Innocent Hostage (17 page)
He shook his head. “On the whole, the best things in my life have come from doing the opposite of what they taught. The useful and good things in my life came from Natasha’s lessons.” He could feel the warmth of her through his jeans. He wished she hadn’t used the words “rubbed off on you” as she pressed against him but he didn’t think she’d yet realized what was happening. She was concentrating so hard on getting her point across that she hadn’t noticed
his
point.
“Then do it for Natasha.” Suddenly she stopped talking and gasped. “Oh!”
He grinned at the shocked expression on her face. What did she expect while they were standing like this?
Then her expression segued into something very different. A look of longing, of inquiry, of speculation.
His stomach muscles tightened. “Okay. I promise I will no longer use my parents as an excuse.” He nudged her legs apart. “I promise”—he gave another nudge and her face reddened from pale pink to scarlet—“to ask Ms. Rowland for help only after I’ve explored every avenue myself. Does that please you?”
“You mean your career plan or this?” She reached down and touched him tentatively.
He sucked in his breath.
A muffled snort behind them made them spring apart as if a sword had cleaved a path between them. Then Breck stifled a laugh. Kit, snoozing on the sofa, had rolled over in his sleep.
Ingrid closed her eyes in relief. “God, I thought he was getting an eyeful. Thank goodness he’s asleep.”
Sexual heat shimmered through his veins. With Kit asleep, there was nothing stopping them. He reached for her.
“We need to talk.”
His thoughts ground to a halt. They needed to talk like he needed to inhale sulphur dioxide. No way. When women said they needed to talk, trouble followed.
“In here.” She tugged his arm and shoved him into the bedroom. Oookay. He wasn’t going to object, but his little fairy princess was acting way out of character. Sure, they’d been on the boil for a couple of weeks now, but he had never in a million years imagined that Ingrid would take the initiative. He had planned a very, very slow seduction. He mightn’t be good at passing exams, but he was good at planning. Now, however, it was as if the world had shifted on its axis. Confused, he tilted up her chin so he could look into her face. She still glowed redder than a traffic light. Turning her head away, she took another step, then stopped suddenly as if she’d run out of spunk.
He couldn’t resist a quick glance over her shoulder. A bed took up most of the small room and surprise, surprise, there was nary a white frill or stuffed toy in sight. The bedcover was a businesslike dark green. She practically shoved him on to the bed and muttered, “Sit down.”
“I’ve had more romantic invitations, but I guess sitting down will do for a start.” Then he caught the anxious, frightened look on her face and wished he hadn’t been so flippant.
“Please don’t,” she said. “I have to say this first.”
“I’m sorry, Ingrid. What is it?”
“Before we—we…” she trailed off. “Anyway, I can’t do this with someone who mistrusts me. I just can’t. Do you trust me now?”
He cursed himself for being so stupid, for accusing her of contacting his parents. He had hurt her badly. All because whenever he got near his parents, he couldn’t think clearly. It had always been that way. For God’s sake, he was almost thirty-three. Wasn’t it time he let that stuff go? He was close to losing the best thing that had ever happened to him because of his stubbornness.
He stroked the back of her hand. “If I hadn’t been so crazy about you, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I guess you’ve figured that out. But the world I’d so painstakingly built up got dragged down around my ankles by a lovely woman I was beginning to trust—”
“Beginning to trust,” she interrupted. “That says it all. You are so unwilling to trust anyone that when your parents arrived on your doorstep, you decided it was my fault. Just because I own a couple of textbooks they wrote.”
“You sang their praises, Ingrid. You adhere to their principles.”
“It’s true I was trained using their textbooks, but that was the choice of Education NZ, not my choice. It could just as well have been textbooks by Abercrombie or Troughton or…or someone.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. What I’m saying is that on very slim evidence you decided that I had—had betrayed you.”
He looked at her for a moment, his heart thudding like a jackhammer. Had he made the biggest mistake out of a lifetime of mistakes? “Betrayal is the correct word. I felt betrayed. Only someone who knows me well would understand how I feel about my parents. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to lately about them.”
“So it must have been me. How very logical.”
“Goddammit, logic was all I had! I daren’t let my feelings for you dictate what—”
“What feelings?”
Damn it to the pit. The woman bit like catfish at junk on a streambed. She’d honed in on the very thing he should never have said. Women loved to dissect conversations for every subtle nuance. Hadn’t he learned that from his mother and Tania?
