And as for luck – yes, she believed she had eventually shaken off the bad and was now on the receiving end of some good luck. It also helped that people had finally taken down their Christmas decorations. Never had Daisy been more pleased to see the back of Christmas as she was this year.
Her mother had insisted on leaving them all in place, right up until the sixth of January, despite Daisy pleading for them to be taken down.
‘At least, get rid of the hanging foil things,’ she’d urged, but Sandra had shaken her head.
‘It’s bad luck,’ her mother had said.
Wrong, Daisy thought. It’s silver sixpences in Christmas puddings that were bad luck. Thank goodness the tradition had more or less died out, and if her great-gran suggested it next year, Daisy would pass the pudding bit and stick the coin straight where the sun don’t shine – up Gee-Gee’s backside, not her own! She’d had enough of those kinds of shenanigans to last her a lifetime.
Daisy had been dragged into putting the tree up the attic, but first, every decoration and every ornament had to be carefully wrapped in newspaper. If it was up to Daisy, she’d simply have shoved the tree up through the hatch, without removing a bauble, working on the theory that it would save time and hassle when the tree was brought down again next year.
‘I’ve had some of these decorations since before you were born,’ Elsie had said. ‘You be careful with them.’
They looked older than Methuselah, too, but Daisy did as she was told. Then she’d gone into work and did the same thing again, except this time she was allowed to shuffle the complete thing into a corner of the storage room and throw an old sheet over it to keep the dust off. If she could have done the same with December, she would have. It had been the worst Christmas ever, but it was all behind her now, and she had a totally new year to look forward to and a new man to share it with.
The new man in question was staring at her intently. ‘Where did you go?’ he asked. ‘You looked miles away.’
‘I was thinking how hard this past month has been, what with Freddie and Caring Cards, and Zoe and David, and that bloody sixpence. And now it’s all turned around and the future is looking so much brighter.’
‘What did happen to that coin? I’m assuming it must have put in an appearance, because you haven’t mentioned having it surgically removed since New Year’s Day.’
Daisy blushed. She seriously didn’t want to talk about the mechanics of the coin’s reappearance. ‘I took it to Gee-Gee. She said she wanted it back, but when I gave it to her she changed her mind, so I left it on the table. I never want to set eyes on the damned thing again!’
‘You don’t intend putting it in next year’s pudding?’ he joked.
‘No way! Besides, it brought me nothing but bad luck.’
‘Isn’t that Freddie?’ Noah asked.
Daisy looked at the table Noah was staring at.
Damn, so it was.
Freddie waved to her, and Daisy waved back, trying to hide her dismay. Was that…? Yes, it was – Freddie was dining with Carl. She was also astonished to see that they were holding hands. She tried to grab a look at Freddie’s wrists, but his sleeves were pulled right down, but at least he was out and about and looking much better than the last time she saw him.
After a few minutes, Freddie sauntered over to their table.
‘Hi, Daisy.’
‘Freddie,’ she said, cautiously. ‘Do you remember Doctor Hartley?’
Freddie nodded sheepishly. ‘Sorry about all the trouble I caused,’ he said.
‘No trouble,’ Noah replied with a smile. ‘How are you feeling?’
Freddie pushed his sleeves back to reveal two plasters. ‘Much better, thanks to you.’
‘Just doing my job,’ Noah said.
‘You’re back with Carl, I see,’ Daisy said, and Freddie beamed.
‘We’re good. Carl was right, I wasn’t ready then, but I am now. Coming out was all a bit much, but doing what I did opened my eyes and made me realise that I have to be true to myself.’
‘How do your parents feel about that?’ Daisy asked.
Freddie grimaced. ‘Mum is okay, but it’ll take Dad a while yet.’ He brightened. ‘He’s invited Carl to lunch, so he must be coming around to the idea. I hope.’
Daisy was glad she wouldn’t be there. Lunch at Freddie’s parents was hard enough as it was. Good luck, Carl, she thought, you’re going to need it!
