‘That’s fine because I really objected to being summoned away from my job today.’
‘If you’re expecting an apology for that you’re wasting your time.’ He sipped his coffee and looked at her over the rim of his cup. ‘For a start, I take it you’ve already handed in your notice...’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Secondly, you hate the place...’
‘Hate is a bit strong—’
“Thirdly, you spend quite a bit of time correctly pointing out to me that Amy must come first so you can hardly object when I ask to meet you for the expressed purpose of discussing her.‘ His mobile phone buzzed, and he pressed a button to switch it off. ’Now, arrangements. I’ll send someone along to do all the packing. You’ll simply have to point out what’s to be taken and what’s to be left. There’s nothing terribly big to be transported so a sizeable van should be sufficient.’
‘There’s really no need for you to trouble yourself,’ Leigh said quickly. ‘It’ll be more tiring to have to direct someone to what can and can’t be packed. I’ll make sure that it’s all done by Saturday morning.’
‘You hate this, don’t you?’ he asked, after they had agreed on times and Leigh had started wondering whether she wasn’t beginning to consume too much of his valuable working time.
‘What?’ She deliberately misunderstood the question, but from the expression on his face she had not managed to fool him.
‘The way events have taken a turn in your life.’
‘I’m cautious, that’s all.’
‘That’s understandable.’
‘I mean, fatherhood has been thrust onto you but you don’t know the first thing about what it’s like, having a child live under your roof. Are you still going to be enthusiastic after two months? Six? A year? You won’t be able to return her to a shop, you know. You might well be her natural father but, let’s face it, you probably know your paper boy better than you know your own daughter.’
His eyes had turned wintry. He slowly deposited his cup on the table and leant towards her with his elbows on his knees.
‘Let’s get something very straight here, Miss Walker. You seem to consider it perfectly acceptable to set yourself up as judge and jury on me and my lifestyle. Sure, you have your doubts and I can understand that, but I am frankly sick to death of your sweeping assumptions and moralising. If Amy senses in any way whatsoever that your heart isn’t in this move it won’t be long before she begins to feel uncertain, and I will not have that happening.’
Leigh’s body had become rigid and she could hardly breathe, although this was far less to do with anger than with the mortifying knowledge that there was an element of truth in what he was saying.
‘You may dislike me, but you’ll be civil. Do you understand?’ he hissed.
‘There’s no need to treat me like a child!’ She found that she was whispering as well, although there was no one else in the room with them. This just wasn’t the sort of place for making a scene.
‘If you act like a child you’ll be treated as one.’
Leigh stared at him at a loss for words, and finally he shook his head impatiently.
‘There’s that look again.’
‘What look?’
‘That huge-eyed, innocent look.’
‘That gets on your nerves... I do apologise...’ She could feel tears stinging the backs of her eyes. Was she childish? Yes. Yes, she supposed she was. She had always been looked after, cosseted by her parents and by a sister who had been old enough to have seen her as a baby to be indulged and protected. When their parents had died Jenny had soothed her, looked after her, put her needs first, taken over the role of parent. And moving on to art college had hardly hardened her.
Now here she was, dealing with responsibilities that she had never had before—dealing with a man whose only experience of women was of the sophisticated variety. She had been forced to grow up and she had, but underneath there was still the young girl, trying hard to be strong. She had been strong when Jenny and Roy had died, strong for Amy’s sake. She had been strong when her relationship with Mick had crumbled around her. She had developed the necessary veneer to take her through the thin times. But she wasn’t strong with this man.
‘Don’t damn well apologise. It wasn’t meant to be an insult.’ He paused and very nearly smiled. ‘You’re an utter contradiction, do you know that?’ He looked at his watch and closed his briefcase. ‘Is it all settled about the weekend, then?’
Leigh stood up and nodded, tugging down her dreary black skirt and attempting to look practical and businesslike.
‘I’ll be over to help some time during the morning, and—’ He stood up, put on his jacket and said, before she could interrupt, ‘Don’t tell me that there’s no need to trouble myself.’ He straightened, looked at her so thoroughly that her skin began to prickle and graced her with another of those slow, amused smiles which she found so disorienting.
‘There’s no need to trouble yourself,’ she said, with a smile of her own, then she ducked and began to precede him to the door.
What, she thought later, had that been all about? One minute she had been angry and insulted by his scathing directness and then, quite suddenly, something had altered, although for the life of her she couldn’t put her finger on it All she knew was that by the time they had parted company outside the club her heart had been pounding like a drum in her chest.
Was it because she was so inexperienced when it came to men that she simply found it difficult to handle those lightning shifts in his moods?
She stuffed the niggling questions to the back of her mind and concentrated on the ordeal of relieving drawers and cupboards of what progressively was turning into a treasure trove of unplumbed trivia, all of which needed to be sorted out bit by laborious bit
It was just as well that she had now left her job. Her boss, with aggravating and long-winded petulance, had finally allowed her to leave, without giving her full month’s notice, and she needed the time to pack.
