A Mother by Nature

by Caroline Anderson

  ‘Thank you.’ Anna went up on tiptoe and kissed him again, then took his arm and drew him into her living room. ‘Sit down, I’ll get you a drink. Tea or coffee? It’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid, unless you want water or fruit juice?’

  ‘Coffee’ll be fine. Let me help you make it.’

  ‘Oh, the kitchen’s a mess—’

  He laughed softly, cutting her off. ‘Fair’s fair. You saw my house at its absolute worst yesterday.’

  ‘But I’ve got no excuse,’ she protested.

  Hmm. He was just as stubborn as her, obviously, because he turned her round, put his hands on her shoulders and propelled her gently back out into the hall and down to the kitchen.

  ‘It looks fine—what are you talking about?’ he said from right behind her, his breath puffing softly against her nape. She had a crazy urge to lean back, just a tiny little bit, and bend her head, and let his lips stroke a trail of fire over her skin…

  As if she’d willed it, she felt his lips against her hair, his touch like the brush of an angel’s wing, so light yet with so much power. Her eyes drifted shut and she stood motionless as his hands eased her back against him, so she could feel the heat of his body through her thin sweater, warming her.

  His lips moved lower, caressing the sensitive skin of her nape, hot and slow and unbelievably erotic. His tongue traced a pattern on the skin, then he blew, just softly, and she felt the touch of ice over the fire.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured, and his voice was husky with promise.

  Her breath jammed in her throat. Make love to me, she thought. Don’t stop. Take me to heaven. Please…

  He let her go, stepping just out of reach and leaving her abandoned in a sea of emotion so powerful she thought she’d drown. ‘Coffee?’ he said softly, and she moved then, like an automaton, taking mugs from the cupboard, finding the coffee, a spoon, sugar.

  ‘Do you want sugar in your coffee?’ she asked, realising she’d never made it for him. She’d hardly done anything for him. She’d known him three days!

  Just three short days, and yet she knew he was more important to her than anyone else she’d ever met. OK, it was hasty, it was foolish and impulsive and precipitate and all the other things that her mother would have warned her about, but it was also right.

  She turned to give him his coffee, and found him watching her with a strangely intense expression. He took the mug from her and put it down.

  ‘No, I don’t want sugar. I want to make love to you, but it’s too soon,’ he said gruffly. His honesty rocked her, and brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said, with a matching honesty. ‘It’s not too soon—not for us. I feel as if I’ve been waiting for you for years.’

  For a moment Adam said nothing, then the breath left him in a rush and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again the heat in them consumed Anna. He held out his hand, and wordlessly she went to him, placing her hand in his and leading him upstairs to her bedroom.

  In the doorway, she hesitated. ‘It’s a mess,’ she said softly, and he gave a strangled laugh.

  ‘Do you really think I care?’ He turned her, his eyes searching hers, and she knew he could see only her. ‘Oh, Anna,’ he whispered, and drew her into his arms. His mouth found hers, and his kiss was tender. ‘I didn’t come here for this,’ he murmured gruffly. ‘That’s not why I rang you—’

  ‘Shh. It’s all right, I know.’ She lifted her hand, her fingertips searching his face, stroking the line of his cheekbone, the muscle jumping in his jaw, rubbing lightly backwards against the rasp of stubble, somehow so erotic against her skin. Her hand slid round to cradle his nape and draw him down to her again. ‘Make love to me,’ she murmured. ‘Please. Now. I need you.’

  His eyes flared and darkened, and with a ragged groan he sought her mouth and took it. Fire seemed to rip through her, and her legs buckled and gave way.

  He caught her against him, lifting her and setting her down gently in the middle of her tumbled bed. He undressed her slowly, his fingers shaking, and she could see from the harsh rise and fall of his chest how aroused he was, just how much effort it took to hold on to his control.

  ‘You are so lovely,’ he whispered unsteadily. His eyes tracked over her, then locked with hers, and the raw hunger in them found an echo in her heart. ‘Anna, I need you.’

