by Liz Fielding
Even on those social occasions when they found themselves face to face, there was no eye contact. Only icy civility.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
He shook his head. There was nothing anyone could do. His family was, always had been, his problem, but it was a mess he wanted out of his office. Now.
‘Follow up on the points raised at the meeting, Jake.’ He looked at the crumpled sheet of paper in his hand, then folded it and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. Unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘Keep me posted about any problems. I’m going home.’
It took a kitten to drag May out of her dark thoughts.
Her first reaction to the news that she was about to lose her home had been to rush back to its shabby comfort—no matter how illusory that comfort might be—while she came to terms with the fact that, having lost the last surviving member of her family, she was now going to lose everything else. Her home. Her business. Her future.
Once home, however, there would be no time for such indulgence. She had little enough time to unravel the life she’d made for herself. To wind down a business she’d fallen into almost by accident and, over the last few years, built into something that had given her something of her own, something to live for.
Worst of all, she’d have to tell Robbie.
Give notice to Patsy and the other women who worked for a few hours a week helping with the cleaning, the cooking and who relied on that small amount of money to help them pay their bills.
There’d be no time to spare for the luxury of grieving for the loss of their support, friendship. Her birthday was less than a month away. The birthday. The one with a big fat zero on the end.
Yesterday that hadn’t bothered her. She’d never understood why anyone would want to stop the clock at ‘twenty-nine’.
Today, if some fairy godmother were to appear and offer her three wishes, that would be number one on the list. Well, maybe not number one…
But, while fairy godmothers were pure fantasy, her date of birth was a fact that she could not deny and, by the time she’d reached the last park bench before home, the one overlooking the lake that had once been part of the parkland surrounding Coleridge House, her legs had been shaking so much that she’d been forced to stop.
Once there, she’d been unable to find the will to move again. It was a sheltered spot, a sun trap and, despite the fact that it was the first week in November, pleasantly warm. And while she sat on this park bench she was still Miss Mary Louise Coleridge of Coleridge House. Someone to be respected.
Her place in the town, the invitations to sit on charitable committees were part of her life. Looked at in the cold light of day, it was obvious that it wasn’t her they wanted, it was the Coleridge name to lend lustre to their endeavours. And Coleridge House.
No one would come knocking when she didn’t have a grand room where they could hold their meetings, with a good lunch thrown in. An elegant, if fading house with a large garden in which to hold their ‘events’.
It was the plaintive mewing of a kitten in distress that finally broke through these dark thoughts. It took her a moment to locate the scrap of orange fur clinging to the branch of a huge old beech tree set well back from the path.
‘Oh, sweetie, how on earth did you get up there?’
Since the only reply was an even more desperate mew, she got to her feet and went closer.
‘Come on. You can do it,’ she cooed, standing beneath it, hoping to coax it back down the long sloping branch that came nearly to the ground. It edged further up the branch.
She looked around, hoping for someone tall enough to reach up and grab it but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Finally, when it became clear that there wasn’t anything else for it, she took off her jacket, kicked off her shoes and, skirting a muddy puddle, she caught hold of the branch, found a firm foothold and pulled herself up.
Bitterly regretting that he’d taken advantage of the un-seasonably fine weather to walk in to the office, Adam escaped the building via his private lift to the car park. He’d hoped to pick up a taxi at the rank on the corner but there were none waiting and he crossed the road to the park. It was a slightly longer way home, but there was less chance of being seen by anyone he knew.
Oblivious to the beauty of the autumn morning, he steered the buggy with one hand, using the other to call up anyone who might have a clue where Saffy was heading for.
His first action on finding Nancie had been to try her mother’s mobile but, unsurprisingly, it was switched off. He’d left a message on her voicemail, asking her to ring him, but didn’t hold out much hope of that.
Ten minutes later, the only thing he knew for certain was that he knew nothing. The new tenants of the apartment, her agent—make that ex-agent—even her old flatmate denied any knowledge of where she was, or of Michel, and he had no idea who her friends were, even supposing they’d tell him anything.
Actually, he thought, looking at the baby, it wasn’t true that he knew nothing.
While the movement of the buggy had, for the moment, lulled her back to sleep, he was absolutely sure that very soon she would be demanding to be fed or changed.
Ask May. She’ll help.
Ahead of him, the tall red-brick barley twist chimneys of Coleridge House stood high above the trees. For years he’d avoided this part of the park, walked double the distance rather than pass the house. Just seeing those chimneys had made him feel inadequate, worthless.
These days, he could buy and sell the Coleridges, and yet it was still there. Their superiority and the taint of who he was.
Asking her for help stuck deep in his craw, but the one thing about May Coleridge was that she wouldn’t ask questions. She knew Saffy. Knew him.
He called Enquiries for her number but it was unlisted. No surprise there, but maybe it was just as well.
It had been a very long time since he’d taken her some broken creature to be nursed back to health, but he knew she’d find it a lot harder to say no face to face. If he put Nancie into her arms.
