Marion Lennox - Their Baby Bargain

‘I can’t believe her mother could just give her up,’ Wendy said slowly, looking down at the sleeping baby, and there was such a look of pain on her face that Luke thought for a moment that he must have imagined it.

He hadn’t. She turned away, but as she did he saw the glimmer of tears on her lashes. So, social worker or not, Wendy wasn’t quite impervious to human drama.

‘Tell me what your background is?’ he asked her again as she bundled towels and baby clothes together.

She shook her head. ‘I have things to do.’

‘Yeah, right. Like running the washing machine-without electricity, without hot water and without a washing machine.’ He patted the bare boards beside him, inviting her to sit. ‘We have two sleeping children. It’s grown-ups’ time now.’

That made her smile. ‘I guess, for you, it’s always grown-ups’ time.’

‘I don’t have a lot to do with children,’ he agreed. ‘Until now.’

‘And now it’s only for a week.’

‘As you say…’ He looked at her, his eyes asking a question. ‘Go on, then.’ He held out a hand, took hers and tugged, so she had to sink down to sit beside him. For some reason she was reluctant-but there was no good reason not to.

It was just, he made her feel…

Peculiar. She wasn’t taking it any further than that, she decided, as she pulled her hand away. She couldn’t afford to. If there was one thing Wendy Maher had decided all those years ago it was that men were trouble. And this one looked more trouble than most.

‘I’ll give you my résumé if you like,’ she said, lowering herself to perch on the edge of the veranda and then staring out to the distant sea. Distancing herself… ‘It’s very good.’

‘All this and modest to boot?’

‘If I don’t sing my praises no one will.’ She smiled. ‘I have a first-class honours degree in social work. I have nursing training-only one year but it’s enough for what I need it for. I have five years’ experience as a Home mother at Bay Beach Orphanage.’

He frowned at that. It didn’t quite fit. ‘I would have imagined a social worker with a first-class honours degree would have been working in an organisational capacity rather than hands-on child care,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Surely you don’t need those qualifications to be a Home mother.’

‘I like children,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly clipped.

‘You always wanted to be a Home mother?’

‘No. Only when…’

‘Only when your husband died?’

‘I…yes.’

‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘So when you say if you don’t sing your praises no one else will-it’s because you’re totally alone in the world?’

‘I have friends.’

‘Friends aren’t the same,’ he said softly. ‘I figured out that one early.’

‘When your mother died.’

‘As you say.’ He shrugged. ‘My grandparents and my mother died within two years of each other. It was pretty hard.’

‘I’d imagine it must have been.’ There was soft sympathy in her tone and he looked curiously across at her. She was sitting staring out into the moonlight, her face serene and calm. What she had said was an open invitation-to tell her all his troubles. Lay it all on her.

How many people had done that to her, he thought suddenly. Wendy was that sort of woman. It was an almost irresistible compulsion-to burden her with his needs…

Somehow he managed not to. ‘You haven’t finished telling me about you,’ he told her, and he received a surprised look for his pains. He was right, then. She was a woman who took on other people’s troubles and kept her own close to her heart.

‘What else do you need to know?’

He surveyed her thoughtfully. What else…?

‘How did your husband die?’

‘Car crash,’ she said briefly. ‘How else?’

How else indeed? There was a story behind this. ‘You sound bitter.’

‘Do I?’ She caught herself and managed a smile. ‘I shouldn’t be. It was a long time ago.’

‘It was a good marriage?’

Her breath sucked in at that. He’d overstepped the mark and he knew it straight off. ‘That, Mr Grey, is none of your business,’ she told him. ‘And there are better ways to be exercising your mind right now than by going over past history.’

He was still watching her-this lady with shadows. ‘Like what?’

‘Like, where are we going to sleep?’ Ever practical, Wendy’s mind closed completely to the nerve ends he’d just exposed. She’d learned long ago what to do when life slapped her in the face, or when something made her think of the past. She looked about her for what came next-and then she did it. Right now!

‘Mattresses,’ she said firmly, and he blinked.

‘Pardon?’

‘You can sleep in the house if you want,’ she told him frankly. ‘But I’m not. I’ll sneeze all night. We have Gabbie’s room habitable-just-but the rest of the house is an environmental nightmare. Air pollution two hundred and twenty per cent and rising, I’d guess. We’ve stirred up dust that hasn’t been touched for twenty years. I’ll sleep on a mattress out here, under Gabbie’s window so I’ll hear if she wakes.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want us to pick ourselves up and go to a hotel?’ he said almost desperately, and she grinned.

‘Where’s your sense of adventure, Luke Grey? Sleeping outdoors is good for the soul. Two mattresses and a couple of the quilts I thumped the living daylight out of, and we’re set for the night.’

‘But-’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said, exasperated. ‘You’ve brought me here, Luke. You’ve shown us our new home, and we’re here to stay.’

It was the strangest night.

They dragged mattresses outside and set them up with quilts. Wendy used the bathroom-cold water only-and then, when it was Luke’s turn, he came out to find she was already under her quilt and ready for sleep. There was nothing for him to do but follow-under his own quilt on his own mattress four feet away.

It was so different!

Since ending university, Luke had been accustomed to money. He’d studied commerce and law, and his brilliant mind meant he’d been employed before the ink was dry on his degrees. He’d moved straight into a world where money was counted in thousands-or millions-and he’d lived in five-star luxury ever since.

He’d almost forgotten his roots. He’d almost forgotten why his mother had fought for custody and fought to bring him back here. He’d forgotten there were things money couldn’t buy. Like this place. The sea air. The silence.

Now he lay on his back on the mattress, with his hands linked behind him, and he stared upward at the veranda roof and saw the frayed ends of rope where a swing had once hung. A swing his mother had pushed him on, over and over.

Gabbie could have a swing like that, he thought-and after Gabbie, Grace.

‘Tell me about Gabbie,’ he said softly, into the hushed silence where the murmur of the sea was the only sound for ever. There was no traffic noise which felt truly strange. Luke hadn’t slept without traffic noise for twenty years. There was only silence…and his companions. But he knew Wendy wasn’t asleep and he badly wanted to talk.

‘Gabbie doesn’t look five years old,’ he tried again softly. ‘And…she looks scared.’

‘Her story’s not very pretty,’ Wendy murmured into the dark, and he knew once more that she was considering him. Letting him off the hook if he didn’t really want to hear.

Hell, did she never think of herself? Where were Wendy’s needs in all this?

But she wouldn’t talk of herself. He knew that now.

Focus on Gabbie…

‘So what is her story?’ he probed, and she sighed.

‘If you really want to know.’