  ‘I know. It’s OK.’ She knelt up in the middle of the bed and seized the hem of his sweater, dragging it over his head with a total lack of ceremony. Her patience, such as it was, was at an end, and she needed him now, needed to hold him, to touch him, to be part of him. Nothing else mattered, and no other thought entered her head.

  She stripped him, her breath jamming in her chest at the sight of his body, lean and muscled and so, so ready. She touched him with trembling hands, feeling the hot satin of his skin under her palms, the shudder as she skimmed her fingers over him, learning him, treasuring him with her touch.

  ‘Anna,’ he whispered, his breath jagged, his control in tatters. Good. That was what she wanted. She didn’t want technique, she didn’t want skill, she wanted him. Just him. Nothing more, nothing less.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, and drew him down into her arms…

  Boneless.

  She was curled into his side, her head cradled on his chest and one knee wedged between his thighs. They were just about as close as they could get, and about as drained. Gradually Anna’s senses returned, her breathing slowed, her heart settled to a steady rhythm. Adam’s was beating just under her ear, slow and strangely comforting.

  She didn’t move. She couldn’t move. She just lay there, like an abandoned doll, sprawled against him and listening to his heartbeat. She felt his hand on her back, gliding slowly over the skin, caressing her absently. She gave a soft sigh of contentment, and he turned his head, pressing his lips to her forehead.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘How can you even ask that?’ she mumbled, too slaked to move her mouth properly.

  A low chuckle rumbled through his chest, and he hugged her closer, pulling the covers over her and tucking them round her shoulders. ‘It was pretty spectacular, wasn’t it?’

  Something niggled at her—something important—but she couldn’t think what it was or deal with it. She closed her eyes, squirmed a little closer to him and sighed again. Biology was a very clever thing, she thought idly, and then remembered what it was that was niggling her.

  Oh, damn.

  Her finger outlined a pattern on his chest. ‘Um…did I miss something, or did we just forget to use anything?’ she asked quietly.

  He went still, his hand on her back coming to rest where it was, his breathing suspended for a second. Then he moved again, his hand resuming its gentle rhythm against her spine. ‘No, you didn’t miss anything, Anna, but it’s OK. You aren’t going to catch anything from me.’

  ‘Catch anything?’ she repeated, puzzled. She wasn’t thinking about catching so much as falling.

  ‘The last woman I slept with was my wife, over three years ago,’ he confessed. ‘You’re safe.’

  Three years? No wonder he’d been so responsive to her touch! And her to his, of course. Between them they’d stacked up a lot of years of abstinence. Small surprise that their lovemaking had packed such a punch.

  ‘I was more worried about getting pregnant,’ she explained. ‘I’m not on the Pill.’

  Again Adam went still, and then he spoke, his voice flat and expressionless. ‘There’s no need. When I said you’re safe, I meant it in every sense. I can’t get you pregnant, Anna. I’m sterile.’

  Shock held her motionless for several seconds, then her breath left her as if her lungs had been punctured.

  Sterile?

  Adam, sterile? Adam, who had three children, couldn’t get her pregnant?

  ‘But you’ve got three children,’ Anna said in confusion. ‘How come…?’

  ‘They’re adopted.’

  ‘Oh.’ What else was there to say? She dragged in a d
eep breath, and let it out in a shaky gust. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘That they’re adopted? Absolutely,’ he said, a thread of humourless laughter in his voice.

  ‘No—I meant—that you can’t have children,’ she said, hardly able to say the words. There was a huge, empty void opening up inside her, and she was desperate to stop it spreading because she knew it would consume her. She wanted his child—needed his child.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he said quietly after a moment, and she could hear the pain in his voice. She put her own pain on one side and concentrated on his. She could deal with hers later. This was important.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked gently. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I had mumps when I was twenty-five. I was really ill with it—I’d never had it and we visited my wife’s sister. Her children went down with it just after we’d left them and, of course, I’d picked it up. I developed severe orchitis as a complication, and then a few months afterwards when we decided to start a family, nothing happened.’

