size on the well‐stocked tables wasn’t so easy, and besides, her concentration was shot to pieces by constant thoughts of Ben.
He’d tried to find her after their night together. Was that good or bad? Not good, she reminded herself. But then, she’d tried to find out about him when Dylan was a toddler.
Her discreet inquiries had come up with nothing. Googling his name on the net didn’t tell her anything new; there were the old news articles about the smart kid in trouble with the police and suspended indefinitely from his school for hacking into its computer system and handing out the confidential contents of teachers’ files to other students.
Julie Mac
There were the almost gleeful media follow‐ups of his earlier entrepreneurial black market hawking of soft drinks in the school grounds after the high school had banned the sale of fizzy drinks in the tuckshop. And later, a brief report from one of the local papers, covering his court appearance.
But nothing else. Surprising, she’d thought at the time, considering he’d been seen by some of her friends—more than once—hanging out in his early twenties with guys known as the local drug pedlars.
She’d found no clue as to where he lived or worked, not a single hit on any social networking sites.
Then, just a couple of years ago, she’d seen him in a television news clip of an incident at Auckland Airport’s domestic terminal. A man, his back to the security cameras, walked up to a prominent Member of Parliament and punched him in the face, hard. The portly middle‐aged MP buckled up, blood gushing from his fleshy face, while his assailant walked on calmly. Security guards rushed to grab the attacker, who made no effort to get away.
When the man, tall and dark‐headed, turned fractionally towards the security camera, Kelly knew she was looking at Ben Carter.
She’d scanned the news avidly for the next few days, and was amazed to read that the MP had declined to press charges. It was election year; he earned much‐needed brownie points by saying he wouldn’t waste precious court time and public money by bringing charges against the unidentified assailant, a poor, sad, loser. A stranger who was probably on drugs, and had done no real harm, the MP had said at the time.
And that was the last she knew of him. Of course, she could have phoned his parents, or called around to their home. A check in the phone book told her they were still at the same address. But knocking on their door would have caused all sorts of wrong conclusions. Besides, they were good, decent people; it was entirely possible they’d washed their hands of their wayward son.
“This store will close in two minutes. Please make your way to the exits.”
The disembodied voice on the department store speakers, polite but firm, brought her back to the present. She quickly paid at the counter and headed for the lifts with the last of the straggler shoppers.
As she left the shop, she thought of Dylan’s reaction to his new clothes. His eyes would light up with pleasure and excitement. His golden eyes, just like his daddy’s.
Ben grabbed a bottle from his fridge, sank into the sofa, and pushed the button on the TV
remote for the sports channel. He watched motor racing for a few minutes, but didn’t turn up the sound.
He took a long pull on his beer, then swore. He’d done something really dumb today, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.
A Father at Last
He hadn’t needed to follow her—not really. His scumbag colleagues had given up waiting for her long before she came out of the court building. He shouldn’t have followed her, shouldn’t have risked dragging her into his seedy underworld.
But seeing Kelly had been like a breakthrough of sun on a winter’s day, a ray of goodness and hope in an increasingly tawdry world. And once he’d seen her at the court, he couldn’t leave it at that. Couldn’t live with ‘hi and goodbye’ again, not