He looked down at his size twelves. Shit, he’d forgotten to take off his boots. “I’m sorry about the boots. I forgot—”
“What feelings?”
“Damn it, Ingrid. I can’t do this. At this time of my life I have no right to—”
“When
will
be the right time, Breck?”
He bent down and unlaced his boots. Slowly. He straightened up and she was there, in his face, pressed against him, just like she’d been ten minutes ago, the perfume of her skin drawing him in. God, he wanted her. Something of his own. He was weak. Lacing their fingers together he raised her hands and kissed the back of them. He sighed. “Deep down I knew you hadn’t contacted my parents. But where they’re concerned I’m not quite sane. One day I’ll explain. I think I needed an excuse to get good and mad at you. I just couldn’t cope with those endless damn daydreams about us…”
“You too?”
He looked down at her. Somehow her head had decided to nestle on his shoulder, with her chin tucked against his clavicle. Her arms wrapped like vines around his waist and he could feel her heart going lub-dup, lub-dup at a brisk canter. Fighting this thing was just too hard. He lowered his head and—
“Daddy, are we going now?”
Breck raised his head. He held on to Ingrid as she tried to squirm away from him.
“You want to go now, do you? That’s a pity. Ms. Rowland and I were having an in-depth discussion. We’ll finish this another time soon. Very soon.” He ignored Kit for a moment, willing Ingrid to meet his eyes. When she shyly peeped up at him he grinned. “Story of our lives.” Then he sobered. “Are you sure you want to continue—”
“Yes.” Unequivocal. Her hectic flush underlined her affirmation.
He figured he was just as flushed. Not just in the face either. He let go the breath he’d been holding and tipped his forehead to gently touch hers. “Thank you.”
“Daddy?”
“Coming, Kit.”
“Not quite,” Ingrid murmured.
Startled, Breck burst out laughing. He kissed her chastely on the forehead, still grinning, and she leaned into him for a few seconds before pulling away.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked.
Although parts of him were hard, his insides softened like caramel at the anxious question. She was putting it all out there. She had way more courage than he did. Sure, he could take a man down if he threatened someone else, but he was gun shy when it came to laying himself down for a woman to stomp over. “Yes. Tomorrow,” he promised.
But her phone continued to vibrate on the bedside table. She rolled over and snatched it up. “‘Lo?”
“Stay out of what doesn’t concern you or you’ll be sorry.” Clunk.
Scrambling in the dark, she located the reading lamp and turned it on. A book thudded to the floor and she jumped, her cell phone bouncing on the bedspread. As her heart pounded painfully in her chest, she scooped up the phone to check the time. 3:30 a.m. Who would contact her at this time of the night to threaten her? Because that had clearly been a threat. Why? What didn’t concern her? It had been a man’s voice, gravelly and indistinct. He’d been using a landline, judging from the noise when he crashed it back on its cradle. In spite of her confusion, she saved the call carefully. Then she tucked her knees under her chin and pulled the cover up to her ears, her heart still doing push-ups in her chest. The kids told her things all the time, things she didn’t want to know. Mostly she just said, “Uh huh,” and diverted them on to something else. Which kid had told Ingrid some family secrets that the family wanted hidden? Frantically she cast her mind back over the past couple of weeks, but it was impossible to remember an isolated incident. Heck, she spoke to every child every day. What little kernel of truth had she missed?
She’d “be sorry.” Oh,
hell
. This wasn’t what she’d envisaged when she began teaching preschool. She’d thought it was going to be fun, that she’d have the pleasure of guiding fresh, open minds and setting them on a course of…yeah, and she’d been naïve.
She really, really wanted to ring Breck but she couldn’t telephone someone at this hour of the morning just for comfort. Standing on her own feet was something she’d been good at since she’d escaped Marla and Tom’s benevolent dictatorship. “Get it together, Ingrid,” she told herself. She would have to tread very warily at preschool over the next few days. As she planned how she’d talk to each child individually to see if anything jogged her memory, her heart settled back into its regular rhythm.
Then she brightened. Breck would be around for the next couple of weeks. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and he’d be another pair of ears. Not that he didn’t have enough troubles of his own, but he was reliable and she trusted him implicitly. Which was more than she could say about a lot of other people she knew.
She clicked off the light and lay back down, and then bounced up again. What if that call had nothing to do with preschool and everything to do with her relationship with Breck? What if the caller meant: stay out of the Kerrs’ and Marchants’ business? Now
that
was more likely than some disaffected parent phoning her in the early hours of the morning.
