MacAllister's Baby (19 page)

He was so in love with her that he’d give up every single thing he had achieved just to have her love him back.

‘Angus, sit down,’ she said when she returned with the kit. ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’ She took him by the elbow, as if she were the stronger of the two, and guided him to a chair. ‘You’re bleeding like crazy. What did you do?’

‘I dropped a knife. I’m fine.’ He looked down and was surprised to see blood dripping from his fist. He opened his hand and heard Elisabeth’s sharp intake of breath at the sight of the long slice down the pad of his thumb.

‘I think we need to get you to a hospital,’ she said.

‘No need. I’ve had worse.’ He took a roll of cotton wool from her and bound it tightly around his thumb. Blood bloomed through it immediately. He wound it thick and gave the end of it to her to cut.

Her movements were careful. She bit her lip in concern. He loved her and she might be carrying his baby.

Finished cutting, she glanced up and her forehead furrowed. ‘Angus, you’re looking at me very strangely. I think you’re in shock.’

‘A little bit,’ he said. ‘But it’s a good sort of shock.’

Her frown deepened. ‘Right. I’m taking you to a hospital. I don’t like the way you’re acting.’

If he didn’t talk fast, he was going to end up explaining to a doctor that he was lovesick.

‘No. I’m fine, Elisabeth. I’ve done this a few times before, remember? I don’t need stitches and I’m not going to faint. And, besides, the kids need us here.’

She gazed at him, considering.

Did she love him? Could she love him? What could he do to make her love him?

‘All right,’ she said finally, ‘but if that doesn’t stop bleeding soon we’re going no matter what you say.’

‘I love it when you get all authoritative with me.’

That, apparently, was typical enough so that she relaxed a little and sat down on a chair beside him. ‘You’re having an off-day today—first you were late, and now you’ve cut yourself.’

‘It has been a very unusual day,’ he agreed. ‘I’m going to have to be more careful.’

He’d have to take it slowly, build up trust between them. If he told her he loved her out of the blue, she wouldn’t believe him. He could lose her.

He waited until both of the kids were wholly focused on their cooking, and he caressed the soft skin of her cheek with his uninjured hand, savoured the way she leaned into his palm just for a moment before discretion demanded he take his hand away.

She was so precious. And he’d never convinced anybody to love him before. He’d tried once upon a time with his parents, but that had never worked.

‘I’ll be very careful,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any more scars.’

She lay on fragrant moss under the dense trees of a forest. The leaves above her moved with a sound like gentle breath, giving her glimpses of hidden stars. All around her, quiet life: sap in trunks, water in grass, fireflies blinking their way.

This was what her parents had fought for. All life one life, all earth together, united in love. This was what she had read about, seeing the images in her head with the clarity of a dream.

Something like a breeze feathered over her body, stirred her skin into life. She closed her eyes in pleasure, opened her eyes again into daylight, and was awake.

Angus lay behind her in his bed, his body curled into hers. She could feel his breath on the back of her ear and his hand feathering over her skin. Leisurely, so lightly that he felt like the breeze she’d dreamed about, his right hand travelled over her belly, up to hold her breast, tease her nipple. Then to the other breast, and then down the line of her waist and hip, between her legs.

A lazy Sunday morning making love. She made a little cosy sound to let him know she was awake, and nestled further back into him. The lean length of his body surrounded her; a slight shift, and he was sliding inside her. He’d been awake, she thought with a sleepy smile, he’d planned to wake her up like this.

He nuzzled her hair aside and kissed the back of her neck as he moved deeper inside her. ‘Good morning, beautiful,’ he whispered. She pushed her bottom back, took the entire length of him in, and he held her there for a moment.

She felt full, content, whole, excited. Kept safe in the circle of Angus’s arms, his strong body behind her, the two of them joined. As she’d felt held by the forest in her dream.

He found her clitoris with his fingers and stroked her gently, to a slow rhythm that he soon matched with his body. Exquisite caresses, inside and out. She reached behind her and touched his lean hip, his hair-roughened thigh. Because she couldn’t see him her fingertips seemed doubly sensitive.

