The Baby Who Saved Christmas

by Alison Roberts

  ‘And she had you to care for.’

  ‘Yes.’ Alice glanced at the monitor as she ate another mouthful of the delicious risotto. ‘I can imagine loving my child so much that I would be wary of anything that might change my life.’ Then she laid down her fork and sighed ‘Or maybe her heart had just been broken too badly. I know a lot of people think it’s nonsense but—for some—I think there really is only “the one”.’

  Julien was giving her another one of those odd, unreadable looks. ‘And you? Are you one of the “some”?’

  Again, Alice had to look away. How silly was it that her heart had started thumping so loudly she was afraid he might hear it? But she nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes. I think I’m one of those people.’

  Julien’s chair scraped as he pushed it back abruptly. ‘I hope you find this “one”, then, Alice.’

  She took her plate over to the sink beside which he was working again. ‘Sometimes that’s not enough,’ she told him. ‘He will have to find me, too.’

  * * *

  It was the sound of the baby crying early the next morning that woke Julien.

  It was still crying as he pulled on his jeans. A sharp cry that was suddenly alarming.

  Still too sleepy to think clearly, he threw open his door and ran to the nursery. Jacques was in his cot. Alice was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Alice?’

  There was no answer. The kitchenette was deserted and there was no sound of running water from the bathroom.

  The noise level was still increasing. Julien walked to the cot and stood looking down at his nephew. He had no idea what he should do. Surely Alice would come through the door and rescue him?

  Jacques was sobbing. His little fists were waving in the air and his face was bright red.

  ‘Shh...’ Julien said. ‘Alice vient bientôt. Tout est okay...’

  Except it wasn’t okay. Jacques let out a piercing shriek and he couldn’t stand there and do nothing. Reaching into the cot, he picked up the baby and then held it against his chest. A still-bare chest, he realised belatedly that now had a warm little head resting on it as he rocked the baby and tried to make soothing noises into the miniature ear.

  Miraculously, it seemed to be working. The shrieking lessened to a wail and then to a series of hiccupping sobs. And then Jacques started rubbing his nose on Julien’s chest and the movement got slower and slower and then stopped. Julien noticed two things. That Jacques seemed to have gone back to sleep and that one tiny fist was locked around his thumb.

  No. Make that three things. He had picked up this distressed baby and had been able to comfort him. He felt proud of himself. And then he felt...something much deeper. This tiny person was trusting him enough to fall asleep in his arms. To protect him from any evil that might be present in the unknown world around them. Such absolute trust from a being so completely vulnerable was doing something peculiar to his heart because it felt so full it could burst.

  He should go and find Alice and hand over the care of the baby because this was precisely what he had been afraid of. Feeling the kind of bond that would inevitably lead to heartache, no matter how this situation got resolved.

  He had known it would only make it harder to hold his sister’s baby and Alice couldn’t be far away so he could escape.

  He just didn’t want to move quite yet.

  * * *

  Alice had been running up the stairs as she’d heard that alarming shriek over the monitor.

  She’d gone down to the kitchen to find something for her breakfast because Julien wasn’t awake yet and she’d stupidly left the monitor there to go and find a downstairs bathroom. How long had he been crying like that?

  She wasn’t even halfway up the stairs when the increased force of the baby’s cries made her check the screen of her monitor and that was when she saw that Jacques wasn’t alone.

  Julien was standing beside the cot. Half-dressed. Good grief, he hadn’t even fastened the button of his jeans and she could see the white fabric of his underwear exposed. As for the rest of him...oh, my... A torso and arms with sculpted muscle that begged to be traced with gentle hands. A face that was so twisted with indecision that a sympathetic smile tugged at Alice’s lips and she wanted to hug even more than stroke this man.

  She should keep going and rescue him because he clearly had no idea what to do about Jacques but Alice’s steps involuntarily came to a halt. She was holding her breath when she saw Julien reach into the cot and then she had to swallow past a huge lump in her throat as she saw him cradle the baby against his bare chest and start rocking him.

  It was an image that would have melted any woman’s heart but it was bigger than that for Alice because it got added to her memory of whatever had happened between them that had been reflected in the bathroom mirror and had since been banished.

  He was an extraordinary man, wasn’t he?

  Completely out of her league, of course. A television star, for heaven’s sake. Probably extremely wealthy and able to take his pick of a vast array of eager women.

  What would she have to offer that could possibly interest someone like Julien Dubois?

  Obviously nothing, which was why he had backed off so quickly. Alice started walking again. She took a deep breath and tried to shove her thoughts somewhere that wouldn’t show on her face by the time she got to the nursery. If there had been a ‘thing’ and it hadn’t been simply her imagination, then Julien had banished it and she needed to follow suit unless she wanted to totally humiliate herself.

  The ‘thing’—along with that heart-stealing sight of him holding Jacques—had to be jammed into a mental jar like the ones that Julien brought out from the pantry when he was cooking. Big, square glass jars with metal lids that held things like caster sugar or salt. The thing needed to be trapped and the lid tightly screwed into place. The jar couldn’t be opened and the thing couldn’t be allowed to grow because that might shatter the glass and possibly be as catastrophic as the way the glass on her father’s portrait had shattered when Julien had hurled the paperweight at it.