She smiled at Carl, and Carl smiled back, a nice smile this time, not the sneer Daisy remembered from the last (and only) time they’d met.
‘I’d better get back before Carl comes to find me,’ Freddie said. ‘I just wanted to say “hello”.’ He took a step back, then glanced at Noah and back to Daisy. ‘No hard feelings?’ he asked.
‘No hard feelings,’ Daisy confirmed, and she meant it. If it hadn’t been for Freddie, Daisy wouldn’t have met Noah, and she simply couldn’t imagine not having this wonderful, sexy man in her life.
Freddie returned to Carl, and Daisy realised Noah was staring at her again, and she put her fork down, suddenly no longer hungry. Or rather, she was hungry, but not for food. Did that make her a hussy? She gave a mental shrug. If it did, she didn’t care. This was technically their fourth date. If things went a bit further than kissing, then so be it.
At the thought of exactly how far things could go, Daisy’s tummy lurched, and so did other bits of her. What would Noah look like naked? His open-neck shirt was slim-fitting, the breadth of his chest and the flatness of his stomach clearly visible. His bum, though she couldn’t see it right now because he was sitting on it, had appeared firm and decidedly pinchable in his dark blue trousers. She’d had difficulty taking her eyes off it as he’d led her into the restaurant, and the trousers also showed off his long legs. Noah Hartley was all in proportion – she hoped! The wicked thought made her catch her breath.
Unspoken agreement saw them hastily finishing their meal, and Noah asking for the bill. When he’d paid (after a brief tussle, when she insisted on paying next time), they fled the restaurant.
‘Wanna come to mine for a coffee?’ he asked, his voice hoarse and throaty.
If they went back to his place, coffee would be the last thing on the agenda and both of them knew it.
‘Yes, please,’ she said, and he opened the car door for her, giving her a sultry smile.
She went all weak and decidedly girly.
‘I really do mean “coffee”,’ he said, unlocking the door to his flat, after a tense and sexually charged drive back to Worcester, during which she’d kept stealing glances at him, and he’d kept shooting her meaningful looks loaded with promise. ‘I’m not going to jump on you as soon as I get you alone.’
‘How do you know I don’t want you to jump on me?’ she asked, and her tongue came out to flick over her top lip, without her asking it to. It seemed to have a mind of its own, and so did the rest of her body.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, kicking the door shut behind her as he pulled her into the small hall, and pressed her up against the wall.
His mouth claimed hers with an intensity that drove all coherent thought out of her mind, and she met him passion for passion, as his hand found the buttons of her warm winter coat and began to undo them. Still kissing him, Daisy unwound the scarf from around her neck and let it drop, and his lips went straight to the soft flesh under her ear, and nuzzled her until she thought her knees were about to give way.
She’d not been idle either, unzipping his jacket and sliding her hands inside, feeling the solid muscles of his back tense as she stroked him.
He groaned, his tongue probing her mouth, one hand slipping inside her coat to caress her breast.
My God, she wanted this man more than she had wanted any other man before. Just a simple touch from him made her tremble from head to foot and—
She opened her eyes.
Noah was staring back at her from where he was standing in the doorway to the living room. A much younger Noah, a teenage vers
ion, and he looked seriously pissed off.
He opened his mouth and one word came out. ‘Dad.’
Chapter 33
Noah and Daisy sprang apart, Daisy hastily pulling her jumper down, and praying the boy hadn’t seen his father’s hand all over her pink lacey bra.
Noah ran shaking fingers through his hair, and cleared his throat. Still facing away from the living room door, he said over his shoulder. ‘Connor, what are you doing here?’ and winced as he adjusted himself, taking a deep, steadying breath.
When his excitement had diminished (his jeans were quite tight), he turned to face his son.
‘No wonder you don’t want me here,’ the boy spat. ‘You’re too busy shagging her!’ He swivelled on his heel and stamped to the sofa, throwing himself down on it and folding his arms.
‘Connor, watch how you speak, please, and it’s not that I don’t want you—’
‘Yeah, right.’