Or was it?
She peered at the time on her cell again. 3.45. Wide awake she glared at the phone, willing the time to be later—much later. She wasn’t going to get back to sleep now. Sighing, she clambered out of bed and flicked on the light. Brrr. The winter cold stole her breath. Grabbing her robe off the end of the bed she pottered out to the living room and switched on her laptop. Might as well get some work done.
****
Breck dropped Kit at preschool, and then drove on to headquarters to sort out his application papers. As he turned the corner, he glanced in his rear vision mirror. Ingrid was standing in the preschool driveway, her arm around Kit, watching him drive away. She looked sort of forlorn, as if he’d deserted her. He shrugged. He’d be back in an hour.
But when he returned he found Ingrid seated in her office, gazing into space, still with that lost, puzzled expression.
“What’s up, sweet thing?”
She turned and grabbed his hand. “I’m so glad you’re here, Breck. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t like to phone you in the middle of the night.”
He sat down beside her. “The middle of the night?”
“Three-thirty this morning, to be exact.”
He rubbed his fingers across the back of her hand. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She showed him her cellphone with several incoming messages, one timed at 3:30 a.m. precisely. When she explained what the caller had said, he wished he could get his hands on the creep and crush him into little pieces.
“I checked, but the sender’s name is blocked.”
Of course it was. But Ingrid being Ingrid, had all her incoming calls on Record. He listened to the message several times, trying to ascertain if anything in particular stood out.
Ingrid looked down at her feet. “At first I thought it must be a parent sounding off about some troubles they had at home that their child had inadvertently spilled to me, then I began to wonder…do you think it has anything to do with—Tania and all that stuff?”
Oh, Jesus. Had he dragged her into trouble? He replayed the message. “I think the voice is slightly disguised,” he said after a moment. “It hasn’t been changed by a voice changer so much as the speaker is trying to disguise it himself. I mean, he’s perhaps talking more deeply than he usually does.”
Her lips parted. “How can you tell?”
“I can’t, really. It’s just that everything would be altered in sync if he used a voice changer, whereas he’s just changing some of his words. It’s definitely a male.”
“I wasn’t even sure of that.” She touched his arm. “You’re going to make a great detective.”
He couldn’t help laughing. “It takes a bit more than that to pass those damned exams.” He stood. “Just in case, I’ll forward this to Hull. And if it’s the family of one of your kids, then it’s just as well I’ll be here on and off over the next couple of weeks.”
his
point.
“Then do it for Natasha.” Suddenly she stopped talking and gasped. “Oh!”
He grinned at the shocked expression on her face. What did she expect while they were standing like this?
Then her expression segued into something very different. A look of longing, of inquiry, of speculation.
His stomach muscles tightened. “Okay. I promise I will no longer use my parents as an excuse.” He nudged her legs apart. “I promise”—he gave another nudge and her face reddened from pale pink to scarlet—“to ask Ms. Rowland for help only after I’ve explored every avenue myself. Does that please you?”
“You mean your career plan or this?” She reached down and touched him tentatively.
He sucked in his breath.
A muffled snort behind them made them spring apart as if a sword had cleaved a path between them. Then Breck stifled a laugh. Kit, snoozing on the sofa, had rolled over in his sleep.
Ingrid closed her eyes in relief. “God, I thought he was getting an eyeful. Thank goodness he’s asleep.”
Sexual heat shimmered through his veins. With Kit asleep, there was nothing stopping them. He reached for her.
“We need to talk.”
His thoughts ground to a halt. They needed to talk like he needed to inhale sulphur dioxide. No way. When women said they needed to talk, trouble followed.
“In here.” She tugged his arm and shoved him into the bedroom. Oookay. He wasn’t going to object, but his little fairy princess was acting way out of character. Sure, they’d been on the boil for a couple of weeks now, but he had never in a million years imagined that Ingrid would take the initiative. He had planned a very, very slow seduction. He mightn’t be good at passing exams, but he was good at planning. Now, however, it was as if the world had shifted on its axis. Confused, he tilted up her chin so he could look into her face. She still glowed redder than a traffic light. Turning her head away, she took another step, then stopped suddenly as if she’d run out of spunk.
He couldn’t resist a quick glance over her shoulder. A bed took up most of the small room and surprise, surprise, there was nary a white frill or stuffed toy in sight. The bedcover was a businesslike dark green. She practically shoved him on to the bed and muttered, “Sit down.”
