Black Ice (6 page)

She shook her head. Her mouth opened. No words would come out. She gulped, tried again.

'For … two years … I've lived with the possibility … that I may have been raped.'

Daniel rocked back on his heels. 'What?' He couldn't believe what he'd heard. Something was more wrong here than he'd thought.

Then Kirri grabbed his hand, pulled it up to her head, and pushed his fingers through the mass of bright auburn curls. 'Feel them?' she asked. 'The ridges?'

The tips of his fingers slid over a slight ridge of skull bone. As she moved his fingers further, he felt another one. He was positive he had never felt them before.

'Skull fracture. A bad one. I almost died.'

The air whooshed out of Daniel's lungs as though he'd been kicked in the ribs. He let his body fall the extra distance to the floor and sat down heavily. 'When?' he breathed.

'In New Orleans.' Her face was a white mask, even the blue of her eyes had paled. 'The taxi I was travelling in was hit by a truck.'

'Oh, God.' The bottom fell out of Daniel's stomach. He waited for Kirri to continue, but she just sat there, pale and, he noticed now, shaking. He reached up to take her hands. They were like ice. He pulled himself into a kneeling position. 'Just lie back. I'll make you a cup of coffee.'

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he remembered she didn't like coffee. 'Tea.' He corrected, as she uttered the word at the same time. A slight smile touched her lips and he was pleased to see a hint of colour coming back into her pale face.

 

Daniel's words whirled in Kirri's mind as she heard him moving about in the kitchen.
Wife
! She was sure she'd heard that correctly.
She'd agreed to be his wife!
No, that couldn't be right. She hadn't even been in New Orleans a month! Surely not, in such a short time …

'Here,' Daniel placed a mug of tea in her hands. 'Drink this.'

The tea was hot and sweet, and she sipped it gratefully. Daniel sat opposite her on a single lounge chair. 'Do you feel up to telling me what happened?'

'I can only tell you what I remember, and that's not much.' She drank more of the tea, felt its heat warm the chill from her hands. 'I have no memory at all of my time in New Orleans before the accident, or the two weeks before I arrived there.'

As her words fell into the air between them, all the anger and heartache that had haunted Daniel crumbled away. She hadn't walked out on him! His relief was immense. But then he realised that she also had no memory of being in love with him, of agreeing to marry him, and despair tore at his heart.

'But what about our photos?' he asked, a tiny flicker of hope that was quickly extinguished as she shook her head.

'My shoulder bag was stolen from the taxi after it crashed. I was lucky to live. The driver wasn't so lucky.' Her breathing quickened. 'Apparently I'd moved out of where I was staying. My suitcase was in the boot of the taxi. Do you know where I was going?'

'You were coming to the airport. We were flying back to Seattle together. My father had been badly injured in a construction accident and wasn't expected to live. I waited for you, even managed to delay the plane. But when you didn't arrive and you hadn't phoned me…' he almost choked as he remembered the desperation he'd felt as he dialled her cell phone and listened to it ring and ring until it had suddenly been cut off.

'Is that when he … your father … died?'

Daniel nodded. 'Yes. Ten days later. Kirri, I phoned all the hospitals in New Orleans the day after I got back to Seattle. None of them had a record of you.'

'They … the doctors … kept me sedated for days so they could control the swelling.' Kirri explained. 'I had a friend's business cards in my jacket pocket. She was a sculptress I shared a studio with in New York, and we tried to promote each other's work. They called her mobile phone but no-one answered, so they thought the cards belonged to me and registered me under that name. They told me that it was more than a day later someone noticed the initials engraved on my luggage didn't match the name on the cards, but the police traced who I was through the cab company records.'

'Oh, Kirri, if only I'd known …'
Two years! Two wasted years!
Daniel's heart raged at the futility of it.

Kirri watched the expression on Daniel's face. Any doubt she may have had about him being the man she must have made love with in New Orleans was quickly erased by the pain and sorrow she read there.

'Why didn't you look for me, Daniel?' Surely if she'd meant that much to him he would have tried to find her?