She accomplished during the day a large amount when Amy was at school, not wanting her to come across anything that might open floodgates to memories of her parents. But in the evenings Amy insisted on helping, which was more of a hindrance than otherwise. The little things which had to be wrapped were wrapped with such infinite care that the process took ten times longer than if Leigh had done it herself. And then there were the inevitable discoveries of outdated toys, which were greeted like old friends and promptly added to the everincreasing pile of things to be taken to Nicholas’s house.
By Saturday morning there was five times more to transfer than Leigh had intended. The van turned up promptly, and forty minutes later, true to his word, so did Nicholas, dressed in what he doubtless considered old clothes for the job at hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as soon as he had entered the house, ‘there was more than I expected. Bits and pieces. I hope you don’t mind.’ Her voice was very adult and very polite because she had decided since last setting eyes on him that she was not going to act like a prepubescent child. She would not allow him to reduce her to self-conscious uncertainty.
She had made a concentrated effort to put the man into perspective, and the fact was that he was Amy’s father, a virtual stranger who had entered her life through a back door of sorts. His presence in her life was one of necessity and not choice. They were two utterly different human beings who had been brought together by outside circumstances.
In the normal course of events, they would never have met and, even if they had, they would never have spared one another a second look. So, she had told herself, what he said, what he did, could not possibly have any real impact on her. It made sense when she thought about it logically.
Amy, who was sitting on the sofa with a book on her lap, looked up and said with stunning self-confidence, ‘I told Leigh that you wouldn’t.’
Nicholas smiled and there, in that slow, charming, warm smile, was the reason why he had managed to climb so
quickly into Amy’s affections and why her description of him had been of someone kind and thoughtful.
‘It’s a big house,’ he said, walking over to where she was and squatting down on the floor by her so that he was on her level. He glanced at the cover of the book, then looked at his daughter. ‘Big enough to hold any number of things you might want to bring over.’
‘How big?’ Amy asked with interest, and Nicholas described his house to her, but not in estate agent jargon—in funny language a child could understand. He told her that it had been standing there, just waiting for a child like her to come along, and Leigh felt a lump in her throat at this obvious corny, tear-jerking remark. Well, he certainly knew how to lay it on, she thought, and her heart clenched with apprehension as she took in Amy’s pleased face.
If you hurt her, she thought, you’ll have me to answer to.
‘Shall we go?’ she asked in a voice that was more glacial than she had intended, and they looked at her in unison. It was an eerie feeling, seeing the striking similarity at such close quarters. Just looking at them there, they seemed to belong.
‘I take it that only one trip will be necessary?’ Nicholas asked, straightening. The charm had dropped from his face, and his eyes were as cool as her voice had been a minute ago.
‘Oh, yes.’ Leigh forced a smile on her face for Amy’s sake and was relieved when she got a smile back in return. ‘I’ll just check the rooms before we go. Make sure that we haven’t forgotten anything. Not that it’s the end of the world if we have.’
She left them where they were. She had been afraid that when the final hour came, and the front door of the house was closed behind them for good, Amy would break down, but when she returned to the sitting room half an hour later Nicholas had managed to engage Amy’s attention. He had brought a tiny computer toy with him, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and he was explaining the mechanics of it to her.
They left the house, with Amy deeply absorbed in whatever it was that he had given her, and Leigh shot him a look of gratitude.
‘Good idea,’ she said to him, once they were in his car and driving away. She half nodded in the direction of the back seat. ‘I was a bit worried...’
‘Mmm. Yes. Quite. A difficult time potentially.’
They were speaking in code, although Amy’s attention was very far removed from their conversation.
‘And you?’ he asked conversationally, sparing her a fleeting sideways glance. ‘OK?’
She was so surprised by this rudimentary show of interest that she replied without the normal wariness she tended to adopt when in his presence.
‘I guess.’ She sighed and shrugged. ‘Moving on.’
‘Yes. Always hard.’ They had stopped at some traffic lights and he turned to look at her. Their eyes tangled for longer than she intended, and she was the first to look away.
From the back seat the computer toy was emanating strange, high noises, and Leigh covered her momentary confusion by swivelling around in her seat and asking Amy to explain how it worked.
‘You press this button,’ she said obligingly, holding out the toy so that Leigh could pretend to inspect it, even though her eyes could barely focus on what was in front of her. In this position her face was only inches away from Nicholas’s shoulder, and she was shocked to realise how intensely his proximity was affecting her.
‘And it does what?’
‘Move that figure...there... You’ve got to get him to attack those little blobs... See there! Like that...’
‘And then what happens?’
‘And then you get points at the end of the game.’
‘And then what?’ Leigh asked, squinting at the handheld toy.
‘And then,’ Nicholas said, with a throaty chuckle, ‘you become nauseatingly addicted to repeating the exercise all over again and beating your previous score.’
Leigh shifted back into her seat and looked at his amused profile. ‘It doesn’t seem to be a very constructive way of spending one’s time,’ she told him, perplexed.
