SOS: Convenient Husband Required

by Liz Fielding

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘ADAM? What are you doing?’

  ‘Interesting question. Mouse, meet Nancie.’

  ‘Nancy?’

  ‘With an i and an e. Spelling never was Saffy’s strong point.’

  Saffy Wavell’s strong points had been so striking she’d never given a fig for spelling or anything much else. Long raven-black hair, a figure that appeared to be both ethereal and sensual, she’d been a boy magnet since she hit puberty. And in trouble ever since. But a baby…

  ‘She’s Saffy’s baby? That’s wonderful news.’ She began to smile. ‘I’m so happy for her.’ The sleeping baby was nestled beneath a pink lace-bedecked comforter. ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘Is she?’

  He leaned forward for a closer look, as if it hadn’t occurred to him, but May stopped, struck by what he’d just done.

  ‘You just left her,’ she said, a chill rippling through her. ‘She’s Saffy’s precious baby and you just abandoned her on the footpath to come and gawp at me? What on earth were you thinking, Adam?’

  He looked back then, frowning; he stopped too, clearly catching from her tone that a grin would be a mistake.

  ‘I was thinking that you were in trouble and needed a hand.’

  ‘Idiot!’ For a moment there she’d been swept away by the sight of a powerful man taking care of a tiny infant. ‘I’m not a child. I could have managed.’

  ‘Well, thanks—’

  ‘Don’t go getting all offended on me, Adam Wavell,’ she snapped, cutting him off. ‘While you were doing your Galahad act, anyone could have walked off with her.’

  ‘What?’ Then, realising what she was saying, he let go of the handle, rubbed his hands over his face, muttered something under his breath. ‘You’re right. I am an idiot. I didn’t think.’ Then, looking at the baby, ‘I’m way out of my depth here.’

  ‘Really? So let me guess,’ May said, less than amused; he was overdoing it with the ‘idiot’. ‘Your reason for dropping in for the first time in years wouldn’t have anything to do with your sudden need for a babysitter?’

  ‘Thanks, May. Saffy said you’d help.’

  ‘She said that?’ She looked at the baby. All pink and cute and helpless. No! She would not be manipulated! She was in no position to take on anyone else’s problems right now. She had more than enough of her own. ‘I was stating the obvious, not offering my services,’ she said as he began to walk on as if it was a done deal. ‘Where is Saffy?’

  ‘She’s away,’ he said. ‘Taking a break. She’s left Nancie in my care.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ she said. ‘But it’s no use coming to me for help. I know absolutely nothing about babies.’

  ‘You’ve already proved you know more than me. Besides, you’re a woman.’ Clearly he wasn’t taking her refusal seriously, which was some nerve considering he hadn’t spoken to her unless forced to in the last ten years. ‘I thought it came hard-wired with the X chromosome?’

  ‘That is an outrageous thing to say,’ she declared, ignoring the way her arms were aching to pick up the baby, hold her, tell her that she wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to her. Ever. Just as she’d once told her mother.

  She already had the kitten. In all probability, that was all she’d ever have. Ten years from now, she’d be the desperate woman peering into other people’s prams…

  ‘Is it?’ he asked, all innocence.

  ‘You know it is.’

  ‘Maybe if you thought of Nancie as one of those helpless creatures you were always taking in when you were a kid it would help?’ He touched a finger to the kitten’s orange head, suggesting that nothing had changed. ‘They always seemed to thrive.’

  ‘Nancie,’ she said, ignoring what she assumed he thought was flattery, ‘is not an injured bird, stray dog or frightened kitten.’

  ‘The principle is the same. Keep them warm, dry and fed.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ she said. ‘You know all the moves. You don’t need me.’

  ‘On the contrary. I’ve got a company to run. I’m flying to South America tomorrow—’

  ‘South America?’

  ‘Venezuela first, then on to Brazil and finally Samindera. Unless you read the financial pages, you would have missed the story. I doubt it made the social pages,’ he said.

  ‘Samindera,’ she repeated with a little jolt of concern. ‘Isn’t that the place where they have all the coups?’

