Читать книгу Her Boss's Baby Plan - Jessica Hart - Страница 9

LEWIS’S hard gaze encompassed her pale face and the circles under her eyes. ‘You look it,’ he said roughly.

‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t recommend being a single mother to anyone who relies on her sleep,’ said Martha with a wry smile.

‘You must have known it would be hard work.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I did, but it’s like everyone always says…you can say that you know looking after a baby will be tiring, but until you’re actually doing it you have no conception of what sleep deprivation does to you or of just what “tired” can mean!’

Lewis hunched a shoulder. ‘If it’s that bad why do women go on and on about how they want to have babies?’

‘Because the joy you get from your child is worth every sleepless night,’ said Martha, leaning forward to stroke Noah’s cheek. ‘It’s worth every day you get through like a zombie, every hour you spend worrying about whether he’s healthy or happy or how you’re going to afford to give him everything he needs.’

Lewis’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘That sounds all very fine, but in my experience it’s a lot more basic than that. I think a lot of women have children to fulfil their own needs. They think about how much they want to be loved or valued, not about how the child will feel.

‘Half the time they have a baby just because it’s fashionable,’ he said contemptuously. ‘A baby is the latest designer accessory. You can dress it up in rinky-dinky little outfits and show it off, which is fine until the fashion changes and you’ve got to keep up, and then it’s Oh, dear, now what am I going to do with the baby?’

‘Give it to my brother to look after?’ suggested Martha, unsurprised at the bitterness in his voice if that was what had happened with Savannah.

‘Or a nanny or a mother-in-law or anyone else you can find to deal with all that messy, boring stuff as long as it doesn’t stop you doing whatever you want to do!’

There was a little silence. Martha had the feeling that she was treading on dangerous ground. ‘Why did you agree to look after Viola if you feel that way?’ she asked cautiously after a moment.

‘What could I do?’ Lewis replied, hunching a shoulder. ‘I had my sister in hysterics, the baby crying…’

He shuddered, remembering the scene. ‘Savannah’s out of control at the moment. She’s behaving very badly, but she’s still in no state to look after a baby properly. Viola’s father is in the States at the moment—or he was last time I heard. Half the time he’s too out of it to remember that he’s got a daughter, let alone to look after her, and Viola certainly can’t look after herself.’ He sighed. ‘I’m the only one who can be responsible for her at the moment. She’s just a baby. I couldn’t just say that she wasn’t my problem.’

Martha studied his profile, oddly moved by his matter-of-fact attitude. He seemed so hard when you first met him, she thought, remembering how off-putting she had found that austere, unsmiling face and the uncompromising air of toughness and self-sufficiency, but underneath it all he was obviously a kind man, and a decent one.

Kindness and decency weren’t qualities she had valued much when she was caught up in the frenetic whirl of activity at work and a hectic social life, but it didn’t take long to learn how important they were when life became more difficult.

Knowing that Lewis had them made him seem a much nicer man.

And a much more attractive one.

The thought slid unbidden into Martha’s mind and she jerked her eyes away from his face.

Don’t even think about it, she told herself. It’s one thing to realise that Lewis might not be quite as unpleasant as you thought, quite another to start thinking of him as attractive. He’s your employer and you’re going out to find Rory. Don’t complicate the issue.

She took a sip of her water. Maybe she should have stuck to the champagne after all.

‘You must be very close to your sister if you’re the one she turns to for help,’ she said after a while.

Lewis grimaced. ‘It’s partly my own fault Savannah is the way she is,’ he said. ‘Her mother left when she was only four, so she never had an example of good parenting. Michaela—her mother—was an heiress. She was very pretty and very spoilt, just like Savannah. After she divorced my father she went off to the States, but she was killed in a road accident a couple of years later. All her money was put in a trust fund for when Savannah was eighteen, and Savannah has been running through her inheritance ever since.’

‘I didn’t realise that she was your half-sister,’ said Martha, wriggling round in her seat so that it was easier to talk.

‘She’s fourteen years younger than me, so I wasn’t around all that much after I went to university. Poor kid, she didn’t have much of a childhood, looked after by a succession of nannies and then packed off to boarding school. My father was never much of a hands-on parent at the best of times,’ he added dryly, ‘and once his business started going downhill he withdrew into himself even more. I think he forgot about Savannah’s existence most of the time.

