12 Stocking Stuffers

by Beverly Barton

  She hoped he’d say no.

  The lecture on parental responsibility Carl had meant to deliver had disappeared like a footprint covered by a fresh fall of snow. Seeing Beth in the flesh after she’d haunted his dreams on a regular basis had stunned his brain.

  Her lovely eyes were wide and troubled, her narrow shoulders tense beneath the soft jade-green sweater she was wearing, and the way she’d scooped her long blonde hair back, coiling it haphazardly on the crown of her head, emphasised the tender hollows beneath her high cheekbones and made her slender neck look achingly young and vulnerable.

  How could he lecture her when all he wanted to do was fold her in his arms and comfort her, tell her not to get uptight because boys would be boys as long as the world went round? It was no big deal.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Beth,’ he remarked softly, and wanted to add, Too long, but didn’t. ‘You were the last person I expected to see. For all anyone knew you’d disappeared off the face of the earth, so I guess I took it for granted that the cottage had been sold after your grandmother died.’

  Moving past her into the warm brightness of the cosy old-fashioned kitchen, he sensed her slender body flinch and his throat clenched painfully. Was his presence so unwelcome? Because she didn’t want to be reminded of that one-night stand all those years ago? In this day and age it seemed a bit farfetched.

  Unless, of course, her husband was around—the father of the twins. Knowing Beth and her open nature, she would have confessed her past relationships—if one night of out-of-this-world passion could be called a relationship, he amended drily.

  She might be embarrassed at the prospect of having to introduce a past lover to her husband. That could be why she was so uptight.

  He wouldn’t put her in an awkward position, not for all the gold in Fort Knox, so he’d take himself off, relieve her of his unwanted company. He’d spout a few conventional platitudes first, because it would look weird if he just marched straight back out again, even though she might be hugely thankful if he did just that!

  ‘Are you and your husband spending Christmas here?’ he asked as casually as he could when she turned from securing the door. He noted with entirely masculine approval the way her jeans clipped the shapely outline of her long slender legs. ‘Keeper’s Cottage would make an ideal holiday retreat, and the twins will love the freedom.’

  He was simply making idle conversation to make his planned immediate departure seem less precipitate. The thought of returning to that cold, empty house, leaving the warmth, the homely scent of baking, leaving her, leaving all the questions unanswered, was starkly unappealing.

  But his seemingly casual question seemed to have thrown her. She looked as if he’d been speaking in Swahili. Her finely drawn brows tugged together and the green of her eyes deepened as she muttered, ‘Twins?’ and shook her head. ‘Do they look like twins? Guy is my employers’ son. I’ve been his nanny since he was six months old. He and James were brought up together.’ She relaxed just a little, smiling slightly as she confided, ‘Guy’s mother is expecting a new arrival any time now. She wants a home birth, so we all thought it best if I brought the boys away and gave them a proper Christmas here. So it’s just us. I don’t have a husband. James’s father and I never married.’

  Then she dragged her lower lip between her teeth and bit it. Hard. Why couldn’t she keep her big mouth shut? But the tension she’d read in his face had been wiped away, she noted uncomprehendingly. Because of what she’d said? She had no idea.

  The trouble was, she had always found him so easy to talk to. Nothing had changed there. She should have had her wits about her—invented a husband—a father for her son—who was working overseas—and put him off the scent. But lying to anyone simply never occurred to her. Never had and never would.

  Her eyes wide and troubled, she watched him pull a chair from beneath the old wooden table and sit down, uninvited, one arm hooked over the backrest, his long legs outstretched. He was smiling that slow, utterly disarming smile of his now, and his eyes were as warmly intimate as she’d always remembered them.

  He was wearing a soft leather jacket over a dark polo sweater and sleek cord jeans he might just as well have been poured into. If he’d been a film star he’d have had women swooning in the aisles!

  Her stomach squirmed and tightened in a sensation she’d almost forgotten it was possible to experience. Raw sexual attraction, she decided, deploring the fact that he could still have this effect on her.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he invited smoothly. ‘As I said, it’s been a long time. You and I have a lot of catching up to do.’

