Читать книгу Be My Baby: Her Parenthood Assignment / Three Weddings and a Baby - Фиона Харпер - Страница 15

WAS he yelling at her?

Gaby took a quick look over her shoulder, just to double-check no one had walked in behind her, but they were alone in the room.

‘Well? Where have you been?’

Her fingers twitched as she waited for her voice to work. She waved the pad a fraction of an inch. ‘I’ve been sketching…’

Her voice trailed off. He’d lost his rag with Heather over the last few weeks, but never had she seen this kind of raw fury in his eyes. A familiar feeling crept over her. She’d experienced it many times when David had lost his temper with her, but she’d never expected to get it from Luke.

‘You know Heather gets out of school at three-thirty! You’d better have a bloody good reason for leaving her standing in the playground with her teacher, while you were out messing around with crayons!’ Luke took the pad from her, gave it a cursory look and tossed it behind him on to the sofa. It bounced and skittered across the floor.

Gaby stood rooted to the spot, although inside she felt as if she was backing away. He just ploughed on.

‘The school called me at work, wanting to know why nobody was there to pick my daughter up!’

Finally her tongue unwelded itself from the top of her mouth. ‘Oh, my goodness! Heather…’

She looked frantically round the room then tried to rush past him to look in the kitchen. Luke lunged forward and put a restraining hand on her shoulder. ‘Now you’re worried. Why weren’t you thinking like this an hour ago?’

‘But…but she had netball…’

‘No. She didn’t!’

‘But she always has netball on a Monday afternoon! It’s right there—’ she waved a hand towards the kitchen ‘—on the calendar!’

‘Not this week. There was a letter to say it was cancelled because Miss Blackwell is on some training course.’

Her hand flew in front of her mouth. ‘I didn’t know,’ she stammered through her fingers.

‘It’s your job to know!’ Luke ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. ‘What kind of nanny are you? Unbelievable!’ With that, he turned and marched to the bay window.

Gaby ran to the kitchen and tugged at the sheaf of papers clipped beside the calendar. A list of the term dates, a letter about the school choir and a reminder to bring household rubbish in for recycling were all she could find.

She ran back out into the lounge and stopped a few feet away from Luke. He was ignoring her, staring out across the river. The way the muscles of his back clenched told her he was better left alone.

‘Luke? Where’s Heather?’

He turned round and gave her a look that made her want to shrivel.

‘When the school phoned I gave them permission to let Jodi’s mum take her home. It was going to take me at least half an hour to get there, and Patricia Allford had offered to give her tea, so it seemed like the least painful solution for everyone.’

Gaby’s stomach quivered. ‘So…you came back here to look for me?’

Luke just blinked, long and slow. She swallowed.

‘There was me thinking you were lying unconscious on the bathroom floor or something. Stupid, huh?’

She closed her eyes. ‘Luke, I’m sorry. I really am. I just don’t know how I could have—’

‘Forget it.’

The look on his face said it was anything but forgotten.

‘Let me go and pick her up. I can apologise to Mrs Allford in person then.’

Luke marched out into the hall and she heard the rattling of keys. ‘I’ll go.’ The door slammed and she flinched.

This was awful! How could she? She’d been so caught up in herself that she hadn’t spared a thought for Heather. She crossed the room to where her discarded sketch book lay, and stared at it.

Luke was right. She was useless. Sure, he hadn’t said as much, but she could see it in his face. That same look that David had always had when he was about to go on one of his rants. Only this time it wasn’t over something as trivial as a suit left at the dry cleaners. This time she’d really screwed up.

She picked up the pad and flipped the cover to look at the drawing. Suddenly it appeared awkward and childish. She ripped the page out and threw it on the cold but waiting fire. Kindling was all it was good for. Then she fetched the matches. Two minutes later, her afternoon of joy was a plume of smoke snaking its way out of the chimney.

Luke made himself ease off the accelerator. Driving at this speed in winding country lanes was not a good idea. But if he allowed the adrenaline surge to subside, he was going to have to face thoughts he was trying to avoid. Like the fact that Gaby had made a simple mistake. It could easily have been him in her position. He only half-remembered the letter in question himself, and probably would have forgotten all about it if the school hadn’t phoned.

He also didn’t want to face the fact that anger had been bubbling under the surface since the beach trip. Unreasonable anger. Jealousy, if he put the proper label on it. Stuipid, childish jealousy he could do nothing to quench.

