Mistletoe Mother

‘In that case, I’ll bring those boxes in from the porch before they get buried under the snow,’ he said after an interminable pause.

For a moment she’d thought he was going to insist on some immediate answers but the alternative was almost worse. The fact that he was even now carrying his belongings inside was bringing home to her the fact that, thanks to her sister’s scheming, the one man she’d never wanted to see again was actually here, in her house. And, thanks to the dreadful weather, he was going to have to stay here at least until tomorrow morning.

She hurriedly bent to her task, raking the glowing embers out of the cloam oven before she slid the pans of perfectly risen dough into position and shut the door.

Automatically, she reached for the timer and set it again, wondering as she heard it begin to tick the minutes away how different her life was going to be by the time it rang again.

She wrapped her arms around herself as the front door opened again, tucking her hands up inside the ends of the baggy sleeves as the wind whistled across the room and straight up the chimney.

‘Where do you want me to put these?’ He gestured with a nod of his head towards the box he was carrying. ‘It seems to be tins and packets. Staple items.’

‘Through here.’ She turned to open the door on the other side of the fireplace, nervousness setting her chattering. ‘Granny always called it the scullery. The butler sink is still here but the old wash copper’s been replaced with a machine—not that Granny saw the need for using it when she was only washing for one, but Dad insisted she wasn’t to do the sheets and towels by hand any more.’

She had to stop when she ran out of breath and gestured silently for him to put the box on the battle-scarred wooden table against one wall.

Equally silently he obeyed, then paused to look around, his eyes taking in everything from the beamed ceiling that scarcely cleared his head to the handcrafted cupboards along one wall and the flag-stoned floor.

Ella found she was almost holding her breath while she waited for his reaction to his simple surroundings. It was certainly very different from anything a topflight obstetrics and gynaecology consultant would choose to live in.

Then he smiled. It was little more than a brief curving of a mouth that never smiled enough but it sent a shaft of warmth straight to her vulnerable heart.

‘It’s amazing,’ he said softly, his eyes going back to her as she hovered anxiously in the doorway. ‘Apart from the fridge and washing machine lurking in that corner you could almost imagine you’d stepped back in time. Is the whole croft the same?’

‘More or less…apart from the sinful luxury of the tiniest bathroom in the Western world.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he exclaimed fervently. ‘I suddenly wondered if there was still a…what were they called? At the bottom of the garden.’

‘A privy? There is,’ she informed him with a straight face, only breaking into a smile when she saw his look of horror. ‘No longer in use, though,’ she added, wickedly long seconds later.

The flash of humour in his eyes promised retribution but when he approached her it was only to make his way towards the remaining pile of bags and boxes.

He paused in mid-stride and whirled to face her, almost cannoning into her as she followed him across the room.

‘Dammit, Ella, this isn’t going to work,’ he exclaimed, taking a hasty step out of her way as he raked a long-fingered hand through his hair. ‘I came up here expecting to spend the next two weeks in an isolated little cottage of some sort. I certainly didn’t expect to find you here and I want to know what’s going on.’

‘Going on?’ It had sounded almost like an accusation but what was she guilty of?

‘Well, obviously you got your sister to set me up, so what I want to know is what you’re hoping to get out of it? If it’s just another one-night stand you wanted, we certainly didn’t have to come all this way for it. If you’d let me know you were interested, perhaps we could have arranged for a two-week stay in a comfortable hotel somewhere.’

‘Seth!’ The unexpectedness of his attack had left her almost speechless, apart from the fact that it was totally unfair. She wasn’t the one who had—

‘Of course! Stupid me! You don’t go in for anything as long as two weeks. Just the one night after your sister’s wedding and then, when I came back, you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.’ He was so angry that his eyes were almost shooting sparks at her but that didn’t stop her from retaliating with all the fire of her redhead’s nature.

‘I wasn’t the one who disappeared after one night, or have you got a more convenient memory than I have?’ She gave a mirthless laugh as the memories of that fateful day began to scroll their disjointed way through her head. She’d been trying to block them out for month after miserable month and still hadn’t managed it.

