A Mother by Nature

His smile warmed her. Reluctantly, she dragged herself back to her other tasks, handed over and left the ward with only a handful of backward glances.

She went home, put the kettle on while she changed into jeans and a comfy sweater, and sat down with her feet up and a cup of tea in front of the TV news. It didn’t hold her attention. It couldn’t even begin to compete with that sexy smile and the smoky green eyes that were beginning to haunt her every waking moment.

What made him so different? Nothing obvious. Over the years she’d been out with several men, most of them very pleasant, most of them perfectly nice.

Nice. Pleasant.

She didn’t want ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’. She wanted someone who made her blood sing, whose touch would reduce her to putty, whose eyes could turn her heart inside out and melt her into a puddle at his feet.

They hadn’t all been nice, of course. There had been Jim—he’d been charming and utterly faithless. She’d had her fingers burned by him and had been much more circumspect after that. Not that she’d ever been in the slightest bit promiscuous, but everyone seemed to imagine that if you dated them more than twice at the outside you were destined for bed.

Anna didn’t work like that. It had to be right, and it had only been right very rarely. Just recently—like in the last three years or so—it hadn’t been right at all.

‘You’re turning into a desperate old maid,’ she said in disgust. ‘One smile from a halfway presentable man and you’re there waiting with your tongue hanging out. That’s so sad.’

She smacked her mug down, stood up and went through into the kitchen. The fridge revealed very little of any interest, and the freezer was worse.

‘Great,’ she said in disgust. ‘I have to go shopping. Marvellous.’

She slammed the freezer door, stuffed her feet into her old trainers and pulled on her tatty but snuggly duffle-coat. She wasn’t going to see anyone. She didn’t need to dress up.

She drove to the nearest supermarket, picked up a little trolley and started wandering randomly up and down the aisles. Nothing appealed. Well, nothing healthy. She glanced into the trolley next to her, wondering what other people ate that might be more interesting than the usual things that she bought, and she sighed.

Fish fingers, low-fat oven chips, frozen veg, chicken legs, rice—about as inspired as hers, except that this trolley actually had something in it.

Three loaves of bread, lots of tuna and ham and salad ingredients, little cakes—lots of convenience foods, really, she thought. Busy household. Working mother, probably. Poor woman—

‘Anna?’

She looked up, startled, and found Adam looking at her curiously.

‘Hi,’ she said weakly.

‘Hi. Thought it was you. Is there something wrong with my trolley?’

‘Your—No, of course not! I didn’t know it was yours. I was looking in it for inspiration, actually.’

He gave a wry snort of laughter. ‘I should give it a miss, in that case. I buy what the kids will eat, which sometimes seems like utter rubbish. It’s the au pair’s job, of course, but she’s having the evening off, so it’s down to me to buy the junk food today.’

‘It doesn’t look too bad. At least you’re going for the low-fat options.’

‘Ever the conscientious father,’ he said with a fleeting smile. ‘Which reminds me, they’re running riot in the next aisle. I must go.’

She watched him disappear round the end of the aisle and, because she was only human and curiosity was part of human nature, she found herself drifting after him. They’d vanished, but she soon found them.

He was lifting a little boy off the top of the bread display unit, smiling apologetically at a disapproving member of staff and throwing a packet into the trolley with one hand while he clamped the protesting child to his side with the other.

‘No, if you can’t behave then you’ll have to stay here with me where I can keep an eye on you.’

‘I’ll look after him,’ a little girl promised, and Adam put the boy down. ‘Stay right next to me,’ she told him sternly, and he nodded and slipped his hand into hers.

Big sister, Anna thought with a gentle smile.

‘Daddy, can we have supper here, please?’

The middle one, Anna thought, looking at the little face shining up at him with obvious devotion. What a lovely family. A huge lump formed in her throat, and she was just about to slide round the corner of the aisle and find a little privacy to get herself under control when Adam turned and saw her.

‘Um—yes, sure,’ he said distractedly, and smiled at her. She wondered if he knew he’d just been conned, and had to hide her own smile of amusement behind a smile of greeting. ‘My brood,’ he said, waving at them. ‘Skye, Danny, Jasper, this is Miss Long. I work with her.’

‘Anna,’ she corrected, and directed her smile to the children. ‘Hi. Are you making sure he buys all the right things?’