He tapped the lever for the windscreen wipers. The good weather had held on long enough and now the rain was falling thick and fast. It was too early to go and get Heather. Patricia Allford had said to pick her up at six, and it was only just five o’clock.

He drove into the village and parked his car along the front. A walk on the beach might clear his head. It would serve him right if he got drenched. Part of him welcomed the punishment.

He ran to the boot of his car, got his waterproof out of the back, and set off down the shingle beach, enjoying the cold wind on his face. Before long his hands grew icy and he stuffed them in his pockets. He hadn’t worn the coat for a couple of weeks and was surprised to find the spare keys for the back door in the right hand pocket, along with a scrumpled piece of paper.

He spent five minutes or so feeling the pattern of the wrinkles as he walked. Finally, he grew curious and pulled it out to investigate. As soon as he saw the school’s logo on the top of the page, he knew he was in trouble. He didn’t even need to read the letter to know what it was.

He folded the paper up precisely and put it back in his pocket. He’d picked Heather up from school the Wednesday before last. It had been raining then too. She’d run out through the school gates and waved a letter under his nose.

Oh, hell!

He was feeling bad enough about letting rip at Gaby as it was, and now it turned out the whole episode was his fault alone. No wonder she hadn’t remembered the letter! It had been sitting in his pocket the whole time, stuffed inside after he’d given it a quick once-over.

Gaby would be livid with him. At least, she ought to be.

He frowned.

She should have given as good as she’d got earlier on—but she hadn’t. She’d just taken everything he had to hurl at her, yet again. She’d apologised and hadn’t even answered back. Why was that?

He turned and headed back to the car. A thorough soaking was not going to atone for his behaviour this afternoon. He was going to have to do some quick thinking to stop Gaby whizzing back up the motorway to London. He’d do anything to get her to stay.

His stomach bottomed out. She’d only been with them a few weeks, but the Old Boathouse without Gaby seemed a hollow prospect. Heather would be devastated if she left. And he wasn’t ready to handle his daughter without her yet. Strike that. More like he was too scared to handle Heather without her. What if he failed?

There was only one thing for it. He would have to convince her to stay. He needed her.

Luke hatched a plan on the way to collect Heather—who was surprisingly unfazed by the afternoon’s turn of events. She didn’t even mention how much she hated Jodi on the drive home.

Heather rushed into the house as usual, once they’d parked the car, but he took his time hanging his coat up and ridding himself of his dirty shoes. He had no idea what the atmosphere was going to be like inside.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Heather was pestering Gaby for home-made cake. But he needed a chance to talk to Gaby. Alone.

‘Heather, you can’t possibly be hungry already. You’ve only just had dinner.’

Heather gave him a ya-think? kind of look.

‘Anyway, it’s homework time.’ He picked up her school bag and handed it to her. ‘Finish your geography, and then we’ll talk about banana cake.’

She took the bag and sloped off in the direction of her room without saying a word. Too wary of spoiling her chances of cake to answer back, he supposed.

Gaby had her back turned to him, stirring something that looked like onions in a frying pan.

‘Gaby?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ She kept stirring and didn’t turn to face him.

‘Well, I just wanted to apologise…for what I said earlier. I shouldn’t have reacted like that, no matter what had happened.’

The stirring stopped. ‘It’s fine, Luke, really. You shouldn’t be apologising to me.’ The wooden spoon started moving again, slower this time. ‘It was my fault. I got it wrong.’

‘Well, actually…’He couldn’t stand talking to the back of her head any more. Three strides and he was across the kitchen, right next to her. He took the spoon out of her hand and rested it in the pan. ‘What I’m trying to say…’

Where had all his effortless charm gone? Before he’d gone away the right words would have been there, waiting for him to pluck them out of the air. Now it was an effort to string more than one or two together. At times like this he realised just how much polish had been sandblasted off him in prison. Especially when faced with a large pair of brown eyes with ridiculously long lashes.

He took a deep breath and started again. ‘What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t your fault, it was mine. And I’m truly sorry I spoke to you the way I did.’ He offered her the crushed letter he was holding.

Brown eyes that hadn’t looked away all the time he’d been talking now fluttered to the piece of paper in his hand. She took it from him and smoothed it out.

‘I found it in my coat pocket earlier. As I said, it really was my fault.’

