Bride Required

by Alison Fraser

  ‘It’s the waif look!’ she threw back, and pushed his hands away when he would have drawn up her jeans’ zip.

  ‘You heard what I was saying to Cathy Sullivan.’ He threw her an apologetic glance.

  Dee ignored it, in no mood to be pacified. She sat up again and swung her legs over the side of the trolley. She had some idea of hopping to the floor, but he was standing in her way.

  ‘I think you should consider admission,’ he resumed in patient tones. ‘Let them run a few blood tests. At the very least you’re anaemic.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Dee dismissed. ‘I don’t need blood tests. I just want to get out of here.’

  She tried to get off the examination trolley but he barred her way. ‘On one condition.’

  Dee wanted to tell him to stuff his conditions, but she felt powerless. Even if she created a scene, it wouldn’t be her that the nurses and doctors outside would support.

  ‘What?’ she seethed in frustration.

  ‘You refuse to stay here, and yet you can’t possibly take care of yourself.’ He declared. ‘So either you go to Scotland with me or you go home.’

  ‘What?’ she demanded, incredulous now. ‘You still want me to marry you?’

  He hesitated before shaking his head. ‘No, I think that was one of my crazier ideas, but I imagine I could put up with you for a few weeks while you recuperate.’

  Charity, in other words. But what else was there? Home? Where the heart certainly wasn’t. She’d be on sufferance in either case.

  ‘I’ll go home,’ she finally said in resigned tones.

  ‘Good.’ His relief was evident as he helped her down.

  Dee understood. He hadn’t wanted her, of course. He had made the offer because he felt he had to.

  Well, what else had she expected? Her own family didn’t want her. Well, her mother didn’t.

  She thought of that last time at home—Edward’s arms round her, his wet mouth on hers, hands pulling at her clothes, words spilling out over her protests.

  She remembered veering between fear and disgust, pushing at his shoulders while he pushed up her skirt. She remembered the bile in her throat as he panted his love for her. He had wanted her—hadn’t he just!

  Carried away, he hadn’t heard the kitchen door open, hadn’t seen her mother’s face, hadn’t stopped until she’d cried out, ‘How could you?’

  How could he? Dee had assumed as she’d freed herself and run to her mother’s arms.

  Only when Barbara Litton had repeated, ‘How could you?’ had Dee realised it was directed at her.

  It had gone straight to her heart like a knife, severing arteries, blood ties, cutting her loose on the world.

  She had never planned to go home. She didn’t plan it now. She would let Baxter Ross drop her off at the railway station, duty done.

  He knelt beside her to put on her socks and boots, and she felt a flicker of guilt that was extinguished as he added, ‘It’s probably for the best.’

  The child in her wanted to scream at him then, What do you know? because he really didn’t.

  No one knew.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I AM not going home,’ Dee bit out for the third time. ‘Why don’t you listen to me?’

  ‘Because not ten minutes ago you said you were.’

  ‘That was before.’

  Before she’d discovered Baxter Ross was nobody’s fool and intended driving her to the doorstep of her house. She’d tried to slip out of the car, but he’d snapped shut the locks from the console.

  ‘You never planned on going, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, that leaves us with Scotland.’ He switched the engine back on.

  ‘No way!’ She pulled the lock button up and this time managed to open the door.

  ‘Do that and I’ll drive off,’ he threatened. ‘That’ll leave you bagless and dogless.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’ She couldn’t believe he’d saddle himself with someone else’s dog, but his expression said otherwise. ‘Why are you doing this? I’m nothing to you.’

  He didn’t disagree. ‘Call it bloody-mindedness. Now, which is it? Home or Scotland?’

  ‘Neither.’ Dee refused to let him win.

  Baxter finally lost patience and stretched over to the back seat for her rucksack.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dee demanded, although it was evident as he started emptying the contents, discarding each item into her lap. ‘Give me that.’

  She made a grab for the envelope he’d found in an inner pocket of the bag, but he held it out of reach. He drew out her passport and found her birth certificate in its folds.