It is not high, May told herself as she set her foot firmly on the tree. All she had to do was haul herself up onto the branch and crawl along it. No problem…
Easy enough to say when she was safely on the ground.
Standing beneath the branch and looking up, it had seemed no distance at all. The important thing, she reminded herself, was not to look down but keep her eye on the goal.
‘What on earth are you doing up there, Mouse?’
Sherbet dabs!
As her knee slipped, tearing her tights, she wondered how much worse this day could get. The advantage that she didn’t have to look down to see who was beneath her—only one person had ever called her Mouse—was completely lost on her.
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ she asked through gritted teeth. ‘Checking the view?’
‘You should be able to see Melchester Castle from up there,’ he replied, as if she’d been serious. ‘You’ll have to look a little further to your left, though.’
She was in enough trouble simply looking ahead. She’d never been good with heights—something she only ever seemed to remember when she was too far off the ground to change her mind.
‘Why don’t you come up and point it out to me?’ she gasped.
‘I would be happy to,’ he replied, ‘but that branch doesn’t look as if it could support both of us.’
He was right. It was creaking ominously as she attempted to edge closer to the kitten which, despite her best efforts not to frighten it further, was backing off, a spitting, frightened orange ball of fur.
It was far too late to wish she’d stuck to looking helpless at ground level. She’d realised at a very early age that the pathetic, Where’s a big strong man to help me? routine was never going to work for her—she wasn’t blonde enough, thin enough, pretty enough—and had learned to get on and do it herself.
It was plunging in without a thought for the consequences that had earned her the mocking nickname ‘Mouse
’, short for ‘Danger Mouse’, bestowed on her by Adam Wavell when she was a chubby teen and he was a mocking, nerdy, glasses-wearing sixth-former at the local high school.
Her knee slipped a second time and a gasp from below warned her that Adam wasn’t the only one with a worm’s eye view of her underwear. A quick blink confirmed that her antics were beginning to attract an audience of mid-morning dog-walkers, older children on their autumn break and shoppers taking the scenic route into the town centre—just too late to be of help.
Then a click, followed by several more as the idea caught on, warned her that someone had taken a photograph using their mobile phone. Terrific. She was going to be in tomorrow’s edition of the Maybridge Observer for sure; worse, she’d be on YouTube by lunch time.
She had no one to blame but herself, she reminded herself, making a firm resolution that the next time she spotted an animal in distress she’d call the RSPCA and leave it to them. That wasn’t going to help her now, though, and the sooner she grabbed the kitten and returned to earth the better.
‘Here, puss,’ she coaxed desperately, but its only response was to hiss at her and edge further along the branch. Muttering under her breath, she went after it. The kitten had the advantage. Unlike her, it weighed nothing and, as the branch thinned and began to bend noticeably beneath her, she made a desperate lunge, earning herself a cheer from the crowd as she managed to finally grab it. The kitten ungratefully sank its teeth into her thumb.
‘Pass it down,’ Adam said, his arms raised to take it from her.
Easier said than done. In its terror, it had dug its needle claws in, clinging to her hand as desperately as it had clung to the branch.
‘You’ll have to unhook me. Don’t let it go!’ she warned as she lowered it towards him. She was considerably higher now and she had to lean down a long way so that he could detach the little creature with the minimum of damage to her skin.
It was a mistake.
While she’d been focused on the kitten everything had been all right, but that last desperate lunge had sent everything spinning and, before she could utter so much as a fudge balls, she lost her balance and slithered off the branch.
Adam, standing directly beneath her, had no time to avoid a direct hit. They both went down in a heap, the fall driving the breath from her body, which was probably a good thing since there was no item in her handmade confectionery range that came even close to matching her mortification. But then embarrassment was her default reaction whenever she was within a hundred feet of the man.
‘You don’t change, Mouse,’ he said as she struggled to catch her breath.
Not much chance of that while she was lying on top of him, his breath warm against her cheek, his heart pounding beneath her hand, his arm, flung out in an attempt to catch her—or, more likely, defend himself—tight around her. The stuff of her most private dreams, if she discounted the fact that it had been raining all week and they were sprawled in the muddy puddle she had taken such pains to avoid.
‘You always did act first, think later,’ he said. ‘Rushing to the aid of some poor creature in distress and getting wet, muddy or both for your pains.’
‘While you,’ she gasped, ‘always turned up too late to do anything but stand on the sidelines, laughing at me,’ she replied furiously. It was untrue and unfair, but all she wanted right at that moment was to vanish into thin air.
‘You have to admit you were always great entertainment value.’
‘If you like clowns,’ she muttered, remembering all too vividly the occasion when she’d scrambled onto the school roof in a thunderstorm to rescue a bird trapped in the guttering and in danger of drowning, concern driving her chubby arms and legs as she’d shinned up the down pipe.
Up had never been a problem.
He’d stood below her then, the water flattening his thick dark hair, rain pouring down his face, grinning even as he’d taken the bird from her. But then, realising that she was too terrified to move, he’d taken off his glasses and climbed up to rescue her.
