‘Really? So let me guess,’ May said, less than amused; he was overdoing it with the ‘idiot’. ‘Your reason for dropping in for the first time in years wouldn’t have anything to do with your sudden need for a babysitter?’
‘Thanks, May. Saffy said you’d help.’
‘She said that?’ She looked at the baby. All pink and cute and helpless. No! She would not be manipulated! She was in no position to take on anyone else’s problems right now. She had more than enough of her own. ‘I was stating the obvious, not offering my services,’ she said as he began to walk on as if it was a done deal. ‘Where is Saffy?’
‘She’s away,’ he said. ‘Taking a break. She’s left Nancie in my care.’
‘Good luck with that,’ she said. ‘But it’s no use coming to me for help. I know absolutely nothing about babies.’
‘You’ve already proved you know more than me. Besides, you’re a woman.’ Clearly he wasn’t taking her refusal seriously, which was some nerve considering he hadn’t spoken to her unless forced to in the last ten years. ‘I thought it came hard-wired with the X chromosome?’
‘That is an outrageous thing to say,’ she declared, ignoring the way her arms were aching to pick up the baby, hold her, tell her that she wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to her. Ever. Just as she’d once told her mother.
She already had the kitten. In all probability, that was all she’d ever have. Ten years from now, she’d be the desperate woman peering into other people’s prams…
‘Is it?’ he asked, all innocence.
‘You know it is.’
‘Maybe if you thought of Nancie as one of those helpless creatures you were always taking in when you were a kid it would help?’ He touched a finger to the kitten’s orange head, suggesting that nothing had changed. ‘They always seemed to thrive.’
‘Nancie,’ she said, ignoring what she assumed he thought was flattery, ‘is not an injured bird, stray dog or frightened kitten.’
‘The principle is the same. Keep them warm, dry and fed.’
‘Well, there you are,’ she said. ‘You know all the moves. You don’t need me.’
‘On the contrary. I’ve got a company to run. I’m flying to South America tomorrow—’
‘South America?’
‘Venezuela first, then on to Brazil and finally Samindera. Unless you read the financial pages, you would have missed the story. I doubt it made the social pages,’ he said.
‘Samindera,’ she repeated with a little jolt of concern. ‘Isn’t that the place where they have all the coups?’
‘But grow some of the finest coffee in the world.’ One corner of his mouth lifted into a sardonic smile that, unlike the rest of him, hadn’t changed one bit.
‘Well, that’s impressive,’ she said, trying not to remember how it had felt against her own trembling lips. The heady rush as a repressed desire found an urgent response…‘But you’re not the only one with a business to run.’ Hers might be little more than a cottage industry, nothing like his international money generator that had turned him from zero to a Maybridge hero, but it meant a great deal to her. Not that she’d have it for much longer.
Forget Adam, his baby niece, she had to get home, tell Robbie the bad news, start making plans. Somehow build a life from nothing.
Just as Adam had done…
‘I’ve got a world of trouble without adding a baby to the mix,’ she said, not wanting to think about Adam. Then, before he could ask her what kind of trouble, ‘I thought Saffy was living in Paris. Working as a model? The last I heard from her, she was doing really well.’
‘She kept in touch with you?’ Then, before she could answer, ‘Why are you walking barefoot, May?’
She stared at him, aware that he’d said something he regretted, had deliberately changed the subject, then, as he met her gaze, challenging her to go there, she looked down at her torn tights, mud soaked skirt, dirty legs and feet.
‘My feet are muddy. I’ve already ruined my good black suit…’ the one she’d be needing for job interviews, assuming anyone was that interested in someone who hadn’t been to university, had no qualifications ‘…I’m not about to spoil a decent pair of shoes, too.’
As she stepped on a tiny stone and winced, he took her by the arm, easing her off the path and she froze.
‘The grass will be softer to walk on,’ he said, immediately releasing her, but not before a betraying shiver of gooseflesh raced through her.
Assuming that she was cold, he removed his jacket, placed it around her shoulders. It swallowed her up, wrapping her in the warmth from his body.
‘I’m covered in mud,’ she protested, using her free hand to try and shake it off. Wincing again as a pain shot through her elbow. ‘It’ll get all over the lining.’
He stopped her, easing the jacket back onto her shoulder, then holding it in place around her. ‘You’re cold,’ he said, looking down at her, ‘and I don’t think this suit will be going anywhere until it’s been cleaned, do you?’
Avoiding his eyes, she glanced down at his expensively tailored trousers, but it wasn’t the mud that made her breath catch in her throat. He’d always been tall but now the rest of him had caught up and those long legs, narrow hips were designed to make a woman swoon.
‘No!’ she said, making a move so that he was forced to turn away. ‘You’d better send me the cleaning bill.’
‘It’s your time I need, May. Your help. Not your money.’
He needed her. Words which, as a teenager, she’d lived to hear. Words that, when he shouted them for all the world to hear, had broken her heart.
‘It’s impossible right now.’
‘I heard about your grandfather,’ he said, apparently assuming it was grief that made her so disobliging.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘It said in the Post that the funeral was private.’
‘It was.’ She couldn’t have borne the great and good making a show of it. And why would Adam have come to pray over the remains of a man who’d treated him like something unpleasant he’d stepped in? ‘But there’s going to be a memorial service. He was generous with his legacies and I imagine the charities he supported are hoping that a showy civic send-off will encourage new donors to open their wallets. I’m sure you’ll get an invitation to that.’ Before he could answer, she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. That was a horrible thing to say.’
But few had done more than pay duty visits after a massive stroke had left her grandpa partially paralysed, confused, with great holes in his memory. Not that he would have wanted them to see him that way.
‘He hated being helpless, Adam. Not being able to remember.’
‘He was a formidable man. You must miss him.’
‘I lost him a long time ago.’ Long before his memory had gone.
‘So, what happens now?’ Adam asked, after a moment of silence during which they’d both remembered the man they knew. ‘Will you sell the house? It needs work, I imagine, but the location would make it ideal for company offices.’
‘No!’ Her response was instinctive. She knew it was too close to the town, didn’t