  His eyes widened as he read it. ‘Your father’s a doctor?’

  ‘Was,’ she corrected. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘And your mother’s a model,’ he added.

  ‘Was,’ she corrected again. ‘She’s brain dead.’

  ‘So much for the little cockney sparrow act,’ he dismissed. ‘I suppose it gives you more street cred?’

  ‘You try being middle class and homeless,’ she threw back. ‘People don’t like it. They think you must be a real waste of space to have fallen that far.’

  ‘Only you’re not—homeless, that is.’ He read from the certificate. ‘Willow Trees, Steeple Hartdean, Near Royston, Hertfordshire. Sounds posh.’

  ‘Terribly,’ Dee sneered in agreement.

  ‘So what’s the chance of your family still living there—’ he paused to check her year of birth ‘—seventeen years on?’

  His eyes caught hers, testing her for the truth. She stared back, giving nothing away.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t think so,’ he decided for himself. ‘Most people move house at some time or other… Still, it’s a start.’

  He dumped the passport and bag on her lap and restarted the car. He seemed to know where he was going because he didn’t stop to ask directions.

  Dee seethed in silence for almost an hour before they reached the signs for the A1 and she realised where they were going.

  ‘I shouldn’t bother,’ she finally burst out.

  ‘She speaks.’ He awarded her a brief glance. ‘For a while there I thought you’d been struck dumb… What should I not bother with?’

  ‘Going to Willow Trees,’ she replied. ‘My father died. My mother remarried. We moved.’

  She sounded smug, feeling she’d foiled him.

  Baxter kept driving, but asked, ‘Which was more traumatic—the moving or the stepfather?’

  ‘Neither. We moved to a palace and my stepfather was a prince,’ she claimed in sardonic tones.

  Behind them lay some truth. Her stepfather was well off, they had moved to a grander house and she’d been indulged materially.

  ‘All right, so don’t tell me.’ Baxter shrugged. ‘Just give me the general directions to this palace.’

  Dee refused with silence.

  He sighed aloud. ‘We can do it the hard way, if that’s what you’d prefer.’

  ‘The hard way?’

  ‘We go to the address on your birth certificate and I make enquiries there.’

  ‘They’ll think you’re mad.’ Dee had similar doubts herself.

  But he was still clever. ‘I’ll tell them you’re suffering from amnesia and theirs is the only address we have to go on.’

  Dee glanced at him. He wasn’t joking. The slight smile on his face was one of satisfaction. He enjoyed getting the better of her.

  ‘Go ahead.’ She decided to call his bluff.

  Only he wasn’t bluffing. He kept driving, getting closer and closer to Royston. And the trouble was that although Dee had moved, it had been within the same village.

  They were in Royston when Baxter pulled into a filling station and took out a road map from the glove compartment.

  ‘Okay, do you tell me where it is, or do we go down the amnesia route?’

  Dee was torn. It was already noon. She would need enough daylight to allow for a slow hitch back to London.

 
She pointed to Steeple Hartdean on the map. ‘Same village, different house.’

  ‘Three miles or so,’ he observed.

  Quite, Dee thought, her stomach turning over.

  Perhaps he was into mind-reading, because he asked, ‘What sort of reception are you expecting?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll be rushing out to kill any fatted calves,’ she confided dryly.

  Baxter wasn’t entirely surprised. ‘How long since you’ve been home?’

  ‘Easter.’

  ‘Like to tell me why you left?’ he added, more casually than curiously.

  ‘No,’ she answered briefly.

  Fair enough, Baxter thought, not sure if he wanted to know. He had picked up this girl to solve a problem of his own, not to get involved in hers.

  ‘I’m going to buy some petrol and a sandwich. Anything you want?’ He nodded towards the service-station shop.

  ‘Cigarettes?’ Dee said, without much hope of getting them.

  ‘I meant food,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Smoking kills, or haven’t you heard?’

  Dee gave him a resentful look. Did he have to sound like someone’s dad all the time? He wasn’t that old.

