Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 01 (lit)

  ‘Great.’

  Except it wasn’t great, it was terrifying, and he realised that even in the grip of a major accident, when the hospital instituted its MAJAX plan, he’d never felt quite this scared that things would go wrong.

  He could hear the bidding, hear the figures rising perilously close to his maximum. He’d still got the budget for the work in hand, but it needed that. He couldn’t use it all, but he could dip into it if he had to—

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘Another five thousand—in ones,’ he instructed, and listened as the price climbed slowly up, long pauses now between the bids.

  ‘The other bidder’s only gone up five hundred—he must be close to his limit,’ Simon said.

  ‘Call his bluff. Go up five thousand more, in one jump,’ Ben said, his heart pounding. ‘See if you can knock him out.’

  There was a long, long silence, then he heard the auctioneer say, ‘Going once…Going twice…’ and the sound of the hammer coming down. But who—?

  ‘Congratulations!’ Simon said. ‘You’ve got yourself a house.’

  Somehow Ben ended the call. He wasn’t sure what he’d said, what he’d agreed to do. It didn’t matter. He’d call Simon back later. For now there was a woman standing on the headland, and she needed his attention.

  He drove up to the house—his house, or it would be soon—and turned in the gate. Her car was there, pulled up by the door, and he blocked her in just in case he missed her somehow.

  He didn’t. She was still there, standing staring out to sea, and he went down the track by the side of the garden, across the field and walked up behind her.

  ‘Lucy?’

  She turned slowly, and he could see the tears on her cheeks, dried by the wind.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she said woodenly. ‘The house. It’s gone. The sale was at two.’

  ‘I know.’

  She hugged herself, her hands wrapping around her slender arms and hanging on, and he stood between her and the biting wind and cupped her face in his hands.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said softly. ‘Come back to the house with me.’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘The house?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She turned, and he put his arm round her and led her carefully back over the field. At the gateway to the house he stopped and scooped her into his arms.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, startled.

  ‘It’s tradition,’ he said, ‘except it should be the front door, but I can’t do that because I haven’t got the keys and anyway the front door key’s missing.’

  She stared at him blankly. ‘Tradition?’

  ‘To carry your woman over the threshold.’ He took a deep breath and walked through the gateway. ‘Welcome to your new home, Lucy.’

  She stared at him for an age, then hope flickered in her eyes. ‘My new…?’

  ‘I bought the house—for you,’ he told her gently, and she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHE couldn’t believe it.

  He’d put her down carefully on her feet, on the driveway of the house, and he was looking down at her expectantly.

  No, not expectantly, exactly, but as if he wasn’t quite sure what reception his news was getting, and needed—desperately needed—to know.

  ‘Oh, Ben,’ she said, flinging her arms around him and hugging him, then letting him go and looking up at him searchingly while she hunted for a tissue.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and handed her one with a smile, and she blew her nose, scrubbed away the still welling tears, and stared up at him again.

  ‘I can’t believe—How on earth did you afford it? It must have gone for a fortune. You’re crazy!’

  ‘Only a tiny fortune,’ he said with a wry, slightly uncertain smile. ‘I’d sold my house—never did like it—and I’d been looking for somewhere older, somewhere with character. Then you told me about this, and—well, there I was, in a position to do something about it, and I thought—Hell, I don’t know what I thought, but if the chance was there to give you the house of your dreams, somewhere you’d be safe and happy, I didn’t want to risk not doing it. And if you really didn’t want it after all, I thought I could always stick it back on the market.’

  ‘You really bought it for me?’

  His mouth quirked into a smile again. ‘Well, I was kind of hoping you’d let me share it, but—yes, I bought it for you. You and the baby.’ His face shadowed. ‘But it’s quite isolated—apart from the farmhouse over there, you can’t see another house, and it’s nearly a mile to the village, if you can call it that. It seems like a pretty tiny community. If it was just nostalgia—’

  ‘No!’ she said hastily, hurrying to correct him. ‘No, Ben, it wasn’t just nostalgia. I love this house. I’ve always loved it. I just can’t believe—’ She broke off, not knowing how to continue, what to say, still utterly overwhelmed by what he’d done.

