Читать книгу Mistletoe Mother - Josie Metcalfe - Страница 7

‘WHAT on earth am I doing in Scotland in the middle of winter?’ Seth Gifford groaned in disgust.

The snow seemed to be coming at him from every direction at once, and as fast as it was chilling his face and piling up on his hair and coat, it was also melting down the back of his neck in freezing trickles.

He could barely see the outline of the tiny cottage through the wildly whirling flakes surrounding him, even though it was just a few paces away. The path was slippery, too, especially with a cumbersome box of groceries in his arms.

‘Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?’ he grumbled aloud, knowing that there was no one in this whirling white wilderness to hear him. For the first time in his life he was completely alone, with not a single person for miles around him. Even his unofficial chauffeur was too far away by now to hear him talking to himself, on his way back to the cosy warmth of his cottage in the village at the other end of the glen. It would be two weeks, when Christmas and the New Year’s celebrations were all over, before the elderly man would retrieve him from his solitude in this tiny croft.

Solitude, he repeated as he made a second journey between the pile of boxes the elderly man had helped to offload at the gate and the tiny porch sheltering the front door. Well, it was another less emotive word for loneliness, he supposed. But, then, he seemed to have been lonely for so much of his life that another two weeks wouldn’t make much difference.

His colleagues back at the hospital had been looking forward to the coming festive season with their usual mix of anticipation and resignation, depending on their family situations and whether they were rostered on or off duty.

He’d barely registered feelings either way. Since Fran had died he’d had no really close friends. There was only his brother left to share the holiday season with, and he’d had his own agenda for years. Not even the matchmaking efforts of the boldest of his co-workers had been able to persuade him into starting a new relationship, and he certainly wasn’t into brief flings.

There had only ever been three women in his life who had mattered to him. First, Margaret, the mother who had died so tragically when he was only sixteen, then Fran, the wife whose disregard for hospital rules and regulations had exacted such a terrible price. The third had been a colleague in his own Obs and Gyn department who he’d foolishly believed would be there for him when he needed her most.

Instead, she had disappeared from his life without a trace and he tried to avoid even thinking about her, let alone saying her name.

‘So much for third time lucky,’ he muttered grimly as he searched in one pocket after another to find the elusive key while bracing the last box against the frame of the door. With a growl of frustration he dragged first one glove and then the other off with his teeth, beyond caring when only one of them managed to drop inside the box. The other disappeared towards his feet, probably destined to be whirled away and buried under a mountain of snow.

He supposed it was his own fault that he’d ended up here, bearing in mind his increasingly sombre moods over the last year or so. The fact that he’d never been able to confide in any of his colleagues had only added to the stress. Sometimes it had felt as if the only thing that had kept him sane had been the fact that he’d had patients depending on his skills to bring their babies safely into the world, but even so…

Really, he admitted silently, remembering the pointed comments he’d had from more than one of those colleagues, it was probably just sheer luck on his part that his whole team hadn’t ganged up to banish him to the North Pole.

‘On second thoughts, perhaps they have,’ he muttered in disgust as the rising wind blew a veritable blizzard of snowflakes around him in spite of the partial protection of the porch. But he hadn’t been that bad, had he, that they’d want to dump him in the middle of this? At Christmas, too…?

He threw a quick glance over his shoulder and grimaced. The brief glimpse he’d had of starkly beautiful winter mountains had disappeared almost as quickly as his unofficial taxi. The snow was falling faster now and the last of the daylight was almost gone. If this kept up he was going to be completely stranded in a matter of hours and who knew how long it would be before the roads would be clear again? If he didn’t find the key soon, perhaps they’d find his body still frozen on the doorstep when the snows finally thawed in the spring…

‘Gotcha!’ He finally closed his chilly fingers around the elusive key and dragged it out of his pocket. ‘Now all I’ve got to do is get the wretched thing to fit into the lock.’

With a grunt of satisfaction he heard the snick as the key turned but when he leant against the door it remained stubbornly closed, almost as though it were still firmly locked.

‘That’s all I need!’ he groaned in disbelief. ‘Am I going to have to break in to get out of the cold?’ It certainly wouldn’t be very cosy inside if he had to spend the next two weeks combating a howling gale coming in through a broken window.

‘The key must fit, otherwise what was the point in giving it to me?’

The envelope bearing the key and the address of this little cottage had been hand-delivered to his office just two days ago. He hadn’t recognised the handwriting and no one would admit responsibility, but everyone he’d asked had been almost insultingly eager that he should take the suggested holiday.

