His Miracle Baby

At once all her familiar spiel deserted her. Her head was buzzing, her senses stirring in a disturbingly primitive way. For a moment the memories that gripped her were so powerful, so real that her eyes burned with bitter tears and she had to blink furiously to drive them back.

‘The kitchen…’ was all she could manage, gritting her teeth against the sting of irony in his murmured, ‘Obviously.’

From then onwards all she wanted to do was to get the job done as quickly as possible. Not giving him time to look around, she marched him to the next door, opening it briefly.

‘The sitting room… The second bedroom is up there…’

A wave of her hand indicated the small gallery above the sitting room where a neat bedroom nestled under the eaves.

‘The bathroom is down here… And the main bedroom directly opposite. You can get milk and eggs from the farm—everything else from the store in the village, and they’ll cash a cheque for you in an emergency. I’m afraid there isn’t a bank anywhere nearer than St Austell. We provide fresh linen and towels on Mondays.’

There, she was done! Surely now he had to let her go.

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Just a couple of things. But why don’t we discuss them over coffee?’

‘No, thanks,’ Ellie managed through teeth gritted against the urge to scream in frustration. ‘I have other things to do.’

‘And I have things I want to discuss.’

Blatantly ignoring her protest, he turned and headed back down the white-walled corridor to the kitchen, leaving her with no option but to follow him.

‘Morgan, I don’t have time for coffee. I have to work…’

The need for her daughter was like an ache in her heart, a hunger that no food could possibly assuage.

‘Work?’

The look he directed at her burned with frank scepticism.

‘You working on a farm—that’s not at all what I’d have expected from the elegant Ms Thornton.’

‘I told you, I’m not the same person any more. I’ve changed a lot in the past eighteen months.’

‘So I see.’

His tone was a slow drawl and those brilliant eyes swept over her in a deliberately insolent assessment. She couldn’t miss the way that sapphire gaze lingered around the fullness of her breasts, the curves of her hips in the close-fitting skirt.

As a result of her pregnancy she had filled out noticeably, so that her shape was definitely more womanly when contrasted with her slenderness when they had been together. And Morgan, who had known her body with the intimacy of a lover, couldn’t be unaware of those changes either.

‘So I see,’ he repeated, and there was no mistaking the disturbingly sensual note on the words.

She knew that purring tone of voice. Knew only too well what it implied. She had heard it often enough when they had lived together. Then it had made her heart leap in anticipation, had set her body tingling in uncontrolled response. Just to hear her name spoken in that huskily appreciative way had been like a subtle form of foreplay, telling her instantly what was in his mind, and triggering off the same heated longings in her own.

But hearing it now shocked her rigid. Foolishly, naively perhaps, she had expected that the feelings Morgan had once had for her, every type of feeling, would have died, starved into non-existence by eighteen months of lack of nourishment. But there was no mistaking the heated desire that now flared in the brilliance of his eyes, the instant response that made his pupils so huge and dark.

‘Country life obviously suits you. You’re looking really well.’

‘I’m happy here.’

She had learned how to be happy but it hadn’t come easily to her. At first she had felt as if half of her soul had been cut away and it had only been the need to care for the baby growing in her womb that had kept her going.

‘So why don’t you make that coffee while I unload the car and then you can tell me all about it?’

Ellie’s breath hissed in through her teeth in a sound of exasperation.

‘Morgan, what part of what I said did you not understand? I don’t have time for this…’

But she was speaking to empty air. Morgan had already opened the door and gone out to the car. When she hurried after him it was to find that he’d opened the boot and was pulling a case from it.

‘Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t stay! Nan’s expecting me—she’ll be wondering where I am.’

‘I never thought of Marion as a slave-driver.’

He was coming back to the door again now, a suitcase in either hand so that Ellie had to flatten herself against the wall to let him past.

‘And I’m sure she’ll understand that you and I will need to spend a little time getting reacquainted.’

‘We’re not going to get reacquainted or re anything.’