  And the way he’d presented it, too, not as some kind of grand gesture, not a ‘ta-da!’ but humbly, as if he’d done it to make her happy and not to score Brownie points.

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t go inside, but I won’t get the keys for ages.’

  She dangled them under his nose. ‘I got them off Dad. Said I wanted to have a last look around.’ She held them out to him. ‘Well, go on, then,’ she said, but he shook his head.

  ‘It’s not mine yet,’ he reminded her, and it was as if the mention of her father’s name had taken all the colour out of the day. But he was still smiling, his eyes searching her face for clues, and suddenly she wanted to look around it with him, to tell him about her grandmother, to show him the house from her memories.

  ‘I can take you in,’ she pointed out, waggling the keys. ‘I have the vendor’s permission to be here.’

  And taking him by the hand, she led him to the back door, opened it and then stopped him when he would have lifted her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet. Not until we’re…’ She caught herself, then went on, ‘Not until it’s properly yours.’

  What had she been going to say?

  Not until we’re—what?

  Married?

  One step at a time, he warned himself, cutting off his hopes before they got totally out of sync with reality.

  He stopped worrying about it and followed her into the house, watching her face as she went from room to room, telling him stories.

  ‘Oh, it looks so dirty and shabby, but I can remember my grandfather’s coat hanging here, and my grandmother’s elderly jacket that she used for the garden. Tweed, good and thick, utterly hideous, but it kept her warm. And the dogs always slept here, next to the Aga,’ she said, moving through to the kitchen. ‘Grannie was always baking—apple pies, cakes, wholemeal bread that was so wonderful I still haven’t found anything to match it. And there was often a casserole in the bottom oven, or a baked egg custard made with milk from the house cow and eggs from the chickens that used to scratch about outside.’

  ‘Do you want chickens?’ he asked, fascinated by the emotions flitting over her face.

  She laughed. ‘Maybe. There was a cockerel who used to crow outside my bedroom window at some revolting hour of the morning, but I never minded because it meant I was here, and I loved it so much. Yes, chickens would be fun, but not the house cow. Too much like hard work! I remember being kicked off the milking stool by her when I was nine, and my mother wouldn’t let me milk her again. Said it was too dangerous. Anyway, we can get milk from the Trevellyans down the road.’

  We?

  They went through to the rooms at the front, the one she’d said had been the dining room and the one with the lovely fireplace that was just crying out for a big old dog grate with fragrant apple logs burning in the hearth.

  ‘We used to toast crumpets here by the fire,’ she told him. ‘And we’d butter them, and it would drip through and onto our fingers and the dogs would sneak up and lick the backs of our hands where the butter had run round. They used to get yelled at and shooed out.’
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br />   ‘Collies?’

  ‘Mostly. There was a Jack Russell at one time, but he was ancient. He was allowed in here by the fire, and sometimes even on my lap. Grannie was so upset when he died.’

  They went upstairs, to the rooms overlooking the sea, and she took him into the smallest one over the front door. ‘This was mine. Jack and Ed shared the room at the back, and Grannie and Grandpa were in the big bedroom next door that way, and my parents were in that room.’

  ‘Jack and Ed?’

  ‘My brothers.’ She stroked her fingers reverently over the window-sill, wide enough to sit on, and told him about how she’d sat there by the open window in the summer, after the cockerel had woken her, and waited for the dawn. ‘Sometimes I saw a fox sneak past the chicken house, and once I saw one run off with a chicken in his mouth. Grannie was livid.’

  She laughed, the sound like a waterfall, and he felt the tight knot of tension that had been there for days start to ease. It was going to be all right. He knew it was.

  They just had that one last hurdle to get over…

  ‘Did you know about this?’

  The door crashed back against the wall, and the baby inside her stiffened, startled by the sudden noise. Lucy cradled it automatically, soothing it with her hands, and met her father’s eyes with as much composure as she could muster.

