Lynne Marshall - Single Dads Collection

‘And he left you.’

‘Mmm. I told him on Saturday morning, and on Saturday afternoon he packed up and moved out while I was at the supermarket. He left me with the flat, the rent was due and I had no money for food. He’d stopped my card so I couldn’t use it at the supermarket, and when I got home with no food after an embarrassing fiasco at the checkout, he was gone.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I came home. My father collected us and brought us home, my mother looked after Beth so I could go back to work until I had Freddie, and they’ve been fantastic. I don’t know what I would have done without them.’

Her voice was soft and matter-of-fact, but underneath he could sense a wealth of pain and he ached for her. He knew what it was to be unwanted, knew how it felt to be an unwanted child, and having heard her story he was more than ever sure that Beth and Freddie were better off without their father.

‘You don’t need him,’ he said, and she smiled.

‘I know. And you don’t have to sound so cross. He did me a favour, really. Without him I wouldn’t have had my children, and at least he had the decency to go off and leave us alone, instead of hanging around and being cruel…’

He felt his legs bunch. ‘He hit you?’

She laughed and shook her head, leaning over to push him back onto the sofa. ‘Relax. There are other ways of being cruel.’

Oh, yes. And he’d met many of them in his time. He relaxed back against the sofa and sighed, then patted the cushion beside him. ‘Come here.’

She hesitated a second, then she sat beside him, snuggling against his side as she’d done so very many times before. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said softly. ‘I see you on the telly and wonder how you are, if you’ll ever come back to Suffolk…’

‘And I have.’

‘Mmm. With Kizzy. I might have known you’d find a waif and rescue her. You were always a softie.’

He thought of Carmen, how she’d looked after she’d been attacked, and how she’d looked in the chapel at the mortuary, her young face finally at peace.

‘I don’t think I did her any favours,’ he said gruffly. ‘Maybe if I’d left her there, or handed her over to the aid agencies…’

‘Then what? She would have had a child and no way of supporting it except prostitution. Would you want that for her?’

He shook his head. ‘But she didn’t deserve to die.’

‘Of course not, but life’s a bitch, Harry. You gave her hope, gave her a home—and you’ve given her baby a home and a father, safety and security for the rest of her life.’

‘We have yet to survive it, of course,’ he said wryly. ‘Only time will tell.’

‘You’ll survive it.’ She tipped up her face and smiled at him, her hand coming up to cradle his jaw with gentle fingers. ‘You’ll be a wonderful father, Harry. Give yourself time.’

He nodded slightly, not sure if he could believe her but no longer really thinking about it, because her eyes were tender, her mouth was full and soft and, oh, so close, and without thinking, without giving himself time to analyse or argue or reason, he lowered his head and touched his lips to hers.

Oh, dear heaven, she tasted the same. All these years and he could remember her taste, her scent, the feel of her lips under his, the soft stroke of her tongue against his, the tiny sigh, the warmth of her breath, the frantic beating of her heart against his fingertips as his hand glided down over the hollow of her throat and settled against a soft, full breast, fuller than before, her body a woman’s now, lush and generous, the curves just right for his hand.

And he wanted her as he had never wanted her before, as an adult, a man who knew all the joys in store instead of a hormonal youth who simply hoped to find out. And the knowledge was almost enough to destroy his self-control, to push him over the edge.

But then, just as he was about to let her go, when his mind was already pulling back even as his hand curled against her breast, she lifted her head away, her eyes confused, and said, ‘Kizzy.’

Kizzy? What had Kizzy to do with it?

And then he heard her crying, her screams getting louder by the second.

He jerked himself to his feet, strode towards the door and bounded upstairs, his heart racing and his body clamouring to turn round and go back and finish what they’d started…

Emily sagged back against the cushions and lifted her hand to her lips. Had it really always felt that good? And if so, how on earth had they ever stopped?

She closed her eyes and waited for her heart to slow, listening to his voice, a soft rumble on the stairs as he carried Kizzy down. Her cries subsided for the moment, a cuddle enough to comfort her for now.

Emily nearly laughed aloud. A cuddle from Kizzy’s father was nothing like enough to comfort her. She wanted more—much more—but she’d be insane to let this crazy situation go any further, because whatever else she knew about Harry, she knew that Yoxburgh wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him for long.

He’d always talked about seeing the world—a result of his restless upbringing, trailing round the globe in the wake of his parents who had been too busy to pay attention to their little son. So although he’d never had their love, he’d had experiences in spades, and the wanderlust that was a part of his father’s make up was part of his also.

And so he’d go—maybe not now, maybe not for a while, but eventually, when it all got too dull and easy and the world beckoned. And she’d be left, broken-hearted as Pete could never have left her, because although she’d thought she’d loved Pete, she knew full well that an affair with Harry had the potential to bring her far more joy and far more sorrow than Pete could ever have done, because he’d never had that unerring capacity to touch her soul.

So she simply wasn’t going to go there, not now, not ever. And if they’d got scarily close on the night of his grandmother’s funeral, they weren’t getting that close again. No way. It was far too dangerous.

She could hear him in the kitchen, hear Kizzy starting up again, and taking a deep breath to steady her, she got to her feet and went through. ‘Want a hand?’

‘I’m OK,’ he said, his back to her and his voice tight.

Damn.

‘I’m going to do some work, then,’ she said, and went into the study and shut the door a little more firmly than was quite necessary, just to be on the safe side.

‘Oh, Kizzy, what did I go and do that for?’ he murmured, staring down at his tiny daughter with regret. ‘We were getting on so well, and now I’ve gone and screwed everything up, but she was just there, you know, and I just wanted to kiss her. Nothing else. What a silly daddy.’

He took the bottle out of her mouth and propped her up against his shoulder, rubbing her back until she burped gloriously in his ear, then he gave her the rest of the bottle, cuddled her for a minute and then took her back up, changed her and put her down in the travel cot Em had found in the loft.

Kizzy went out like a light, without a murmur, which left him nothing to do but go back downstairs and sit and watch the study door and wonder if Emily was mad with him.

He paused in Freddie’s doorway, staring down at the sleeping boy. He was huge compared to Kizzy, but he was still a baby really, his steps sometimes unsteady, his chin only too ready to wobble if things went wrong. Beth wasn’t that much older, either, but quite different, bright and beautiful and full of mischief, her sparkling eyes just like Em’s.

Beth was lying sprawled across the bed, too close to the edge, and he shifted her back and covered her again before heading downstairs with all the enthusiasm of a French aristo going to the guillotine.