‘Rory was just what I needed after Paul,’ Martha was saying. ‘He made me feel desirable again. It wasn’t love at first sight, no, but we did get on really well in spite of the difference in our ages. If we’d had longer together, who knows? Maybe we could have built a good long-term relationship but, as it was, he had to go back to St Bonaventure. We both knew that it was never going to be a permanent thing, so we just enjoyed it for what it was—a lot of fun.’
Lewis was getting a bit tired of hearing about Rory, who was so attractive and such fun and no doubt a real stud in bed, too, he thought sourly. ‘Did the fun include getting pregnant?’ he asked disapprovingly.
‘No, that was an accident,’ said Martha. ‘We’d been to Paris for the weekend—Rory had never been and I used to go to all the fashion shows—so we thought we’d treat ourselves to a great meal on our last night, and I had oysters. Big mistake! I was on the pill, but those oysters definitely disagreed with me. I had an upset stomach for a couple of days after we got back and…well, it happens.’
She shrugged. ‘A touch of food poisoning isn’t the best of reasons to start a family, I know, but I wouldn’t change Noah for the world now. Anyway,’ she went on with a sideways glance at Lewis, ‘you don’t need to worry that I’ll do an Eve and throw out all your arrangements by deciding I have met the man of my dreams on St Bonaventure. I’m too much of a realist about love now for that, and even if I wasn’t quite frankly I’m too tired to fall in love at the moment!’
CHAPTER THREE
LEWIS’S hard gaze encompassed her pale face and the circles under her eyes. ‘You look it,’ he said roughly.
‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t recommend being a single mother to anyone who relies on her sleep,’ said Martha with a wry smile.
‘You must have known it would be hard work.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I did, but it’s like everyone always says…you can say that you know looking after a baby will be tiring, but until you’re actually doing it you have no conception of what sleep deprivation does to you or of just what “tired” can mean!’
Lewis hunched a shoulder. ‘If it’s that bad why do women go on and on about how they want to have babies?’
‘Because the joy you get from your child is worth every sleepless night,’ said Martha, leaning forward to stroke Noah’s cheek. ‘It’s worth every day you get through like a zombie, every hour you spend worrying about whether he’s healthy or happy or how you’re going to afford to give him everything he needs.’
Lewis’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘That sounds all very fine, but in my experience it’s a lot more basic than that. I think a lot of women have children to fulfil their own needs. They think about how much they want to be loved or valued, not about how the child will feel.
‘Half the time they have a baby just because it’s fashionable,’ he said contemptuously. ‘A baby is the latest designer accessory. You can dress it up in rinky-dinky little outfits and show it off, which is fine until the fashion changes and you’ve got to keep up, and then it’s Oh, dear, now what am I going to do with the baby?’
‘Give it to my brother to look after?’ suggested Martha, unsurprised at the bitterness in his voice if that was what had happened with Savannah.
‘Or a nanny or a mother-in-law or anyone else you can find to deal with all that messy, boring stuff as long as it doesn’t stop you doing whatever you want to do!’
There was a little silence. Martha had the feeling that she was treading on dangerous ground. ‘Why did you agree to look after Viola if you feel that way?’ she asked cautiously after a moment.
‘What could I do?’ Lewis replied, hunching a shoulder. ‘I had my sister in hysterics, the baby crying…’
He shuddered, remembering the scene. ‘Savannah’s out of control at the moment. She’s behaving very badly, but she’s still in no state to look after a baby properly. Viola’s father is in the States at the moment—or he was last time I heard. Half the time he’s too out of it to remember that he’s got a daughter, let alone to look after her, and Viola certainly can’t look after herself.’ He sighed. ‘I’m the only one who can be responsible for her at the moment. She’s just a baby. I couldn’t just say that she wasn’t my problem.’
Martha studied his profile, oddly moved by his matter-of-fact attitude. He seemed so hard when you first met him, she thought, remembering how off-putting she had found that austere, unsmiling face and the uncompromising air of toughness and self-sufficiency, but underneath it all he was obviously a kind man, and a decent one.
Kindness and decency weren’t qualities she had valued much when she was caught up in the frenetic whirl of activity at work and a hectic social life, but it didn’t take long to learn how important they were when life became more difficult.
Knowing that Lewis had them made him seem a much nicer man.
And a much more attractive one.
The thought slid unbidden into Martha’s mind and she jerked her eyes away from his face.
Don’t even think about it, she told herself. It’s one thing to realise that Lewis might not be quite as unpleasant as you thought, quite another to start thinking of him as attractive. He’s your employer and you’re going out to find Rory. Don’t complicate the issue.
She took a sip of her water. Maybe she should have stuck to the champagne after all.
‘You must be very close to your sister if you’re the one she turns to for help,’ she said after a while.
Lewis grimaced. ‘It’s partly my own fault Savannah is the way she is,’ he said. ‘Her mother left when she was only four, so she never had an example of good parenting. Michaela—her mother—was an heiress. She was very pretty and very spoilt, just like Savannah. After she divorced my father she went off to the States, but she was killed in a road accident a couple of years later. All her money was put in a trust fund for when Savannah was eighteen, and Savannah has been running through her inheritance ever since.’
‘I didn’t realise that she was your half-sister,’ said Martha, wriggling round in her seat so that it was easier to talk.
‘She’s fourteen years younger than me, so I wasn’t around all that much after I went to university. Poor kid, she didn’t have much of a childhood, looked after by a succession of nannies and then packed off to boarding school. My father was never much of a hands-on parent at the best of times,’ he added dryly, ‘and once his business started going downhill he withdrew into himself even more. I think he forgot about Savannah’s existence most of the time.
‘I tried to do what I could for Savannah in the holidays, and when our father died she made her base with me, but she was sixteen by then and had got in with a crowd of wild friends.’ Lewis sighed. ‘I was always bailing her out of trouble. I blame myself sometimes. Maybe if I’d been firmer with her she’d be less spoilt now.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Martha stoutly. ‘It’s hard enough for perfect, supportive parents to deal with ordinary adolescents, let alone troubled ones. You can only have been a young man. I don’t see how you could have possibly done more than you did.’
Lewis looked a little taken aback by her support. ‘Helen was always telling me I should be stricter with Savannah.’
A few tiny bristles went up on the back of Martha’s neck. ‘Helen?’