‘No, they’re making sure I buy all the wrong things,’ he said with a laugh.

‘We’re going to have supper here,’ Danny told her. ‘Do you ever do that?’

‘I have done,’ she said, willing Adam to ask her to join them. He didn’t need to. Danny did it.

‘You could have supper with us—couldn’t she, Daddy?’ He swivelled his head round, leaning over backwards and nearly toppling into the bread.

Adam reached out and steadied him, and gave Anna a helpless look. ‘If you’d like to—you’re more than welcome to join us, if you can stand it. It’ll probably be egg, beans and chips if they get their way.’

Thank you, God! ‘Egg, beans and chips sounds good,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘If you mean it.’

‘Of course I mean it,’ he said, his eyes softening. ‘You’re more than welcome. Are you all done?’

‘Yes,’ she lied. To hell with doing the shopping. She’d get the rest another time. This was much more interesting!

They went through the checkout, parked their trolleys and joined the queue, and Danny chatted ingenuously all the way through the selection procedure and most of the way through the meal. He was a sweet, open child with spiky, untidy hair the same dark brown as his father’s, and a direct blue gaze that cut straight to her heart.

Jasper was similar—smaller and quieter, or perhaps simply overwhelmed by his big brother, hanging on his sister’s every word.

And Skye—Skye was different. She had soft, lustrous brown hair, not quite as dark as the others, and the same penetrating blue eyes, but there the similarities ended.

Her eyes were distrustful. That was the difference, Anna decided. Skye was guarded, she hardly spoke except to Jaz, and she was politely distant with Anna.

That was fine. She didn’t need the instant trust of every child in the world, but she sensed that Skye’s reticence hurt Adam, and for some reason she didn’t want to go into that hurt her, too.

There was only one awkward moment, when she wondered if she really ought to have been there. Skye looked at Adam and said softly, ‘Is Anna your girlfriend?’

He looked startled for a second, then shook his head. ‘No. We work together. She’s a nurse.’

Skye glanced at her consideringly, then went back to her meal without another word, leaving Anna thoughtful. It hadn’t sounded, from her tone of voice, as if a girlfriend was something Skye wanted Adam to have. Because she felt threatened? Because she was jealous? Or because he had a constant stream of them and Skye didn’t like it?

The table was crowded, and Anna was more than ever aware of Adam’s long legs tangling with hers every time he moved. Finally the children were finished, and he met her eyes over the litter of dirty plates and cups of fizzy drinks and smiled distractedly.

‘We have to get back. We’ve got frozen food in the trolley—or we did have. I expect it’s all thawed by now.’

She nodded, conscious of a silly little spurt of disappointment. Of course he had to go—Jasper was yawning, Skye was bored and uneasy, and they couldn’t possibly sit there all night. She conjured a bright smile. ‘Yes, you’d better get back. Thank you so much for asking me to join you. I enjoyed it.’

He gave a disbelieving snort of laughter. ‘You’re too polite. Come on, kids, on your pins, let’s make a move.’

She followed him out of the shop, looking like the Pied Piper with the children trailing behind him raggedly. Jasper kept wanting to look at things, and had to be dragged screaming past the little rocket ride just outside the door, with its coaxing invitation, ‘Come on, climb aboard and we’ll head for the skies!’

‘I want to have a go!’ Jasper sobbed, and Adam scooped him up into his arms and hugged him, walking resolutely away.

‘It’s too late. You can have a go next time. It’s too cold to hang about waiting, and we can’t do everything in one night.’

‘Don’t want to do everything! Want to go in the rocket!’

‘Jasper, Daddy said no,’ Skye told him firmly, and the screaming subsided to an unhappy sobbing. They paused at the edge of the car park, and Adam rolled his eyes at Anna in mock despair.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said, and he nodded, hesitated a moment and then spoke as if on impulse.

‘You could come back for coffee—if you could stand the chaos of bedtime and a house that needs cleaning and decorating from attic to cellar.’

A slow smile spread over her face. She could stand anything if it meant spending time with him and his family and getting to know him better. ‘I should think I’ll cope with that,’ she said softly.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

Oh, yes, she thought. I’ll follow you. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth if you ask me to. Just say the word.

Then she caught the look on Skye’s face, and wondered why the little girl was so unhappy about her presence. She needed to know more about the situation, and perhaps this was one way to find out.

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