Their Baby Bargain

by Marion Lennox

  This was feeling better and better by the minute.

  ‘Can I suggest you get up and stoke our fire?’ she said, bursting his euphoric bubble. ‘I had trouble heaping enough embers to heat Grace’s bottle, and we’ll need more for breakfast.’

  ‘Breakfast?’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘It’s only six,’ he said weakly. He’d lain awake and thought for a large part of the night, and a man could do with more sleep now. ‘Maybe after she’s had her bottle we might go back to bed for a bit.’

  ‘In your dreams.’ Her smile widened. ‘Try explaining to a five-month-old baby that it’s not morning. Grace has practically slept around the clock, and you can’t ask more than that.’

  He guessed he couldn’t. Grimacing he pushed his quilt back, and then wished he hadn’t done that as well.

  He’d brought no clothes with him-certainly no pyjamas. He’d hauled off his trousers and shirt the night before and what was left was what she now saw. All he had on was a pair of silk boxer shorts, deep black and emblazoned with tiny red hearts. They were a Valentine’s gift from one of the ladies in his New York office. He’d forgotten he was wearing them-until now.

  Wendy’s eyes widened at the sight. They sparkled mischievously and he hauled up his quilt as if he was about to be shot and his quilt was his only defence.

  ‘Hey, don’t mind me.’ She chuckled. ‘You’re seeing me in my nightie. I don’t mind seeing you in your PJs.’

  ‘I do not usually wear heart-emblazoned boxer shorts to bed,’ he said sourly, and her grin widened.

  ‘No. Of course not. They’re day wear. I can see that.’

  ‘Wendy!’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Will you remember I’m your employer,’ he told her, trying for severity. ‘I’d like a bit of respect.’

  ‘And you have it.’ She schooled her grin into manageable proportions. ‘Who could not respect a man who wears boxers like that to work every day?’

  Right. He glared.

  ‘Firewood, then,’ she said demurely, and turned her back on him, taking pity on him enough to allow him to dress himself with a semblance of dignity.

  But he knew that she was still laughing inside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘THE priorities, as I see it, are these.’

  Luke blinked. That was the sort of line he was accustomed to tossing around at board meetings and the like. He wasn’t accustomed to having it tossed at him, especially by a woman who looked as if she’d come off a communal hippie farm, and who had her arms full of children.

  They’d had their breakfast-sort of. On inspection, the crockery cupboard in the kitchen had been taken over by mice and Wendy declared she wasn’t touching anything without disinfecting first. Therefore they’d given cereal a miss and eaten bread toasted by holding it on a stick over the fire and buttered in their hands, and they’d drunk milk straight from the cartons the taxi driver had brought the night before. Curiously, it was delicious.

  ‘It’s like a breakfast picnic,’ Gabbie had declared gamely, from her safe position right behind Wendy’s skirts, and Luke had been inclined to agree with her.

  ‘First priority, hot water?’ he suggested, trying to regain the initiative, but Wendy nodded and the initiative was still with her.

  ‘I checked it last night. The hot water runs through the fire stove so that’s your first job. The chimney needs cleaning.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘As soon as it’s decent you can ring an electrician and a glazier and the telephone company. That will get our urgent services seen to. If you pay enough we’ll get immediate help but a chimneysweep will take weeks. There’s no one local. Therefore…’ she gave him a sympathetic smile ‘…it’s you.’

  Luke groaned. ‘No.’

  ‘There should be nothing to it.’ She chuckled. ‘We can do it like the bad old days if you like-I’ll pretend I’m the worst kind of chimneysweep, we poke you up and then we light a fire beneath you. That way we get a really clean chimney fast.’

  ‘Or me roasted for lunch. Thanks very much.’ He groaned again. ‘Am I to spend the week scrubbing?’ He looked down at his already filthy clothes. ‘I need to get myself some gear.’