‘You are the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever had,’ Angus murmured in her ear.

He’d awakened her in so many ways. She arched into him, tightened her muscles around him, tried to get him still deeper. He was slow and gentle and tender. Elisabeth closed her eyes and imagined him in her dream forest with her. Weaving his magic with his body.

Behind her closed eyes everything was green, vibrant, alive. She felt his breath on the skin beneath her ear and her nipples tightened, her skin tingled. Her body reached for its climax in slow, maddening steps.

And she could feel Angus getting closer, although his movements stayed unhurried. She’d learned him after all these times making love. His breathing was faster, his thigh hot and hard beneath her hand, tensing with every slow thrust. She pictured his face as she’d seen it before, teeth clenched, eyes narrow and dark as he fought to keep control of the overwhelming pleasure. Waiting for her, trying to give her the best he could, relishing every second of the build-up and anticipation.

But it had built. She was nearly there. She tightened her hand on his thigh and squeezed his penis hard inside her. ‘Come with me,’ she said, and heard him take a great shuddery breath and then let it out as a cry as he thrust hard, once, pulsed and she pressed back against him, thrashing her head in her own orgasm.

He held her close as their breathing slowed, and then she twisted her head back and kissed him. When she opened her eyes she saw his grey ones looking back at her, steady and intense and with something in them she didn’t quite understand.

He’d been looking at her like that a lot this weekend. As if he were searching her. Assessing her.

Elisabeth turned back around. Nestled in his embrace, she should feel safe, as she had a moment before. But she didn’t, not quite.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

‘About eight.’

‘Do you have to work today?’

‘Magnum for ten.’ His voice sounded sleepy and sated.

‘It’s my turn to make you Sunday breakfast in bed.’

He grunted, and she could hear he was smiling. ‘Don’t burn it.’

She sat up and swatted him on his bare shoulder. ‘It’s not my fault I’m an appalling cook. Blame my teacher.’

‘I’ll find him and shoot him after breakfast.’ He caught her wrist and pulled her down with him for another kiss. Angus was warm with sleep and lovemaking. She relaxed into him for a blissful minute, and then got up.

‘Thanks, love,’ he mumbled into the pillow.

She looked at him as she pulled on the jeans and shirt Angus had taken off her last night. His eyes were closed and the dark lashes fanned his cheeks. The skin of his eyelids was soft-looking, vulnerable. His hair was tousled, his cheeks touched with pink. His left hand, curled by his chin, had a blue catering plaster around its injured thumb.

Despite the breadth of his shoulders, the muscles of his arms, the hair scattered across his chest, he looked like a young boy. Innocent and contented. She smiled and went down the stairs and into the kitchen.

Confronted with Angus’s kitchen, she doubted her ability to cook breakfast. Everything was stainless steel and spotless granite. The utensils that hung from the walls resembled instruments of torture. There were so many cupboards and drawers that it would probably take her hours to find what she wanted. Whatever that might be.

Flicking through the TV channels one night she’d seen one of his cooking shows from his last series. It had been filmed in this room. Angus had whipped up something amazing in no time whatsoever and made it look incredibly easy. Whereas she thought that, in this kitchen, she would be doing well if she could manage to boil water without breaking something.

With the thought, she smiled. Angus’s favourite food: boiled eggs and toast soldiers. That, she could handle.

She unlocked the back door and went out to the back garden to the chicken coop, which was tucked away in the back corner of the garden. He’d told her he bribed the neighbours with fresh eggs and baked goods made with them so they wouldn’t mind the noise of his two chickens. Apparently he was out here at all hours after work mucking out so there wouldn’t be an odour.

Keeping chickens in London. It was completely impractical, especially for a man who worked every hour God sent.

She said hello to MacNugget and Kiev in their run, unlocked the door to the coop, and found two eggs warm in the nest. On the way back to the kitchen she thought of Angus warm in his bed.

And suddenly she understood why he went to all the trouble of keeping the chickens.