  She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. He was brandishing a letter from the estate agent, and his face was stiff with fury.

  ‘Yes, I knew,’ she said. ‘Not until afterwards, though.’

  ‘And you didn’t think fit to tell me? My own daughter, and you didn’t tell me that that man had bought my house?’

  ‘Your mother’s house,’ she pointed out, and he growled under his breath and slapped the paperwork down on her desk.

  ‘Don’t split hairs, Lucy! How did you know?’

  ‘I was there,’ she told him, lifting her chin. ‘At the house—saying goodbye. Ben turned up. He told me then—right after the auction. He’d bid over the phone.’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, frustrated. ‘He’d been at work. He didn’t have time to drive all the way to the auction house.’

  ‘God! He only did it to spite me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. It’s a lovely house. He’s been looking for something for ages.’

  Tell him! her conscience urged, but she bottled out in the face of his already considerable anger. Not because she was afraid of him, because she knew perfectly well how much he loved her and that he would never lift a finger to her, but because now wasn’t the time. She had a surgery starting in a minute, and so did he.

  And she wanted time to talk it through with him, to explain her feelings, to discuss her mother’s death a little more rationally. But right now, she knew, he simply wouldn’t listen.

  ‘Well, I wanted to let it go,’ he said at last. ‘And maybe it’s for the best. At least now I know I’ll never have to go into the house again.’

  And he strode out, leaving her sitting there in the ringing silence.

  So much for her blissful, relaxing weekend. They’d had a wonderful time. Ben had taken her down to Padstow, to a café, one of her favourite places, where the food was fresh and unpretentious and the atmosphere lively. It wasn’t romantic, but it was fun, and she’d accidentally squirted Ben with prawn juice and they’d laughed till she’d thought they’d die from lack of oxygen.

  Then they’d gone back to his house and he’d made love to her on the sofa in front of the fire, and then again in the morning, lying in bed lazily until midday while he’d waited on her and indulged her every whim.

  Breakfast in bed—pain au chocolat, gallons of delicately flavoured tea with just a touch of milk, fresh fruit sliced into a bowl and fed to her with his fingers—and then she’d sucked the juice off them, and his eyes had darkened and he’d put the bowl down, moved the tray and kissed the juice from her lips.

  It had taken a very long time, Lucy remembered with a fleeting smile. In the afternoon they’d gone to the supermarket and bought crumpets, and rump steak and shoestring fries for dinner with loads of salad, and he’d cooked the chocolate pudding again.

  They’d got up earlier on Sunday and gone for a lovely walk on the coastal path by Tregorran House, and then they’d gone back inside and talked about what he was going to do to the house. She’d stayed over that night as well, and had only got home this morning in time for surgery.

  And now her father was baying for Ben’s blood, and she didn’t know what to do for the best.

  She shut the door, sank down at her desk and let her hands drift down to cradle her baby. It had been such a lovely weekend, and by the end of it she’d managed to convince herself that everything would be all right.

  Ben had been so good to her, and they’d had so much fun. She knew she loved him, and she was beginning to think that, yes, he really did love her, and they’d get married and live happily ever after in Tregorran House and everything would be great.

  Stupid. She’d let herself get carried away on a big fluffy cloud, and now she was down to earth again with a bang.

  Eight and a half weeks to go, she thought. Eight and a half weeks to convince her father that Ben was all right and he hadn’t done anything wrong, and reconcile them to the point that he would give her away to Ben with his blessing, so they could get married before the baby came.

  Not a chance.

  If only things were more normal and they were married. So the baby could be born in wedlock.

  Grief, what an old-fashioned saying. Wedlock. Like prison.

  Only with Ben, she knew, it wouldn’t be. It would be wonderful. But there was still the problem of her father, and getting both him and Ben at the wedding might be more than she could manage.

  So could she marry Ben without her father there? She swallowed hard, blinking back tears. Without her father’s knowledge?

  No. She couldn’t do that. It would be bad enough not having her mother there. For her father not to be there either—no. She couldn’t even contemplate it.