  So Alice wasn’t even going to think about the muscles on that bare chest and arms. Or those unfastened jeans...

  She would keep her gaze firmly on the baby when she entered the room. She would keep out of Julien’s way as much as possible and when they were together she would stick to something completely safe—like the basic French lessons he had started giving her over dinner last night.

  It should work.

  It had to work.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE PHONE RANG at exactly nine o’clock in the morning.

  The way it had for three mornings now.

  ‘Tell him that the rash is fading on his face,’ Alice called in response to Julien’s query. ‘It certainly hasn’t spread any further down his body and his temperature is normal quite a lot of the time.’

  ‘Do you want the doctor to visit today?’

  Alice shook her head, adjusting the weight of the freshly changed and fed baby in her arms from her position on the gallery, looking down to the foyer that Julien was crossing as he headed for one of the landlines in the house. ‘We might need some more paracetamol syrup, that’s all.’

  There would be no problem having it delivered, along with any other supplies Julien deemed necessary. Vans were still being admitted through the gates every day. More gifts had arrived from Madame Laurent. Nothing as awful as the giant teddy bear but none of them had got as far as the nursery—they were piling up around the blue monstrosity in the foyer, which Alice could see from the corner of her eye as she walked with Jacques around the gallery instead of going straight back to the nursery.

  Maybe she wanted to hear the sound of Julien’s voice as he carried on his conversation with the doctor. No sooner had it stopped than the phone rang again. A s
horter conversation this time and then a much longer silence. So long that Alice decided it was time to return to the nursery, so the sound of her name being called again startled her.

  ‘Alice?’

  Elise. It still gave her a tiny flutter of butterflies in her stomach, the way Julien pronounced her name. She turned to peer down into the foyer again.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Could you come downstairs, please?’

  Alice’s heart skipped a beat. Something had changed. She was used to the level of tension in this house and how serious and almost aloof Julien was but there was a note in his voice that she had never heard before and it made her feel as if she was being summoned to the headmaster’s office because she had done something wrong and she was in trouble. Her heart was in her mouth by the time she got to the bottom of the stairs.

  Had the blood-test results come back to prove her immunity to measles? Was she about to be sent away and the care of Jacques assigned to someone else? Or was Julien also safe and he could escape to meet the deadline of filming his Christmas show in Paris? Alice wasn’t sure which scenario would be worse. She didn’t want anything to change, she realised. Not just yet.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come...’ Julien led her across the foyer, not towards the grand salon, as she might have expected for a formal discussion, but into the kitchen. This was the only room that she’d spent much time in other than the nursery.

  It felt like home. Despite the size and how professional this area of the house was, it didn’t have the kind of museum feel the rest of the house did, with the opulent architecture and priceless antiques so carefully positioned. Julien probably felt more at home here as well, which was why he’d chosen to use it as an office as well as a test kitchen.

  Not that there were any papers strewn over the table yet this morning.

  ‘Sit down.’ The invitation was terse enough to make it sound like a command but, for once, any rebellious streak on Alice’s part was dormant. She sank into a chair beside the table and shifted Jacques so that he was sitting on her lap, cradled in one arm. She rested her other hand on the tabletop, ready to provide extra support quickly if it was needed. Jacques looked up at Alice and then reached out a chubby hand to grab a fistful of her hair. He was only holding it, not tugging, so Alice let it be and shifted her gaze to Julien, who had sat down at the end of the table right beside her.

  This was different, too. If they ate together, he sat opposite her. This felt more intimate. More serious. Alice swallowed hard. Something bad must have happened and the news was going to be broken gently. But she was an orphan already and had no other family so what did she have to lose?

  ‘Oh...’ Alice whispered. ‘The DNA results have come back, haven’t they?’

  ‘Oui. The call came just after I spoke with the doctor.’

  The sinking feeling was so horrible that Alice had to close her eyes. ‘I was wrong, wasn’t I? I’m not André’s daughter. Jacques is not...not my brother...’

  ‘Au contraire...’ The touch of Julien’s hand covering hers as it rested on the table made Alice’s eyes snap open. ‘That is exactly the truth. You are, without doubt, the child of André Laurent. And you are Jacquot’s sister.’

  Alice gasped. The flood of emotion revealed how much she had had resting on this news. There was grief there. For the father she would never know. For her mother who had lost the man she loved and then lost her life far too soon. But there was joy, too. Immeasurable joy and hope for a future she had never imagined.

  She tried to smile but imminent tears made it impossible. She tried to fight them. Tried not to be so acutely aware of how her skin felt where Julien’s hand was covering hers. It felt like support. Protection. And something much more visceral. Attraction mixed with both grief and hope felt remarkably like being in love, didn’t it?

  She couldn’t go there... Couldn’t even let the thought rest long enough to take a recognisable shape.

