Be My Baby: Her Parenthood Assignment / Three Weddings and a Baby

He could see glimpses of the happy little girl she’d once been. That same cheeky smile she’d had, aged three, when she knew she’d said something funny or cute. The way she stroked a strand of her own hair when she was tired.

And it was all down to Gaby. He couldn’t take credit for the tiniest bit of it. All he managed was to stretch his mouth into a smile when it was required, and to say the right things—as if he were reading from a script—and watch his daughter blossom.

Gaby was getting closer and closer to Heather and, miracle of miracles, Heather was letting her.

And, all the while, he stayed on the fringes and watched. He was just as much on the outside of his daughter’s life as he’d been all those years behind bars. Why he couldn’t work his way into the centre—where all the laughter and warmth was—was more than he could fathom.

He watched as Gaby and Heather broke into a run and chased each other along the edge of the surf. The wind was cold and it blew their scarves in front of their faces, which only made them laugh all the more.

How did she do it?

The woman he’d thought at first seemed ordinary, nothing special, had the ability to reach out to a heart and see it respond. A very rare thing indeed. He caught himself studying her, trying to work out what her secret was, where all that warmth and courage came from.

He alternated between admiring her and hating her for it.

He tore his gaze away and returned it to the kite lying a short distance away on the small round pebbles. It seemed injured, lying there fluttering half-heartedly. He walked over and surveyed it with dismay.

The two figures walking along the shore hadn’t even seen it crash.

It was all in a tangle and he didn’t know what to do with it.

Heather sat in the passenger seat of Gaby’s car and fiddled with the catch on the glove compartment.

‘Come on, Heather. You’re going to be late if you don’t actually get out of the car and walk through the gates.’

Heather grimaced and opened and shut the glove compartment a few more times. ‘Twenty’ she said, casting Gaby a weary look.

Okay. Heather was taking a cryptic tack again. Gaby was getting used to this. Heather had problems expressing her fears. Rather than blurting out how she felt, she would leave a trail of crumbs, making her interrogator work for answers she was actually desperate to give. But they didn’t have time for this; the school bell was going to ring in less than a minute.

‘Twenty what, Heather?’ Twenty more slams of the glove box and the whole car would fall apart? She took hold of Heather’s hand gently and removed it from the glove box catch. Heather pulled her hand away and tucked it under the school bag on her lap.

‘Twenty school days until the Easter break.’

Gaby’s heart went out to her, it really did, but she could see where Heather was going with this, and there was no way she was going to let the girl manipulate her. She was going to school today, and that was that.

‘It won’t be as bad as you think, sweetheart.’

‘How would you know? It was probably at least a hundred years since you were at school! You don’t know anything about it. Nobody does.’

Heather was giving her what Gaby always referred to as a laser vision stare—thanks to Luke’s apt description. She refused to take the bait, especially now she’d worked out that Heather created conflict when she didn’t get her own way. So she leaned across, pulled the handle and opened the door for her.

‘Come on, miss. Out. One foot in front of the other, walk through the door, sit your bottom on a chair and stay there. It’s not hard. And then, when you come out again, it’ll be nineteen days and counting.’

Heather flounced from the car, as only a disgruntled pre-teen could, dragging her bag behind her.

‘I’ll see you after netball practice,’ Gaby yelled after her. But Heather was too busy ploughing a path though her schoolmates to hear.

She pulled the door closed and started the car. Heather was making progress, but there was still a long way to go. She and Luke were enjoying a turbulent truce. They still didn’t know how to resolve their differences when a spat erupted, but at least in the in-between times she could see they were both trying.

Although she was very fond of Heather, she was determined to keep a professional distance. There were so many reasons why she couldn’t afford to lose her heart to this needy little girl and her silently aching father.

Distance. That was what they all needed. Luke certainly needed time and space to sort himself out. At least, that was the reason she gave herself for keeping out of his way in the evenings, and always, always leaving the dinner plates on the table for him to clear away.

Back at the Old Boathouse, she parked her car near the back door and let herself in. Seven and a half hours until she had to pick Heather up. It seemed an awfully long time. But she had a shopping list to write and she might as well check whether Heather had put her school uniform from last week in the laundry basket, rather than stuffing it under her bed.

By noon her shopping list was written in a small neat hand and every last sock of Heather’s had been accounted for and deposited in the washing machine. The beds were made, a pot of home-made soup sat bubbling on the hob and she had organised the contents of the freezer.

She sat at the spotlessly clean kitchen table and stared out of the window. It was a typically grey March day. Even so, the colours on the river here were wonderful. Steel greys, mossy greens and slate blues. And the light!

There was inspiration everywhere you looked, no matter the time of day or the weather. When she was younger, she’d have been out there on the beach, brush in hand, like a shot.

Gaby sat up a little straighter.

Why not? What was there to stop her? She’d missed the watercolour classes she’d taken while married to David. Since the divorce she’d had neither the time nor the money to lavish on things like that. But with Heather in school most of the week, she’d have plenty of time to unearth a talent she thought she’d buried for good, and still get all her work done. She jumped up, grabbed her keys and drove into town grinning all the way.

Down a cobbled street she found a shop selling art supplies. She emerged with a carrier bag full of paint tubes, brushes, paper and her head full of ideas for her first project.

She wandered through the town without really paying attention to where she was going and found herself in Bayard’s Cove, a little dead end street near the ferry. One side was open to the river, and a squat, ruined turret of an old fort built to guard the estuary sat where the road ended.

She dipped down and entered the fort through its low doorway. A row of arched windows framed the view up to Dartmouth Castle on the rolling headland.

She would just fit nicely in one of those arches, she decided. Soon her legs were dangling over the ledge, the water lapping below. She pulled a sketch pad and pencil out of her shopping bag and set to work capturing what she saw: bulbous clouds pushing across the sky like an armada, sail boats criss-crossing the water and the higgledy-piggledy houses of Kingswear on the other side of the river.

This was heaven. It had been so long since she’d done something just for her own pleasure. What started out as a quick sketch, rapidly grew in scale and detail. It was only when she glanced up and noticed the light was starting to fade that she checked her watch. Four o’clock. She had time to head home, drop off her bags, then run up to collect Heather from netball practice.

She took a second to consider her sketch, then flipped the pad closed, praying the traffic warden hadn’t slapped a ticket on her windscreen while she’d been sketching.

When she returned to the Old Boathouse, she was surprised to see Luke’s car parked at an angle in the lane. He wasn’t due home until at least seven o’clock. She wanted to show him what she’d been up to, so she fished the pad out of her bag as she walked up to the back door. Once in the mud room, she called out, ‘Hi there! What are you doing back so—?’

The look on Luke’s face as she entered the lounge brought her up short.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

CHAPTER FIVE

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.’