Her words would have more emphasis if she didn’t have to keep trotting after him, forcing her shorter legs to keep up with the long, swift strides that took him through the cottage and into the ground-floor bedroom in the space of a few seconds.

‘I told you—the only reason I’m here is because you’re a guest and it’s part of my duties to make sure you’re settled in.’

‘And to arrange the other services you’ll provide,’ Morgan returned sharply, dumping the cases on the floor and heading back to the car again.

‘Services?’

It was a squawk of panic, both at the thought of just what he might have in mind and because he had come to an abrupt halt, whirling round to face her so that she had to screech to a stop herself, narrowly avoiding slamming straight into his chest.

‘I was given to understand by Mr Knightley that you provided a cleaning service.’

‘Well, yes…yes, we do. But surely—’

‘And some meals?’

‘Yes—for long-stay guests we can provide an evening meal…’

Too late she saw just where his thoughts were heading.

‘Oh, no! No way! I’m not—’

‘But it’s in the contract.’

Anyone else might only have heard the gentle reminder in his comment but, knowing Morgan as she did, Ellie was hypersensitive to the ominous undertone that threaded darkly through the words.

‘I know it’s in the contract, but surely now you can’t expect us to keep to it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well—isn’t it obvious? I mean, you won’t want me round the house every day.’

‘Won’t I?’ Morgan’s expression gave nothing away. ‘As a matter of fact I think it could work very well. You know my ways—know not to move papers, the crazy hours I work, the food I like. You’d be less likely to disturb me than a stranger.’

‘But Dee—the housekeeper—she usually…’

Her voice failed her as she saw the adamant shake of his dark head.

‘Not Dee,’ he stated in a voice that brooked no further argument. ‘I want you, angel. You and no one else.’

‘I won’t do it.’

For one thing she couldn’t be away from Rosie that long—and she certainly didn’t plan on bringing her little daughter along to the cottage with her. And for another, she already felt emotionally mangled after barely half an hour in Morgan’s presence. There was no way she could cope with the prospect of seeing him for long periods of time, day after day.

‘You’ll have to find someone else.’

‘I don’t want anyone else.’

The blue eyes were like shards of ice, hard and implacable. Past experience told her that arguing with Morgan at times like this was like banging her head hard against a brick wall; that she was only hurting herself by continuing, but she couldn’t give in.

‘What is this? Some sort of power game? A way of getting back at me for leaving you? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure out of the prospect of seeing me skivvying for you?’

‘Is the idea of doing a few hours’ simple housework so humiliating?’ Morgan shot back at her.

Not for anyone else. But working for Morgan—working with Morgan was quite a different prospect. Where he was concerned nothing was ‘simple’ at all.

‘I don’t find it in the least humiliating—normally! Actually, I quite enjoy it. And as a matter of fact, the additional services were my idea. I suggested we put them…’

‘In the contract,’ Morgan finished for her with grim satisfaction when, seeing how her foolish outburst had trapped her, she let the sentence trail off weakly. ‘Believe me, Ellie, I intend to keep you to every letter of every word of that agreement. There’s no way I’m going to let you run out on this.’

He didn’t add the words ‘as you did before’, but they were there at the back of what he was saying, implied by his scathing tone and the black, burning look that seared over her skin.

‘I didn’t “run out”!’ she protested. ‘I explained.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

The harshness of his tone slashed into her heart like a savage sword.

‘You said that things had changed. You “didn’t feel the same way any more”.’

Hearing the words flung at her so brutally, Ellie could only wince inwardly at the realisation of how inadequate they sounded.

But she couldn’t possibly have told the truth. And even to protect her unborn child she couldn’t have told Morgan that she no longer loved him.

‘Well, my feelings had changed—I’d changed!’

Changed in the most fundamental way it was possible for a woman to do so. She had become pregnant and, knowing how he would react to that one basic fact, she had seen leaving him as the only course open to her.

‘You certainly had.’

Morgan leaned back against the wall, arms folded across the width of his chest, eyeing her with bleak cynicism.

‘If I’d been a betting man, angel, I’d have put money on the fact that we had something special…’

‘Well, you’d have been wrong.’