'I phoned up where you were staying in the French Quarter and they said you had checked out. When the hospitals didn't have you listed I didn't know what to think. I was just about living at the Seattle hospital, hoping that Dad might beat the odds and survive. Then,' he continued reluctantly, 'I thought you must have changed your mind and didn't have the guts to tell me.'

Disappointment washed through Kirri. Had he thought so little of her character that he would believe that? 'You mustn't have had a very high opinion of me.'

'My father was dying, and the woman I'd asked to be my wife had disappeared. I wasn't thinking very straight.' Daniel listened to his own words, heard how lame they must sound to Kirri after what she had endured. 'Then my father died, and the vultures came swooping in, trying to take over his business.' He rose to his feet, ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. How could he make Kirri understand?

'My father's company had gone public some years before, but Dad had the controlling interest because he had the majority of shares. He was the key man on the Board of Directors, but he hadn't done any succession planning within the company.' He saw Kirri's questioning look. 'He hadn't ensured there was someone capable of taking over if he died,' he explained. 'Except me.'

Daniel sighed. He didn't want to talk about business. All his heart and mind wanted to concentrate on was Kirri, and what had happened to her. But it might help her understand why he had appeared to have failed to search for her.

'Dad's dream was to have me take over from him. I'd told him I was happy being a ranger, but I learned all I could about the business just to keep him happy. Even spent my vacations on construction sites with him as well as attending board meetings. Hell! I never thought he would die so young. Even when that did happen I thought I'd be able to sell the shares and walk away. But then I found out the other board members wanted to sell the company to a rival who would make half the employees redundant. If Dad had been alive it would have broken his heart.'

'So you took over his position.'

'Yes. It wasn't easy. I still had a lot to learn. But I took time off to fly to New York to look for you. You'd told me you were staying in Greene Street, Soho - it was the only clue I had to where you might be. Eventually I found someone who knew you.' At the questioning look in her eyes his heart lurched. He'd give anything to have the time back again, to take a different course to the one he had. 'They thought you'd returned to Australia.'

'That's all?' The tinge of disbelief and despair in her voice ripped at his guts. He nodded.

'So you thought I'd run out on you and left it at that.' There was a world of accusation in her voice. Her liquid blue eyes gleamed with a fierce disappointment as she clenched her hands in her lap.

'No.'

'No?' Her curls danced as she sprang to her feet. 'I didn't notice you knocking on my door and asking for me.'

A smile threatened to twist Daniel's mouth. This was more like the old Kirri - passionate, fiery, that spark in her eyes. He reached out to take her hands, but she shook him away.

'Kirri, I didn't know exactly where you lived in Australia. All you'd told me was that you lived near Cairns. And having Smith for a surname didn't make it any easier. I couldn't go looking for you myself, there was still the possibility I could lose control of the company. That wouldn't have worried me if I was the only one who could lose out, but a lot of other people were depending on me, so I hired a private investigator to find you.'

'Well, he didn't do a very good job, did he!'

'Unfortunately, he did too good a job.' Daniel fought to keep the pain from his voice. 'He didn't have much luck at first. You'd told me you'd worked in Sydney before you'd left for New York, but it took him a while to establish you hadn't returned there. Then he tried Cairns, but you weren't on the electoral rolls there, so he started searching the outlying districts. Eventually he asked around in Gordonvale and found out you were living not far away … with another man.'

Kirri drew herself up tightly. Daniel watched the way her fingers curled into fists.

'And just who was this man I was supposed to be living with?'

'John Devlin O'Connor.' The name was emblazoned in his memory, along with the nights of pain as he dreamed of Kirri in this other man's arms.

'J.D. is my step-brother!' Incredulity and anger raised Kirri's voice. 'Your stupid private eye should have got his facts straight!'

Realisation hit Daniel with stomach-plummeting force. 'But …' his mind raced, 'the photo …'

'What photo?'