  ‘So you had a test.’

  ‘Yes. They found very few healthy sperm. Low motility, that sort of thing. Lyn was gutted. We tried everything—crazy positions, centrifugal spinning to concentrate the sperm, syringes—all sorts. We didn’t make love for years. We had sex—carefully orchestrated sex timed to coincide with her ovulation, not a single sperm wasted on frivolous entertainment, and month after month we failed. We couldn’t go down the IVF or ICSI route, because the treatment didn’t agree with her, so that was that.’

  Anna swallowed the tears that were hovering in her throat and threatening to choke her. ‘So you decided to adopt.’

  ‘Yes. We decided to adopt. We went through all the screening procedures with all their intrusive and highly personal investigations, and shortly before we were approved we were given some catalogues of children—the kids nobody wanted. They’re called “Children Who Wait”, and there is simply page after page of tragedy. They’re mostly families, because they’re the hardest to home. Nobody wants a family group. They want a baby. We were looking for a baby, just one, and then we saw my three and I just fell for them. I knew they were right.’

  ‘What did Lyn think?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At the time she agreed to try, but she never seemed too wholehearted—it was always me. I should have listened to her, I suppose. She had reservations for good reasons. I had none. I knew we could give those children a good home.’

  ‘How old were they?’ Anna asked, trying to picture the sorry little family.

  ‘Skye was three, Danny not quite two and Jaz was a little baby. Their mother was dead, a drugs overdose, and there was no father figure in evidence. It was a cut-and-dried adoption with no strings—it should have been easy. Instead, it drove us apart, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I was too taken up with the children to see the signs, and we were in the process of finalising the adoption when Lyn left me.’

  Even now, after all this time, Anna could hear the hurt in his voice. There was more to the story, she could tell, but not even she could have guessed the full extent of the hurt Lyn had inflicted on them.

  ‘Was it very bitter?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Bitter?’ Adam dragged in a deep breath and let it go on a harsh gust of laughter. ‘You could say that. She went off with my best friend,’ he said rawly. ‘They’d been having an affair for months. She was pregnant.’

  Her eyes closed to keep out the horror of his words, but they swirled round in her head, shocking in their simplicity. ‘Oh, Adam,’ she said brokenly, and slid her arms round him to hold him close. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  His grip tightened. ‘It’s OK. I got over it. I continued with the adoption, with the reluctant blessing of Social Services, and we struggled through and we’re coming out of it now. Danny was all right, more or less, but Jasper was lost without Lyn and Skye was devastated.’

  ‘I can imagine that,’ Anna said sadly. ‘Poor little girl.’

  ‘She was. She’d just started to come out of herself and thaw with us, and she was right back to square one. Worse, really, because her mother had died and been taken from her. Lyn had chosen to leave. That was harder to take. Skye was very, very hurt, and very difficult, and she still is.’

  ‘And you? Were you very hurt?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘At the time. Betrayed more than anything else. I could understand about the baby. I knew how important it was to her—she used to say she had a biological ache to carry a child. I understood that. I had a biological ache to be a father, to see my wife swell with my child, to hold my baby in my arms. I love children. I really, really wanted a child of my own, but it couldn’t happen for me.’

  He broke off and took a steadying breath. ‘I’m sorry, it still gets to me,’ he said roughly.

  ‘That’s OK,’ she murmured soothingly, her soft heart aching for him. ‘Take your time, I’m not going anywhere.’

  She thought he’d ground to a halt, but then after a moment Adam continued his heartbreaking story.

  ‘I offered to let her go. When we found out it was me, I offered to divorce her if that was what she wanted. She said it wasn’t. We went through the infertility programme, and again I asked her, before we started the adoption proceedings. She said no. She said no, and yet, once the children were there, living with us, and they’d been with us nearly a year—then, of all times, she turned round and said she wanted to go and that she was carrying someone else’s child.