Noah sighed. ‘This year and the next are important years for you,’ he said, and by the tone of his voice Daisy guessed it wasn’t the first time that father and son had explored this topic.
‘I don’t care.’ The boy was the picture of a sulky, disgruntled teenager.
‘Connor,’ Noah sighed. ‘You’re in year ten. You have your GCSEs next year and—’
‘I told you, I don’t care. Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to what I want?’ Connor glared at his father, then turned his attention to me. ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he sneered. ‘She’s the reason you don’t want me here. I hate you!’
‘If you hate me so much, why do you want to come and live with me,’ Noah responded.
Not good, Noah, Daisy thought. No wonder he said he had trouble relating to kids. That wasn’t what Connor wanted to hear right now. She was tempted to chip in, but thought better of it, and picked up her scarf instead. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ Noah said, at the same time Connor snarled, ‘Yeah, go, we don’t want you here.’
Daisy hovered in the doorway, uncertainly, and Noah grabbed her hand. ‘Daisy is my guest and I won’t have you speaking to her like that,’ he said to his son.
‘Guest? Is that what you call her?’
‘Okay, girlfriend,’ Noah said.
Connor shot Daisy a filthy look and said to his father, ‘Nobody wants me, not you, not mum.’
It was unadulterated emotional blackmail, but Noah fell for it. ‘Of course, we want you. Your mother and I love you very much.’
‘She loves Ian now,’ the teenager retorted, and Daisy saw the unshed tears in his eyes, which he dashed angrily away with the back of his hand.
‘She loves you, too,’ Noah said. ‘She’ll always love you.’
‘Why is she marrying Ian then, when she knows I don’t like him?’
Noah clearly had no answer for that. He rubbed a hand across his face and shook his head. ‘Does your mother know where you are?’ he asked.
Connor shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
‘She doesn’t, does she, because she wouldn’t have let you come all this way on your own.’
Another shrug.
‘Where does she think you are?’
‘A friend’s.’ Connor still refused to look at his father, his attention on the carpet.
‘I’d better ring her,’ Noah said, reaching into his pocket for his mobile.
‘Don’t,’ Connor said, finally looking up. ‘She’ll kill me.’
‘You deserve it,’ Noah replied, thumbing the number in. ‘Running away isn’t going to help.’
‘This isn’t running away. This is coming to live with my dad.’ For a second Connor was a small, confused, upset boy.
‘Kate? It’s Noah.’
Connor leapt up, strode towards Daisy and pushed past her rudely, before stamping into another room off the hall, and slamming the door. The sound of running water came from behind it.
‘Listen, don’t worry, but I’ve got Connor with me.’ A pause. ‘No, I didn’t encourage him. He turned up out of the blue.’ Another pause. ‘What do you take me for? Of course, I’ll bring him back personally. I’m hardly going to stick him on a train and send him off all by himself, am I?’ A sigh. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you should look at his relationship with Ian.’
Daisy tried not to listen, but it was hard not to. Anyway, she was curious about how Noah interreacted with his ex. Spikily was the word which popped into her mind. Was that because he still had feelings for her, or because she’d taken his son so far away? It couldn’t be easy for Noah to find the time to visit – Daisy knew first-hand how many hours Noah worked, and the unsociable shift patterns. The two of them had enough trouble getting together, and Daisy only lived a mile or so away.
‘Don’t blame me! I didn’t ask him to come. He came because of Ian.’ Noah held the phone away from his ear. Even at a distance of several feet, Daisy heard the high-pitched voice on the other end. Kate was clearly having a bit of a tantrum. ‘Maybe you should ask him yourself. It seems our son doesn’t like him much. I wonder why that is?’ There was a hint of a threat in Noah’s voice, and Daisy hoped, for Ian’s sake, that this unknown man was treating Connor right, and that the boy’s dislike was something as normal as simply not wanting to share his mum.
Daisy sensed a presence behind her and turned her head. Connor’s face was ashen. Noah noticed his son seconds later.