  ‘So? Practically every doctor I know smokes,’ she claimed rather extravagantly.

  Certainly her father had smoked, and so did Edward, her stepfather. It had been his cigarettes she had first smoked in the toilet at home and, on being discovered, she had hardly been discouraged. But then it had been a sign she was growing up, and Edward had hardly been able to wait for that.

  ‘I’m surprised you can afford to smoke,’ Baxter Ross added.

  ‘I can’t,’ she countered. ‘And, before you read me a lecture on dole scroungers wasting their money on cigarettes, I don’t qualify for benefit. If I sometimes choose to buy a packet rather than eat with my busking money, then that’s my decision.’

  In fact, Dee hadn’t smoked for weeks. She just needed one now. A crutch to help her face the family reunion.

  She didn’t expect him to understand and, when he responded with a ‘Hmm’ before climbing out to fill the hire-car with petrol, she assumed her request was being denied.

  But that was Baxter Ross—unpredictable. He remained grim faced even as he returned from the shop to throw a packet of cigarettes and matches in her lap.

  ‘You’re a life-saver.’ Dee’s smile was quick and natural for once.

  ‘Not according to the government health warning on the packet,’ he replied dryly.

  Dee read it briefly, then with the barest hesitation unwrapped the cellophane. Like most young people she viewed death as so distant a prospect it was unimaginable.

  She took out a cigarette, and was about to light up when he instructed, ‘Wait.’

  Dee frowned, not understanding, but did as she was told.

  He drove to some wasteland at the rear of the service station. ‘I’ll give you five minutes.’

  Dee caught on. He might be prepared to buy her cigarettes but he wasn’t going to let her foul up his air. She climbed out of the car and pointedly leaned against the front bonnet while she lit up.

  It was just as well she was leaning on something, as the first puff made her head swim. She still smoked it halfway down to the filter before stubbing it out.

  He grimaced as she climbed back into the car.

  ‘Okay, I smell like an ashtray,’ she said before he could, then couldn’t resist adding, ‘So tell me, Doc. Does it ever get boring, being so perfect yourself?’

  He got the point and laughed all the same. ‘Sometimes… In fact, it can be pretty hard work.’

  Dee smiled briefly, then caught herself at it. She was determined not to like this man.

  ‘Okay, let’s get this over with,’ she went on, ready as she was ever going to be.

  Baxter glanced towards her. She was clearly nervous. But why?

  ‘Directions?’ he requested.

  Dee supplied them in a flat, spare tone until they finally reached the place where she’d spent much of her childhood. In her father’s day they’d lived in a detached house in the village that had included his surgery. When her mother had married Edward, they’d moved to one of the more substantial houses on the outskirts.

  The village had grown bigger over the years, but was still small enough for most people to be on nodding acquaintance. Dee sat, expressionless, as they drove past the junior school she’d attended and the church where they’d buried her father.

  It was the retriever who reacted. Alerted by their slowing in speed, he sat up, looked out at the back window and, recognising something familiar, sights or smells, let out a sound that was between a bark and a howl.

  Dee remained slumped in the front seat. ‘Take the left fork,’ she instructed Baxter Ross. ‘It’s about a mile down here.’

  They passed the riding stables where Dee had gone as a young child, then a field or two, before they reached a mature residential area where all the houses were hidden by high walls.

  Her nerve went a hundred yards short of Oakfield. ‘Pull up here.’

  He did as she requested. ‘Have we passed it?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Now she was here, Dee recalled even more vividly why she’d left. Would anything have changed? Had the last three months made her better equipped to deal with Edward?

  Baxter watched her closely, detecting anxiety—or was it fear? What might a smart-mouthed, streetwise kid like Dee be scared of?

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked simply.

  Dee shook her head. She had told the truth before and hadn’t been believed. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ she said instead. ‘Will you take me back to London?’

  He shook his head. ‘We’re here now.’

