ARRIVING at the office on the Monday morning after her disastrous engagement party, Kalera found herself walking into a whirlwind. At first she thought the turmoil meant there must have been a fire alarm.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked Luke, one of the software engineers, as he staggered down the hallway with an armload of portable hard-disk drives and cartridges.
‘We’re bugging out,’ he grinned.
‘Moving?’ she asked incredulously. They couldn’t have been evicted because Duncan owned the building! ‘What—everyone?’
‘Nah. Just the A-team.’
That meant Bryan Eastman’s lot.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Dunno…the roof first, then no one’s saying. A distant galaxy far, far away is my guess.’
‘The roof!’ Kalera hurried down to her office, which was in equal chaos, but not because of any moving.
‘What’s going on, Bettina?’
‘I don’t know; no one tells me anything,’ the young woman complained, rummaging in the files, yelping when she almost broke a nail. ‘Hey, have you seen the Bredon disk? I was sure I put it somewhere in here on Friday.’
‘Have you checked under B?’
Bettina looked at her blankly and Kalera left before she gave in to the overwhelming desire to fire her on the spot. Her feet slowing, she headed towards Duncan’s door. There was no sense in putting off this confrontation any longer.
Duncan was pacing up and down insulting someone over his mobile phone, darting over every now and then to punch an addition into the open laptop on his desk. His light grey suit would have been numbingly plain but for the effect of the lime-green shirt and an electrifying fluorescent green tie sprinkled with little orange lightning bolts. When he looked up and saw Kalera something flared in his eyes and he hastily ended his call and slammed the phone down on the desk.
‘You’re late!’ he barked.
It was not the manner of greeting she had expected, and it immediately put her on familiar ground.
‘I had trouble with my car,’ she said mildly.
‘I thought you weren’t going to turn up at all,’ he growled, explaining his ill humour, his eyes running over her as if to make sure she was all there. She had her neat, practical office garb on again and looked a world away from the woman she had been on Saturday night. His world, he thought, with a gloating surge of satisfaction.
He gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Not the twins again?’
She sighed. He probably wouldn’t give up until he had dragged it out of her. ‘I ran out of petrol.’
His eyes widened. ‘On the way to work? You? Mrs Organisation herself?’
‘I used the car a lot over the weekend,’ she said unsmilingly, ‘and I had other things on my mind.’
His frown was swift to reappear. ‘Yes, where were you yesterday? I tried you at home, and at your parents’. I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
Shades of Stephen! ‘I was fine,’ she said, with a little tilt of her chin that told him it was a lie. ‘I went for a drive.’
‘All day and night?’ His scowl deepened. ‘I even rang Steve’s place but I never got anything but the answering machine. I thought you and he might have been meeting somewhere…?’
‘Well, we weren’t. I drove lots of places, and I stopped at a motel for the night.’ As an anonymous traveller—out of reach of people or telephones, and free of sympathy, advice or any kind of pressure. ‘I just wanted some time on my own.’
His dark brows lifted. ‘So…’ He moved towards her, tense with expectancy. ‘Have you and Steve settled things between you?’
She shook her head and gestured helplessly with her hands, bringing him to a halt as his eyes zeroed in on what Anna had seen.
‘We hardly had a chance for more than a few words, when I went to pick up my car.’ And those composed of futile counter-recriminations, with Stephen even suggesting that she was the one who had overreacted on Saturday night. ‘Stephen was rushing out to the hospital because apparently Michael fell down some stairs early yesterday morning, and got a slight concussion and a badly broken arm. Maybe Stephen spent all day at the hospital; I don’t know.’ Perhaps the trauma had succeeded in jolting him into recognising the unbreakable emotional bond he shared with his son. For both their sakes, Kalera hoped so.
Duncan picked up her right hand, thumbing the ostentatious ring. ‘He never did get to make that announcement, did he? So you could say you’re not formally engaged at all…’
‘We’re not formally disengaged either,’ she said warily.
His grip tightened. ‘But you will be soon?’ he insisted.
A familiar look of stubbornness entered her grey eyes as she resisted his coercion. She had no intention of telling him that the ring was on her finger simply because it was the safest place to keep it. She didn’t want to make herself any more vulnerable than she was already.
