Fiona Harper - Be My Baby - Her Parenthood Assignment / Three Weddings and a Baby

Gaby would be livid with him. At least, she ought to be.

He frowned.

She should have given as good as she’d got earlier on—but she hadn’t. She’d just taken everything he had to hurl at her, yet again. She’d apologised and hadn’t even answered back. Why was that?

He turned and headed back to the car. A thorough soaking was not going to atone for his behaviour this afternoon. He was going to have to do some quick thinking to stop Gaby whizzing back up the motorway to London. He’d do anything to get her to stay.

His stomach bottomed out. She’d only been with them a few weeks, but the Old Boathouse without Gaby seemed a hollow prospect. Heather would be devastated if she left. And he wasn’t ready to handle his daughter without her yet. Strike that. More like he was too scared to handle Heather without her. What if he failed?

There was only one thing for it. He would have to convince her to stay. He needed her.

Luke hatched a plan on the way to collect Heather—who was surprisingly unfazed by the afternoon’s turn of events. She didn’t even mention how much she hated Jodi on the drive home.

Heather rushed into the house as usual, once they’d parked the car, but he took his time hanging his coat up and ridding himself of his dirty shoes. He had no idea what the atmosphere was going to be like inside.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Heather was pestering Gaby for home-made cake. But he needed a chance to talk to Gaby. Alone.

‘Heather, you can’t possibly be hungry already. You’ve only just had dinner.’

Heather gave him a ya-think? kind of look.

‘Anyway, it’s homework time.’ He picked up her school bag and handed it to her. ‘Finish your geography, and then we’ll talk about banana cake.’

She took the bag and sloped off in the direction of her room without saying a word. Too wary of spoiling her chances of cake to answer back, he supposed.

Gaby had her back turned to him, stirring something that looked like onions in a frying pan.

‘Gaby?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ She kept stirring and didn’t turn to face him.

‘Well, I just wanted to apologise…for what I said earlier. I shouldn’t have reacted like that, no matter what had happened.’

The stirring stopped. ‘It’s fine, Luke, really. You shouldn’t be apologising to me.’ The wooden spoon started moving again, slower this time. ‘It was my fault. I got it wrong.’

‘Well, actually…’He couldn’t stand talking to the back of her head any more. Three strides and he was across the kitchen, right next to her. He took the spoon out of her hand and rested it in the pan. ‘What I’m trying to say…’

Where had all his effortless charm gone? Before he’d gone away the right words would have been there, waiting for him to pluck them out of the air. Now it was an effort to string more than one or two together. At times like this he realised just how much polish had been sandblasted off him in prison. Especially when faced with a large pair of brown eyes with ridiculously long lashes.

He took a deep breath and started again. ‘What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t your fault, it was mine. And I’m truly sorry I spoke to you the way I did.’ He offered her the crushed letter he was holding.

Brown eyes that hadn’t looked away all the time he’d been talking now fluttered to the piece of paper in his hand. She took it from him and smoothed it out.

‘I found it in my coat pocket earlier. As I said, it really was my fault.’

She looked back at him. Something inside her seemed to swell, and then the shutters came down.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, blinking once. But he knew they were empty words. There was no sense of release, no closure. She broke eye-contact, picked up the spoon and toyed with the onions some more.

He didn’t move away, but watched her in silence. Then he realised he’d seen her do this before—shut herself away and gloss over something. He didn’t want this. He wanted her to shout, to cry—anything but smile and tell him everything was fine.

That was what Lucy had used to do. No, nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine. And it clearly had been anything but fine if she had been sleeping with her boss the whole time. He hated that word with a passion now.

It would do Gaby some good to admit what she was feeling, really let rip. He stepped back and rested against the counter. What the hell did he know? Letting rip was the only way he seemed able to communicate these days, and it wasn’t helping matters in the slightest.

Maybe Gaby was better off the way she was. He certainly couldn’t do the warm and fuzzy stuff she did.

He finally admitted defeat and headed upstairs for a shower. Maybe she just needed time to cool off. He shouldn’t expect her to snap out of it just because he was ready for her to.

When he came back downstairs, Gaby hadn’t moved. The onions had been joined by tomatoes and herbs and what looked like the start of a pasta sauce was bubbling away on the stove. She was stabbing rather violently at lumps of tomato to break them up.

‘That smells good. What is it?’ Oh, yeah, really smooth.

‘Just a basic tomato sauce I was going to add some things to. Tonight I was going to—’

Luke reached over and turned the knob on the stove to off. ‘Tonight, Gaby, you are going to sit down at that table, put your feet up, and take a night off cooking.’ He pulled out a chair and motioned for her to sit in it, which she did, a bemused look on her face.

‘But the tomato sauce—’

‘Will keep until tomorrow, won’t it?’

She nodded.

‘Great. I’m in charge of food this evening.’

She started to stand again. ‘No way! I’ve tasted your so-called cooking, remember?’

‘Trust me. You’ll live.’

He opened a bottle of wine and poured a glass for her. ‘First, you are going to sip this. Then you are going to have a long, hot soak in the bath while I make sure madam has finished her homework and gets ready for bed. Then we’ll eat. Deal?’

Gaby took a sip of wine and looked up at him through her lashes, evidently wary of this new, polite Luke. ‘Deal.’

Luke scraped the pasta sauce into a large bowl and left it to cool. He could feel Gaby watching him as he washed up the sauté pan. She must think he was ready to revert to his grumpy old self at any time.

He picked up a dish towel to dry his hands. Her teeth were biting the corner of her lip, as if she were trying to decide whether she should say something or not.

‘From now on I’m not going to call you Dr Armstrong. I’m going to call you Dr Jekyll.’

Luke grinned, and then he laughed. Even Gaby gave a reluctant smile and looked away.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said, and walked out of the room.

Gaby tried to turn the hot tap with her toe, but it was wedged fast. She swiped some of the bubbles away and reached forward to top up the bath with hot water.

Luke Armstrong was a surprise. It took a real man to be able to admit when he was wrong. David had raised his voice to her on a predictably regular basis, yet he had never once said sorry. How she’d ever thought he was a man worth sticking around for was a mystery to her. She shook her head and picked up a book to read while she waited for the water to go cold.

Later, as she was dressing in her comfy old tracksuit, she noticed the house was oddly quiet. She walked across to Heather’s bedroom, knocked gently on the door and turned the handle.

Heather looked up from the book she was reading. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi there. You’re being very quiet.’

‘I’m allowed to stay up fifteen minutes longer if I read quietly in bed. Luke…Dad said I could.’

Gaby smiled. It was great to hear Heather call him Dad, even if it didn’t yet fall out of her mouth naturally. She kissed Heather on the forehead. ‘I’ll be up later to turn out the light, okay?’