He hadn’t loved the children either, but there was no way she was telling Edward that his father had used them as a lever to get her to agree to things she wouldn’t otherwise have countenanced. Things like remortgaging their house so riskily, because otherwise, he said, they’d be homeless.
Well, they were homeless now, and he’d had to flee the country to escape the debt, so a lot of good it had done to prolong it. And why on earth she’d let him back last year so that she’d ended up pregnant again, she couldn’t imagine. She must have been insane, and he’d gone again long before she’d realised about the baby.
Not that she’d send Thomas back, not for a moment, but life had become infinitely more complicated with another youngster.
She’d have to work on her CV, she thought, and wondered what Jake was doing and if he’d let her use the Internet to download a template so she could lay it out better.
‘You need to go to sleep,’ she said softly, and bent over and kissed Edward’s cheek. ‘Come on, snuggle down.’
‘Can we play in the snow again tomorrow?’ he asked sleepily, and she nodded.
‘Of course—if it’s still there.’
‘It will be. Jake said.’
And if Jake had said …
She went out and pulled the door to, leaving the landing light on for them, and after checking on the sleeping baby she went back downstairs, expecting to find Jake in the breakfast room or the drawing room.
But he wasn’t, and his study door was open, and his bedroom door had been wide open, too.
Which left his little sitting room. His cave, the place to which he retreated from the world when it all became too much.
She didn’t like to disturb him, so she put her laptop in the breakfast room and tidied up the kitchen. The children had had a snack, and she was pretty sure that Jake would want something later, so she made a pile of sandwiches with freshly cut bread, and wrapped them in cling film and put them in the fridge ready for him. Then she put Rufus’s new coat on and took him out into the snow for a run around.
He should have been used to it, he’d been outside several times today, but still he raced around and barked and tried to bite it, and she stood there feeling the cold seep into her boots and laughed at him as he played.
And then she turned and saw Jake standing in the window of his sitting room, watching her with a brooding expression on his face, and she felt her heart miss a beat.
Their eyes locked, and she couldn’t breathe, frozen there in time, waiting for—
What? For him to summon her? To call her to him, to ask her to join him?
Then he glanced away, his gaze caught by the dog, and she could breathe again.
‘Rufus!’ she called, and she took him back inside, dried his paws on an old towel and took off her snowy boots and left them by the Aga to dry off. And as she straightened up, he came into the kitchen.
‘Hi. All settled?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, they’re all settled. I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry, so I made some sandwiches.’
‘Brilliant. Thanks. I was just coming to do that, but I wasn’t sure if I could cut the bread with one hand. It’s all a bit awkward.’
‘Done,’ she said, opening the fridge and lifting them out. ‘Do you want them now, or later?’
‘Now?’ he said. ‘Are you going to join me? I thought maybe we could have a glass of wine and a little adult conversation.’
His smile was wry, and she laughed softly, her whole body responding to the warmth in his eyes.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, and found some plates while he opened the bottle of red they’d started the night before last and poured two glasses, and they carried them through to the breakfast room, but then he hesitated.
‘Come and slum it with me on the sofa,’ he suggested, to her surprise, and she followed him through to the other room and sat down at one end while he sprawled into the other corner, his sore leg—well, the sorer of the two, if the bruises were anything to go by—stretched out so that his foot was almost touching her thigh.
And they ate their sandwiches and talked about the day, and then he put his plate down on the table beside him and said, ‘Tell me about your work.’
‘I don’t have any,’ she reminded him. ‘In fact, I was going to ask you about that. I need to write a CV and get it out to some firms. I don’t suppose you’ve got wireless broadband so I can go online and do some research?’
‘Sure. You can do it now, if you like. I’ll help you—if you want.’
She flashed him a smile. ‘That would be great. Thanks.’
‘Any time. Have you got a computer or do you want to use mine?’
‘My laptop—it’s in the breakfast room. I’ll get it.’
He’d sat up by the time she got back in there, so she ended up sitting close to him, his solid, muscled thigh against hers, his arm slung along the back of the sofa behind her. As she brought up her CV, he glanced at it and sat back.
‘OK, I can see a few problems with it. It needs more immediacy, it needs to grab the attention. You could do with a photo of yourself, for a start. People like to know who they’re dealing with.’
‘Really? For freelance? It’s not as if I’d have to disgrace their office—’
‘Disgrace? Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, leaving her feeling curiously warm inside. ‘And anyway, it’s about how you look at the camera, if you’re open and straightforward and decent.’
‘Or if you have tattoos or a ton of shrapnel in your face,’ she added, but he laughed and shook his head.
‘That’s irrelevant unless you’re talking front of house and it’s the sort of organisation where it matters. In some places it’d be an asset. It’s much more about connecting with the photo. Stay there.’
And he limped out stiffly, drawing her attention to the fact that he was still sore, despite all he’d done today for her and her children. He should have been lying down taking it easy, she thought uncomfortably, not making snowmen and snow angels and construction toys. And now her CV.
He came back with another laptop, flipped it open and logged on, and then scrolled through his files and brought up his own CV. ‘Here—this is me. I can’t show you anyone else’s, it wouldn’t be fair, but this is the basic stuff—fonts, the photo size and so on.’
She scanned it, much more interested in the personal information than anything else. His date of birth—he was a Cancerian, she noticed, and thirty-five this year, five years older than her—and he’d been born in Norwich, he had three degrees, he was crazily clever and his interests were diverse and, well, interesting.
She scanned through it and sat back.
‘Wow. You’re pretty well qualified.’
‘So are you. How come you can’t find a job? Is it that they don’t get beyond the CV?’
She laughed. ‘What, a single woman with three young children and one of them under a year?’
‘But people aren’t allowed to ask that sort of thing.’
‘No, but they ask about how much time you’re able to commit and can you give weekends and evenings if necessary, are you available for business trips—all sorts of sly manoeuvring to get it out of you, and then you can hear the gates slam shut.’
‘That’s crazy. Lots of my key people are mothers, and they tend to be