‘I can’t say,’ she prevaricated, firmly extracting her hand. ‘I need to see Stephen first. In fact, I’m going to go over there this evening,’ she decided.
‘You can’t!’ he rapped out.
The command made her raise haughty eyebrows. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Anna’s head poked around the corner. ‘Hey, Chief, Bryan says you’d better suit up—it’s zero-minus-ten and counting.’
‘All right, all right—’ He waved her away and began grabbing things off his desk and slinging them into a briefcase.
‘What on earth is going on?’
He snapped down the catches on the briefcase and spun the combination lock. ‘Get your laptop and come with me.’
‘What for?’ she asked, relieved to turn her mind to more impersonal matters.
‘Just do it, OK?’ he said impatiently.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there—like all the rest.’
There was safety in numbers, she reminded herself. ‘Are we going to be away long?’
‘Probably.’
‘You’re going to leave Bettina in charge of the office for the whole day?’ was her first appalled thought.
‘Anna’ll keep her in line. Now can you get a move on? Everyone else is waiting…’
He hustled her into the lift and pressed the button for the top floor.
On the windy roof Kalera stared in dismay at the helicopter being loaded up by Bryan and his four coworkers, all of whom, she noticed ominously, had roll-bags or suitcases of personal gear.
‘Exactly how long is long?’ she demanded as Duncan added his briefcase and laptop to the load.
He shrugged. ‘However long it takes. Look—’ he tersely cut off her burgeoning protest ‘—your soon-to-be-ex-fiancé—’ the emphasis was crushing ‘—has suddenly started boasting about a speech-recognition program which bears a suspicious resemblance to ours, so I’m cutting off any possible source of information. I’m going to sequester this team in a leak-proof fortress and maybe, without any outside distractions, we can accelerate our final debugging and bring this baby home early enough to pre-empt a coup.’
‘Why take me and not Anna?’
‘Because Anna’s working on other priority programs and I’d rather have you where I can keep an eye on you…’
‘Are you accusing me of having something to do with the leak?’ She bristled up at him.
‘If I thought that you wouldn’t have a ticket to ride,’ he said, throttling her doubt with a look.
‘Then how come everyone but me got more than five minutes’ notice?’ she said, pointing at the pile of suitcases.
‘Because I was able to contact all of them yesterday,’ said Duncan smoothly.
‘But I haven’t made any arrangements to be away.’ She chafed. ‘I haven’t even got a change of clothes! And what about my car—and my house? I have to cancel the paper!’
‘Anna is going to deal with all that for you. You can send her a message about what things to pack for you and we’ll send the helicopter back to collect it.’ The wind had whipped his black hair into devilish quiffs.
‘I should at least let my parents know I’ll be away—’
‘Already done.’
She hesitated, twisting the burdensome ring on her finger, before admitting the root of her reluctance. It was no good—she couldn’t leave herself, or Stephen, hanging in limbo for an indeterminate length of time…
‘I need to make one phone call,’ she pleaded, hoping that Stephen would be in his office. ‘It won’t take long—’
The pilot had begun to rotate the huge blades.
‘No time,’ said Duncan flatly. ‘Sorry.’
Kalera didn’t think he looked very sorry.
‘Are you sure it’s safe to take off in this wind? It seems pretty gusty.’ Her voice lifted to compete with the rising throb of the blades.
‘It landed, didn’t it? Come on, Kalera, any woman who can drive an F1 the way you did on Saturday night can’t be afraid of a little breeze.’
Kalera pushed at the hem of her skirt as the swirling air stirred up by the helicopter flipped it up her thighs. It still unnerved her to remember how power-crazed she had acted when she had got behind the wheel of his ridiculously expensive macho-machine.
The sexy purr of the engine, the roar of the tyres on the road and the wind past her open window, and the sweet vibration of all that power, had been an exhilarating combination. With Duncan gritting his teeth in the passenger seat she had cruised through the suburbs, getting used to the superb handling, and then planted her foot down on the motorway with reckless disregard for the speed-camera signs.
When Duncan had kindly pointed them out she had laughed. It was his car…if she was flashed, then the traffic department would be sending him the fine—and it would be a small price to pay for all the trouble he had caused!