“I’ve had more romantic invitations, but I guess sitting down will do for a start.” Then he caught the anxious, frightened look on her face and wished he hadn’t been so flippant.
“Please don’t,” she said. “I have to say this first.”
“I’m sorry, Ingrid. What is it?”
“Before we—we…” she trailed off. “Anyway, I can’t do this with someone who mistrusts me. I just can’t. Do you trust me now?”
He cursed himself for being so stupid, for accusing her of contacting his parents. He had hurt her badly. All because whenever he got near his parents, he couldn’t think clearly. It had always been that way. For God’s sake, he was almost thirty-three. Wasn’t it time he let that stuff go? He was close to losing the best thing that had ever happened to him because of his stubbornness.
He stroked the back of her hand. “If I hadn’t been so crazy about you, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I guess you’ve figured that out. But the world I’d so painstakingly built up got dragged down around my ankles by a lovely woman I was beginning to trust—”
“Beginning to trust,” she interrupted. “That says it all. You are so unwilling to trust anyone that when your parents arrived on your doorstep, you decided it was my fault. Just because I own a couple of textbooks they wrote.”
“You sang their praises, Ingrid. You adhere to their principles.”
“It’s true I was trained using their textbooks, but that was the choice of Education NZ, not my choice. It could just as well have been textbooks by Abercrombie or Troughton or…or someone.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. What I’m saying is that on very slim evidence you decided that I had—had betrayed you.”
He looked at her for a moment, his heart thudding like a jackhammer. Had he made the biggest mistake out of a lifetime of mistakes? “Betrayal is the correct word. I felt betrayed. Only someone who knows me well would understand how I feel about my parents. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to lately about them.”
“So it must have been me. How very logical.”
“Goddammit, logic was all I had! I daren’t let my feelings for you dictate what—”
“What feelings?”
Damn it to the pit. The woman bit like catfish at junk on a streambed. She’d honed in on the very thing he should never have said. Women loved to dissect conversations for every subtle nuance. Hadn’t he learned that from his mother and Tania?
He looked down at his size twelves. Shit, he’d forgotten to take off his boots. “I’m sorry about the boots. I forgot—”
“What feelings?”
“Damn it, Ingrid. I can’t do this. At this time of my life I have no right to—”
“When
will
be the right time, Breck?”
He bent down and unlaced his boots. Slowly. He straightened up and she was there, in his face, pressed against him, just like she’d been ten minutes ago, the perfume of her skin drawing him in. God, he wanted her. Something of his own. He was weak. Lacing their fingers together he raised her hands and kissed the back of them. He sighed. “Deep down I knew you hadn’t contacted my parents. But where they’re concerned I’m not quite sane. One day I’ll explain. I think I needed an excuse to get good and mad at you. I just couldn’t cope with those endless damn daydreams about us…”
“You too?”
He looked down at her. Somehow her head had decided to nestle on his shoulder, with her chin tucked against his clavicle. Her arms wrapped like vines around his waist and he could feel her heart going lub-dup, lub-dup at a brisk canter. Fighting this thing was just too hard. He lowered his head and—
“Daddy, are we going now?”
Breck raised his head. He held on to Ingrid as she tried to squirm away from him.
“You want to go now, do you? That’s a pity. Ms. Rowland and I were having an in-depth discussion. We’ll finish this another time soon. Very soon.” He ignored Kit for a moment, willing Ingrid to meet his eyes. When she shyly peeped up at him he grinned. “Story of our lives.” Then he sobered. “Are you sure you want to continue—”
“Yes.” Unequivocal. Her hectic flush underlined her affirmation.
He figured he was just as flushed. Not just in the face either. He let go the breath he’d been holding and tipped his forehead to gently touch hers. “Thank you.”
“Daddy?”
“Coming, Kit.”
“Not quite,” Ingrid murmured.
Startled, Breck burst out laughing. He kissed her chastely on the forehead, still grinning, and she leaned into him for a few seconds before pulling away.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked.
Although parts of him were hard, his insides softened like caramel at the anxious question. She was putting it all out there. She had way more courage than he did. Sure, he could take a man down if he threatened someone else, but he was gun shy when it came to laying himself down for a woman to stomp over. “Yes. Tomorrow,” he promised.
Chapter Seventeen
But her phone continued to vibrate on the bedside table. She rolled over and snatched it up. “‘Lo?”
“Stay out of what doesn’t concern you or you’ll be sorry.” Clunk.