Not that she’d thanked him.
She’d been too busy yelling at him for letting the bird go before she could wrap it up and take it home to join the rest of her rescue family.
It was only when she was back on terra firma that her breathing had gone to pot and he’d delivered her to the school nurse, convinced she was having an asthma attack. And she had been too mortified—and breathless—to deny it.
He was right. Nothing had changed. She might be less than a month away from her thirtieth birthday, a woman of substance, respected for her charity work, running her own business, but inside she was still the overweight and socially inept teen being noticed by a boy she had the most painful crush on. Brilliant but geeky with the family from hell. Another outsider.
Well, he wasn’t an outsider any more. He’d used his brains to good effect and was now the most successful man not just in Maybridge, but just about anywhere and had exchanged the hideous flat in the concrete acres of a sink estate where he’d been brought up for the luxury of a loft on the quays.
She quickly disentangled herself, clambered to her feet. He followed with far more grace.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘No bones broken?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, ignoring the pain in her elbow where it had hit the ground. ‘You?’ she asked out of politeness.
She could see for herself that he was absolutely fine. More than fine. The glasses had disappeared years ago, along with the bad hair, bad clothes. He’d never be muscular, but he’d filled out as he’d matured, his shoulders had broadened and these days were clad in the finest bespoke tailoring.
He wasn’t just fine, but gorgeous. Mouth-wateringly scrumptious, in fact. The chocolate nut fudge of maleness. And these days he had all the female attention he could handle if the gossip magazines were anything to judge by.
‘At least you managed to hang onto the kitten,’ she added, belatedly clutching the protective cloak of superiority about her.
The one thing she knew would make him keep his distance.
‘I take no credit. The kitten is hanging onto me.’
‘What?’ She saw the blood seeping from the needle wounds in his hand and everything else flew out of the window. ‘Oh, good grief, you’re bleeding.’
‘It’s a hazard I expect whenever I’m within striking distance of you. Although on this occasion you haven’t escaped unscathed, either,’ he said.
She physically jumped as he took her own hand in his, turning it over so that she could see the tiny pinpricks of blood mingling with the mud. And undoing all her efforts to regain control of her breathing. He looked up.
‘Where’s your bag?’ he asked. ‘Have you got your inhaler?’
Thankfully, it had never occurred to him that his presence was the major cause of her problems with breathing.
‘I’m fine,’ she snapped.
For heaven’s sake, she was nearly thirty. She should be so over the cringing embarrassment that nearly crippled her whenever Adam Wavell was in the same room.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll walk you home.’
‘There’s no need,’ she protested.
‘There’s every need. And this time, instead of getting punished for my good deed, I’m going to claim my reward.’
‘Reward?’ Her mouth dried. In fairy tales that would be a kiss… ‘Superheroes never hang around for a reward,’ she said scornfully as she wrapped the struggling kitten in her jacket.
‘You’re the superhero, Danger Mouse,’ he reminded her, a teasing glint in his eyes that brought back the precious time when they’d been friends. ‘I’m no more than the trusty sidekick who turns up in the nick of time to get you out of a jam.’
‘Just once in a while you could try turning up in time to prevent me from getting into one,’ she snapped.
‘Now where would be the fun in that?’ he asked, and it took all her self-control to keep her face from breaking out into a foolish smile.
‘Having seen your indignity for myself, I can assure you that tomorrow’s paper will be a sell-out,’ he replied. She was still struggling with a response to that when he added, ‘And if they can tear their eyes away from all that lace, the kitten’s owners might recognise their stray.’
‘One can live in hopes,’ she replied stiffly.
She shook her head, then, realising that, no matter how much she wanted to run and hide, she couldn’t ignore the fact that because of her he was not only bloody but his hand-stitched suit was covered in mud.
‘I suppose you’d better come back to the house and get cleaned up,’ she said.
‘If that’s an offer to hose me down in the yard, I’ll pass.’
For a moment their eyes met as they both remembered that hideous moment when he’d come to the house with a bunch of red roses that must have cost him a fortune and her grandfather had turned a garden hose on him, soaking him to the skin.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, her insides curling up with embarrassment, killing stone dead the little heart-lift as he’d slipped so easily into teasing her the way he’d done when they were friends.
She picked up her shoes, her bag, reassembling her armour. But she wasn’t able to look him in the eye as she added distantly, ‘Robbie will take care of you in the kitchen.’
‘The kitchen? Well, that will be further than I’ve ever got before. But actually it was you I was coming to see.’
She balanced her belongings, then, with studied carelessness, as if she had only then registered what he’d said, ‘See?’ she asked, doing her best to ignore the way her heart rate had suddenly picked up. ‘Why on earth would you be coming to see me?’
He didn’t answer but instead used his toe to release the brake on a baby buggy that was standing a few feet away on the path. The buggy that she had assumed belonged to a woman, bundled up in a thick coat and headscarf, who’d been holding onto the handle, crooning to the baby.