Another flurry of snow sifted its way down the back of his neck and for just a second he contemplated finding his mobile phone to ask for his unofficial taxi driver to come straight back to collect him. Then the thought of dragging a man almost old enough to be his grandfather out again on a night like this resurrected a little of his pride.

‘You’re not caving in at the first hurdle,’ he told himself fiercely. ‘The others might have been half joking when they sent you here, but you’re the only one who really knows how much you need to get your head together. Now, think, man. Why didn’t the key work? Perhaps the door’s warped, or something. Small wonder if this weather is par for the time of year.’

As he bent down to deposit his ungainly burden before trying again, he suddenly realised that he was still talking to himself and grimaced. Was this a new habit? Surely the isolation wasn’t getting to him already.

As he straightened up to try the key again, the increasingly vicious wind caught the end of his scarf and flipped it right across his face just as the door swung silently open in front of him. He blinked as light and warmth spilled over him like some unearthly benediction and suddenly realised that he had an unexpected welcoming committee.

‘How far have you got, then?’

Ella bent awkwardly towards the hearth to lift the corner of the tea towel and peered at the rising dough underneath it with a satisfied smile.

The bread wouldn’t be ready to go into the oven for another twenty minutes or so. Just enough time to get the fire going so that the oven would be hot enough to make a crusty top on each loaf. ‘Just the way you taught me, Granny,’ she murmured as she set the timer, feeling as ever that her grandmother’s spirit would never really leave the cottage she’d loved so much. ‘Put the bread in first, when the oven’s hottest, then pastry, then cakes as the temperature slowly falls.’

Later, she would be putting in a casserole to simmer slowly overnight, but her supper tonight was going to be at least one steaming bowl of home-made leek and potato soup with a couple of slices of hot, freshly baked bread. ‘If I can get the fire hot enough, that is,’ she grumbled as she lowered herself heavily to her knees and reached for a handful of kindling. ‘I’m moving even slower than Granny did, and she was eighty years old and riddled with arthritis.’

After the last seven or eight months, the whole baking process was almost second nature now—lighting a fire in the old-fashioned cloam oven from the briskly burning embers of the open hearth, then raking out the fire when the oven reached the right temperature to bake the bread.

Her father had wanted to replace the centuries-old hearth with a modern cooker to make his mother’s life a little easier but she’d stubbornly clung to the methods she’d grown up with. In spite of the effort involved, Ella could understand the attraction of the old ways, especially on such a cold day.

The fire was blazing brightly in the depths when she shut the oven door and sat back on her heels, glad that her grandmother had resisted. It might be old-fashioned, but the wide fireplace with the cloam oven built into the wall of one side of it was certainly the most appropriate for this sort of weather.

‘Not only does it keep me warm but I can use it for cooking my food, too, and all without worrying about power cuts or running out of gas bottles.’

The swiftly running stream that hurried past the back of the cottage provided her water, via the totally modern tanks and pipes at one end of the tiny loft. Granny had been easily persuaded that there was no good reason to carry buckets of water or make trips to the ‘privy’ when she could have the labour-saving convenience of running water and an inside bathroom.

At the same time, the force of the stream on its downward rush had been unobtrusively utilised to provide all the power she needed for lighting and a fridge. In a really bitter winter the volume of water might be diminished by ice, but so far the little diesel generator hidden away in one of the outhouses as an emergency backup hadn’t been needed at all.

Anyway, she preferred the oil lamps her grandmother had once relied on, and she had a plentiful supply of candles. There was plenty of wood split for burning, with several days’ worth neatly piled beside the fire and even a stack of peat if she got desperate.

Real pioneer stuff, as her sister Sophia was prone to tease, her pretty face screwed up in an expression of mock disgust as she examined her neatly manicured nails.

And it was just teasing, Ella knew with a renewed surge of gratitude for Sophia’s generosity. They’d both loved their visits to the little cottage and had revelled in the freedom to roam far and wide no matter what time of year they’d come. It seemed almost impossible that they would never again hear the soft burr of Granny’s voice as she bade them come in for their tea, or the stories she would tell of the creatures that shared the glen with her.

It had been her bequest to the two of them that they should share the cottage between them and it had been Sophia’s idea that Ella should stay here until she decided what direction her life was going to take.

She’d originally offered to sell the cottage so that Ella could use the money to live on, only admitting how much she’d hated the thought of losing it when Ella had turned the idea down without a second thought.

Staying here had been the best solution all round. She had chickens for eggs and she’d become almost self-sufficient once she’d got the vegetable garden going. As for the rest, it hadn’t taken long to dust off her grandmother’s spinning wheel so that she had goods to sell or barter in the way of isolated rural communities for the other things she needed.