She looked back at him. Something inside her seemed to swell, and then the shutters came down.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, blinking once. But he knew they were empty words. There was no sense of release, no closure. She broke eye-contact, picked up the spoon and toyed with the onions some more.

He didn’t move away, but watched her in silence. Then he realised he’d seen her do this before—shut herself away and gloss over something. He didn’t want this. He wanted her to shout, to cry—anything but smile and tell him everything was fine.

That was what Lucy had used to do. No, nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine. And it clearly had been anything but fine if she had been sleeping with her boss the whole time. He hated that word with a passion now.

It would do Gaby some good to admit what she was feeling, really let rip. He stepped back and rested against the counter. What the hell did he know? Letting rip was the only way he seemed able to communicate these days, and it wasn’t helping matters in the slightest.

Maybe Gaby was better off the way she was. He certainly couldn’t do the warm and fuzzy stuff she did.

He finally admitted defeat and headed upstairs for a shower. Maybe she just needed time to cool off. He shouldn’t expect her to snap out of it just because he was ready for her to.

When he came back downstairs, Gaby hadn’t moved. The onions had been joined by tomatoes and herbs and what looked like the start of a pasta sauce was bubbling away on the stove. She was stabbing rather violently at lumps of tomato to break them up.

‘That smells good. What is it?’ Oh, yeah, really smooth.

‘Just a basic tomato sauce I was going to add some things to. Tonight I was going to—’

Luke reached over and turned the knob on the stove to off. ‘Tonight, Gaby, you are going to sit down at that table, put your feet up, and take a night off cooking.’ He pulled out a chair and motioned for her to sit in it, which she did, a bemused look on her face.

‘But the tomato sauce—’

‘Will keep until tomorrow, won’t it?’

She nodded.

‘Great. I’m in charge of food this evening.’

She started to stand again. ‘No way! I’ve tasted your so-called cooking, remember?’

‘Trust me. You’ll live.’

He opened a bottle of wine and poured a glass for her. ‘First, you are going to sip this. Then you are going to have a long, hot soak in the bath while I make sure madam has finished her homework and gets ready for bed. Then we’ll eat. Deal?’

Gaby took a sip of wine and looked up at him through her lashes, evidently wary of this new, polite Luke. ‘Deal.’

Luke scraped the pasta sauce into a large bowl and left it to cool. He could feel Gaby watching him as he washed up the sauté pan. She must think he was ready to revert to his grumpy old self at any time.

He picked up a dish towel to dry his hands. Her teeth were biting the corner of her lip, as if she were trying to decide whether she should say something or not.

‘From now on I’m not going to call you Dr Armstrong. I’m going to call you Dr Jekyll.’

Luke grinned, and then he laughed. Even Gaby gave a reluctant smile and looked away.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said, and walked out of the room.

Gaby tried to turn the hot tap with her toe, but it was wedged fast. She swiped some of the bubbles away and reached forward to top up the bath with hot water.

Luke Armstrong was a surprise. It took a real man to be able to admit when he was wrong. David had raised his voice to her on a predictably regular basis, yet he had never once said sorry. How she’d ever thought he was a man worth sticking around for was a mystery to her. She shook her head and picked up a book to read while she waited for the water to go cold.

Later, as she was dressing in her comfy old tracksuit, she noticed the house was oddly quiet. She walked across to Heather’s bedroom, knocked gently on the door and turned the handle.

Heather looked up from the book she was reading. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi there. You’re being very quiet.’

‘I’m allowed to stay up fifteen minutes longer if I read quietly in bed. Luke…Dad said I could.’

Gaby smiled. It was great to hear Heather call him Dad, even if it didn’t yet fall out of her mouth naturally. She kissed Heather on the forehead. ‘I’ll be up later to turn out the light, okay?’

‘Okay. But don’t rush. This book is really good.’ With that, she turned the page and carried on reading, and Gaby crept out and made her way downstairs. Luke was nowhere to be seen. She padded into the lounge, sank into one of the large comfortable sofas and tucked her legs up under herself. The fire had been lit, and the feel of its glow on her face was soporific. She hadn’t even realised she’d closed her eyes until she heard the front door bang and they snapped open.

It was Luke. He stuck his head through the lounge door and smiled at her. Her stomach did a weird little bellyflop. What was that all about?

