Liz Fielding - The Bachelor's Baby

He’d warned her. He didn’t pretend.

Lying alone in the warm nest of her bed, listening as he’d moved swiftly through the cottage, snapped the door shut behind him as if to convince himself of the finality of his departure, heard his wheels spin against the gravel of the lane as he’d sped away from her, she had wondered what made him so afraid.

Wondered what had happened in the past to send him racing away from the warmth of a woman’s arms, even when he’d plainly longed to stay.

Cross with herself for standing there, waiting for the test to develop, she put the wand down on the edge of the bath. She didn’t need it. She had better things to do.

She opened the door to the small front bedroom she’d been using as an office. Her hand briefly touched her waist. She’d be working from home more in the future; she’d need her little office.

The other spare room was stacked with stock from her shop. Boxes of handmade soaps, scented candles, essential oils. She’d have to rent more space from Mike, she decided as she looked about her, run her mail-order business from the craft centre.

She’d have to totally reorganise the shop, too. It was time to promote Vicki, give her more responsibility, take on someone else part-time. She was going to need help. A lot more help. A sudden tremor of doubt shivered through her. Suppose she couldn’t cope on her own?

For a moment her hand touched her waist. No, not on her own. Never again. Her baby might be no bigger than a match-head, there might be nothing yet for the world to see, but inside her something amazing was happening. Already her baby had a backbone, a primitive heart…

The low afternoon sun was shining in through a window that overlooked the rear garden. Yes, this would make a perfect nursery. She could see it already…had the colours picked out in her mind…

And she stopped being cool and serious and totally in control and rushed back to the bathroom.

Yes!

Her hand was shaking as she snatched up the tester. A blue line. Did that mean it was a boy? No, no. Stupid. Of course it wasn’t a boy. She was going to have a girl. She and Jake were going to have a baby girl.

Her legs went suddenly wobbly and she clutched at the sink and lowered herself onto the edge of the bath.

She was pregnant.

It wasn’t just a feeling any more; it wasn’t just something she ‘knew’. It was fact. Not just some airy notion that couldn’t, shouldn’t be true. Jake wasn’t a man to take risks. But that last time something extraordinary had happened and neither of them had thought of anything but a deep and desperate need to be held, to be loved. Without limitation, reservation, conditions attached.

And now there was a baby, his baby, their baby, growing inside her. A life begun. It was totally, seriously true.

A smile forced its way across her face, erupting into a disbelieving laugh that faded as quickly as it came.

Falling in love with Jake Hallam had not been a good move. Head-over-heels-at-first-sight falling in love was never a good idea, especially not with a man who’d made a point of explaining his attitude to commitment before he’d stepped over her threshold.

But it had been too late then.

She’d tried. She’d known it was pointless, but she’d made an effort and really tried. After that first moment, when their hands had touched and their gazes had locked and all kinds of incredible sensations had made concentration on anything else very, very difficult, she’d kept her distance. Kept the length of the room between them. She’d sensed that he was doing the same thing, unnerved by the certainty that their fates were inextricably linked.

Yet they had both arrived at the door at the same time, ready to leave. If they’d planned it, it couldn’t have been better timed.

The only comfort was that he didn’t know she was in love with him. Men distrusted that kind of emotional stuff. Not that he’d have believed her anyway. If she’d used the ‘L’ word, Jake would have panicked, certain that she’d cling. If she wasn’t very careful, he’d see the baby as an attempt to entrap him.

Amy laid the flat of her palm against her stomach. No. He must never feel that. If he came back it must be because he wanted to. Because nothing could stop him.

She knew he’d try to stay away.

He’d found it too difficult to leave her not to recognise the danger. He’d driven away from her cottage as if the hounds of hell were on his back. Which was, she decided, promising. It suggested a certain unease, a fear that saying he ‘didn’t do commitment’ wouldn’t be enough.

He was mistaken. It would be. If he wanted it that way. His decision.

She’d have to tell him about the baby, though. Before he heard it from someone else. She had three or maybe four months’ grace, but after that it would be difficult to hide the fact that she was pregnant, and Mike had seen them leave together, had been aware of the tension between them.

His parting ‘Take care’ had been loaded with apprehension…As if he would have protected each of them from the other, but had sensed the attempt was futile.

But once Mike knew about the baby it wouldn’t put a strain on his powers of deduction to put two and two together and come up with the date of Ben’s christening.

The phone began to ring and she let the thought go. She had plenty of time before she had to worry about Jake’s reaction to fatherhood. He was in America, would be gone for weeks. He’d stressed that. As if he needed to reinforce the message. So, she had ages to work out the best way to break the news to him.

Just for the moment it was her secret, and she planned to keep it that way.

Then, as she headed for the door, she realised she was still holding the little plastic spill. Even as her hand moved towards the wastebin she discovered she was totally incapable of throwing away the precious evidence of her baby’s existence. Instead she popped it into a little glass jar standing on the bathroom windowsill and went to deal with her call.