  ‘Look, this is a waste of time.’ She said what she felt. ‘They won’t want to see me, so why go through the grief?’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Baxter could imagine she hadn’t been the easiest of teenagers to control. ‘But at the very least you could let them know you’re still alive.’

  ‘Trust you,’ Dee muttered back.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Baxter sighed in return.

  ‘To see things from their perspective. I suppose it’s a generation thing,’ she added pointedly.

  Baxter was left feeling old enough to be her father.

  ‘Quite,’ he agreed, suddenly losing patience as he jammed the car into gear and revved up. ‘Now, which one?’ he demanded.

  ‘First on the left, but you’re not coming in.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Baxter had no desire to be present at the reunion. Families were, in some respects, foreign territory to him.

  He turned in where she indicated and raised a brow. At the end of the drive lay a sizeable brick-built house, with a small flight of steps leading to a flagged terrace.

  Dee breathed a sigh of relief. Her mother’s car was there. Her stepfather’s wasn’t.

  ‘You can drop me off here,’ she commanded rather imperiously. ‘Thanks for the lift. I can get the stuff myself.’

  She pushed open the passenger door and, swinging her gammy leg out, managed to lever herself to her feet. She limped round to the boot to let out an excitedly barking Henry.

  For an old dog he moved surprisingly fast, jumping across the front terrace, through a gate at the side, and round the back to familiar stomping ground.

  Dee emptied the rest of her things from the car, placing them next to the miniature stone lion that guarded the steps. She lifted a hand to wave goodbye to him.

  About to go, Baxter felt his eyes drawn as the front door opened and a blonde woman appeared, giving the car a quizzical look before spotting the girl.

  At first Baxter didn’t think she recognised Dee, because her reaction seemed curiously like dread. But then perhaps that was down to the short hair, ripped jeans and Doc Martens. They were scarcely Home Counties chic.

  Dee, of course, knew her mother had recognised h
er the first instant. She counted the seconds that it took for her mother to recover and put on the semblance of delight that followed.

  ‘Deborah…darling,’ she cried, and came out on the terrace to greet her.

  ‘Hello, Mother.’ She met her halfway and suffered the obligatory embrace.

  ‘Thank God you’re all right,’ her mother continued on a high note. ‘I was so worried.’

  ‘Were you?’ Dee echoed, unwilling to play to the gallery.

  That was what her mother was doing. For Baxter Ross, out from behind the driver’s seat but keeping his distance as he leaned against the car roof.

  ‘Of course. You’re my daughter.’ Her mother’s eyes brimmed briefly with some emotion, but not long enough for Dee to identify it. ‘Come along inside, darling…your friend, too,’ she gushed on, her slightly puzzled glance including this male stranger.

  Dee looked at him too, and wished she hadn’t when he left his side of the car to approach them.

  ‘This is Baxter, Mother—Mother, Baxter,’ she introduced flatly.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Baxter offered his hand, and the woman took it with a charming smile.

  Dee watched her mother instantly warm to Baxter Ross and saw him through her mother’s eyes: tall, handsome, well-mannered, and ultimately respectable in cream trousers and button-down shirt.

  Dee gave a limited explanation of his presence. ‘Baxter drove me up from London.’

  ‘That was kind of you,’ her mother applauded, then asked, ‘Will you stay for tea?’

  ‘He’s in a hurry.’ Dee’s tone told him he wasn’t welcome.

  Baxter disregarded it, saying, ‘I have time for tea.’

  ‘Good.’ Her mother looked pleased.

  Dee understood only too well. Anything was better than the two of them being alone together.

  When her mother turned to lead the way inside, Dee caught at Baxter’s sleeve. ‘You don’t want to get involved in this.’

  Baxter agreed, he didn’t. But it niggled at him. Why would a girl run away from this comfortable home to live the life Dee had been leading in London?

  ‘Your mother’s waiting for us.’ He shrugged off Dee’s hand and picked up her bags to carry them inside for her.

  He placed them at the foot of the stairs in the hall, and, ignoring another glare from the girl, waited for her to show him the way.