‘There you are.’ He walked into the room and deposited a couple of plain carrier bags on the coffee table.

‘What have you got there?’

One side of his mouth drew upwards in a wry smile. ‘Humble Pie.’

She smiled back at him as he unloaded the bags. From the delicious smells wafting her way, she was certain it was Chinese takeaway. He opened all the cartons and disappeared into the kitchen for plates and chopsticks, while Gaby peered in each container to see what was what.

Salt and pepper king prawns! Her absolute favourite.

Luke returned and they set about demolishing his ‘pie’. She almost forgot as she sat there, legs crossed on the sofa, that he was her employer. A very stupid thing to do. But, as they talked and ate and laughed, she couldn’t help seeing him as the man who was slowly becoming her friend.

Luke watched Gaby as she reached over for the last king prawn. She looked totally at home here. In fact, this old house hadn’t felt like a home at all until she’d arrived. And, all he’d done was grump and bark at her. He’d been a Grade A pain in the backside. Well, from tonight, all that was going to change. It was about time he polished up his social skills, and Gaby certainly deserved to be the one who got to see them first.

So he made a real effort to be nice and charming and talkative. And all of a sudden, he wasn’t trying, he was just doing it. And it all felt so natural that he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten how. With Gaby it was easy.

Just look at her now, smiling as she pushed her plate away and took a sip of her wine.

‘I haven’t really told you how much I appreciate all you’ve done with Heather.’

‘I haven’t done anything special.’

Oh, no? Then why couldn’t he duplicate it? Why was it so hard for him to connect with his daughter the way she did? He threw the carton he was scraping out back on to the coffee table.

‘Do you think we’re ever going to find some common ground, Heather and I?’

‘Luke—’ Gaby shook her head and laughed ‘—I can’t believe you don’t see it! The pair of you are so alike, you’re practically carbon copies. Of course, you’ll find some common ground.’

‘We are? I mean, we will?’

‘Yes! She’s a mini version of you. A baby control freak.’

‘I’m sorry. Did you say “control freak”?’

Gaby nodded. She looked as if she were trying not to laugh. ‘That’s why you clash so much. Neither one of you is willing to give an inch sometimes. She needs to be in charge of her destiny just as much as you do.’

He opened his mouth to contradict her, but closed it again and stared at the ceiling. ‘You think?’

‘You just need to ease off a bit and she’ll calm down. Stop trying to do everything for her. She’s not the little six-year-old you left behind any more. And you can’t make up for lost time by treating her as if she were.’

‘And you think this will improve things?’

‘It certainly won’t hurt. You’ve already started doing it a little. Just keep going, a step at a time.’

‘How do you know all this stuff? Is this what they teach you at nanny school?’

Gaby shuffled in her seat a little. She seemed to be embarrassed. ‘Let’s just say that, as a child, I used to feel a lot like she did. I know what it’s like to have your whole life mapped out for you. It’s suffocating. Every little thing had to be just so, or it was the end of the world. I don’t know how I stood it as long as I did.’

Somehow the conversation had shifted and he knew she wasn’t talking about her childhood any more. It had to be the ex-husband. What an idiot.

‘Earlier on…’

‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about earlier on, Luke.’

‘Let me finish, woman. I was going to ask you about your drawing—the one you had in the pad when you came in.’

‘It wasn’t very good. I threw it away. I’m a bit rusty.’

‘Better than me. I have problems drawing a straight line.’

‘Painting is what I really like to do. I was planning to start again in my free time. The colours on the river are just so beautiful.’

Were they? He couldn’t say he’d noticed that much. Too busy looking inside to notice the world around him.

‘What’s your favourite colour, then?’ Okay, sparkling conversation was still out of reach, but she didn’t seem to notice. She looked as if she were enjoying herself as much as he was.

‘Green, I think. It’s hard to choose. But not that garish bright green. Soft mossy greens and deep emerald greens are my favourite. What about you?’

He was mesmerised by her. When she talked about things she loved, she sparkled. How had he ever thought of her as ordinary? She was looking right at him and her eyes were positively glowing…

‘Brown.’ The word was out of his mouth before he had a chance to think about it.

‘Brown? Your favourite colour is brown. Seriously?’ She pulled a face.

‘No, not brown, I mean…’

Then he looked back into her eyes. Polished chestnut, warm and dark with gold lights. At that moment he couldn’t think of a colour to top it.