His first action on finding Nancie had been to try her mother’s mobile but, unsurprisingly, it was switched off. He’d left a message on her voicemail, asking her to ring him, but didn’t hold out much hope of that.
Ten minutes later, the only thing he knew for certain was that he knew nothing. The new tenants of the apartment, her agent—make that ex-agent—even her old flatmate denied any knowledge of where she was, or of Michel, and he had no idea who her friends were, even supposing they’d tell him anything.
Actually, he thought, looking at the baby, it wasn’t true that he knew nothing.
While the movement of the buggy had, for the moment, lulled her back to sleep, he was absolutely sure that very soon she would be demanding to be fed or changed.
Ask May. She’ll help.
Ahead of him, the tall red-brick barley twist chimneys of Coleridge House stood high above the trees. For years he’d avoided this part of the park, walked double the distance rather than pass the house. Just seeing those chimneys had made him feel inadequate, worthless.
These days, he could buy and sell the Coleridges, and yet it was still there. Their superiority and the taint of who he was.
Asking her for help stuck deep in his craw, but the one thing about May Coleridge was that she wouldn’t ask questions. She knew Saffy. Knew him.
He called Enquiries for her number but it was unlisted. No surprise there, but maybe it was just as well.
It had been a very long time since he’d taken her some broken creature to be nursed back to health, but he knew she’d find it a lot harder to say no face to face. If he put Nancie into her arms.
It is not high, May told herself as she set her foot firmly on the tree. All she had to do was haul herself up onto the branch and crawl along it. No problem…
Easy enough to say when she was safely on the ground.
Standing beneath the branch and looking up, it had seemed no distance at all. The important thing, she reminded herself, was not to look down but keep her eye on the goal.
‘What on earth are you doing up there, Mouse?’
Sherbet dabs!
As her knee slipped, tearing her tights, she wondered how much worse this day could get. The advantage that she didn’t have to look down to see who was beneath her—only one person had ever called her Mouse—was completely lost on her.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ she asked through gritted teeth. ‘Checking the view?’
‘You should be able to see Melchester Castle from up there,’ he replied, as if she’d been serious. ‘You’ll have to look a little further to your left, though.’
She was in enough trouble simply looking ahead. She’d never been good with heights—something she only ever seemed to remember when she was too far off the ground to change her mind.
‘Why don’t you come up and point it out to me?’ she gasped.
‘I would be happy to,’ he replied, ‘but that branch doesn’t look as if it could support both of us.’
He was right. It was creaking ominously as she attempted to edge closer to the kitten which, despite her best efforts not to frighten it further, was backing off, a spitting, frightened orange ball of fur.
It was far too late to wish she’d stuck to looking helpless at ground level. She’d realised at a very early age that the pathetic, Where’s a big strong man to help me? routine was never going to work for her—she wasn’t blonde enough, thin enough, pretty enough—and had learned to get on and do it herself.
It was plunging in without a thought for the consequences that had earned her the mocking nickname ‘Mouse’, short for ‘Danger Mouse’, bestowed on her by Adam Wavell when she was a chubby teen and he was a mocking, nerdy, glasses-wearing sixth-former at the local high school.
Her knee slipped a second time and a gasp from below warned her that Adam wasn’t the only one with a worm’s eye view of her underwear. A quick blink confirmed that her antics were beginning to attract an audience of mid-morning dog-walkers, older children on their autumn break and shoppers taking the scenic route into the town centre—just too late to be of help.
Then a click, followed by several more as the idea caught on, warned her that someone had taken a photograph using their mobile phone. Terrific. She was going to be in tomorrow’s edition of the Maybridge Observer for sure; worse, she’d be on YouTube by lunch time.
She had no one to blame but herself, she reminded herself, making a firm resolution that the next time she spotted an animal in distress she’d call the RSPCA and leave it to them. That wasn’t going to help her now, though, and the sooner she grabbed the kitten and returned to earth the better.
‘Here, puss,’ she coaxed desperately, but its only response was to hiss at her and edge further along the branch. Muttering under her breath, she went after it. The kitten had the advantage. Unlike her, it weighed nothing and, as the branch thinned and began to bend noticeably beneath her, she made a desperate lunge, earning herself a cheer from the crowd as she managed to finally grab it. The kitten ungratefully sank its teeth into her thumb.
‘Pass it down,’ Adam said, his arms raised to take it from her.
Easier said than done. In its terror, it had dug its needle claws in, clinging to her hand as desperately as it had clung to the branch.
‘You’ll have to unhook me. Don’t let it go!’ she warned as she lowered it towards him. She was considerably higher now and she had to lean down a long way so that he could detach the little creature with the minimum of damage to her skin.
It was a mistake.
While she’d been focused on the kitten everything had been all right, but that last desperate lunge had sent everything spinning and, before she could utter so much as a fudge balls, she lost her balance and slithered off the branch.
Adam, standing directly beneath her, had no time to avoid a direct hit. They both went down in a heap, the fall driving the breath from her body, which was probably a good thing since there was no item in her handmade confectionery range that came even close to matching her mortification. But then embarrassment was her default reaction whenever she was within a hundred feet of the man.
‘You don’t change, Mouse,’ he said as she struggled to catch her breath.
Not much chance of that while she was lying on top of him, his breath warm against her cheek, his heart pounding beneath her hand, his arm, flung out in an attempt to catch her—or, more likely, defend himself—tight around her. The stuff of her most private dreams, if she discounted the fact that it had been raining all week and they were sprawled in the muddy puddle she had taken such pains to avoid.
‘You always did act first, think later,’ he said. ‘Rushing to the aid of some poor creature in distress and getting wet, muddy or both for your pains.’
‘While you,’ she gasped, ‘always turned up too late to do anything but stand on the sidelines, laughing at me,’ she replied furiously. It was untrue and unfair, but all she wanted right at that moment was to vanish into thin air.
‘You have to admit you were always great entertainment value.’
‘If you like clowns,’ she muttered, remembering all too vividly the occasion when she’d scrambled onto the school roof in a thunderstorm to rescue a bird trapped in the guttering and in danger of drowning, concern driving her chubby arms and legs as she’d shinned up the down pipe.
Up had never been a problem.
He’d stood below her then, the water flattening his thick dark hair, rain pouring down his face, grinning even as he’d taken the bird from her. But then, realising that she was too terrified to move,