Blind-Date Baby (16 page)

He stared out of the window and nodded. If she’d have thought him capable of it, she’d have said his heart was breaking. ‘I understand.’

It was better this way, it really was. She could raise a child on her own. She’d done it before when she’d been young and clueless, so she could do it again now she was older and clueless. But she couldn’t be the mum she needed to be if she spent every day living with Noah, knowing he didn’t love her, not even knowing if he
really
wanted this baby.

Suddenly, he spun around to face her and her breath hitched.

‘Don’t…don’t be in a rush, Grace. I don’t want to lose you and the baby. We’ve got that Paris trip, the book launch in a fortnight. Don’t go anywhere until after that. Please?’

Oh, yes. The book launch! Better not spoil that.

‘If you still feel the same way when we come home, then we’ll sit down and talk about it.’

Oh, he was being far too reasonable. She wanted him to shout, to tell her she was being ridiculous. She’d even settle for relief. Anything would be better than this
non
-reaction. Now was the time to tell him about his stupid spy character, see if she couldn’t hit him where it hurt.

‘I know what’s wrong with Karl.’

He looked momentarily off-balance. ‘Huh?’

‘Karl. Your super-spy? The reason you can’t make him work is
you
.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shook her head. Half of her had been hoping he’d tell her not to bother with this now, but he was like a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of his nose.

‘I mean, the reason you can’t get down to a deeper level with him is because
you
won’t go there. Karl is you, Noah. I’m surprised you can’t see it. He came out of your subconscious and he’s got your weaknesses.’

A look of sudden revelation passed across his face. Good. She hoped something positive would come out of this whole fiasco.

‘Until you break through that barrier you use to protect yourself from the world, you are never going to make Karl a convincing hero.’

Grace moved into the spare bedroom that night. Noah tried to insist she stay in the master suite, but she refused, telling him it had never really been her bedroom. She couldn’t face rattling round the house knowing Noah was doing the same, so she took herself—and Daisy’s laptop—off to bed early. She needed Dani and Marissa more now than ever. When it hit a time that she knew they might be online she sent out a distress call.

Grace make herself breathe deep and slow. Okay, here goes again. Stick to the relevant points. And after she’d filled them in…

Grace sat back and stared at the screen for a moment. If Noah could connect with his feelings…If she could accept what he offered and not want more…If she could be sure their child would be brought up in a loving and nurturing environment…

N
OAH
stood on the doorstep of Caz’s little cottage and rapped on the oversized lion’s head knocker. A short time passed and then a voice called, ‘It’s open!’ He pushed the glossy red door and discovered that it swung smoothly, despite its weight.

She was in the kitchen, cooking something odd-smelling. And that wasn’t the only thing that was odd. Caz was wearing cowboy boots, a long floaty hippy dress and had a feather stuck in her swept-up hair.

‘About time,’ was all she said when she saw it was him.

‘You know why I’m here, then?’

She nodded and motioned for him to sit down in a sturdy chair next to the bowed pine table. He did as he was told, but had to evict a large ginger cat from the spot first.

The small kitchen was filled with pots, pans, vases. Bits of free-standing furniture and bright hand-painted pottery on the walls. Half-dead herbs hung from an airer hoisted high over his head.

‘How can I make her stay?’

Caz stopped stirring what he now thought might be soup and looked at him. ‘Noah, you can’t make her stay. You have to give her a reason to stay.’

Damn. He was all out of reasons. And, on his own, he wasn’t
reason
enough.

‘I don’t know what to do, Caz. I want her to stay, but I can’t give her what she wants. I don’t
do
love. Never have. I have no idea how to explain how I feel about her because I don’t even know how to define it. Would
you
stay for that?’

She pressed her lips together and thought for a moment.

‘Love is more than words, Noah.’

‘I know that.’

‘Do you?’ she said, looking him up and down. ‘Really?’

The ginger cat made a reappearance and started rubbing itself on his calf. He tried to shoo it away, not by kicking, more by just nudging with his leg. Caz returned her attention to her soup and, after she’d flung in a few herbs, she nodded to herself, turned down the heat and covered it with a lid. Then she stood with her large bottom cushioning her as she leaned against the kitchen cabinet and folded her arms.

‘What’s one of the most important things an aspiring writer needs to learn?’

He racked his brain. What had been his weaknesses?

‘Spelling?’ he said hopefully.

Caz threw her head back and laughed. He’d expected a witch’s cackle but it was light and melodious. ‘Dig deeper.’

Why was everybody so fixated on digging? It was driving him mad. He was about to ask her as much when one of his hunches hit him and he blurted a phrase out before his conscious brain had even had a chance to give it the once-over.

‘Show, don’t tell.’