  ‘You do at that,’ she agreed. Her eyes grew thoughtful, and he could see she was tossing over options. ‘I think, after you organise me some electricity, some chopped wood and a clean chimney, I might give you leave of absence for a bit.’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  She wasn’t finished yet. ‘You need to do something urgently about Grace,’ she added, and he frowned.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like getting yourself some legal protection,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been thinking. The way things are, if Grace’s mother turned up she could accuse you of all sorts of things-kidnapping included-and it’s your word against hers.’

  He was startled. ‘She wouldn’t do that. She dumped her on me.’

  ‘People do all sorts of strange things,’ Wendy said softly, hugging Gabbie close. She had Grace in her other arm, and with her two littlies cradled against her she looked like a protective mother hen.

  She was used to fighting for kids, Luke thought suddenly-and he also thought there was no one he’d rather have on his side. She was some woman!

  Somehow he dragged his thoughts back to practicalities. To Grace’s mother…

  ‘Why on earth would she accuse me of kidnapping Grace?’

  ‘If Lindy is angry at how your father treated her, there’s nothing to say she won’t take that anger out on you.’

  ‘She wouldn’t-’

  ‘Maybe she wouldn’t,’ Wendy said soothingly. ‘But you need to cover yourself. Find her, get yourself a lawyer and have him witness her agreement that you’re taking care of her child. The sooner you do it, the better.’

  He thought that over, the memory of Wendy’s description of Sonia ringing in his ears. Hell…

  ‘Maybe I’d best go straight away.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not quite. You have a chimney to clean,’ she told him. ‘And there’s something else.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ she went on calmly, as though it was a tiny detail she was just adding, ‘I have no protection either. If you leave, then I have no legal right to care for Grace.’

  ‘I’ll cover you,’ he said quickly. ‘If there’s any problem then I’ll protect you. And I should be back in a couple of days.’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ she told him, her eyes cool and un-challenging. ‘People don’t come back. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that.’

  His brows snapped together in anger. ‘You don’t trust me?’

  She was unperturbed by his anger. ‘I trust no one when a child’s future is at stake,’ she told him. ‘On their behalf, I can’t afford to.’

  ‘But-’

  ‘But don’t worry.’ She smiled again and there was now a hint of mischief lurking deep in her eyes. ‘I’ve been figuring out surety and I know what you can leave behind so I know you’ll come back.’

  ‘What?’ But somehow he suspected what was coming before she said it. His heart sank as her smile deepened. Oh, no!

  And here it was, right on cue. ‘Your car,’ she said sweetly.

  Okay, he’d suspected it, but it didn’t mean he was ready and waiting. He blenched as Gabbie looked at him with eyes that didn’t trust him an inch and Wendy watched him with eyes that asked just how serious he was about taking care of his baby sister.

  ‘My car,’ he said finally, knowing he was beaten before he even started.

  ‘That’s right.’ She smiled again. ‘As I said, I’ve been thinking things over. I can’t stay here without transport. What if one of the children was to become ill, or there was an accident? Plus there’s the shopping and I can’t use taxis all the time. You must see I need to be able to go back and forth to Bay Beach. I know that as a concerned employer you’ll be providing me with a car before you leave for good.’
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br />   ‘But-’

  ‘But meanwhile we can kill two birds with one stone,’ she interrupted blithely. ‘You can phone a hire firm from Bay Beach and have them rent you wheels of some kind. Then you can leave your Noddy car here for us.’

  ‘My Noddy car!’

  ‘Your Noddy car.’ She chuckled at the look on his face. ‘We like it, don’t we, Gabbie? We’d prefer it in canary yellow, but we’re prepared to overlook that one small blemish. This way we’ll have something to do the grocery shopping in.’

  ‘You’ll use my car to do the supermarket shopping?’ He was practically gibbering.

  ‘And then we know you’ll come back,’ she ended serenely. ‘That is-if you still want Gabbie and me to look after your baby?’

  She raised her eyebrows and waited. He glared at her and she smiled straight back.

  ‘What sort of a bargain is this?’ His voice was practically rising through the roof. ‘My car…’

  ‘It’s a baby bargain,’ she told him, and her smile slipped a little. ‘And you don’t need to panic. We’ll take the very best care of your precious car, and you know we’ll take the very best care of your precious baby, too. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ She tilted her head and watched his face. ‘A baby. Not a car?’

