of strained reason to one of unrestrained fury.

  ‘What in hell were you thinking of? You’re supposed to be a bloody intelligent woman, yet you acted like a gullible sixteen-year-old. Even if he convinced you that you were still in love with him, how could you let a guy whom you haven’t seen for over a year—during which he’s been doing God knows what with God knows whom—talk his way into your bed on the strength of a few hours’ reacquaintance? Surely you didn’t fall for that line about fate? I saw the way he looked at you and, believe me, it wasn’t the way a man looks at a woman he’s in love with—’

  ‘That’s because he was never in love with me,’ said Anne, shaking off her dumb shock in the soaring knowledge that she was finally free to confide in him.

  He halted in front of her, hands on hips, voice dripping with ice. ‘You know that and you still let him make you so desperate for human comfort that when he crawled into your bed you welcomed him—?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ Anne yelped at him, as outraged as he by the notion.

  ‘The hell you didn’t!’ he stormed, the ice turning to fire. ‘Don’t lie, on top of everything else. I’m not stupid. I saw him leaving this morning—he was here all night, wasn’t he?’

  He didn’t wait for her answer. ‘Whatever you thought I did to you, I didn’t deserve that.’ His tone became savage. ‘Was he lying there beside you when you made that touching little plea through the wall? Were you both snivelling with laughter at the thought of having driven me to drown my sorrows like some pathetic bloody caricature of rejection—?’ His face was a mask of loathing as he vomited out the humiliating vision of himself as the drunken butt of their sly jokes.

  ‘No! No, I would never do a thing like that to you, Hunter, never. And certainly not with Dmitri! He didn’t sleep with me last night because it wasn’t even me he came to see—’

  ‘I suppose he’s told you he wants Ivan,’ he interrupted harshly. ‘He knows all the right buttons to push, doesn’t he? He probably realises that you’d do anything for your son. He’s manipulating you, can’t you see that?’ Hunter clenched his teeth and drew a savagely controlling breath, briefly bowing his head as he visibly struggled to master his emotions. ‘Where is he, by the way?’ he asked in a voice taut with the effort.

  ‘Dmitri?’

  He flared up at the conjured image. ‘No! Ivan.’

  Anne looked around her strangely empty flat. No nappies airing, no scattered baby paraphernalia, no toothy grin and fearsomely questing button-black eyes. No one to listen to her daily delights and devastations, to light her life with his innocence and joy, a world away from adult woes.

  She swallowed, hard. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ He looked at her with puzzled impatience. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘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.