‘Jake? Are you happy with that?’

Jake had been miles away. Thousands of miles away. His body might be sitting in a boardroom in downtown New York, but his mind was on the other side of the Atlantic. Suddenly, he couldn’t get Amaryllis Jones out of his mind.

He’d done a pretty good job of it during the last month. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he sensed it would be a wise move to forget all about her.

Okay, so he hadn’t been able to totally eradicate the searing memory of the way they’d been together. But working hard on setting up a partnership with an American telecommunications company whose CEO had been determined to give him the VIP treatment had made it relatively easy—or, if not easy, at least possible—to push her right to the back of his mind.

But now, sitting with their massed lawyers hammering out the final details, nailing down any loose ends, all he could think of was the scent of bluebells and rain on warm English soil, a woman’s touch that had seemed to reach down into his soul.

What on earth had possessed him? They’d been at a christening, for heaven’s sake! He was the baby’s godfather!

Was that it? An atavistic yearning for fatherhood sending him over the edge? No way! He enjoyed being godfather to Ben but that was as close to fatherhood as he ever intended to get.

It was why he was so careful to choose his partners with a detachment that bordered on coldness. He didn’t walk, he ran from any possibility of emotional entanglements. He kept his relationships uncomplicated, the kind he could walk away from without a backward glance.

Love was too easy to say, too difficult to mean. He’d learned that the hard way.

The only person in the world who’d ever been there for him had been his foster mother. Aunt Lucy was a great lady and he owed her a lot, would be grateful to her until his dying day, but he still knew, deep down, that it wasn’t him she cared for.

She opened her heart to any needy child, or puppy, or kitten who hadn’t got anywhere else to go. He had been just one of dozens through the years. She was kind, warm-hearted, totally honest. It was in her nature to take in the heartsore strays, put them back on their feet, head them in the right direction and despatch them into the world. She’d done it for him, saved him from the kind of trouble a hurting youth could all too easily succumb to, but he wasn’t fooling himself. It hadn’t been personal.

And observing Aunt Lucy had taught him the wisdom of keeping a certain protective distance between himself and the risk of pain. Only someone you loved could hurt you.

With Amy Jones alarm bells had rung right on cue, every instinct warning him to stay away. And he had. Kept his distance. But they’d still arrived at the door together as if they’d planned it. Maybe she had. Maybe Mike was right. Maybe Amy had looked at him with those wide green eyes and bewitched him. Nothing else could account for the way he was feeling. Nothing else could account for the fact he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

‘Jake? Do we have a deal?’

He dragged himself back to the air-conditioned chill of the boardroom, looked around the table at the men waiting for his decision and realised that he hadn’t heard a word anyone had said for the last ten minutes. Not a great way to do business. Not the way he did business.

Standing up, he closed the folder in front of him and said, ‘Thanks for your time, gentlemen. I’ll let you know.’

Before anyone had registered that the meeting was over, he was out of the room and using his cellphone to book himself on the next flight back to London.

Amy was working in the garden when she heard footsteps coming round the cottage. She looked up and smiled as she saw Willow Armstrong pushing Ben along the path in his new, all-terrain buggy.

‘Wow! Fancy wheels, Ben!’

‘A present from a doting grandpa,’ Willow said, with a grin.

A grandpa. Her baby wouldn’t have a grandpa. Or a grandma. Not even an aunt to call her own. ‘Lucky Ben,’ she said softly.

‘Am I interrupting something vital?’ Willow asked, looking at the half-dug trench. ‘Only I haven’t seen you since the christening.’ She paused, as if waiting for Amy to offer some exciting reason for her lack of sociability.

‘Is it that long?’ she hedged. As if she hadn’t counted every hour, every day of four long weeks, waiting for Jake to return—the last two searching for the perfect words to break the news of his impending fatherhood.

‘The garden seems to take up every spare minute at this time of year.’

‘Yes, well, I’m here to interrupt you. It’s such a lovely evening I thought I’d give the buggy a test run on the common while Mike gets the dinner. Catch up with the gossip and with luck get a cup of tea into the bargain?’

Amy jabbed her spade into the soft earth and joined her visitors on the path. The baby was lying beneath the canopy shading him from the sun, a little tuft of fair hair sticking up on his forehead. He was gorgeous. Perfect. Without thinking her hand flew to her waist where her own baby was growing, unseen, unknown.

‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said, snatching off her gardening gloves before Willow had a chance to register the giveaway gesture, hoping that the flash of heat in her cheeks would be put down to nothing more than exertion. She wasn’t ready to share her news yet. Not even with Willow. Not until she’d told Jake. ‘I’ve been meaning to drop by,’ she said quickly, ‘but I’ve been reorganising the shop, and if I don’t get my beans in now…’ Leaving a summer bereft of the delights of home-grown runner beans to her friend’s imagination, she took the handle of the buggy and began to push it towards the door. ‘But I’m ready for a break. Come inside so I can wash my hands and give this little angel a cuddle.’