Her thoughts were wandering happily over the little successes that had helped to bring her out of the depression that had driven her here when a sound outside the front of the cottage drew her attention.

A car? She began the struggle to get to her feet. ‘If that’s Malcolm coming to check up on me again I shall give him a piece of my mind. I told him I had plenty of everything and he shouldn’t be driving around when the weather’s like this. Doesn’t he realise that Morag worries about him?’

She used the arm of the chair to heave herself upright and stood puffing for a moment while she listened to the sound of thuds and bumps in the little porch. She hardly needed more food and she had enough wood stacked within easy reach to last for a couple of months at least. She even had a source of fresh milk, delivered daily to the end of the track by one of the MacLain lads on his way into the village. Anything else she needed, including help, she just had to lift the phone to find any number of people willing to offer, such was her grandmother’s legacy within the tiny community.

The only thing she hadn’t got—and that Malcolm couldn’t deliver—was some extra energy.

‘Oh, I’ll be so glad when I’ve lost some of this weight,’ she grumbled as she waddled towards the door. ‘The next three weeks can’t go fast enough. I can’t wait to see my feet again—no offence, baby!’ she added as she slid a hand under the voluminous hand-knitted jumper which had once been her father’s and patted the taut mound of her belly.

For a moment it almost sounded as if someone was trying to use a key in the lock, but before she could think anything of it she was distracted by a hefty kick against her hand.

‘So, you want to get out, do you? If you take my advice, you’ll wait until the weather’s a bit better, or at least until daylight,’ she murmured fondly as she reached out to slide the old-fashioned bolt aside, her other hand reaching for the light switch that was almost never used. ‘We don’t want to make Malcolm do too many trips in the snow.’

She pulled the door open and was momentarily blinded by a flurry of whirling snowflakes before she realised that, whoever he was, the man on her doorstep wasn’t sixty-four-year-old Malcolm.

For just a moment the reflexes she’d honed when she’d lived in the city nearly had her slamming the door in the stranger’s face. Then common sense stayed her hand.

Whoever he was, and whatever had brought him to her door, he needed help to find his way back to the road, although how he could possibly have mistaken her little track for the properly surfaced glen road she had no idea.

‘Are you lost?’ she asked, and had to suppress a smile when she heard echoes of her grandmother’s accent in her voice. When she’d lived in the city all those years, during her training, her own accent had almost disappeared. Until this moment she hadn’t realised that it had returned stronger than ever.

She shivered as the wind forced its way through the narrow gap between door and jamb, glad of her thick jumper and the fact that she wasn’t out in that awful weather.

As her visitor fought to subdue the ends of his scarf the light over his head suddenly illuminated a head of thick dark hair, tousled by the wind in spite of the neatness of the style and dotted with glittering shards of ice. He blinked to rid sinfully long lashes of the latest sprinkling of snowflakes and revealed eyes the colour of burnished steel.

‘If this isn’t Buchanan’s Croft, I am lost,’ her visitor said wryly.

Every hair went up on the back of Ella’s neck when she heard that all-too-familiar voice and she had an awful sinking feeling inside her that wasn’t helped by the vigorous football match being enacted inside her.

‘And why would you be looking for the Buchanan’s Croft?’ she asked, copying his ‘foreign’ pronunciation of the name as she had to raise her voice over the rising sound of the wind. She had a dreadful feeling as the scene played out in front of her eyes that her peaceful existence was just about to shatter beyond repair. This was all of her worst nightmares come to life and she would far rather have shouted at him to go away than hold a polite conversation on her doorstep.

‘Because I’m supposed to be staying at the croft for the next two weeks and I seem to have been delivered to the wrong place.’ He was searching his pockets as though trying to find something. ‘Is it far away?’

‘Staying?’ she squeaked as the situation just got worse and worse. ‘But…’

‘Ah! Here it is!’ he exclaimed as he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of an inside pocket. ‘There’s the address, right there.’

He held the pale blue slip towards her and she leant forward to look at it.

Her gasp as she recognised the handwriting in the distinctive violet ink echoed his exclamation when she was clearly illuminated for the first time.

‘Sophia!’ she hissed, and didn’t know whether to burst into maniacal laughter or floods of tears when she realised what her sister had done.

‘Ella?’ he exclaimed, clearly shocked. ‘Ella Buchan? What are you doing here?’

‘What am I doing here?’ she repeated. ‘I live here, Seth. This is the Buchan’s Croft—’ she stressed the correct pronunciation ‘—and since Sophia married in March, I am the last remaining Buchan.’

Ella stepped back into the cottage, opening the door wider to invite him into the warmth. There was no point in leaving him standing on the doorstep any longer, not now that she knew her wretched sister had deliberately sent Seth up to see her.