  ‘I—’ Aware that all her nerves were standing to attention, her breathing shallow and fast, Beth made a conscious effort to relax. Behaving like a cat on hot bricks would only make him suspicious. She pulled in a slow breath and offered, ‘I was just about to make tea. Would you like a cup?’

  ‘Love one. It’s been a long day.’ His eyes narrowed as he watched her turn away to take the now furiously boiling kettle from the hotplate. The girl who had woven herself into his dreams for so many years had matured into quite a woman. Five feet five inches of seductive, enticingly feminine curves. Why hadn’t the father of her son married her? She was lovely to look at and had a nature to match. He couldn’t think of a man on the planet who wouldn’t be proud to call her his wife.

  Unless her lover had been already married.

  He would never have put her down as the type to get involved with some other woman’s husband. She’d been so sweet, innocent and trusting. Which was why he’d been so ashamed of himself for taking something so rare and precious and sullying it.

  He frowned heavily, black brows meeting over darkening eyes. Her son was seven years old. He didn’t need a degree in advanced mathematics to work out that she must have jumped out of his bed and straight into another’s! Had the air of innocence and openness that had so enthralled him been nothing but a clever act?

  Jealousy and a sense of bitter disappointment twisted a sharp knife deep inside him—and that was both warped and ridiculous! For heaven’s sake, what had happened was well in the past. He had been married himself in the intervening years; he had no damned right to have any feelings whatsoever about what she might or might not have done with her life!

  Oblivious, Beth settled a knitted cosy on the teapot and reached cups and saucers from the dresser, milk from the fridge. In the bedroom overhead she could hear the boys clumping about. From long experience she knew that getting washed and changed could take anything from twenty manic seconds to an eternity.

  The latter today, she devoutly hoped. They would surely spin the chore out as long as humanly possible in view of the telling-off they were due to receive the moment they presented themselves downstairs!

  Which would give Carl time to drink his tea and her time to make a more normal impression—make something approaching normal conversation. After all, they had been childhood friends. He would think it odd if she didn’t make some attempt to do some of the catching up he’d talked about. Not too much, though. She needed him out of here before James reappeared and gave him time to note the almost uncanny resemblance between the two of them.

  ‘I was sorry to hear of your uncle’s death,’ she said quietly as she set the tea in front of him. ‘I liked him a lot. He always had a kind word for me and apparently a bottomless pocketful of toffees!’ Her smile was unforced; she had genuinely happy memories of Marcus Forsythe.

  ‘I miss him,’ Carl admitted heavily, his smoky eyes darkening. ‘He was one of the best.’ He gave her a slight smile. ‘I think the fact that we were both without parents drew us together when we were kids. But you drew the short straw. Your grandparents were pretty forbidding.’

  ‘They did what they thought was best,’ Beth said defensively, soft colour washing over her cheeks. They had been good to her after their own fashion, and she wouldn’t hear a bad word against either of them. In spite of saying she’d washed her hands of her, Gran mus
t have felt something for her. Otherwise, why would she have left this cottage to her? She could have willed it to the church she’d been such a staunch member of, or any number of charities.

  Her chin lifting, Beth met Carl’s eyes across the table and earnestly explained, ‘I think they must have both been born with a strong Puritanical streak—it was in their nature, so they can’t be blamed for the way they were. And after what had happened with their only child, my mother, they were doubly strict with me.’

  As pain flickered briefly in her lovely eyes Carl instinctively reached over the table and took her hand. ‘I remember how upset you were when your gran told you the truth about her,’ he said softly.

  Home from school for the Easter break, he had found her sobbing her heart out down by the stream, where the wild primroses grew. Gradually she’d blurted it all out. Her mother, a first-year student at a Birmingham college, had got pregnant. The first Beth’s grandparents had known about it had been when their daughter had arrived at Keeper’s Cottage with a newborn baby. Twenty-four hours later she had walked away and had never been back.