  ‘I don’t have a choice,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t.’ Surprisingly her voice held a trace of sympathy, and her hand came out to touch his. It was as if she really did understand what his car meant to him. Her touch was strong and warm and somehow…somehow it made a difference. ‘You don’t have a choice,’ she agreed. ‘But that’s life. It’s full of really, really tough breaks-like having to use a hire car for a couple of days. Now, Mr Grey…’ laughter returned ‘…about that chimney…’

  What on earth was he getting into? Luke reluctantly tackled the fire stove but his mind was only about ten per cent on the job. The rest was figuring out how much his life had changed in twenty-four hours, and why he’d let himself be talked into leaving his precious Aston Martin with a woman and two children…

  When he went overseas he left his car in a special garage, carefully enfolded in a climate-controlled autobag. Here, the garage behind the house was tumbling down and unfit for use. There was no safe place here to leave it. His pride and joy would have to stay parked outside in the sea air-and there were crows and parrots and even seagulls…

  ‘There must be a bird’s nest blocking the chimney.’ Wendy’s voice came from behind him and he jumped a foot. He hit his head on the mantelpiece and swore.

  ‘Hey, hush.’ Wendy clapped her hands over Gabbie’s ears-the little girl was never more than two inches away from her-and she fixed Luke with a school-marm look. She appeared not to even notice that he was rubbing his head in pain! ‘Gabbie doesn’t know words like that-do you, Gabbie?’

  Gabbie chuckled and sank back against Wendy’s skirt. When she smiled, her elfin face lit up like a sunbeam and Luke found his heart twisting. Just a little, mind, not too much-not so much as you’d write home about-at the treatment that had been meted out to this child.

  Good grief! he thought, as he stared at the pair of them. He wasn’t a soft touch. He didn’t like children! So what was happening here? The emotion he was feeling was building all the time, and he had to stay impartial. He was simply setting up a home for his little sister because it was expected of him, he told himself-and then he was getting out of here.

  But Wendy was still concentrating on chimneys. ‘If you stick your nose up the chimney you can’t see daylight,’ Wendy said wisely. ‘I tried it last night. It took me ages to open the damper but when I did it was still black. There must be a bird’s nest blocking the top.’

  ‘I don’t wish to stick my nose up the chimney,’ Luke snapped, thrown totally off balance. ‘You have your belongings here, lady. I don’t even have a change of clothes.’

  ‘You’ll be able to buy something in Bay Beach on the way back to Sydney,’ she said kindly. ‘After all, what’s another suit of clothes to a wealthy young futures broker like you?’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He glared. ‘So I just meander into Bay Beach Menswear, wearing soot up to my armpits!’

  ‘It was just a suggestion,’ she said hastily. ‘If you’re going to be crabby-’

  ‘I am not crabby.’

  ‘Let’s go, Gabbie.’ Wendy pulled Gabbie backwards out the door, her eyes still brimming with laughter. ‘We’ll leave Uncle Luke to his chimney sweeping-without nose-poking. Though how he’s going to do it and stay clean…’

  ‘So what are you doing?’ he yelled after her, exasperated.

  ‘Women’s work,’ she yelled back cheerfully. ‘Gabbie and I are going to address the issue of a bag of soiled nappies.’ He heard the laughter in her voice. ‘Want to swap jobs, Mr Grey?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said hastily-and stuck his nose up the chimney, soot and all.

  Handyman was hardly a description that fitted Luke well. By the time he’d been old enough to learn any useful skills in that direction, he’d been sent to boarding school. Since then there’d always been a janitor or a maintenance man or a gardener to take care of any crisis.

  There wasn’t one on call now, and he needed one badly.

  Wendy was right. The view, through the two-inch-wide crack available after wedging open the damper, was of unmitigated blackness.

  Sighing deeply, he headed for the garage to see if he could find a ladder.