Food is emotion,
he’d told her. Danny and Jennifer loved foods that reminded them of times before their troubles had begun; Elisabeth remembered what she was eating when she’d discovered her favourite escape. Angus’s favourite meal was the only one he could remember having been cooked for him growing up.

Angus MacAllister kept an egg factory in his back garden just so he’d never go without the comfort he’d felt, briefly, all those years ago.

The thought made her want to run upstairs and kiss him. But if food was emotion, boiled eggs and toast soldiers would show how she felt about him much more than kisses would.

She put the eggs carefully on the counter and searched for several minutes until she found a small pan. She glimpsed a strange assortment of appliances in the cupboards, but nothing overtly resembling a toaster. Considering he went to all the trouble of keeping chickens, odds were he had a toaster, too, but she decided not to waste her time looking for it when the grill would do for toast. She filled the pan with water, put the eggs in, located the timer on the cooker, and starting hunting for bread and butter.

Ten minutes later, she opened the freezer in desperation and found about a million ice-cube trays and three containers of chocolate ice cream. No sliced white bread, the staple of most households the length and breadth of Britain.

‘Shop,’ she said to herself. Fortunately it was easy to find her shoes and handbag, abandoned by the front door last night, and Angus’s keys in the bowl in the hallway. She stepped outside.

Elisabeth wasn’t sure what direction a shop was in, but, figuring in central London any direction would lead her to one eventually, she locked Angus’s door behind her and turned left up the street.

The weather was bright and sunny. There was a gentle breeze that ruffled her hair as she walked. The plane trees that lined the street rustled their leaves like the trees in her dream this morning.

Dreams, poetry, novels: they all had hidden meanings, messages you could puzzle out if you chose. She’d found that idea endlessly fascinating at school, as if there were a secret code in a book waiting for her to discover it. She thought of her dream this morning of being in a night forest, held close, and how it had turned out to be Angus touching her, making morning love.

Why a forest? she wondered idly, swinging the ring of keys from her fingers, enjoying the chiming sound they made. It wasn’t a memory; she’d spent plenty of time in Canadian forests, but this hadn’t been like that. It had been quiet, supernaturally green, friendlier than the wilderness of Saskatchewan. An enchanted place.

Like the setting of the play she was teaching at school.

She stopped the keys swinging, silenced their music. That was what she’d dreamed. Shakespeare’s magical forest in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
where mortals were tricked into falling in love.

And she’d dreamed it because that was happening to her.

Despite all her worries, all her promises to herself to keep herself safe. She was falling in love with Angus.

The way she felt cherished. How she wanted to spend every moment with him. Even this symbolic, emotional breakfast she was about to cook for him.

She was falling in love with him and she should have recognised the signs from her time with Robin, from all the books she’d read, should have recognised and stepped back before she lost so much control that she could only understand what was going on when she was told by her dreams.

She’d reached a corner shop; caught up in her thoughts, she pushed on the door. When it didn’t budge she focused her eyes and saw there was a young woman on the other side of the glass. ‘Pull,’ mouthed the woman, smiling. Elisabeth pulled the door open and stood aside to let the woman past.

She held the hand of a little blond boy, a toddler. He had his arm clasped around a plastic bottle of milk, his face screwed up with the concentration required not to drop it.

‘Thanks,’ said the woman, picked up her son, and walked down the street with him in her arms. Elisabeth watched them go.

Mine would have been that age now,
she thought.

Two years on, it hurt less. It had to. But she still marked it with children she saw, charted the growth that wouldn’t happen.

Angus had said he wouldn’t do what Robin had done. But Robin had been the least of what she had lost. She’d lost her baby, lost her hopes, lost a part of herself she’d never seen again.

And here she was jumping right back into love.

The woman and the child rounded the corner out of sight. Elisabeth went into the shop and found a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread on the dim shelves and a cube of butter in the chill cabinet in the back. She waited at the till behind an elderly man who was laboriously unloading a basketful of cat-food tins onto the counter.

Her gaze wandered around the shop without taking anything in, finally settling on the piles of newspapers by the counter. Automatically, her arm stretched out to pick up the thick paper she normally read on a Sunday, stacked beside the tabloids.