‘I tried to do what I could for Savannah in the holidays, and when our father died she made her base with me, but she was sixteen by then and had got in with a crowd of wild friends.’ Lewis sighed. ‘I was always bailing her out of trouble. I blame myself sometimes. Maybe if I’d been firmer with her she’d be less spoilt now.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Martha stoutly. ‘It’s hard enough for perfect, supportive parents to deal with ordinary adolescents, let alone troubled ones. You can only have been a young man. I don’t see how you could have possibly done more than you did.’

Lewis looked a little taken aback by her support. ‘Helen was always telling me I should be stricter with Savannah.’

A few tiny bristles went up on the back of Martha’s neck. ‘Helen?’ she asked in a carefully casual voice.

‘My girlfriend.’

Girlfriend? Martha was alarmed by the sinking feeling in her stomach. Why should she be so disappointed…? No, no, scrub disappointed, she told herself. That wasn’t the right word at all.

Surprised, that was better. Why should she be so surprised that Lewis had a girlfriend? She guessed he was in his late thirties. He was intelligent, competent, solvent, and even not bad-looking—if you liked the dour, steely type, that was. Apparently straight, and nothing obviously kinky about him. Of course he had a girlfriend.

‘We were together for years,’ Lewis was saying, ‘but she used to get very fed up when Savannah turned up drunk when we had friends round, or rang me in the middle of the night.’

Past tense. Phew! Martha relaxed, only to remember that if she hadn’t been disappointed there was no reason to feel relieved, was there?

Unaware of Martha’s convoluted mental exertions, Lewis was brooding about his sister. ‘I’m sure Helen’s right,’ he said. ‘I probably do encourage Savannah to depend on me too much, but in spite of all that money she hasn’t had an easy time of things. Yes, she’s been spoilt, but she’s very insecure and I can’t just turn her away when she needs help, can I? She can behave appallingly sometimes, but when it comes down to it she’s still my little sister—’

He broke off suddenly. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he demanded.

‘I’m just thinking that it’s a shame that you don’t have any children,’ said Martha, appalled to find herself blushing slightly. She hadn’t meant to stare at him like that. ‘Not many men have such a strong sense of family. Don’t you want a family of your own?’

‘No,’ he said, his face hardening. ‘Savannah’s been quite enough family to deal with, thank you.’

‘It would be different if you had your own children.’

He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t risk it. There’s too much grief when things go wrong.’

‘And so much happiness when they go right,’ countered Martha.

‘You said yourself that having a baby is hard work and you spend most of your time exhausted.’

‘Yes, but I also said that it was worth it. And I’ve been trying to manage on my own. It wouldn’t be like that for you.’

‘That’s what Helen used to say. “It won’t be like that for us.”’ Lewis shook his head. ‘I didn’t see why it should be different for us.’

‘You’re…um…not together any more, then?’ asked Martha.

‘No.’ He glanced at her and then away. ‘Helen and I had what I thought was an ideal relationship. She’s a beautiful, smart, very talented lady.’

Oh, good, thought Martha. The ex from hell.

Although what was it to her, after all? Martha scowled down into her glass of water. Water! What was wrong with her? She had been the ultimate party girl once, the queen of champagne sippers.

‘We were together a long time,’ Lewis was saying. ‘I travel a lot, and she was busy training as a barrister.’

Excellent, a barrister! So Helen was not just beautiful and smart but a serious person. Not the kind of woman who stood around sipping champagne, then.

Oblivious to Martha’s mental running commentary, Lewis was still telling her about his relationship. ‘We both had our own lives, but we enjoyed the time we spent together and everything was perfect until one day she woke up with her hormones in overdrive.’

His mouth turned down at the edges, remembering. ‘That’s when she started lobbying for a baby. It wasn’t about getting married for Helen. She just wanted a child. “This is the right time,” she kept saying.’

‘Well, maybe it was for her,’ said Martha, beginning to feel a twinge of sympathy for Helen. She might have been intimidatingly clever and beautiful, but she obviously hadn’t got very far with Lewis.

‘It wasn’t the right time for her career,’ he said astringently. ‘She’d worked incredibly hard and had just qualified. She should have been thinking about getting experience, not babies. I couldn’t believe that she would even consider chucking it all in.’