  ‘Giving up already?’ Wendy called. Grace was rolling happily on a rug on the cattle-cropped grass below the veranda, and Wendy and Gabbie were plunging things that Luke didn’t want to know about into buckets of water. It was an incredibly domestic scene, and, imperceptibly, his mood changed. His chest expanded a mite and he rolled up his sleeves. These might well be his kids and his woman-and he was doing man’s work.

  ‘There’s a ladder under the house,’ she told him, and his bubble pricked a bit at her look of concern. ‘If that’s what you’re looking for. But you be careful on the roof.’

  ‘I have it under control,’ he told her, setting his chin, caveman-like-off to hunt his dinosaur for lunch. ‘You just stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine.’

  His chauvinism didn’t last. She was concerned. How about him?

  Luke balanced on the ladder-he’d used it to climb onto the roof and had hauled it up after him to balance it against the chimney. Now, with his feet feeling decidedly insecure beneath him, he stared down into the abyss.

  There was a bird’s nest in the chimney. How they’d managed to build it there he didn’t know, but it was a vast, untidy conglomeration of sticks, wedged about two feet down.

  At least there weren’t any eggs or baby birds in sight, he thought, thanking heaven for small mercies. He didn’t have to make any life or death decisions here. It must be an old nest.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  Luke looked down-and then wished he hadn’t. Wendy was a long, long way down, standing on the grass by Grace and staring up at him anxiously.

  ‘There isn’t one.’ Heck, a man had some pride. He took a deep breath and then managed to raise the rake he’d hauled up here over his head. ‘It’s a bird’s nest. I’ll dislodge it.’

  He looked upward-much better than downward-at the circle of irate crows fussing over his head. The birds had been squawking from the moment he’d put his foot on the first step of the ladder-defending their territory.

  ‘I’d guess it’s either us or the crows, so there’s no choice,’ he called to Wendy. ‘A man has to do what a man has to do.’ He positioned his rake.

  ‘Luke…’

  ‘If I hook it I’ll be able to pull it up.’

  ‘I don’t think so-’

  No. Suddenly neither did he. The rake caught the edge of the nest and, once one side was dislodged, the entire thing caved in and plummeted down to rest on the damper below.

  ‘Yuck.’ Wendy was as covered in soot as he was. They were back in the kitchen,
hauling bits of nest out from the slit between damper and chimney. It was foul work, and it took for ever. ‘This is disgusting, and any minute now I’m expecting to grab something that moves,’ she said. ‘Are you sure there were no baby birds up there?’

  ‘Do I look like I’m the sort of man to empty babies from their nests?’ he demanded, affronted. ‘After all the work I’ve done in the interest of babies…’

  ‘The crows up there looked worried.’

  ‘I am not worried about worried crows.’ He hauled a stick sideways through the crack, it resisted and then came with a rush of soot. Gabbie squealed as a shower of blackness coated all of them. ‘Good grief.’

  ‘They’re making such a fuss!’

  ‘There were not any birds in that chimney,’ Luke confirmed. ‘Just ancient nesting material.’

  ‘It was the birdies’ home,’ Gabbie said solemnly.

  ‘They can relocate.’ Luke glowered. ‘Just as long as it isn’t into the front seat of my car. Don’t you dare leave the top down while…’

  He didn’t finish the sentence.

  There was a terrified squawk from the inside of the chimney, a rush of scrambling wings and claws, and a cloud of soot bigger than all the rest showered over them.

  What the…?

  The squawking didn’t stop. It grew louder and louder as, inside the chimney, a bird descended as if it was heading into the room.

  The bird didn’t come into the kitchen but it wasn’t for want of trying. It couldn’t. The damper stopped it in its tracks, just above the stove.

  ‘It must be a young one that’s just left the nest.’ Wendy was sitting back on her heels, staring in horror at the feathers and soot fluttering through to the hearth. The noise was deafening and she had to practically shout to make herself heard. The trapped bird squawked as if there was no tomorrow and, above the roof, every crow from a ten-mile radius had come to lend a hand. Or wing. Or whatever.

  ‘How do you know?’ Luke’s heart was sinking. Of all the stupid things. Now what? Gabbie’s normally pale face was turning ashen. The child was expecting the worst, and Luke was starting to feel the same.