  ‘But grow some of the finest coffee in the world.’ One corner of his mouth lifted into a sardonic smile that, unlike the rest of him, hadn’t changed one bit.

  ‘Well, that’s impressive,’ she said, trying not to remember how it had felt against her own trembling lips. The heady rush as a repressed desire found an urgent response… ‘But you’re not the only one with a business to run.’ Hers might be little more than a cottage industry, nothing like his international money generator that had turned him from zero to a Maybridge hero, but it meant a great deal to her. Not that she’d have it for much longer.

  Forget Adam, his baby niece, she had to get home, tell Robbie the bad news, start making plans. Somehow build a life from nothing.

  Just as Adam had done…

  ‘I’ve got a world of trouble without adding a baby to the mix,’ she said, not wanting to think about Adam. Then, before he could ask her what kind of trouble, ‘I thought Saffy was living in Paris. Working as a model? The last I heard from her, she was doing really well.’

  ‘She kept in touch with you?’ Then, before she could answer, ‘Why are you walking barefoot, May?’

  She stared at him, aware that he’d said something he regretted, had deliberately changed the subject, then, as he met her gaze, challenging her to go there, she looked down at her torn tights, mud soaked skirt, dirty legs and feet.

  ‘My feet are muddy. I’ve already ruined my good black suit…’ the one she’d be needing for job interviews, assuming anyone was that interested in someone who hadn’t been to university, had no qualifications ‘…I’m not about to spoil a decent pair of shoes, too.’

  As she stepped on a tiny stone and winced, he took her by the arm, easing her off the path and she froze.

  ‘The grass will be softer to walk on,’ he said, immediately releasing her, but not before a betraying shiver of gooseflesh raced through her.

  Assuming that she was cold, he removed his jacket, placed it around her shoulders. It swallowed her up, wrapping her in the warmth from his body.

  ‘I’m covered in mud,’ she protested, using her free hand to try and shake it off. Wincing again as a pain shot through her elbow. ‘It’ll get all over the lining.’

  He stopped her, easing the jacket back onto her shoulder, then holding it in place around her. ‘You’re cold,’ he said, looking down at her, ‘and I don’t think this suit will be going anywhere until it’s been cleaned, do you?’

  Avoiding his eyes, she glanced down at his expensively tailored trousers, but it wasn’t the mud that made her breath catch in her throat. He’d always been tall but now the rest of him had caught up and those long legs, narrow hips were designed to make a woman swoon.

  ‘No!’ she said, making a move so that he was forced to turn away. ‘You’d better send me the cleaning bill.’

  ‘It’s your time I need, May. Your help. Not your money.’

  He needed her. Words which, as a teenager, she’d lived to hear. Words that, when he shouted them for all the world to hear, had broken her heart.

  ‘It’s impossible right now.’

  ‘I heard about your grandfather,’ he said, apparently assuming it was grief that made her so disobliging.

  ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘It said in the Post that the funeral was private.’

  ‘It was.’ She couldn’t have borne the great and good making a show of it. And why would Adam have come to pray over the remains of a man who’d treated him like something unpleasant he’d stepped in? ‘But there’s going to be a memorial service. He
was generous with his legacies and I imagine the charities he supported are hoping that a showy civic send-off will encourage new donors to open their wallets. I’m sure you’ll get an invitation to that.’ Before he could answer, she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. That was a horrible thing to say.’

  But few had done more than pay duty visits after a massive stroke had left her grandpa partially paralysed, confused, with great holes in his memory. Not that he would have wanted them to see him that way.

  ‘He hated being helpless, Adam. Not being able to remember.’

  ‘He was a formidable man. You must miss him.’

  ‘I lost him a long time ago.’ Long before his memory had gone.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Adam asked, after a moment of silence during which they’d both remembered the man they knew. ‘Will you sell the house? It needs work, I imagine, but the location would make it ideal for company offices.’

