Liz Fielding: Her Ideal Husband

“You’re perfect.”

Nash put his arm around her waist and did what he’d wanted to do since he’d first set eyes on her. He kissed her. Hard and sweet.

Behind him, Clover was standing in the doorway, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Oh, hell! What had she seen? Say something…anything….

“Is Nash going to be my new daddy?”

Stacey managed a laugh. “New daddy?” she repeated, unable to look at Nash.

“He was kissing you.”

“Oh, yes, well, Nash was trying to cheer me up,” she improvised.

Clover didn’t look convinced. “When Sarah Graham’s mummy was cheered up like that, Sarah had a new daddy and a new baby sister.”

Oh, great. Stacey finally looked at Nash, hoping for a little assistance.

“Would you like a baby sister?” he asked Clover.

Born and raised in Berkshire, U.K., Liz Fielding started writing at the age of twelve, when she won a hymn-writing competition at her convent school. After a gap of more years than she is prepared to admit to, during which she worked as a secretary in Africa and the Middle East, got married and had two children, she was finally able to realize her ambition and turn to full-time writing in 1992.

She now lives with her husband, John, in West Wales, surrounded by mystical countryside and romantic crumbling castles, content to leave the traveling to her grown-up children and keeping in touch with the rest of the world via the Internet.

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The Bachelor’s Baby

#3666

Her Ideal Husband

Liz Fielding

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

NASH GALLAGHER knew he was crazy. He hadn’t intended to stay. He was just passing through, stopping for a last look at the garden before the bulldozers moved in. Keeping a promise to an old man.

It had been a mistake.

Somehow he’d expected it to be the way it was in his memory. Everything ordered, everything perfect, the one place he had always been sure of in a confusing world.

Stupid.

Gardens weren’t static things.

The walled kitchen garden might have survived the break-up of the estate, but the small garden centre his grandfather had run from it had been closed for nearly two years. Everything had run to seed, gone wild...

He dragged a hand over his face in a vain attempt to obliterate the image. He’d sworn he wouldn’t fall for his grandfather’s attempt at emotional blackmail, but maybe the old man knew him better than he knew himself.

It was the peach trees that did it.

Remembering how, when he was a boy, he’d been lifted up to pick the first ripe fruit, the taste of it, the juice running down his chin...

The memory was so strong that Nash rubbed his chin against his shoulder, as if to wipe the juice away, then he angrily pulled away a handful of the weeds that crowded against an ancient trunk, choking it.

Stupid. In a few weeks it would all be gone.

But the old trees were covered with small fruit, swelling in the sudden burst of hot weather, refusing to give up despite the lack of pruning, despite the thick choking weeds at their roots. Like his grandfather, they refused to give up in the face of the inevitable. He couldn’t leave them like that.

He wanted the men with the bulldozers to know they were smashing something that had once been cared for. It wouldn’t take long. He could spare a day or two for the peach trees.

Except it wasn’t just the peach trees.

There were the greenhouses with their old coke stoves and hot pipes. A wonderful place to play when it was too cold outside. A magic place full of warm, earthy scents.

It still was, despite the damage. A thin cat had given birth to a litter of kittens behind the stove. He’d spotted her once or twice, flashing through the long grass with some small creature clamped in her jaws and, as he stood there, the bravest of the kittens ventured out amongst the broken glass that littered the floor.

He moved it out of harm’s way and then reached for an old broom. He was sweeping up the broken glass, wondering at how swift nature was to reclaim its own, when a ball blasted him out of the past as it smashed through the roof and he swore volubly as the fine shards showered him and sent the kitten flying back to safety of the nest.

For a moment he stared at the ball, big, bright red, intrusive, and an unexpected fury boiled up in him. People were so damned careless. Didn’t they know, didn’t they understand how long this had been here? Care about the generations of men who’d spent their lives working, harvesting, loving the place as he did?

He shook the glass out of his hair, carefully peeled off his T-shirt, then bent to pick up the ball, intent on telling the idiot who’d kicked it without a thought for the consequences, exactly what he thought of him.

‘Mummy, Clover’s kicked the ball over the wall again!’

At the most trying stage of refitting the handle to a freshly painted door, Stacey couldn’t do much about her youngest daughter’s plaintive cry, other than put her on hold.

‘Tell her she’ll have to wait,’ she called back as she tried to juggle the handle and the screwdriver at the same time as fitting a screw with a life of its own into the hole. There were times, she felt, when two hands were simply not enough. But then, she had never been much use at this sort of thing.

Give her something solid to work with, a spade or a hoe, and she was perfectly at home. She could double-dig a vegetable plot, build a compost heap without raising a sweat. But put a screwdriver in her hand and she was all fingers and thumbs.

Not just a screwdriver. She wasn’t much use with a paintbrush. There was more paint on her clothes and her skin than there was on the door.

‘Mummy!’

‘What?’ The screw took advantage of this momentary distraction to make an escape bid. It hit the quarry-tiled floor, bounced once and disappeared beneath the dresser. Stacey only had four screws, the ones she’d taken out of the door plate when she’d removed it. Now she’d have to strip the dresser of china before she could move it and retrieve the wretched thing. Great. She dug screw number two out of her pocket, then remembered that her daughter wanted her for something. ‘What is it, Rosie?’

‘Nothing.’ Then, ‘Clover says not to worry, she’ll climb over and get it herself.’

‘Right,’ she muttered, through teeth clamped around the handle of the screwdriver. If she could just get one wretched screw in place everything would be easier. She jammed it hard into the hole so that it stayed put while she retrieved the screwdriver and then realised what Rosie had said. ‘No!’

As she spun round to make sure she was obeyed, the metal plate pivoted on the screw and gouged an arc out of the freshly painted surface.

For a moment Stacey stared at the scarred paintwork, too shocked even to let slip the kind of word that mothers weren’t supposed to know, let alone say.

Actually, she felt like screaming, but what would be the point? If she succumbed to the temptation to give in to her feelings and scream every time something went wrong, she would be permanently hoarse. Instead she dropped the screwdriver back into the toolbox, took a deep breath and, doing her best to keep calm, walked out into the garden.

It was not the end of the world, she told herself. She would get there one day. She would finish the kitchen. She would tile the bathroom. She would fix the guttering and decorate the dining room. She would do it because she had to. The house was unsellable the way it was. She’d tried it.