Scrambling in the dark, she located the reading lamp and turned it on. A book thudded to the floor and she jumped, her cell phone bouncing on the bedspread. As her heart pounded painfully in her chest, she scooped up the phone to check the time. 3:30 a.m. Who would contact her at this time of the night to threaten her? Because that had clearly been a threat. Why? What didn’t concern her? It had been a man’s voice, gravelly and indistinct. He’d been using a landline, judging from the noise when he crashed it back on its cradle. In spite of her confusion, she saved the call carefully. Then she tucked her knees under her chin and pulled the cover up to her ears, her heart still doing push-ups in her chest. The kids told her things all the time, things she didn’t want to know. Mostly she just said, “Uh huh,” and diverted them on to something else. Which kid had told Ingrid some family secrets that the family wanted hidden? Frantically she cast her mind back over the past couple of weeks, but it was impossible to remember an isolated incident. Heck, she spoke to every child every day. What little kernel of truth had she missed?
She’d “be sorry.” Oh,
hell
. This wasn’t what she’d envisaged when she began teaching preschool. She’d thought it was going to be fun, that she’d have the pleasure of guiding fresh, open minds and setting them on a course of…yeah, and she’d been naïve.
She really, really wanted to ring Breck but she couldn’t telephone someone at this hour of the morning just for comfort. Standing on her own feet was something she’d been good at since she’d escaped Marla and Tom’s benevolent dictatorship. “Get it together, Ingrid,” she told herself. She would have to tread very warily at preschool over the next few days. As she planned how she’d talk to each child individually to see if anything jogged her memory, her heart settled back into its regular rhythm.
Then she brightened. Breck would be around for the next couple of weeks. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and he’d be another pair of ears. Not that he didn’t have enough troubles of his own, but he was reliable and she trusted him implicitly. Which was more than she could say about a lot of other people she knew.
She clicked off the light and lay back down, and then bounced up again. What if that call had nothing to do with preschool and everything to do with her relationship with Breck? What if the caller meant: stay out of the Kerrs’ and Marchants’ business? Now
that
was more likely than some disaffected parent phoning her in the early hours of the morning.
Or was it?
She peered at the time on her cell again. 3.45. Wide awake she glared at the phone, willing the time to be later—much later. She wasn’t going to get back to sleep now. Sighing, she clambered out of bed and flicked on the light. Brrr. The winter cold stole her breath. Grabbing her robe off the end of the bed she pottered out to the living room and switched on her laptop. Might as well get some work done.
****
Breck dropped Kit at preschool, and then drove on to headquarters to sort out his application papers. As he turned the corner, he glanced in his rear vision mirror. Ingrid was standing in the preschool driveway, her arm around Kit, watching him drive away. She looked sort of forlorn, as if he’d deserted her. He shrugged. He’d be back in an hour.
But when he returned he found Ingrid seated in her office, gazing into space, still with that lost, puzzled expression.
“What’s up, sweet thing?”
She turned and grabbed his hand. “I’m so glad you’re here, Breck. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t like to phone you in the middle of the night.”
He sat down beside her. “The middle of the night?”
“Three-thirty this morning, to be exact.”
He rubbed his fingers across the back of her hand. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She showed him her cellphone with several incoming messages, one timed at 3:30 a.m. precisely. When she explained what the caller had said, he wished he could get his hands on the creep and crush him into little pieces.
“I checked, but the sender’s name is blocked.”
Of course it was. But Ingrid being Ingrid, had all her incoming calls on Record. He listened to the message several times, trying to ascertain if anything in particular stood out.
Ingrid looked down at her feet. “At first I thought it must be a parent sounding off about some troubles they had at home that their child had inadvertently spilled to me, then I began to wonder…do you think it has anything to do with—Tania and all that stuff?”
Oh, Jesus. Had he dragged her into trouble? He replayed the message. “I think the voice is slightly disguised,” he said after a moment. “It hasn’t been changed by a voice changer so much as the speaker is trying to disguise it himself. I mean, he’s perhaps talking more deeply than he usually does.”
Her lips parted. “How can you tell?”
“I can’t, really. It’s just that everything would be altered in sync if he used a voice changer, whereas he’s just changing some of his words. It’s definitely a male.”
“I wasn’t even sure of that.” She touched his arm. “You’re going to make a great detective.”
He couldn’t help laughing. “It takes a bit more than that to pass those damned exams.” He stood. “Just in case, I’ll forward this to Hull. And if it’s the family of one of your kids, then it’s just as well I’ll be here on and off over the next couple of weeks.”
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