She had driven eighty kilometres out into the country before she’d turned around, and by the time they’d made the outskirts of the city again most of her anger had been dissipated in the concentration it had required to navigate the dark roads. Easing off the pedal, she had taken an off-ramp at random and Duncan had unclamped his hands from the edge of his seat and croaked, ‘Where to now?’
Kalera ducked her head to read a fluorescent street name. ‘I’m not sure—I don’t know where we are…’
‘I do. Why don’t you let me—?’ She shot him a searing look and he altered his next word before it issued from his mouth. ‘Navigate from here.’
‘I’m not going to your place,’ she warned fiercely. She had made enough mistakes for one night.
‘Fine…’ His face was calm, as if no such thought had even entered his head. ‘Take the next left, and then go right, at the intersection…’
When he finally directed her through huge, twin stone pillars and up a narrow road lined with box hedges she was completely mystified by his choice of destination.
‘What is this place—a museum?’ she murmured, parking where instructed and looking up at the classical stone building, its exterior softly illuminated by concealed spotlights in the formal shubbery that ran along the frontage. There were also lights showing through the downstairs windows.
‘It’s the house where I grew up. My parents live here.’ He unclipped his seat belt, and then hers, leaning over to flick off the headlights. ‘We’re probably just in time to join them for coffee and liqueurs—they like to keep fashionably late hours.’
She gaped at him as he got out and walked around the front of the car to open her door.
‘You brought me here to see your parents?’ she squeaked.
He bent down to offer her his hand. ‘You took me to see yours—’
‘You invited yourself!’
‘Well, now I’m inviting you.’
‘I can’t go in there now!’ she said feverishly, shrinking back into her seat.
‘Why not? They don’t know what’s happened,’ he said, prising her out. ‘And what better time to meet people than when you’re dressed to impress? Aren’t you the least bit curious about my background?’
In truth she was fascinated, but half an hour later Kalera had satisfied her curiosity and was dying to leave.
Jacob and Serena Royal were both handsome, highly educated, articulate and opinionated. They were also amongst the most boring people that Kalera had ever met. Their lack of humour made the conversation turgid and their subtly domineering attitude towards their son made Kalera inwardly bristle on his behalf.
‘If you’d gone to the Bar you probably would have taken Silk by now,’ was all his father said when Duncan mentioned a recent Labyrinth product which had won a leading computer magazine award. It was evident from their condescension that Duncan’s brilliance and success in a field for which his parents had little respect or understanding meant less to them than the academic failures and peripatetic nature of his past. Kalera felt a surge of gratefulness that he had managed to escape the straitjacket of conformity into which his mother and father had tried to force him.
Perched on the edge of an uncomfortable antique sofa, balancing a wafer-thin cup of Colombian coffee on her knee, Kalera weathered another quarter of an hour of excruciatingly dull conversation before Duncan blandly asked if she could bear to tear herself away.
When the door shut behind them they both uttered identical, deep sighs of relief and their eyes met in an exquisite moment of perfect understanding. Duncan grinned and she realised that he hadn’t smiled once inside the stultifying solemnity of that house.
‘Freedom!’ He caught up her hand and together they ran down to the car, laughing, like two children escaping school for the summer.
Without discussion, Duncan took the wheel, surprising her yet again when they ended up at a regional park high on the cliffs overlooking Waitemata Harbour.
There were a few other cars parked on the access road, a lovers’ lane of steamy windows, but Duncan drove past them, over a cattle grid and up to a dead end where a wire fence supported a wooden stile. There he took off his shoes and socks and made Kalera do the same, teasing her as she made him turn his back for her to unroll her stockings, and walked her across the rolling, moonlit fields, the grass already damp with spring dew, to where the sea breeze met the edge of the cliff, throwing up a salt-perfumed gush of air.
‘I love coming up here alone late at night,’ he exulted softly, tipping his head back to stare up at the vast vault of heaven pricked with stars. ‘Just me…and the rest of the universe.’
The light from the yellow slice of moon was just enough to silver his strongest features, throwing the rest into impenetrable shadow.
‘You can dream dreams here with no one to tell you that they’re futile or feckless. Someone once told me that the way to success is never to stop believing in your dreams, or trying to achieve them…’
Kalera wrapped her arms around herself, soaking up the tranquillity of the night, feeling safe enough under the cover of the darkness to study him for the first time with her heart in her eyes, aching with the knowledge that her own secret dream, the one she had steadfastly refused to admit even to herself, was still as unreachable as the stars overhead. She loved Duncan Royal, had loved him for much longer than was comfortable to contemplate.