  ‘I can’t forgive her for that—for what she did to those poor, vulnerable little children—and I can’t forgive my closest, oldest friend for being a part of it—for lying to me, for listening to me unburden myself and pretending to sympathise, and then, when my back was turned, for sleeping with my wife. I nearly killed the bastard for that.’

  Anna said nothing. There was nothing to say, nothing she could add that wouldn’t sound trite or insincere.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he went on after a moment. ‘I don’t talk about it very often, and it still gets to me.’

  ‘Do you ever see them?’

  ‘No. I can’t forgive them for what they did to the children, and it would be hypocritical to have anything to do with them. Anyway, I’m not a sucker for punishment.’ He turned his head and kissed her gently. ‘I’m sorry, Anna. This all got rather heavy. I didn’t mean to unload on you like that, but you may as well know the whole story.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve been wondering why she left. Now I know.’ Knew more than she’d ever wanted to know.

  Adam shifted slightly, turning towards her, and trailed a feathery kiss across her brow. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing to do with us,’ he said softly. ‘It’s all gone. Finished.’ He kissed her again, over her eyes, down the line of her jaw, in the soft hollow of her throat. ‘Forget about it now. Let me make love to you again.’

  Forget about it. Just like that, as if it was so easy.

  But he was right. She would forget it now, and concentrate on him, and this moment, and then later, when she was alone, she’d deal with it.

  His mouth was tracing a line of fire over her shoulder and down her arm, then back again to claim her lips. The fire spread through her body, and she arched against him, suddenly desperate to hold him close.

  And then in the distance they heard his bleeper, and with a muttered curse he rolled away from her and grabbed his underwear.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he instructed, and ran downstairs. She heard his voice on the phone, and then a moment later his footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘I have to go in,’ he said gruffly. ‘Stay there. I’ll ring you if it’s going to be brief. Otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow. OK?’

  She nodded. ‘OK.’ She nearly told him to come back anyway, at whatever time, but then she thought better of it. She needed to be alone. She had a lot of thinking to do.

  He tugged his sweater over his head, turned the roll-neck down and bent to kiss her goodbye.

  ‘I’ll see you la
ter. Think of me.’

  As if she could do anything else, with her body still humming from his loving and her heart in shock.

  She waited till the door closed behind him, then got up and put on her dressing-gown and went downstairs. The candles were still burning, mellow pools of golden light flickering against the wall. She turned off the side lamps and curled up, opening the chocolates. They’d been going to share them over coffee, but the coffee was sitting, cold, on the side in the kitchen and he was gone.

  Adam’s words stayed with her, though, echoing in her head like a death knell. ‘I’m sterile. I can’t get you pregnant. I’m sterile—sterile—sterile…’

  Anna swallowed, but the tears fell anyway, dripping off her chin and splashing heavily on her hands. She was grieving, she realised dimly—grieving for Adam and for the children he would never have, and for Lyn, denied her husband’s child, and for herself, for the fledgling dreams that had been trampled in the dust.

  The phone rang, and she answered it, gulping down the tears.

  It was Adam. ‘It’s going to be a long night,’ he said apologetically. ‘Don’t wait up. I’ll ring you tomorrow. Save me some of the chocolates.’

  ‘OK,’ she promised, trying to inject a cheerful note into her voice. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  She hung up just before the sob broke, and, curling up in the corner of the settee, she finally gave in to the tears.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS a long and tragic night. Adam struggled to save the legs of a young woman involved in a car accident, while another team lost the battle for her fiancé’s life in the next theatre.

  He had to amputate one leg in the end, because he was unable to restore the circulation, and the other would be permanently disfigured and might well prove too difficult to treat successfully.

  He did his best—he always did his best, but sometimes it just wasn’t good enough, and it grieved him. She was twenty-two, a lovely girl poised on the brink of the rest of her life, and suddenly that life had been trashed by an act of fate.

  And he wasn’t even supposed to be operating on her! He’d come in to see a child with a pelvic fracture which hadn’t need surgery in the end, and he’d been asked to stay to help because the orthopaedic team were at full stretch with a succession of RTAs.