  A card—the only one that had ever been sent—had arrived to mark Beth’s first birthday, with a note enclosed for Frank and Ellen Hayley saying that their daughter had met and married an Australian and would be going to live in Darwin.

  Carl had been fourteen years old to Beth’s twelve and he hadn’t known what to say to ease her misery, so he’d simply hugged her. And she’d clung to him until she was all cried out. Looking back, that was when his feelings for her had begun to change. Certainly during the next few years he’d felt awkward in her company, increasingly inclined to blush, get tongue-tied and sweaty.

  His fingers tightened around hers now, and something sweet coiled around his heart as she responded with increased pressure of her own. ‘It was a tough nut to swallow, knowing your mother hadn’t wanted you, but it didn’t make you bitter and twisted—I admire you for that.’

  ‘Why should it?’ Beth’s face went pink. She snatched her hand away from his. What did she think she was doing? Holding hands—and loving it—with a married man! So, OK, she’d had a huge crush on Carl Forsythe for almost as long as she could remember, and he was the father of her son, but that didn’t excuse or explain why she should still feel so inescapably drawn to him.

  Knotting her hands together in her lap, trying to erase the sheer magic of his touch and bring herself down to earth again, she drew herself up very straight and staunchly defended what her grandparents had regarded as indefensible. ‘My mother was very young and probably couldn’t face the responsibility of bringing a child up on her own. My grandparents would have given her a hard time. They certainly didn’t take the modern, relaxed attitude to single parenthood.’

  As she had discovered for herself!

  ‘You did. You shouldered the burden of responsibility,’ Carl put in quietly. ‘Did Frank and Ellen throw you out?’

  ‘Of course not!’ But their disgust and outrage at the way she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps and brought shame on them had made it impossible for her to stay. ‘And James has never been a burden. I wanted my baby!’

  Flushed and flustered, she pushed herself to her feet and cleared away the teacups. Why did talking to him, opening her heart to him, seem so right and natural? She wished he would leave. Any minute now she might say something that would alert him to the true situation. Hadn’t Gran always complained that she didn’t know how to keep a still tongue in her head?

  Rinsing the cups out under a furiously gushing tap, she desperately hoped he’d take the hint and leave. But his hand on her shoulder killed that hope stone-dead, and she could have cried with frustration as he reached over and turned off the tap.

  He was too close, far too close. Her breath ached in her lungs. His body heat burned her. They were nearly touching. Almost against her will, but unable to stop herself, she tilted back her head to look up at him.

  He had a beautiful mouth. Her eyes lingered on the wide, sensual contours. As if it had been only yesterday she could remember exactly how that mouth had felt as it had plundered hers, so sweetly and gently at first, and then with a passion that had swept her away in a floodtide of feverish longing. And love.

  A shiver raced through her as she heard him whisper her name, and her long lashes flickered as she raised her eyes to meet his. There was something in the slow, smoky burn of that intent gaze that made her gasp air into her oxygen-starved lungs.

  ‘Beth—’ Lean strong fingers reached out to touch a wildly beating pulse at the side of her lush mouth. ‘You don’t have to put on a brave face for me. Things must have been tough for you, and I’d like to help for old times’ sake. You say you’re working as a nanny. I assume that means you and your boy are living under someone else’s roof at your employer’s beck and call night and day? It shouldn’t have to be that way.’

  Beth was watching the way his mouth moved, inhaling the fresh masculine scent of him, fighting the insane impulse to wind her arms around his neck and move closer, close enough to be part of him. His words merely grazed the surface of her consciousness, drowned out by the thunder-beats of her heart.

  But when he asked gently, his fingers sliding down to briefly caress her delicate jawline, the slender line of her neck, ‘Beth, what happened? You didn’t marry your boy’s father—wouldn’t the relationship have worked out?’ she was jolted back to stark reality with a vengeance, like the shock of having been suddenly plunged into a pool of icy water.