‘After visiting the family mausoleum,’ he murmured, still scanning the heavens, ‘you must know why it’s always been so important for me to be free—to be a renegade who makes his own rules.’
‘Is that why you took me there?’ She turned to look out over the shadowy sea, the lights of the distant shore suddenly blurring in her sight.
Oh, God, had he guessed how she felt? Did he think she had required an object lesson on how little to expect from him? She knew him too well to have believed it would be any different. In spite of his flamboyant gregariousness and greedy appetite for excitement, he travelled through life essentially alone. Just Duncan and the universe of dreams he carried inside him.
She felt him move up behind her, his hands steadying the sway of her slight body in the breeze. ‘I wanted you to understand. You think we’re worlds apart in our outlook but we’re not so very different, you and I, in what drives us to do the things that we do and make the choices that we have. Neither of us wants to be our parents…’
‘I don’t think there’s any danger you’ll end up like your father,’ said Kalera, thinking of the dour, repressive man whose face might have been carved in granite.
His arms replaced his hands, folding around her waist, his chin propped on her moon-silvered top-knot as he drew her securely back against him.
‘And you have too much strength of will to ever be swayed into forsaking your responsibilities for the sake of casual self-indulgence, as your mother did.
‘You had too much freedom in your childhood, I had too little. We both over-compensated. The trick is to hold a balance in your life.’
‘I’d like to learn that trick some day,’ sighed Kalera.
He turned her in his arms, a column of moonstruck fire, and rested his cool forehead against hers. ‘Would you like me to teach you?’ he whispered, nudging her nose with his.
He had obliquely warned her off falling in love with him, and now he was inviting her to accept him for the man he was…
A breath away from being kissed, she lost courage and turned her cheek.
He was not dispirited. ‘Ever since your mother told me you were born on grass I’ve had this lovely fantasy,’ he murmured, nuzzling the silky slant of her delicate cheekbone. ‘You naked as the day you were born on a lush field of grass. Will you make love with me, now, Kalera—here on this bed of grass, in the moonlight…?’
If only she had. If only she hadn’t been too shocked, too shy, too fearful of betraying her most private emotions to act out his fantasy, maybe she wouldn’t be feeling so miserable and confused now…
‘Kalera? Are you going to get into that helicopter or are we going to have to winch you in?’
Wrenched back to the present by Duncan’s impatient growl, Kalera stumbled forward, bending low, and hitched her skirt to climb into the rear of the transport, gasping as she received a caressing boost to her taut rear by Duncan’s cupped hand.
She flushed as she subsided into her seat and was immediately squashed up against the bulkhead by Duncan, who ensured she was buckled in before he issued a thumbs-up to the pilot. The rotation increased sharply and the helicopter shuddered and lurched. Kalera closed her eyes and a warm hand wrapped around her white-knuckled fingers as they swooped off the top of the building. It was several minutes before she opened her eyes and Duncan gave her hand a warm squeeze of reassurance as she looked out of the window, her stomach lurching to see that they were skimming over the sparkling waters of Waitemata Harbour. Soon, though, she was fascinated by the view, eagerly looking out for the landmarks Duncan pointed out in the toy-land unfolding below while Bryan dozed and his four young ‘apostles’, Matthew, Mark, Luke and Brendan, played a series of wildly fast games of cards that competed against the rotors for rowdiness.
It took an hour to get to their secret destination, flying south across the Firth of Thames to an isolated spot in the south-eastern reaches of the Coromandel Ranges. As the helicopter hovered low over a cleared patch of land in the midst of thick native bush, Kalera saw a large, square, single-storey house of white-washed concrete.
She turned wide grey eyes to Duncan’s face.
He nodded, leaning close to her ear to be heard. ‘I call it The Labyrinth.’
‘You own it?’
His navy eyes gleamed. ‘Built it four years ago. My secret hideaway from the world…’
Privately she thought it a rather ridiculous name for such a prosaic dwelling—until she walked through the ceiling-high front door and discovered that the interior was constructed as a clever series of square rooms of various sizes connected by a maze-like interconnection of corridors which doubled as bookshelves and storage areas. All the interior doors were internal sliders which vanished back into the walls, thus preserving the illusion of endless entrances and exits and providing the option of open-plan living or very private bolt-holes.