  ‘No!’ Her response was instinctive. She knew it was too close to the town, didn’t have enough land these days to attract a private buyer with that kind of money to spend, but the thought of her home being turned into some company’s fancy corporate headquarters—or, more likely, government offices—was too much to bear.

  ‘Maybe a hotel or a nursing home,’ he said, apparently understanding her reaction and attempting to soften the blow. ‘You’d get a good price for it.’

  ‘No doubt, but I won’t be selling.’

  ‘No? Are you booked solid into the foreseeable future with your painters, garden designers and flower arrangers?’

  She glanced at him, surprised that he knew about the one-day and residential special interest courses she ran in the converted stable block.

  ‘Your programme flyer is on the staff noticeboard at the office.’

  ‘Oh.’ She’d walked around the town one Sunday stuffing them through letterboxes. She’d hesitated about leaving one in his letterbox, but had decided that the likelihood of the Chairman being bothered with such ephemera was nil. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said. ‘That’s the office manager’s responsibility. But one of the receptionists was raving about a garden design course she’d been on.’

  ‘Well, great.’ There it was, that problem with her breathing again. ‘It is very popular, although they’re all pretty solidly booked. I’ve got a full house at the moment for a two-day Christmas workshop.’

  Best to put off telling Robbie the bad news until after tea, when they’d all gone home, she thought. They wouldn’t be able to talk until then, anyway.

  ‘You don’t sound particularly happy about that,’ Adam said. ‘Being booked solid.’

  ‘No.’ She shrugged. Then, aware that he was looking at her, waiting for an explanation, ‘I’m going to have to spend the entire weekend on the telephone cancelling next year’s programme.’

  Letting down all those wonderful lecturers who ran the classes, many of whom had become close friends. Letting down the people who’d booked, many of them regulars who looked forward to a little break away from home in the company of like-minded people.

  And then there were the standing orders for her own little ‘Coleridge House’ cottage industry. The homemade fudge and toffee. The honey.

  ‘Cancel the courses?’ Adam was frowning. ‘Are you saying that your grandfather didn’t leave you the house?’

  The breeze was much colder coming off the lake and May really was shivering now.

  ‘Yes. I mean, no…He left it to me, but there are conditions involved.’

  Conditions her grandfather had known about but had never thought worth mentioning before the stroke had robbed him of so much of his memory.

  But why would he? There had been plenty of time back then. And he’d done a major matchmaking job with Michael Linton, a little older, steady as a rock and looking for a well brought up, old-fashioned girl to run his house, provide him with an heir and a spare or two. The kind of man her mother had been supposed to marry.

  ‘What kind of conditions?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Ones that I don’t meet,’ she said abruptly, as keen to change the subject as he had been a few moments earlier.

  The morning had been shocking enough without sharing the humiliating entailment that Freddie Jennings had missed when he’d read her grandfather’s very straightforward will after the funeral. The one Grandpa had made after her mother died which, after generous bequests to his favourite charities, bequeathed everything else he owned to his only living relative, his then infant granddaughter, Mary Louise Coleridge.

  Thankfully, they’d reached the small gate that led directly from the garden of her family home into the park and May was able to avoid explanations as, hanging onto the kitten, she fumbled awkwardly in her handbag for her key.

  But her hands were shaking as the shock of the morning swept over her and she dropped it. Without a word, Adam picked it up, unlocked the gate, then, taking her arm to steady her, he pushed the buggy up through the garden towards the rear of the house.

  She stopped in the mud room and filled a saucer with milk from the fridge kept for animal food. The kitten trampled in it, lapping greedily, while she lined a cardboard box with an old fleece she used for gardening.

  Only when she’d tucked it up safely in the warm was she able to focus on her own mess.

  Her jacket had an ominous wet patch and her skirt was plastered with mud. It was her best black suit and maybe the dry cleaners could do something with it, although right at the moment she didn’t want to see it ever again.

  As she unzipped the skirt, let it drop to the floor and kicked it in the corner, Adam cleared his throat, reminding her that he was there. As if every cell in her body wasn’t vibrating with the knowledge.