She should have expected Sophia to find some means of having her own way. All their lives she had been pulling rank as the older sister and the fact that she was now a married woman didn’t seem to have made any difference—probably made things worse, in fact.

‘But…How long have you been living here? No one seemed to know where you’d gone. Where are you working now?’ The questions were tumbling out of him without giving her a chance to reply, but at least they were telling her that Sophia hadn’t primed him before he’d come up here.

If she’d thought about it logically, she’d have realised that her sister was far too Machiavellian to have done that. All she’d needed to do had been to set the scene by sending Seth up to see her. That would guarantee that little sister Ella had to ‘sort her life out’ just as Sophia had been advising her for months.

Seth was standing there with his coat and scarf still on but apparently totally unaware of his surroundings, his eyes riveted to her face almost as if he was expecting her to disappear at any moment.

A sudden sharp ring took Ella by surprise. For a moment she couldn’t think what it was, then remembered the bread dough waiting to be cooked.

‘Excuse me but I’ve got to see to that,’ she said as she hastily turned towards the fireplace. If she was lucky she could get her brain to work in the few moments the task would take.

‘In that case, I’ll bring those boxes in from the porch before they get buried under the snow,’ he said after an interminable pause.

For a moment she’d thought he was going to insist on some immediate answers but the alternative was almost worse. The fact that he was even now carrying his belongings inside was bringing home to her the fact that, thanks to her sister’s scheming, the one man she’d never wanted to see again was actually here, in her house. And, thanks to the dreadful weather, he was going to have to stay here at least until tomorrow morning.

She hurriedly bent to her task, raking the glowing embers out of the cloam oven before she slid the pans of perfectly risen dough into position and shut the door.

Automatically, she reached for the timer and set it again, wondering as she heard it begin to tick the minutes away how different her life was going to be by the time it rang again.

She wrapped her arms around herself as the front door opened again, tucking her hands up inside the ends of the baggy sleeves as the wind whistled across the room and straight up the chimney.

‘Where do you want me to put these?’ He gestured with a nod of his head towards the box he was carrying. ‘It seems to be tins and packets. Staple items.’

‘Through here.’ She turned to open the door on the other side of the fireplace, nervousness setting her chattering. ‘Granny always called it the scullery. The butler sink is still here but the old wash copper’s been replaced with a machine—not that Granny saw the need for using it when she was only washing for one, but Dad insisted she wasn’t to do the sheets and towels by hand any more.’

She had to stop when she ran out of breath and gestured silently for him to put the box on the battle-scarred wooden table against one wall.

Equally silently he obeyed, then paused to look around, his eyes taking in everything from the beamed ceiling that scarcely cleared his head to the handcrafted cupboards along one wall and the flag-stoned floor.

Ella found she was almost holding her breath while she waited for his reaction to his simple surroundings. It was certainly very different from anything a topflight obstetrics and gynaecology consultant would choose to live in.

Then he smiled. It was little more than a brief curving of a mouth that never smiled enough but it sent a shaft of warmth straight to her vulnerable heart.

‘It’s amazing,’ he said softly, his eyes going back to her as she hovered anxiously in the doorway. ‘Apart from the fridge and washing machine lurking in that corner you could almost imagine you’d stepped back in time. Is the whole croft the same?’

‘More or less…apart from the sinful luxury of the tiniest bathroom in the Western world.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he exclaimed fervently. ‘I suddenly wondered if there was still a…what were they called? At the bottom of the garden.’

‘A privy? There is,’ she informed him with a straight face, only breaking into a smile when she saw his look of horror. ‘No longer in use, though,’ she added, wickedly long seconds later.

The flash of humour in his eyes promised retribution but when he approached her it was only to make his way towards the remaining pile of bags and boxes.

He paused in mid-stride and whirled to face her, almost cannoning into her as she followed him across the room.

‘Dammit, Ella, this isn’t going to work,’ he exclaimed, taking a hasty step out of her way as he raked a long-fingered hand through his hair. ‘I came up here expecting to spend the next two weeks in an isolated little cottage of some sort. I certainly didn’t expect to find you here and I want to know what’s going on.’

‘Going on?’ It had sounded almost like an accusation but what was she guilty of?

‘Well, obviously you got your sister to set me up, so what I want to know is what you’re hoping to get out of it? If it’s just another one-night stand you wanted, we certainly didn’t have to come all this way for it. If you’d let me know you were interested, perhaps we could have arranged for a two-week stay in a comfortable hotel somewhere.’