As Duncan trailed his troop of guests across the polished wood floors, introducing them to the intricate layout of the colourfully furnished white-walled rooms, Kalera murmured, ‘It looks sort of like—’
‘A labyrinth, I know; I designed it that way.’ He rewarded her with an indulgent smile. ‘Let me show you the bedrooms I’ve allocated for you all and then we can get settled in. I have a live-in caretaker who is a fantastic cook, by the way, so anything you want in the kitchen, just ask Jed—except for snacks and drinks; you can help yourself to those.’
He showed the five men their sleeping quarters first—a cluster of twin-bedded rooms next to a fully equipped computer centre soon cluttered with all the extra equipment they had bought.
Kalera, to her dismay, was far away on the opposite side of the house, in a spacious bedroom next to Duncan’s.
She looked slowly around her room, her eyes avoiding the sliding door midway along the wall, which she guessed must open into Duncan’s master suite, and the wide, inviting bed with its sensuous green satin cover.
‘Shouldn’t I be over with the rest of the workers?’ she commented.
‘I wanted you near me,’ he said simply, sending a frisson up her spine with his heavy-lidded smile. ‘In case I need you.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘For work, you mean?’
The smile grew bitter-sweet. ‘I can always rely on you to tell me what I mean, can’t I, Kalera? God forbid you should believe I mean what I actually say.’
Shortly afterwards the helicopter was despatched on a round trip back to Auckland in order to fetch Kalera’s solitary suitcase—an absurd extravagance that she nonetheless accepted as compensation for the vast inconvenience of the trip.
Over the next three days, Kalera saw virtually nothing of the other five men, who seemed to be breathing, eating and sleeping on the job, but she saw far too much of Duncan, whose sole purpose in existing now seemed to be to drive her crazy with unrequited love. Now that she had finally admitted her own feelings to herself, it was proving impossible to push them aside and pretend that she wasn’t aware of him with every breath that she took.
It didn’t help that instead of knuckling down to any serious work Duncan was merely flirting with it—and with her—teasing her with his arrant mischief, making her laugh at his wit and tempting her with sultry glances and wicked reminders of the passion they had shared.
The catalyst came early one morning when she happened to meet Bryan in a state of half-zombification in the kitchen, blearily chugging milk from the refrigerator after another all-nighter, and learned something from him that sent her exploding furiously into Duncan’s bedroom, forgetting she was only wearing her demure white cotton nightie.
He groaned and rolled over onto his back, looking up at the blonde banshee who had erupted into his dreams.
‘This is all an elaborate sham, isn’t it?’ she shouted at his big, supine body, sheathed in green satin sheets. ‘We never had to come down here at all! Bryan just told me that there wasn’t a big leak at all, just a campaign of misinformation by Stephen—and you knew all about it last Friday!’ Throwing his behaviour at the party into a shattering new perspective and raising all her old angry doubts about his motives.
Duncan closed his eyes again and she was furious with him for pretending to be bored to sleep by her accusations.
‘Get up! I want to hear this from you. There’s no need for us to be here at all, is there?’
She grabbed a handful of the slippery sheet, creased across his chest, and tugged it threateningly. ‘I said, get up, you rat!’
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ he warned gently, still not opening his eyes.
Exhilaration raced through her veins at the challenge.
‘Huh!’ With a snort of defiance she ripped the bedclothes off and tossed them away over the end of the bed where he wouldn’t be able to reach them. Her whole body immediately felt as if it had been dipped in boiling water.
‘As you can see, I’m already up,’ drawled Duncan, looking down at the bold arousal of his body. He lazily rolled onto his side, facing her with the jutting evidence. ‘Actually, I’m always up when you’re around, Kalera. This happened last time you came into my bedroom, too, remember?’
All too well. She trembled, unable to look away, the turbulent excitement building to flashpoint inside her, the breath jamming in her throat as he lightly touched himself. ‘Don’t—’
‘Don’t what? Want you? Too late. Look at me. This is how I feel about you. I want you…all the time. And I’ve waited a long time for you to invite yourself back into my bedroom…’
She gasped and turned to flee, but he hit the floor running and scooped her up easily with one long, muscled arm, ramming the door shut with a bang, and flipping her backwards onto the crumpled sheet in a wild flurry of long blonde hair and kicking bare legs.