He would never know how much it cost her to say those words. Because she too had thought they had had ‘something special’ and she had dreamed of it staying that way. Of it growing and flowering into the sort of relationship you could build a lifetime upon. She had even let herself dream of marriage, maybe, one day.

But there had been one small flaw in the perfection of her love. Morgan didn’t want children. He had been absolutely emphatic on that matter right from the start. Had warned her that if she hadn’t been able to cope with the idea then he’d been prepared to break it off now, before either of them had got in too deep.

But Ellie had already been in too deep. She had told herself she could manage—that Morgan himself was enough for her. And he had been enough—until the day she had realised that an accident had happened and that in spite of her precautions she was going to have a baby.

Ellie came back into the present with a jolt, and, looking deep into those inimical blue eyes, she shivered involuntarily, fearful of the cold antipathy she could see in their depths.

‘Nothing stays the same for ever,’ she managed, ruthlessly suppressing her voice’s tendency to wobble revealingly.

‘Nothing stays the same…’ Morgan echoed viciously. ‘How true. Nothing—not even the protestations of undying love, the vows of eternal faithfulness, the declarations that you had never felt this way before, would never feel it again. How long did it last, my angel? Ten months? A year?’

‘Oh, stop it!’

Ellie longed to lift her hands and clap them over her ears, anything to drown out the brutal litany of scorn he was subjecting her to.

‘I never thought—I… I’m sorry…’ she finished miserably, knowing she had to say it, even though it was hopelessly inadequate and far, far too late. ‘I’m really sorry. If I could say anything—’

‘No!’ Morgan cut in harshly. ‘Don’t! Don’t say anything—and don’t say that you’re sorry—because I’m not! I was angry when you left—true. I was even a little hurt at the thought that you could discard me so easily, move on to someone else. But when I calmed down and started thinking rationally again, I realised that in fact you’d done me one hell of a favour.’

‘A favour?’

‘Yeah, a favour. I was close to making the biggest mistake of my life with you.’

He shook his head as if in despair at his own foolishness.

‘Something I would have regretted for as long as I lived. But by leaving when you did, you saved me from that. Really, instead of reproaching you, I reckon I should thank you.’

‘Don’t bother!’ Ellie snapped, unable to take any more.

For the first time she admitted to herself that she had come here with a tiny thread of a weak, foolish hope in her heart. Hopes of a reconciliation, of finding that Morgan, too, had suffered from their time apart, and so might be prepared to rethink his feeling about children. But his comments had not only taken that pathetic hope away from her, they had crushed it into tiny, irreparable pieces, impossible ever to put together again.

‘Well, at least you won’t expect me to stay after—’

‘Oh, but I do,’ Morgan cut in sharply. ‘In fact, now I want that coffee more than ever.’

‘Well, you can just go on wanting! I’m finished here, I—’

‘But I haven’t finished with you,’ Morgan came back at her with deadly quietness. ‘There are things we still have to talk about.’

He pushed himself away from the wall, straightening up lazily.

‘Make the coffee, Ellie,’ he said and it was a command, not a request.

CHAPTER THREE

FOR a moment Morgan thought he’d lost her.

He knew that look of old. The set jaw, the compressed mouth, the mutinous glare that declared only too clearly that Ellie was having none of whatever she thought he was suggesting.

This was Ellie at her most stubborn, and, strangely enough, it was seeing her in this mood that reached out and stabbed him in the heart, when he least expected it to.

This was the Ellie who had most infuriated him when they’d been together. The woman who could set against something, however small, and turn it into a battle, one she had no intention of letting him win. There had never been any chance of wearing her down when she’d been like this. In fact there had only ever been one approach that had a chance of winning her round.

So he used it.

‘Please…’ he added softly, pitching his voice at a very different level.

She wasn’t going to give in that easily, it was clear. Just one swift, stunned blink of those amazing eyes showed any sort of response, making Morgan wonder exactly why he was so set on having her stay when quite clearly she would rather be anywhere but here.