  What in heaven’s name did she think she’d been doing? Having lustful thoughts about another woman’s husband, her whole body responding to his touch, the seductive velvet stroke of his eyes…

  And, just as dangerous, she heard the squeaky hinges of the boys’ bedroom door, tentative footsteps on the top of the stairs.

  Jerking backwards, she uttered thickly, ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, do you? Now, if you’ll excuse me—’ she walked to the door on legs that felt as if they didn’t belong to her and dragged it open ‘—I have a lot to do.’

  And she willed him to go, right now, right this minute, before the boys reached the foot of the stairs and he had the time and the leisure to really look at James and begin to wonder…

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘THERE—that should do it.’ Beth snipped off one final piece of scarlet-berried holly, added it to the unwieldy bunch she’d already collected, and slipped the secateurs back into one of the capacious side pockets of the cosy fleece she was wearing. For the boys’ sake she was doing her level best to be bright and cheerful, to act as if decorating the cottage for Christmas was the only thing on her mind. But inside she was quaking. Did Carl know? Or at the very least strongly suspect that James was his son? Or was her guilty conscience making her imagine things?

  ‘There’s loads more over there,’ Guy objected.

  ‘You can’t take it all,’ James countered. ‘The birds will be hungry if we have all the berries. Mum,’ he added on that reminder, ‘I’m hungry now.’

  ‘And me.’ Guy put on his pleading face, and Beth hoisted the bundle of holly more securely in her arms, forced her own fears aside and grinned down at them.

  The cold wind had whipped rosy colour into their cheeks, banishing city pallor, and the fresh air had turned what had been often picky appetites into something worthy of a couple of navvies.

  Which was just one more reason why the idea that she and James should make Keeper’s Cottage their permanent home was becoming more firmly fixed with every hour that had passed since they’d arrived here five days ago.

  The village primary school was excellent, and surely she could find a part-time job—cleaning, helping in the village stores—anything that she could fit in around school hours. What she had saved during her years with the Harper-Joneses would keep them while she hunted for something suitable.

  ‘Lunch in an hour,’ she promised, marvelling at the way they could be hungry after the piles of pancakes and bac
on she’d cooked at breakfast-time. She called after them as they scampered back through the trees to the lane that led down to the village. ‘Don’t run, and watch out for traffic!’ Though very little of that passed this way.

  Following more sedately, she watched the two small figures—both dressed identically in bright red anoraks, miniature combat trousers and green wellies—and knew they would miss each other. But their separation was bound to happen, whatever she decided about the cottage. Angela Harper-Jones had dropped several hints since her pregnancy had been confirmed.

  Angela and Henry Harper-Jones were both barristers and Guy had been unplanned. At the time of his birth Angela had had no intention of giving up her career, which was why she’d advertised for a full-time nanny, child no objection. The fact that Beth had had a three-month-old son had been viewed as a bonus.

  ‘They will be company for each other,’ Angela had said, making Beth view the reasonably paid, live-in position as the godsend it had been.

  She hadn’t had to farm her precious baby out while she went out to work, and they hadn’t had to go on living off the state in a flat in a run down high-rise building the council had provided.

  But now Angela was ready to be a full-time mother, and with the resident cook-housekeeper who had been with her throughout her married life she would have no need for a nanny. Beth’s days in the Harper-Jones household were numbered.

  Scrambling down the last few feet of muddy track to the lane, where the boys were waiting patiently—well, as patiently as seven-year-old boys could be expected to, kicking up the piles of fallen leaves that had gathered at the edge of the band of woodland—she made her mind up.

  She and James would move in here when she was made jobless and homeless—he had already told her he wanted to stay for ever. It was a good place to be.

  Despite her strict upbringing she had had a wonderfully happy childhood, and she wanted the same for James. The village of Lower Bewley was a close-knit community, rather like an extended family. Her precious son would have so much more freedom than was possible in London, and as for her—well, the Hall would soon be sold, so she wouldn’t run the risk of running into Carl and his wife.