  ‘Jacquot?’ she queried, her voice choked.

  Julien shrugged. ‘It is a... How do say it? A pet name? Like Jamie instead of James.’ He smiled at the baby, reaching out to touch his cheek gently. ‘It seems you have a big sister, little Jacquot.’

  Alice lost the battle with the tears. The skin on her hand was still tingling where he’d been touching it and she knew exactly what the stroke of that finger on the baby’s cheek would feel like. Tender. Caring...

  The tears rolled down her cheeks in big, fat droplets.

  Julien glanced up and then stared at her, his brow furrowed. ‘This news has made you unhappy?’

  Alice shook her head. What had Julien said? ‘Au contraire,’ she managed on a stifled sob. ‘I... I couldn’t be happier.’

  A sudden tug on her hair made her look down and, as if he knew how momentous this news had been, Jacquot stared back up at the two adults.

  And then it happened. His little face crinkled and then split into a grin—the first real smile Alice had seen him make.

  The alchemy of her emotional turbulence found a new direction. The one it should have had all along. This was the moment that she fell completely in love with this baby.

  Her brother...

  It was a crooked little grin. Rather like the only way she’d seen his uncle smile. Alice lifted her gaze and that might have been a mistake because it hit her again. It was so huge, this love that she had for Jacquot. Her heart could burst with the enormity but it wouldn’t because some of that love was spilling out and Julien was somehow caught up in the fallout. Words formed and came out in a whisper.

  ‘He looks like you.’

  Julien met her gaze. His eyes looked bright—with unshed tears perhaps? ‘I was just thinking how much he looks like Colette.’

  The poignant undertone of his words made Alice want to gather him close and cuddle him the way she was cuddling Jacquot. The corners of her own mouth were still curling, as they had done in an instant response to the baby’s smile, but now she could feel them wobble. She could see exactly the same struggle between happiness and sorrow hovering over the edges of Julien’s lips and when she was brave enough to catch his gaze again, there it was.

  The thing...

  And this time it was powerful enough to feel like a punch in her gut, maybe because she recognised it for what it was. How could she not, when she’d just fallen utterly in love with her little brother?

  Julien Dubois wasn’t just caught up in the fallout of what she was feeling for her little brother. He was a part of what was causing this tsunami of emotion. She had somehow slipped past the warning signs that she might be in danger of falling in love with him.

  For some reason she couldn’t identify, there was a sense of connection in that particular look they had shared more than once now that was sucking her in and making her imagine things that couldn’t possibly be true. How ridiculous was it to get a flash of thought that this man could be the person she had been searching for ever since she’d been a naïve teenager and had begun dreaming of a fairy-tale happy ending in her search for love?

  They didn’t even speak the same language, for heaven’s sake.

  They had absolutely nothing in common, other than a genetic connection to a small, orphaned child.

  No wonder she hadn’t been able to dismiss the memory of how that eye contact had made her feel. Or how it had been magnified by the sight of Julien standing half-naked with Jacquot in his arms. With the skin of her hand still buzzing with the memory of his touch even though it had been removed now, the air around her felt volatile. As if something could very well explode.

  That imaginary glass jar perhaps?

  Alice dragged her gaze free of Julien’s so fast he didn’t have a chance of being the first to break that contact.

  They both seemed to feel the need to change the subject and they both spoke at ex
actly the same time.

  ‘The doctor said...’

  ‘I think I’d better...’ Alice stopped and blinked. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘That the nanny, Nicole, is showing signs of having caught measles. She has the spots inside her cheeks. I’ve forgotten what he called them.’

  ‘Koplik’s spots. Oh, no... That makes this a more serious outbreak, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It would appear so. But he said that Jacques will not be contagious within another day or two and he’s found a children’s nurse who can come into the house and care for him. Marthe—the housekeeper—could also return as her tests have shown her to be immune.’

  ‘No...’ Alice surprised herself with the vehemence of her response so it was no wonder that Julien’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I want to look after him,’ she added. ‘He’s...’ A smile curved around her soft words. ‘He’s my brother.’

  Julien frowned. ‘It may take some time before your relationship to Jacques can be legally acknowledged. The French system of law is complicated and offices will close down for some time over the Christmas period.’ His frown deepened. ‘There have been repeated calls from Madame Laurent—his grandmother. She is impatient to have the child collected and taken to her home in Geneva at the earliest opportunity.’

  ‘Have him collected?’ Alice was shocked. ‘This is her grandson. How could she be prepared to let total strangers come and take him away from his home? How frightening would that be? It’s hard enough that he has people he doesn’t know looking after him when he’s sick but at least he’s in a familiar place.’

  ‘She buried her only son a few days ago. I imagine it’s a taxing time for an elderly woman.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Given that her son was in his early sixties, I expect she’s well over eighty.’

  Far too old to be taking on the task of raising a baby, then. But then another thought struck Alice and it made her catch her breath.

  ‘Good grief...do you realise that Madame Laurent is also my grandmother?’