‘Con, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘I meant—’
‘I know what you meant. You don’t want me here, messing things up with your new girlfriend. You’ve never wanted me. And now Mum doesn’t either.’ The boy’s shoulders sagged under the weight of his hostility and anger.
‘Con, Con, look at me.’ Noah strode into the hall and Daisy backed up as far as the main door. She needed to leave. This was between father and son, and she realised her presence was only inflaming things.
‘We do want you – both of us,’ Noah insisted.
‘Why are you living here, then? A hundred and eighty miles away?’
The question gave Noah pause. ‘I’m not going to get into the blame-game, Con. You know the story.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ This kid did a good line in sneering, Daisy thought, as he added, ‘She moved to Brighton when I was little – I know all this, but you could have come with us.’
‘My home was here. It still is.’
Daisy guessed no one had told Connor that Noah hadn’t been invited.
‘It doesn’t have to be though, does it? You can work anywhere,’ Connor correctly pointed out.
Noah sent Daisy a helpless glance. ‘Look, Con, let me run Daisy home, then when I come back we’ll talk. Yeah?’
The boy narrowed his eyes, his shoulders hunched somewhere about ear level, but he nodded. He clearly wanted Daisy gone about as much as she didn’t want to be there.
‘Don’t leave the flat,’ Noah warned. ‘I’ll be about twenty minutes. And don’t touch anything.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, once they were outside. ‘I had no idea he was here.’
‘I gathered that. It was nice meeting him.’
‘Ha!’
‘No, really, it was. He’s a big part of your life.’
‘Not as big a part as he should be. I wonder what this is all about. I know he’s not keen on Kate getting married, but for him to act out like this, it’s out of character.’
Was it though? Daisy hadn’t had much experience with teenagers, except for being one herself and watching her younger brother go through the joys of puberty, but she had a feeling that if Connor didn’t see his father all that often, then maybe he was usually on his best behaviour when he did. Unable to think of anything constructive to say, she resorted to platitudes. ‘It’s probably a teenage boy thing,’ she said. ‘Everything will work out in the end, you’ll see.’
‘I hope so.’ Noah pulled over into the kerb and turned the engine off. ‘I’m sorry about tonight,’ he said, leaning across the gearstick and cupping the side of her face with his hand
. ‘We never did have that coffee.’
‘Coffee being a euphemism for…?’ She fluttered her eyelashes at him.
Noah smiled. ‘Exactly!’
But the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. They were sad and slightly wary. No wonder, Daisy thought, not envying him what he had to face when he returned home.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘But I’ve no idea when that’ll be. I’ll have to take him back to Brighton in the morning. His mother is going mental.’ He checked the time on the dashboard clock. ‘It’s too late now, so he’ll have to stay with me tonight.’
Noah didn’t look particularly pleased at the thought of either of those things. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I wanted you to meet him under better circumstances than this.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ she replied brightly, not feeling bright at all. ‘I’ve met him now, warts and all, and I’m still here.’
‘Are you?’ he asked softly.
‘I am.’
‘Good.’
This time his kiss held a hint of the passion they’d shared earlier and when he finally drew back, some of the sparkle had returned to his eyes.
‘I think I’m falling for you, Daisy Jones,’ he said and a bolt of electricity shot through her.
‘Me too,’ she said, a hitch in her voice.
‘I’ll call you when I get there,’ he promised, running the pad of his thumb across her lips.
Her tongue flicked out and desire flamed deep inside her. It was answered by the expression on Noah’s face.
‘I’d better go, Connor will be wondering where I am.’
She wanted to beg him to stay for a few minutes longer, but she knew she had to let him go. His son needed him now, and after all, she and Noah had all the time in the world.
Chapter 34
Time was going so slowly, and even though she had loads to do, sorting through piles of dusty, old invoices and putting them in date order ready for filing, it didn’t keep her brain occupied enough to prevent her from worrying about Noah. She found herself checking her phone every five minutes.
A Very Lucky Christmas Page 22