Caz nodded and beamed at him the way a proud teacher would reward her star pupil. ‘Exactly. You think about that.’

She turned and put the kettle on and, while she made them both a cup of tea, Noah tried to think about
show, don’t tell
. He came up with exactly nothing.

As if she could tell he was struggling, Caz took a different tack.

‘Now you’re going to be a daddy, you need to think about how a parent loves their child.’

He thought of his parents and also came up blank. Then he thought about Grace and how she would sacrifice everything for Daisy. And, finally, he thought about his own child, the one growing inside Grace, the one he may only get to see on alternate weekends if his wife decided to leave. That pounding, primal, protective thing surged through him again.

Oh.

He looked up at Caz, his mouth open. ‘I love that baby already. Even though I haven’t met it. Even though I don’t know what it will be like.’

She smiled and nodded. ‘Of course you do. It won’t matter what that child does or says. You will always love it. Always.’

Of course. Unconditional love.

And then another zap hit him. Boy, those hunches were coming thick and fast today.

That was Karl’s problem. The girl—the double agent—Karl loves her like that. And he lets her do what she does, even though he knows she’ll betray him.

The ginger cat suddenly bounded onto his lap, purred and curled itself up into a ball.

‘Yes. That’s it,’ Caz said. ‘Even when it hurts. Even when you lose a little piece of yourself in the loving.’

He understood that much, but…

He looked up at Caz as she peeked into her soup pot. ‘But how does this relate to Grace? How can I stop her leaving?’

The feather in her hair fluttered to the floor as she shook her head. ‘That’s for you to work out. But I’ll tell you this…There was a reason I let you buy my coffee shop. And it wasn’t so you could hurt Grace.’

Grace wasn’t in when Noah got back that afternoon and he found a note letting him know she’d gone for a walk. She
seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. Walking. Leaving the house to get away from him. He chucked his jacket over the back of the sofa and headed for his study.

Once there, he pulled a large pad of paper out of the drawer in his football-pitch-sized desk. It was time to make all these thoughts running round his head physical. Then they couldn’t shift and change, one second seeming one thing, the next another. And once he could see his thoughts in stark black ink, maybe he’d be able to make sense of them.

He flipped the pad open and stared at the vast white page. Plain paper had been a deliberate choice—no constricting lines or squares. His thoughts could flow where they needed, unhampered. When he’d finished, the page would be full of scribbled phrases and roughly drawn boxes with arrows sprouting out of them and words. Lots of words. Then he’d sit back and stare at it until he saw the pattern.

But the paper stayed blank. Empty.

Realising that he actually had feelings rather than just instincts had been a major breakthrough for him. But putting those feelings into vowels and consonants was still beyond him. He let out a dry laugh. He made his living creating something out of nothing, with words as his only tool. Why couldn’t he turn that skill on himself?

Maybe he could.

Maybe he just needed to take a step back and look at himself as he would one of his characters. Maybe he needed Post-it notes and coloured pens and index cards…He stood up and reached for the shelf that held all his supplies.

No.

That was just time-wasting. Procrastinating. Pen and paper would be enough.

He sat down again and wrote his name in the middle of the white space. Then he underlined it and drew a box round it, waiting for the ideas to start. When they did, he’d hardly be able
to scrawl fast enough to keep up, but there was always a moment like this when he sat in the silence and he feared they would never bulge over the lip of his subconscious and begin to flow.

The moment stretched and elongated. Noah’s heart began to race. What if they never came, what if—

His pen began to move.

Like he had done with Karl, he started with his past. But, instead of building a history to explain who his character was today, he deconstructed. He pulled the layers away, using his pen as a scalpel, until he could see what had made him this way.

He saw his parents—people who abhorred emotional displays of any kind, who valued stoicism. And he saw the boy who had tried so desperately to win their approval by squashing himself into that mould, even if it was a painful fit. A boy who grew up to go into the army at nineteen, who literally saw friends die in front of him. A young man who couldn’t let himself grieve because, if he’d let it out there and then, he’d have been no use at all to his regiment. So he’d shoved it all in a big hole and built a trapdoor over it.

His hand flew over the paper now, his usually neat writing becoming more angular, less uniform.

He’d carried all of that with him into his post-army life, into his relationship with Sara. Wow. He saw it now. What she’d said. Why she’d left. His glass wall wasn’t a barrier keeping him out, stopping him feeling what everybody else felt. It was a shell. A glass shell. His method of self-protection had been the cause of a lot of his unhappiness. It was still causing Grace’s.

Grace. How did this all relate to Grace? Because that was what was important now, not his own self-knowledge.

Show, don’t tell.

Had his actions communicated more than his words, even his own thoughts?