‘You’re an artist. Your definition of a constructive way of spending one’s time is to create something.’ He shot her a glance, then redirected his attention to the road ahead. ‘You grew up with paper and colours and paint.’
‘Papers and colours and paint are still in existence, believe it or not.’ The beeping noises were still coming from the back seat, accompanied by exclamations of delight, closely followed by moans of disgust.
‘But computers have now been added to the equation.’ ‘I don’t know a thing about computers.’
‘You must have used one in your job,’ Nicholas said, glancing in his rear-view mirror to make sure that the van was behind them.
‘Electric typewriter, thank heavens. I don’t trust those things.’
‘You think that they’ll explode if you press the wrong button?’ he teased. ‘Come to life and stage a take-over?’
‘Well, we’ve all seen the movies,’ she said.
From behind Amy asked. ‘What movies?’
‘Computers, taking over the world,’ Leigh said, laughing. She relaxed, feeling young and carefree for the first time in months.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Amy said, laughing as well. ‘They can’t do that. You just never use them!’
‘You tell her,’ Nicholas encouraged.
Leigh could feel an immense sense of well-being steal over her and through her, filling her up, and she found herself idly wishing that this car drive could continue for ever.
It was only as they began to slow down and turned right into a driveway that she pulled herself back together. And it was only as they were getting the things unloaded from the van and taken into the house that she realised how thoroughly Nicholas had managed to remove all the tension from her shoulders. Tension which had been with her from the day her sister had died. Tension which had been with her, it seemed, from way back before that.
She looked at him as he strode up the stairs ahead of her, with Amy following closely, and wondered how on earth he had succeeded in doing that. How had he? She didn’t even like the man!
He was directing things into rooms while Amy opened doors, peered inside and asked questions, thoroughly uninhibited.
‘You can help me with my toys,’ she said to him, and they stood in the middle of a pile of boxes while Amy surveyed her quarters.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Leigh said to them, and promptly did. She headed for the other bedroom and carefully began to unpack her own belongings—clothes, some books, a few ornaments, her art equipment. She had enrolled at the college to start at the beginning of the next term, and just the feel of her brushes and the caked surface of the toolbox which she used to store her paints was like the touch of a familiar friend.
Her back was to the door when she heard a voice behind her. ‘There’s a room on the floor below that you can use as a studio if you like.’
She swung round to find Nicholas, lounging against the doorframe, and she immediately wondered how long he had been standing there, watching her. Then she laughed the notion away.
Did she imagine that because he was friendly for half an hour in a car that he suddenly found her attractive? With her short hair and her coltish body and her freckles? Not to mention her unspeakably faded attire, which she had donned because moving was a fairly messy business.
‘That’s very kind,’ she said awkwardly from her position on the floor, where she was kneeling to inspect her art box. She slammed down the lid and stood up hurriedly, brushing her clothes with one hand.
‘Have you enrolled in your...college?’
‘To start next term.’ They looked at each other and Leigh broke into hurried speech. ‘The hours are perfect. I shall be able to drop Amy off at school and collect her in the afternoons, and I can always paint after she’s gone to bed. Much better than when I worked, as a matter of fact.’ She heard herself babbling on with something approaching dismay. ‘It was always a mad dash to get to her school on time.�
�� Her voice petered out, and to her consternation he appeared in no hurry to break the silence, which left her gazing awkwardly at him while her hands fidgeted nervously together.
‘Has Amy finished unpacking?’ she asked eventually. ‘I should go and check on her or else she’ll get swamped by her things and forget that the object of the exercise is to put them away.’ She looked down at her feet, shoeless because she had removed her trainers, and then at her hands, which she forced to her sides because twining them together was so indicative of her nervousness and there was no sane reason why she should be feeling nervous.
‘She’s engrossed in her unpacking,’ Nicholas said. ‘Leave her to it.’
‘Right.’
A further silence fell. Leigh cleared her throat meaningfully and hazarded a full look at him.
‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘Your portfolio.’ He nodded to her bed and she followed his gaze. ‘May I have a look?’
Absolutely not was her first, panicky thought, but hard on the heels of this instinctive reaction was the acknowledgement that she was quite prepared to show her work to all and sundry so why on earth not him? She nodded and watched as he unclasped it and looked through the contents, holding them out and inspecting them. Eventually he said, without looking at her, ‘Artists are very sensitive about criticism, aren’t they?’
‘Very,’ she agreed, blushing, ‘so please feel free to lie.’
‘I expected something more abstract.’
‘I’m a rather boring painter,’ Leigh told him, cutting short any temptation on his part to waffle on about the merits of abstract art. ‘There’s so much beauty around—why distort it?’
‘Why, indeed.’ He returned her canvasses to the portfolio, snapped it shut and stood back with his hands in his pockets. Separated by the width of the room, she was still profoundly aware of him—of his overpowering masculinity.
‘I like them,’ he told her, and she nodded and muttered her thanks. ‘They’re very vibrant, very emotional.’ He paused and then said musingly, ‘Do you ever dress like the woman I would have described as being behind those paintings?’
A Daughter For Christmas Page 8