  And anyway, they were light years from that, and before she could worry about it, she had a surgery to get through, and a whole batch of visits, including one to Edith Jones. She’d tried to ring her first thing but hadn’t got any reply. There could have been lots of reasons for that, not least that Edith couldn’t move that fast any longer.

  On the other hand—no, don’t borrow trouble, she told herself, and worked her way steadily through her patients, putting Edith and Ben and her father firmly out of her mind for now.

  Doris Trefussis, the practice cleaner and general all-round good egg, stuck her head round the door after her last patient had left. ‘Want a cuppa, my bird?’ she asked, giving Lucy a smile that still twinkled even though she was beginning to show her age. She was supposedly fifty-nine, but by all accounts she’d been fifty-nine for years. Thin, wiry and always smiling, Lucy didn’t know what they’d do without her.

  ‘No, I’m fine, Doris, thank you. I’ve got to go out on my visits. I’m a bit worried about Edith Jones—she’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘Saw her yesterday out in her garden—she looked all right,’ Doris said. ‘Can’t you have a little drink first?’

  Lucy smiled but still shook her head. ‘No. You can make me one when I get back. And if you’ve got a minute, you couldn’t slip round to the bakery and pick up a sandwich, could you? Wholemeal bread, something healthy without too much mayo?’

  ‘Of course, dear. I’ll get one with a nice bit of chicken in it—easily digestible. And a little apple turnover—I know you love them.’

  ‘You spoil me,’ she said, giving Doris the money and wondering how huge she was going to be by the time everyone, including Ben, had finished feeding her up. ‘Right, I’m off to Mrs Jones. I’ll see you later. Bless you.’

  She drove to Edith’s first, a little bungalow high up above the old town, in a development characterised by its lack of any a
rchitectural merit but a comfortable, friendly community for all that. Edith and her husband had lived there all their married lives, and Lucy sincerely hoped Edith could continue to live there for ever. She’d certainly have support from her neighbours. She’d known most of them for years and years.

  She pulled up on the road outside and looked around, seeing nothing out of the way. Nothing to indicate that there was a problem, certainly. Getting her bag out of the car, she went up to the front door and rang the bell, listening carefully.

  Odd. The television wasn’t on. It always was. Perhaps she’d gone away—spent the weekend with one of her children and not got back yet, perhaps? Except Doris had seen her yesterday, out in the garden. She rang the bell again, and bent down and peered through the letter box.

  ‘Mrs Jones?’ she called. ‘Edith? It’s Dr Lucy. Are you all right?’

  Silence, and then, just as she let the flap go, she heard a faint cry. She pushed it open again. ‘Edith? Are you there?’

  ‘In the kitchen—key under the pot,’ Edith called weakly.

  Pot? Which pot? There were hundreds, in all shapes and sizes, clustered around the front door. She checked under all the obvious ones, then went round to the back door and tried there, and to her relief there it was under the first pot she lifted—a shiny silver key. She opened the door and went straight into the kitchen, and found Edith lying awkwardly on the floor, propped up against the kitchen cupboards where she’d hauled herself.

  ‘Edith!’ she exclaimed softly, crouching down beside her a little awkwardly and touching her cheek in a gesture of reassurance.

  ‘Oh, Dr Lucy, I’m so glad to see you. I knew you were coming—it’s the only thing that’s kept me going. I heard the phone ring and ring, and I just couldn’t get to it. I was so hoping you’d come—not just think I was out.’

  Lucy felt a huge wave of relief that she hadn’t, in fact done that. She knew many doctors would have, but people in this tight-knit community didn’t let each other down, and if Edith hadn’t been going to be there, she would have told her.

  ‘Don’t move. Let me check you over. You just stay there. Let me get you a pillow for your head and something to tuck behind your back.’ She ran into the bedroom, came back with a pair of pillows and the quilt off the bed and, after checking that Edith wasn’t experiencing any back pain, she slid the pillows into place and then ran her hands gently over all her limbs.