‘OK, little guy?’
She turned and looked at Josh over her shoulder, his face all eyes and doubt.
‘Want G’annie and G’anpa.’
‘I know, but we can’t get there today because of the snow, so we’re going to stay here tonight with Sebastian in his lovely house and have an adventure!’
She tried to smile, but it felt so false. She was dreading going inside with Sebastian into the house that contained so much of their past. It would trash all her happy memories, and the tense, awkward atmosphere, the unspoken recriminations, the hurt and pain and regret lurking just under the surface of her emotions would make this so difficult to cope with, but it wasn’t his fault she was here and the least she could do was be a little gracious and accept his grudging hospitality.
She glanced round as her nemesis walked over to her car and opened the door.
‘I’m sorry.’
They said it in unison, and he gave her a crooked smile that tore at her heart and stood back to let her out.
‘Let’s get you both in out of this. Can I give you a hand with anything?’
‘Luggage? Realistically I’m not going anywhere tonight, am I?’ She said it with a wry smile, and he let out a soft huff of laughter and started to pick up the luggage she was pulling from the boot.
He wondered how much one woman and a very small boy could possibly need for a single night. Baby stuff, he guessed, and slung a soft bag over his shoulder as he picked up another case and a long rectangular object she said was a travel cot.
‘That should do for now. I might need to come back for something later.’
‘OK.’ He shut the tailgate as she opened the back door and reached in, emerging moments later with Josh.
Her son, he thought, and was shocked at the surge of jealousy at the thought of her carrying another man’s child.
The grapevine had failed him, because he hadn’t known she’d had a baby, but he’d known that her husband had died. A while ago now—a year, maybe two. While she was pregnant? The jealousy ebbed away, replaced by compassion. God, that must have been tough. Tough for all of them.
The boy looked at him solemnly for a moment with those huge, wary eyes that bored right through to his soul and found him wanting, and Sebastian turned away, swallowing a sudden lump in his throat, and led them in out of the cold.
* * *
‘Oh!’
She stopped dead in the doorway and stared around her, her jaw sagging. He’d brought her into the oldest part of the house, through a lobby that acted as a boot room and into a warm and welcoming kitchen that could have stepped straight out of the pages of a glossy magazine.
His smile was wry. ‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it?’ he offered, and she gave a slight, disbelieving laugh.
The last time she’d seen it, it had been dark, gloomy and had birds nesting in it.
Not any more. Now, it was...
‘Just a bit,’ she said weakly. ‘Wow.’
He watched her as she looked round the kitchen, her lips parted, her eyes wide. She was taking in every detail of the transformation, and he assessed her reaction, despising himself for caring what she thought and yet somehow, in some deep, dark place inside himself that he didn’t want to analyse, needing her approval.
Ridiculous. He didn’t need her approval for anything in his life. She’d given up the right to ask for that on the day she’d walked out, and he wasn’t giving it back to her now, tacitly or otherwise.
He shrugged off his coat and hung it over the back of a chair by the Aga, then picked up the kettle.
‘Tea?’
She dragged her eyes away from her cataloguing of the changes to the house and looked at him warily, nibbling her lip with even white teeth until he found himself longing to kiss away the tiny indentations she was leaving in its soft, pink plumpness—
‘If you don’t mind.’
But they’d already established that he did mind, in that tempestuous and savage exchange outside the gate, and he gave an uneven sigh and rammed a hand through his hair. It was wet with snow, dripping down his neck, and hers must be, too. Hating himself for that loss of temper and control, he got a tea towel out of the drawer and handed it to her, taking another one for himself.
‘Here,’ he said gruffly. ‘Your hair’s wet. Go and stand by the Aga and warm up.’
It wasn’t an apology, but it could have been an olive branch and she accepted it as that. They were stuck with each other, there was nothing either of them could do about it, and Josh was cold and scared and hungry. And the snow was dripping off her hair and running down her face.
She propped herself up on the front of the Aga, Josh on her hip, and towelled her hair with her free hand while she tried not to study him. ‘Tea would be lovely, please, and if you’ve got one Josh would probably like a biscuit.’
‘No problem. I think we could probably withstand a siege—my entire family are here for Christmas from tomorrow so the cupboards are groaning. It’s my first Christmas in the house and I offered to host it for my sins.’
‘I expect they’re looking forward to it. Your parents must be glad to have you close again.’
He gave a slightly bitter smile and turned away, giving her a perfect view of his broad shoulders as he got mugs out of a cupboard. ‘Needs must. My mother’s not well. She had a heart attack three years ago, and they gave her a by-pass at Easter.’
Ouch. She’d loved his mother, but his relationship with her had been a little rocky, although she’d never really been able to work out why. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. I hope she’s OK now.’
‘She’s getting over it—and why would you know? Unless you’re keeping tabs on my family as well as me?’ he said, his voice deceptively mild as he turned to look at her with those penetrating dark eyes.
She stared at him, taken aback by that. ‘I’m not keeping tabs on you!’
‘But you knew I was living here. When I answered the intercom, you knew it was me. There was no hesitation.’
As if she wouldn’t have known his voice anywhere, she thought with a dull ache in her chest.
‘I didn’t know you’d moved in,’ she told him honestly. ‘That was just sheer luck under the circumstances, but the fact that you’d bought it was hardly a state secret. You were rescuing a listed house of historical importance on the verge of ruin, and people were talking about it. Bear in mind my husband was an estate agent.’
He frowned. That made sense. He contemplated saying something, but what? Sorry he’d died? Bit late to offer his condolences, and he hadn’t felt able to at the time. Because it felt inappropriate? Probably. Or just keeping his distance from her, desperately trying to keep her in that cupboard she’d just ripped the door off. And now, in front of the child, wasn’t the time to initiate that conversation.
So, after a pause in which he filled the kettle, he brought the subject back to the house. Safer, marginally, so long as he kept his memories under control.
‘I didn’t realise it had caused such a stir,’ he said casually.
‘Well, of course it did. It was on the at-risk register for years. I think everyone expected it to fall down before it was sold.’
‘It wasn’t that close. There wasn’t much wrong with it that money couldn’t solve, but the owner couldn’t afford to do anything other than repair the roof and he hadn’t wanted to sell it for development, so before he died he put a restrictive covenant on it to say it couldn’t be divided or turned into a hotel. And apparently