  ‘Robbie will kill me if I track dirt through the house,’ she said, peeling off the shredded tights and running a towel under the tap to rub the mud off her feet. Then, as he kicked off his mud spattered shoes and slipped the buckle on his belt, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve been on the wrong side of Hatty Robson,’ he replied. ‘If she’s coming at me with antiseptic, I want her in a good mood.’

  May swallowed hard and, keeping her eyes firmly focused on Nancie, followed him into the warmth of the kitchen with the buggy, leaving him to hang his folded trousers over the Aga, only looking up at a burst of laughter from the garden.

  It was the Christmas Workshop crossing the courtyard, heading towards the house for their mid-morning break.

  ‘Flapjacks!’

  ‘What?’

  She turned and blinked at the sight of Adam in his shirt tails and socks. ‘We’re about to have company,’ she said, unscrambling her brain and, grabbing the first aid box from beneath the sink, she said, ‘Come on!’ She didn’t stop to see if he was following, but beat a hasty retreat through the inner hall and up the back stairs. ‘Bring Nancie!’

  Adam, who had picked up the buggy, baby, bag and all to follow, found he had to take a moment to catch his breath when he reached the top.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘The buggy is heavier than it looks. Do you want to tell me what that was all about?’

  ‘While the appearance of Adam Wavell, minus trousers, in my kitchen would undoubtedly have been the highlight of the week for my Christmas Workshop ladies…’ and done her reputation a power of good ‘…I could not absolutely guarantee their discretion.’

  ‘The highlight?’ he asked, kinking up his eyebrow in a well-remembered arc.

  ‘The most excitement I can usually offer is a new cookie recipe. While it’s unlikely any of them will call the news desk at Celebrity, you can be sure they’d tell all their friends,’ she said, ‘and sooner or later someone would be bound to realise that you plus a baby makes it a story with the potential to earn them a bob or two.’ Which wiped the suspicion of a grin from his face.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked. ‘Hide at the top of the stairs until they’ve gone?’

  ‘No need fo
r that,’ she said, opening a door that revealed a wide L-shaped landing. ‘Come on, I’ll clean up your hand while you pray to high heaven that Nancie doesn’t wake up and cry.’

  Nancie, right on cue, opened incredibly dark eyes and, even before she gave a little whimper, was immediately the centre of attention.

  May shoved the first aid box into Adam’s hand.

  ‘Shh-sh-shush, little one,’ she said as she lifted her out of the buggy, leaving Adam to follow her to the room that had once been her nursery.

  When she’d got too old for a nanny, she’d moved into the empty nanny’s suite, which had its own bathroom and tiny kitchenette, and had turned the nursery into what she’d been careful to describe as a sitting room rather than a study, using a table rather than a desk for her school projects.

  Her grandfather had discouraged her from thinking about university—going off and ‘getting her head filled with a lot of nonsense’ was what he’d actually said. Not that it had been a possibility once she’d dropped out of school even if she’d wanted to. She hadn’t been blessed with her mother’s brain and school had been bad enough. Why would anyone voluntarily lengthen the misery?

  When she’d begun to take over the running of the house, she’d used her grandmother’s elegant little desk in her sitting room, but her business needed a proper office and she’d since converted one of the old pantries, keeping this room as a place of refuge for when the house was filled with guests. When she needed to be on her own.

  ‘Shut the door,’ she said as Adam followed her in with the buggy. ‘Once they’re in the conservatory talking ten to the dozen over a cup of coffee, they won’t hear Nancie even if she screams her head off.’

  For the moment the baby was nuzzling contently at her shoulder, although, even with her minimal experience, she suspected that wasn’t a situation that would last for long.

  ‘The bathroom’s through there. Wash off the mud and I’ll do the necessary with the antiseptic wipes so that you can get on your way.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘No, you can’t. Heaven knows what’s lurking in that mud,’ he replied as, without so much as a by-your-leave, he took her free hand, led her through her bedroom and, after a glance around to gain his bearings, into the bathroom beyond. ‘Are your tetanus shots up to date?’ he asked, quashing any thought that his mind was on anything other than the practical.