‘In case you really have forgotten what happened, let me remind you of the salient facts,’ she snapped fiercely, holding one hand up to count them off, finger by finger.

‘One—we danced at my sister’s wedding. Two—we ended up in bed together. Three—you had disappeared by the time I woke up the next morning. Four—by the time I went back on duty it was announced that you had gone on some sort of hastily organised leave with no date given for your return. Now,’ she continued when she’d drawn in a hasty breath and planted her fists combatively on her hips, ‘correct me if I’ve missed anything out, but I’m almost certain that nowhere in that series of events was there any mention on your part that you’d even enjoyed the encounter in the first place, let alone that you were interested in repeating it.’

His lips had been pressed into a thin line and his hands had been balled into tight fists when she’d started, but by the time she finished his arms were hanging limp at his sides, his eyes riveted on the front of her baggy jumper.

She glanced down to see that she’d planted her hands on her hips as she’d harangued him, and the gesture had drawn her clothing against the burgeoning evidence of her heavily pregnant state.

‘My God! Ella, you’re pregnant!’ he breathed, clearly shocked.

‘Well, I’m glad to see that all those years of training weren’t wasted,’ she retorted acidly, just as the timer rang again.

It didn’t take more than a minute to turn the loaves round to ensure they baked evenly, but it was long enough for her to regret her rudeness.

There had been two of them in that hotel room that night and that meant it had been just as much her fault as his that they hadn’t taken any steps to prevent her getting pregnant.

She straightened up from her task, knowing that she had to apologise, but before she could speak he beat her to it.

‘So, who’s the father? I hadn’t heard you’d got married but, then, once you left the hospital you were outside the scope of the gossip grapevine.’ He stopped suddenly, as though struck by a sudden thought. ‘Is this place big enough to have guests to stay? Won’t your husband have something to say about your sister dumping an old colleague of yours on him?’

For a moment Ella didn’t know whether she was going to laugh or cry but ended up determined to do neither.

‘You stupid man!’ she exclaimed shrilly as all those months of wondering and hurting finally boiled over. ‘I’m not married. I have never been married and I have no intention of ever getting married. Furthermore, whether you believe it or not, you are the only man I’ve ever slept with, but to save you wasting your money on DNA testing I’ll tell you here and now that I won’t be asking you for a single penny to raise this child. At least you’ll go away from here secure in the knowledge that I have no intention of using the baby to destroy your marriage.’

The last words were still quivering in the bread-scented room when reaction began to set in.

This was not how she’d dreamed of telling Seth that he was going to be a father.

In her dreams his marriage didn’t exist and he’d come to her telling her that he’d missed her dreadfully and couldn’t bear to live without her.

In her dreams he’d told her that he loved her and the baby they’d made that magical night, and would take care of them for ever.

In her dreams he came to her and wrapped her in loving arms while he kissed her. He didn’t stand on the other side of the room like a statue carved out of granite with his eyes burning into her like hot coals.

For a moment she just stood there with her hands resting protectively over the prominent bulge of her pregnancy, wondering why everything had gone so wrong. When she’d first met him she’d thought he was something so special. How could she have been so mistaken?

They had been working together for several months before the fateful day of her sister’s wedding, time in which she’d believed they’d been getting to know each other. Only she hadn’t known him at all. Hadn’t known that he’d been hiding such a monstrous secret until it had been far too late to stop herself falling in love with him.

She was still glaring at him after her outburst, but the longer she looked the more she began to notice about his appearance.

He’d changed since she’d seen him last. There was a sprinkling of grey at his temples that hadn’t been there before and he looked thinner, almost as if he’d been ill.

There was a subtle difference in the expression in his eyes, too. A year ago their polished steel had had the intensity of lasers where now they seemed almost…almost defeated.

He doesn’t look happy, she thought with a strange ache around her heart.

Startled by the burgeoning emotion she’d vowed to dismiss for ever, she suddenly realised that in spite of everything she was as much in love with him as she’d ever been.

Then to her utter mortification she burst into tears.

CHAPTER TWO (#u5903e72b-5cf2-5f7f-a3f5-5f1f5ee0bd60)

FROM the first moment she saw him, Ella felt as though a light had been switched on inside her.