‘You want the charade to be over—so be it, it’s over!’ he said, pinning her to the bed with his sleep-warm body, luxuriating in the instant melting of her resistance. ‘Bryan wanted to give the project a hurry-up and this was the perfect place to do a full immersion, but no, you and I didn’t have to come, too. You and I are here because of this…’
He lifted her right hand and dragged off the glittering diamond ring and threw it onto the floor. Then he placed her bare hand on his thrusting body and crushed her mouth with his and suddenly her dammed emotions were bursting their swollen banks and she was fighting with him for the pleasure, helping him tear off her nightie, arching her breasts to his mouth and lifting her legs to encompass the rock-hard strength of his thighs, guiding him into the silky heat for the physical union that would complete them as two halves of a whole. The intense pleasure spiked at his first thrust, then again, and again, as his hips drove him deep into her central core, and Kalera shuddered, her gasping cry mingling with his answering groan of completion.
‘I never meant that to happen,’ said Duncan in a hoarse, stunned voice as they lay in a tangle of sweaty glory. He felt her tense beneath him and chuckled wryly into her tangled hair. ‘I don’t mean making love to you, darling, I mean ravishing you wildly like that. Not the first time. I was going to seduce you gently, with love, so that you’d respect me in the morning—and yourself—not like that other time…’
With love. Her heart suddenly felt too big for her breast. ‘I wasn’t ready for you then,’ she remembered painfully. ‘You were too…’
He lifted his head and frowned down into her eyes. ‘Too what?’
‘Much,’ she said wryly, touched by his anxiety. ‘Too exciting, too sexy, too…alive. Too much a man for me in every way at that point in my life.’
‘So you turned to Stephen instead.’
She blushed. ‘He was…comfortable. I thought that was what I wanted.’
‘And what do you want now?’
With love. She made the final leap of trust. ‘You.’
Joy made his eyes very blue. ‘I was ready for you,’ he told her quietly. ‘I’ve been ready now for a long, long time, Kalera. Much longer than you imagine. I knew you felt you had betrayed Harry by asking me to make love to you, but I didn’t feel guilty. I loved it. And, hell, I figured Harry owed me that much…’
‘Owed you for what? I thought Harry was your friend.’
‘Harry was my friend because he felt sorry for me.’
She was stunned. ‘Sorry for you?’
He smoothed her hair gently back from her forehead. ‘He knew that you loved him and he felt sorry for me because he knew how I felt about you. Don’t ask me how, since you never had a clue, but he did. But he didn’t come the heavy husband or warn me off—oh, no, not Harry. After that party of yours when you and I danced on the balcony he rang to offer me a round of golf, even though he knew I didn’t play. He knew I’d accept, you see—he knew I’d be curious about Kalera’s husband.
‘I wanted him to be an insensitive bastard who didn’t deserve you, but he wasn’t, he was a bloody nice guy. He was utterly secure in who he was. It didn’t matter to him that I was better educated, richer, brighter and better-looking than he was—he knew he had the one supreme advantage that I could never top: you loved him. So he made a friend of me when most men would have shunned me as a potential enemy.
‘And do you know what else he did?’ His voice softened with awe. ‘He trusted me. He trusted me not to do what he knew I wanted with my whole heart and soul to do…seduce his wife and take her away from him for ever. I wanted you to love me, not him, to wear my ring with the pride that you wore his, to have my babies…’
‘Oh, Duncan—’ Her throat thickened with love.
‘I loved him for that, Kalera,’ he said proudly. ‘For giving me back the honour that Stephen stole from me. And I loved him because you found him worthy of love…because what you love I love.’
‘You obviously love yourself very much, then,’ she teased tenderly, knowing now that there was emotional security to be found even in loving a turbulent man of extremes. ‘But then I always knew you were a dreadful egotist!’
‘I was beginning to think I’d never hear you admit you loved me,’ he gloated, running his hands over her slender body, and arousing her all over again. ‘I hope I’m not going to wake up to find this is just another dream…’
‘But it is,’ she told him. ‘You’re my for ever dream, and I’ll never stop believing in you…and in us…’