But perhaps that was the whole point. Whatever was bugging her, it was pretty damn important to her. And the more she seemed determined not to let any hint of it drop, the more he wanted to know what it was.

‘Ellie…’

He pushed one long-fingered hand through his ebony hair, raking it back from his face with a sigh.

‘I’ve been driving for hours and I really could murder for a coffee.’

He did look tired, Ellie admitted to herself reluctantly. Typical Morgan. When he was working, or concentrating on anything, he forgot about minor practicalities like food or drink.

‘What are you afraid of if you stay?’ Morgan questioned softly.

‘Nothing.’ It didn’t sound at all convincing. ‘What on earth makes you think that I’m afraid?’

That was better. She might even believe herself now. But she knew only too well what she was afraid of—and with good reason. She just couldn’t bring herself to admit it.

‘Just one cup of coffee,’ she growled reluctantly, risking a swift glance at his face and immediately wishing she hadn’t as she was rewarded with the sort of wide, flashing smile that would have melted rock, never mind her weak, foolish heart.

‘You’re an angel.’

‘It will only be instant…’

Desperately she tried to claw back some of the ground she had surrendered.

‘Fine!’

He punctured her sense of triumph quickly and easily, tossing the response over his shoulder as he headed back out to the car.

Struggling to keep her mind blank, Ellie moved to fill and switch on the kettle. One cup of coffee wouldn’t take very long. She’d be on her way in no time.

At least she didn’t have to worry about Rosie. Even if the little girl had woken from her nap, she would have Nan and Dee to take care of her. She’d known both women all her short life and had had them wrapped round one small, chubby finger since the day she’d been born.

‘You couldn’t rustle up a sandwich or something as well, could you?’

Morgan dropped a cardboard box of groceries on the kitchen table beside her, startling her out of her thoughts.

‘There’s bread and cheese in there somewhere.’

‘When did you last eat?’

It wouldn’t be held back, the sense of exasperation painfully familiar.

He paused briefly to consider, then shrugged his broad shoulders.

‘Don’t know.’

He was too close, that evocative scent setting her nerves prickling again. The sun slanting in through the kitchen window gleamed on hair of ebony silk, highlighting sapphire eyes behind a fringe of outrageously thick dark lashes. Narrow hips in snug fitting denim rested casually against the side of the table, and he had rolled up his sleeves revealing tanned and muscular forearms, lightly covered in soft dark hair.

‘Didn’t want to waste time stopping. And you know what motorway services are like.’

And she knew what Morgan was like. Motorway services, with his best-sellers on display in the shops, meant the possibility of being recognised, something he avoided like the plague. Ellie bit down hard on her lip as she struggled with the twist of pain in her heart that came with yet another reminder of just how well she had once known this man.

‘But a sandwich would be very welcome…and if you could slice up some tomatoes as well…’

‘What did your last servant die of?’ Ellie flung after him, his laughter in response infuriating her further.

But she was only protesting to save face, she knew. She would do it, dammit. She would make him his coffee and his sandwich not just because she felt she had no option. She couldn’t even deceive herself with the thought that she would do the same for any new guest who had had a long journey.

She would do it because she couldn’t help herself. Because she could no longer deny herself the opportunity to do this small thing for this man who had once meant all the world to her. Sighing, she rooted in the box, pulled out bread, cheese.

It was as she was slicing into the crisp crust of the loaf that memory struck, hard and sharp, stilling her hand and holding her frozen, staring straight ahead with sightless, unfocussed eyes.

It had been—what?—over two years ago. A warm June evening, not unlike today. The night she had moved to Morgan’s London apartment following his suggestion that she come and live with him. Of course, she hadn’t hesitated. She’d been crazily out of her mind with love, her ‘Yes’ had been out of her mouth almost before he’d finished asking, and she had moved in the very next day.

Then, as now, Morgan had directed her into the kitchen, suggesting she prepare something for them to eat while he unloaded her belongings from the car.