'He sent me a photo of you and this J.D. embracing. It was so intimate, so loving…'

'Of course J.D. loves me. Like a sister.' The temper in her eyes blazed, then was suddenly replaced by suspicion. 'When was this photo taken?'

'About four months after you … after we parted. It was taken outside some shops in Gordonvale. You'd both gone there together.' But her hair, he remembered now, was so short. At the time he'd thought it was another indication of how swiftly she'd changed her life to cut him out.

A frown crinkled Kirri's forehead. 'That must have been after I came out of the doctor's. I was so stunned, then when J.D. asked me what was wrong I broke down and cried and he held me.' The memory of that terrible morning came rushing back, and Kirri felt almost faint at the recollection. 'I'd just been informed I was pregnant. And I had no idea who the father was.'

Daniel longed to take her in his arms and soothe away all the hurt he could read in her eyes, but her words stood between them like an accusation.

'Catelyn's my daughter, isn't she?'

'How the hell would I know!' Kirri felt an irrational flood of resentment. She'd spent many long months wondering about the man who'd fathered her child, wondering if it had been an act of love … or rape.

She had been four months pregnant before she'd realised that the delay in her periods might not be related to her accident. Then the tiny fluttering movements in her womb had formulated in her mind to a living, breathing baby, and the thought of termination hadn't been an option. As the days had progressed into months and there was no sign that whoever had left her in this condition was coming to claim her, she had become fiercely protective of the baby growing within her. On the day the scan had revealed her baby's sex, Kirri had named her Catelyn, a combination of her grandmother's and mother's names.

She glared at Daniel, then frowned as he reached into his jeans pocket and took out his wallet. Wordlessly, he extracted a small, battered photo and handed it to her.

The air squeezed out of her lungs as she gazed at the black and white image.

Philip Weyburn closed down the computer program with a sigh. How his father had managed to keep his embezzlement from being found out was beyond him. If Daniel Brand had come to Australia and demanded a copy of the company's records before this, Jim Weyburn's theft would have been discovered.

Gazing down at the photo of his mother in the gilt-edged frame standing on his father's desk, Philip was conscious of the terrible legacy his father had left him. His mother's mental health was precarious, had been for some years, with mood swings and depression that had almost destroyed his parents' marriage. But she had been a loving parent in his youth and he was determined to protect her from the scandal that would eventuate if his father's crime was revealed.

Once his father's half of the company's shares had been transferred to him, Philip would have as much control as Daniel Brand, but in the meantime -

'Is there anything I can help you with, Philip?' The low voice from the doorway spun him around in the chair. Stella Quinlan's statuesque body moved with a relaxed grace that belied her usually controlled demeanour as she walked over to his desk. She was smiling with a warmth that didn't really reach her eyes, and he felt a prickling between his shoulder blades. She was his age, but he had the feeling she was light years ahead of him in areas he hadn't explored until now.

Philip cursed his previous reluctance to learn more about the financial management side of the company. He'd always enjoyed the more practical side of construction, and he excelled at it, never gaining the same satisfaction from the necessary, but to him, boring investment and finance strategies that his father had handled. Over the last couple of years, his father had turned more to Stella for assistance, and now Philip found himself wondering if she knew about the embezzlement.

He scrutinised her face, the perfect though understated makeup, the dark expressionless eyes he'd always felt hid an inner insolence. She reminded him of a shark - cold, calculating, ready to close in for the kill. He was determined not to give her that chance. For the time being he needed her, but soon she would have to be removed.

The prospect gave him a great deal of pleasure.

'I'm sure your father would have wanted me to assist you in any way possible.'

If it was in Stella's nature to purr, Philip suspected she would have done so. Since his father's death, Stella's polite business-like attitude towards him had warmed considerably, but he couldn't bring himself to reciprocate. There'd been an easy intimacy between Jim Weyburn and his private secretary that had always made Philip feel excluded, and he viewed her changed behaviour with suspicion. Perhaps she felt her job was now in jeopardy …

'Have you confirmed Mr Brand will be available to pick you up at the airport?'