Rebecca Winters - Baby's On The Way!

The shock of a baby in the works had seemingly done nothing to quell his fierce imagination.

He jumped up at the turning of the lock and was brushing off his jeans when the door opened and Rachel appeared, looking a little pale. ‘Morning sickness, I guess,’ she said as she walked out. He nodded as if he understood, but beyond the fact that he knew pregnant women were sick sometimes he was pretty much clueless. For a start, shouldn’t it happen in the morning? He didn’t know the exact time—he hadn’t worn a watch since he was a kid. It was probably past eleven when he left his workshop. And he’d laid floorboards and half carried a pregnant woman up a flight of stairs since then. It was definitely well past morning.

‘Sorry, it took me by surprise. It’s not happened before,’ she continued, as clipped and professional as if he’d called by her office. He stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and gently turned her face up to him.

‘I borrowed your toothbrush,’ she blurted, and he guessed from the rosy blush of her cheeks she’d not meant to confess. He laughed, the re-emergence of her human side relaxing him.

‘No worries.’ He smiled at her. ‘I think we’re a little past worrying about a shared toothbrush.’ He was gratified by her small smile, but a little uneasy at how his own insides relaxed at the sight of it.

‘So what now?’ she asked as they hovered on the landing. She looked lost, smaller somehow, as if she was losing a grip on what it was that allowed her to present her usual polished, professional, vibrant face to the world. He knew what she was missing—her plan—but he couldn’t bring himself to look at it yet. Not even for her. But he could offer her a distraction, a plan for the next hour or so. He hoped it would be enough.

‘What about a walk on the beach? An ice cream and fish and chips—if you’re hungry.’

She nodded and he remembered the night they met, when he’d heard the clear chime of her laugh and seen it as a challenge to get her to make that sound as many times as he could. The prospect seemed a distant one right now. But he’d made a connection with her before. Felt her relax in his arms. If they could do that again, find the connection that had strung between them that night and held strong until the next morning.

‘A walk and an ice cream,’ she repeated. ‘I think I can manage that. I just need to change. Where...?’ She glanced around the landing and he felt a stirring heat inside him. He wanted to curse the gentlemanly instinct that had made him tell her that he had a spare room, and had him working through the night for the past couple of days to get it ready for her. Even if it meant that he was sleeping on a mattress on bare floorboards.

He shook away the tempting image of sharing a room with her, and concentrated on their maintaining civility for the time being. That they couldn’t even make it through a cup of coffee without fighting had shown him all too clearly how fragile this relationship was—how easily it could fall apart around them. He’d had no ulterior motive in inviting Rachel to come and stay. He really did want to get to know her better. Now he was starting to realise that he’d been hoping to get her to do things his way. To show her his way of life and hope that she would want it. This had shown him how precarious their situation was.

He pushed open the door to the guest room and stood back to let her past him. ‘This is yours,’ he said, even as he was turning away. He tried to brush past her—suddenly unable to think of being alone in a bedroom with her, and cursed the narrow doorway as he found himself pressed against her. He dropped his hands to her hips as he attempted to get by, but kept his eyes on their feet—determined not to be drawn in, not yet.

But the press of her body was electric against his, and her hair beneath his face smelt fresh and fruity. On impulse he lifted a lock of it, twisting it around his fingers. Rachel’s eyes snapped up to his, and for a long moment their gazes held. All sensible considerations threatened to fall away in the onslaught of her body on his senses. But he couldn’t give in to it. Couldn’t lose sight of all the reasons getting any more involved with her was an impossibility. Dropping her hair, and pulling his eyes away, he jogged down the stairs and leaned back against the wall as he reached the kitchen. It was starting to look as if his bright idea had been a huge mistake.

He returned upstairs with her suitcase and a glass of water. Reaching out to knock on the open door, he caught sight of Rachel, silhouetted by the window, looking out over the water. The light was catching her hair, highlighting every shade of chocolate and chestnut, and a subtle smile turned the corners of her lips. She looked almost dreamy, and at that moment he would have given just about anything to know what she was thinking. But his foot hit a creaky floorboard, and she turned around, her relaxed expression replaced by something more guarded.

‘This is beautiful,’ she said, glancing round the room as she took in the furniture he’d found, sanded, painted and waxed. The light he’d sculpted from a block of driftwood, and the seascapes painted by a local artist friend, mounted in frames he’d made in his workshop. But her eyes hovered on the evidence of his labour only briefly. Because they were drawn inexorably to the window, and out over the water. The window itself was an exercise in love and commitment. The product of arguments with planning authorities, and then wrestling with metres-long expanses of timber and glass, all to create this huge, unbroken picture of the sea. It was calm today, just a few white-crested waves breaking up the expanse of ever-shifting blue-green.

If he’d known beforehand, though, what it would have taken to get the thing finished—the hearings and the plans, and the revised plans and rescheduled hearings—he wasn’t sure that he could have started.

He handed Rachel the glass of water, and his gaze rested on her face rather than being drawn out to sea. Her eyelashes were long and soft, and brushed the skin beneath her eyes when she blinked. There were faint shadows there, he realised. He wondered whether they were new, or whether he’d just not seen them before. But he was struck by a protective instinct, the desire to look after her, ensure she was sleeping. Her hair had been pulled back into a loose tail—a style that owed more to her morning sickness than anything else, he guessed. The navy dress she wore wouldn’t have been out of place among the stiff suits at her office. His eyes finally dropped to her belly—still as flat as he remembered it, but where her child, their child, was growing. It seemed almost impossible that a whole life could be growing with no outward sign.

She turned, and must have caught the direction of his gaze, because her hands dropped to her tummy. She spread her fingers and palms, stretching the fabric flat against her, and then looked up and caught his eye.

‘Nothing to see yet,’ she said with a small, cautious smile. ‘It’ll be a couple more months before I start to show.’ He nodded again, as if he had the faintest clue about any of this. As if at the sight of her hands on her belly he wasn’t remembering the last time he’d seen her fingers spread across her skin like that. He held her gaze, wondering if she remembered, too. But she gave a little start, pulling back her shoulders and straightening her posture—leaving him in no way uncertain that if she was remembering, she wasn’t too happy about it.

‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ he said, giving her the space her expression told him she needed.

CHAPTER SIX

AS THEY STROLLED along the beach, Rachel felt the tension of the past few hours draining from her limbs, being replaced by the gentle warm glow of summer sunshine. They’d walked down the coastal path from the cottage, barely exchanging a word, but somehow the silence felt companionable, rather than awkward. She was taken aback, as she had been at the window upstairs, by the beauty of Leo’s home. It perched on a cliff above the beach, and even with the tarpaulin for a roof, and the building materials dumped in the yard, the way it nestled into the rock and sand, shutters on the outside of the window, even the way the front door reflected the colour of the sea all helped it look as if it were a natural part of the landscape, as if it had emerged from the Jurassic rocks fully formed and—almost—habitable.