The knife shook in Ellie’s hand, tears stinging cruelly as she recalled how he had whistled as he’d worked. How each time he had passed her he had flashed that wide, devastating smile that had turned her insides to molten liquid, and snatched a kiss or simply let his hands trail along her back, her shoulders, her hair. It was if he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her and had had to keep reassuring himself that she’d been there.

And then, when everything had been unloaded, he had come up behind her, sliding strong, warm arms around her slim waist, resting his head on her shoulder, his breath warm against her cheek…

This had been a mistake, Morgan told himself as he slammed the now-empty boot of the car shut and turned to the last box that still lay on the back seat of the Alfa Romeo. One hell of a stupid mistake.

It was no wonder that he’d had a sense of déjà vu. No wonder that it seemed as if he’d lived through this before. It was almost an exact replay of the day that Ellie had first moved in with him.

‘Oh, hell!’

Forgetting the box for a moment, he rested his arms on the sun-warmed top of the car, his chin supported on one hand as he let the memories roll over him.

He’d never been so happy. Or so scared. Never in all his twenty-eight years had he known a feeling like it. He still couldn’t actually believe that he’d made the move, spoken the words that he’d been sure he’d never say to anyone.

Or that she had agreed.

He hadn’t known that he was going to say anything. No rational thought, no careful preparation had come into his head. One moment he’d been lying there, his heart still thudding, his skin still slick with sweat after the blazing passion of their lovemaking, the next he had turned and looked into her face and just known.

But the feeling had been still too new, too delicate, to share with anyone, even Ellie. Ellie who’d declared ‘I love you’ as easily as breathing, who’d seemed to have no fear, no doubts.

And so he’d gone for the casual approach.

‘I think, after that, saying goodnight and going home alone has definitely lost its appeal. How do you feel about making this into a—more logical arrangement?’

‘Coffee’s ready!’

Ellie’s call from the kitchen splintered his memories, bringing his head up sharply, reminding him where he was.

It was just as well he’d held back on his true feelings, he reflected cynically as he forced his mind back on to the present and, collecting the last box, headed inside once more. Ellie’s ‘love’, so carelessly given, had been just as easily taken away again. They had had perhaps eleven months before he had felt her attention drifting and barely two weeks after that she had told him she was leaving.

‘Is that the last one?’

Ellie was buttering bread, her attention fixed on what she was doing, and she glanced up casually as he came in.

‘Just dump it somewhere and come and get your coffee while it’s hot. Not that dump is the appropriate word,’ she added as her eyes focussed on what he was carrying. ‘That’s a laptop, isn’t it?’

‘The newest, state-of-the-art, portable wonder machine.’ Morgan nodded, concentrating unnecessarily hard on placing the box carefully on the sideboard while he got his thoughts back under control. ‘It does everything I want of it. If I could just get it to create plots for me as well, then it would be perfect.’

He was talking to distract himself, he knew. He should never have let himself remember what it felt like to make love to her. Never have recalled the blazing desire, the pounding of his blood in his veins, the hungry kisses and even hungrier caresses. Just to think of them made his body tighten, setting up an ache that left him fighting for control.

‘You’ve made enough sandwiches to feed an army.’ He struggled to keep the conversation light.

‘Self-defence,’ Ellie returned, concentrating fiercely on laying pieces of tomato on top of the thinly sliced cheese. ‘I know what your temper’s like when you’re hungry—it’s one thing about you that I have most definitely not missed.’

‘So there are things that you do miss?’

He couldn’t stop himself from moving closer, had to clench his hands tight in the pockets of his jeans so as to resist the temptation to touch. A shining golden strand of her hair had fallen forward over her cheek and his fingers itched to smooth it back, tangle in the rest of the silken weight.

‘Oh, yes…’

Did he have to come so close? Every nerve in her body sang with tension, tight as the strings of a harp, and the race of her heart made it a struggle to breathe.

‘I miss the tip that your office turns into when you are working. The way you are perfectly capable of forgetting about the practicalities of life and existing on nothing but endless mugs of coffee. I miss the impossible hours you work. The way you forget about appointments, social commitments, invitations…’

‘You obviously have very fond memories!’ Morgan put in wryly.