‘Seth!’ The unexpectedness of his attack had left her almost speechless, apart from the fact that it was totally unfair. She wasn’t the one who had—

‘Of course! Stupid me! You don’t go in for anything as long as two weeks. Just the one night after your sister’s wedding and then, when I came back, you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.’ He was so angry that his eyes were almost shooting sparks at her but that didn’t stop her from retaliating with all the fire of her redhead’s nature.

‘I wasn’t the one who disappeared after one night, or have you got a more convenient memory than I have?’ She gave a mirthless laugh as the memories of that fateful day began to scroll their disjointed way through her head. She’d been trying to block them out for month after miserable month and still hadn’t managed it.

‘In case you really have forgotten what happened, let me remind you of the salient facts,’ she snapped fiercely, holding one hand up to count them off, finger by finger.

‘One—we danced at my sister’s wedding. Two—we ended up in bed together. Three—you had disappeared by the time I woke up the next morning. Four—by the time I went back on duty it was announced that you had gone on some sort of hastily organised leave with no date given for your return. Now,’ she continued when she’d drawn in a hasty breath and planted her fists combatively on her hips, ‘correct me if I’ve missed anything out, but I’m almost certain that nowhere in that series of events was there any mention on your part that you’d even enjoyed the encounter in the first place, let alone that you were interested in repeating it.’

His lips had been pressed into a thin line and his hands had been balled into tight fists when she’d started, but by the time she finished his arms were hanging limp at his sides, his eyes riveted on the front of her baggy jumper.

She glanced down to see that she’d planted her hands on her hips as she’d harangued him, and the gesture had drawn her clothing against the burgeoning evidence of her heavily pregnant state.

‘My God! Ella, you’re pregnant!’ he breathed, clearly shocked.

‘Well, I’m glad to see that all those years of training weren’t wasted,’ she retorted acidly, just as the timer rang again.

It didn’t take more than a minute to turn the loaves round to ensure they baked evenly, but it was long enough for her to regret her rudeness.

There had been two of them in that hotel room that night and that meant it had been just as much her fault as his that they hadn’t taken any steps to prevent her getting pregnant.

She straightened up from her task, knowing that she had to apologise, but before she could speak he beat her to it.

‘So, who’s the father? I hadn’t heard you’d got married but, then, once you left the hospital you were outside the scope of the gossip grapevine.’ He stopped suddenly, as though struck by a sudden thought. ‘Is this place big enough to have guests to stay? Won’t your husband have something to say about your sister dumping an old colleague of yours on him?’

For a moment Ella didn’t know whether she was going to laugh or cry but ended up determined to do neither.

‘You stupid man!’ she exclaimed shrilly as all those months of wondering and hurting finally boiled over. ‘I’m not married. I have never been married and I have no intention of ever getting married. Furthermore, whether you believe it or not, you are the only man I’ve ever slept with, but to save you wasting your money on DNA testing I’ll tell you here and now that I won’t be asking you for a single penny to raise this child. At least you’ll go away from here secure in the knowledge that I have no intention of using the baby to destroy your marriage.’

The last words were still quivering in the bread-scented room when reaction began to set in.

This was not how she’d dreamed of telling Seth that he was going to be a father.

In her dreams his marriage didn’t exist and he’d come to her telling her that he’d missed her dreadfully and couldn’t bear to live without her.

In her dreams he’d told her that he loved her and the baby they’d made that magical night, and would take care of them for ever.

In her dreams he came to her and wrapped her in loving arms while he kissed her. He didn’t stand on the other side of the room like a statue carved out of granite with his eyes burning into her like hot coals.

For a moment she just stood there with her hands resting protectively over the prominent bulge of her pregnancy, wondering why everything had gone so wrong. When she’d first met him she’d thought he was something so special. How could she have been so mistaken?

They had been working together for several months before the fateful day of her sister’s wedding, time in which she’d believed they’d been getting to know each other. Only she hadn’t known him at all. Hadn’t known that he’d been hiding such a monstrous secret until it had been far too late to stop herself falling in love with him.

She was still glaring at him after her outburst, but the longer she looked the more she began to notice about his appearance.

He’d changed since she’d seen him last. There was a sprinkling of grey at his temples that hadn’t been there before and he looked thinner, almost as if he’d been ill.

There was a subtle difference in the expression in his eyes, too. A year ago their polished steel had had the intensity of lasers where now they seemed almost…almost defeated.

He doesn’t look happy, she thought with a strange ache around her heart.

Startled by the burgeoning emotion she’d vowed to dismiss for ever, she suddenly realised that in spite of everything she was as much in love with him as she’d ever been.

Then to her utter mortification she burst into tears.