How had he treated Grace in the last few months? He
pushed his pad away and bit the end of his pen. Well, he’d practically manipulated her into marrying him for a start. It hadn’t been a conscious plan, but when he looked back on his actions now, it made him uncomfortable. Would she still have married him if she hadn’t been backed into a corner? What would she have done if she’d known, at the eleventh hour, he’d decided to try and negotiate for The Coffee Bean? He’d told himself he was doing it for her but, really, he’d done it for himself. Because he wanted Grace to marry him so badly he’d thought he needed a sweetener, something to keep her with him when the honeymoon was over—literally.

And what had he done after she’d pledged to join her life to his? He’d starved her of love and he’d drained her dry.

What else? What else have you done?

He’d tried to be a good husband, the best he knew how to be. It was a pity his knowledge on the subject had been so lacking. He’d only done stupid little things like bringing her dry toast in the mornings when she felt sick, or always making sure he came home with a choice of three different dinners every night. If he’d heard a song on the radio he thought she’d like, he’d bought her the CD.

These were all little things, but in the world of
show, don’t tell
they added up to something bigger. Noah’s spirits began to lift.

For goodness’ sake, he’d bought her a patisserie! Not his brightest idea, it turned out, but you couldn’t fault him for trying to give her everything she’d ever dreamed of.

What did all those things say?

He still didn’t know. And it was all churning around inside his head, making him feel claustrophobic. He left the study and headed for the garden. As he passed through the kitchen, he was shocked to see it was almost six o’clock and that he’d been holed up in his study for hours.

It was one of those balmy summer evenings that the
London suburbs did really well. The horizon was a gentle peach colour and a warm breeze made the trees whisper. His garden was large and rather beautiful, all clipped lawns and leafy trees. No credit to him; he’d inherited them from the previous owner—along with a rather cantankerous gardener who seemed to work different hours every week and had a habit of popping up unexpectedly and scaring the life out of him.

Noah walked across the patio and onto the lawn. There was a beautiful little bench just out of sight, tucked behind a large rhododendron, and he liked to sit there and stare out across the surrounding fields. However, when he got to the spot, he discovered the bench was occupied.

Grace was sitting in one corner. Not sprawled out, relaxing in the early evening sunshine, but hunched into an awkward shape, as if she was trying to physically keep herself together.

In that moment, before she turned and saw him, while a look of unbearable sadness passed across her features, Noah had the strongest hunch of his life. It hit him like an express train going full speed, and he stumbled with the impact of it.

He loved Grace.

With all his heart. With everything he had and everything he was.

That wasn’t a hunch, you dummy! It was a feeling. Just like all the other feelings you’ve been having, but your subconscious dressed them up in disguise and gave them another name so they were safe, so they were acceptable.

And, just like that, the trapdoor sprang open.

Memories and images and everything he’d pressed down and refused to feel for so many years tumbled into his brain. He ignored most of it and rummaged for things labelled
Grace
and
marriage
.

It wasn’t just a today thing either, this loving Grace. He’d loved her right from the moment he’d known she was
going to be his wife. Maybe even before that. The realisation made him gasp.

Grace, who had apparently been unaware of his presence, jumped up and spun around. ‘Noah!’

She was looking at him and he couldn’t say a thing. This was the face of the woman he loved. He needed to explore it afresh with his eyes, each familiar curve and line. God, she was beautiful. Of course he’d always thought that, but now…it wasn’t just about cheekbones and lashes and lips. It was three-dimensional.

She knew something was different, he could tell. Her eyes held a question. And, since words were still nowhere to be found, he answered it the only way he knew how. He closed the distance between them, pulled her into his arms and kissed her. At first she hesitated, but it wasn’t long before the old chemistry started to fizz and she joined him in a deep, hungry, searching kiss.

They made it as far as the conservatory before their patience ran out and the clothes started to come off. A blouse on the wicker chair, a shoe in the kitchen, her skirt left on the stairs, his shirt on the landing…

It was as if he’d been making love in the dark for years and somebody had just turned the light on. No longer was it just about pure physical sensation and muffled feelings he refused to set free.

Afterwards, he lay back and stared at the ceiling. If he’d known it could be like this, that he could feel like this, he’d have started searching for Grace twenty years earlier. Why, oh, why had he wasted all this time?

Even then he couldn’t bear any distance between them. He curled round her, dragging her to him, and she intertwined her arms with his and pulled them into her body and kissed his knuckles, his fingers, his palms. At first he was jubilant, ready to leap up and down on the bed and declare
his love for her, but then he started wondering why she’d let him make love to her in the first place, why she hadn’t shied away from him as she had done in recent days. There had been a poignant sweetness in her lovemaking today, almost a sadness.