The Accidental Family (2 page)

“Do you mind all this kissing, by the way?” Sophie asked him intently, silently cursing herself for her apparently boundless capacity to ask stupid and inappropriate questions that were far more likely to make a man fall out of love with a woman than in.

Louis laughed. “Like I said, I’m horrified. It’s dreadful kissing an incredibly beautiful woman for hours on end.”

“Are you being sarcastic?” Sophie thought it was best to double-check.

“Of course I’m being sarcastic! Good god, woman, I
love
kissing you!”

Sophie found herself smiling, her shoulders relaxing again as she let her torso lean into his, her thigh resting against the length of his.

“I do love the girls,” she said thoughtfully. The realization of that fundamental truth still shocked her, but it was inescapable. Two small, lost children had inspired emotions in her she had never believed possible—and the girls weren’t even hers. “I do love them. And I’d do anything for them but …” Sophie’s mouth went dry. Declarations weren’t really her thing and she’d already made one today, which was one more than she had ever made in her entire life, but still, now that she was here, she felt she had to say something important and
momentous
. “I came here for you, because I, you know, love you and stuff.”

“And stuff?” Louis repeated, his voice full of warmth.

“Yes, and stuff,” Sophie said, holding his gaze defiantly.

“Sophie.” Louis picked up her hand and stroked the back of it with his forefinger. “Thank you. Thank you for leaving your life in London to come down here for me. And I really mean that because I am stupidly, wholly, utterly grateful to you because I
love
you. I love you
and
stuff, if stuff is a requirement. I haven’t said it before now because for the last six hours and—” he checked his watch— “twenty-two minutes I’ve been wondering if you’re really here or if this is all some illusion I’ve conjured up for myself, because god knows, all I’ve done since we parted is daydream about having you near me.” Louis kissed the back of her hand. “But now that you’ve told me you love me ‘and stuff,’ I know it’s really you. Only the real Sophie Mills would say that. So maybe it is impossible for two people to fall in love after only a few months, and maybe we are crazy, but you being here has made me the happiest man this side of Plymouth and probably beyond. I love you, Sophie Mills.”

Sophie put her hand over his and felt tears in her eyes.

“I’m glad,” she said. “Because I would have looked like an awful idiot if you didn’t.”

“And look,” Louis told her earnestly, “I want you to know that I’m here for you all the time. The second you have a worry or a doubt or feel like freaking out because you’ve realized that no one wears high heels on a weekday round here, all you have to do is come to me and I’ll talk you down, because—”

“Louis.” Sophie stopped his mouth with her finger.

“Yes,” Louis said against her skin.

“Shut up and kiss me.”

One
Six months later

Scones and clotted cream are the devil’s work,” Sophie said out loud as she inspected herself in her latest pair of jeans. Technically she was still a size ten, but if she was honest, the almost daily trips to Carmen Velasquez’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe had pushed her hips to the size’s upper limit, something she’d have to sort out eventually, particularly if she really was going to wear quite so much denim.

Once, before Bella, Izzy, and their father had come into her life, Sophie had owned only one pair of jeans, which she hardly ever wore. She had been an occasion dresser, with a fondness for silk blouses on workdays and a rule that a heel should never dwindle below three inches. But since she’d come to stay in St. Ives, not only had she not bought a single pair of high heels, she’d collected four pairs of jeans, two denim skirts, an assortment of casual tops, and an anorak. Sophie loved her double-zipped weatherproof red and navy blue anorak, but it was a love that dare not speak its name, at least
not when she was on the phone talking to her erstwhile secretary and good friend Cal about her outlandish new life in Cornwall.

“Have you got any wellies yet?” Cal would ask her without fail during their weekly chats.

“Me, wellies, are you joking? I have some standards,” Sophie would tell him breezily. And then, hoping to change the subject, she’d try to engage him in some work talk. “Tell me what’s new, do you have new accounts—are things as bad in the city as they say they are?”

Cal, who was never that fond of bad news, would ignore her. “Wellies mean you aren’t coming back,” Cal took pleasure in telling her. “Wellies are a sign of commitment to your new way of life. Wellington boots are the nearest that you, Sophie Mills, will ever get to an engagement ring.”

“Thanks, Cal, thanks very much for boiling my entire romantic happiness down to rubber boots,” Sophie would reply. “Besides, what would you, the king of commitment phobia, know anyway? I might get married one day—anyway, I was thinking that if the big corporations are cutting back on parties to show how sorry they are, why don’t you target smaller firms? I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if the big guys haven’t got any money, then the little guys certainly don’t, but—bear with me—smaller events at discounted rates mean less work and less outlay—more accounts and only marginally reduced revenue. You should run that by Eve—you can tell her it’s your idea if you like.”

“Sophie, have you forgotten that you traded in the life of a corporate junkie to breathe in sea air and be fulfilled? I don’t need your ideas, I have ideas. I’m going after the pink pound. I’m much more interested in the idea of
you
getting married—you!”

Trying not to feel hurt that Cal had rejected her idea so entirely, Sophie gazed out her bedroom window at the gray and stormy sea beyond the harbor below. Before she’d left London to come here,
she had never once daydreamed about getting married or being a bride. But during the last six months she’d spent with Louis, she felt like a different person, no, a different version of herself, the self she might be if she were living in a novel or a film. The happy-ending self. And if you were the sort of person who believed in happy endings, then you knew they always came about with a wedding.

“To Louis?” Cal persisted.

“Potentially.” Sophie’s mouth curled into a smile meant only for herself. “One day, you know …when the time is right.”

“Wellies first.” Cal was adamant. “Once you’ve bought the wellies, then he’ll finally know you’re committed and he’ll ask you. That’s what he’s waiting for.”

But as of yet there were no Wellington boots in the wardrobe in Sophie’s room at the Avalon B & B, and at six months she was the second-longest-staying guest, second only to Mrs. Tregowan, who had been there for nearly a year since her husband died and she had decided she couldn’t bear to go back to her bungalow without him.

Sophie had arrived in the Cornish town of St. Ives in the spring. Fully experiencing the burgeoning season and embracing the renewal of life, she’d felt herself awaken to the unknown possibilities that the future might hold. On weekend mornings she and Louis had waded in the freezing waters of the harbor with the girls until her soft city toes turned blue, collecting interesting shells and bits of pottery. Sophie had let the cool, crisp sea breeze ruddy her cheeks and whip her fine blond hair into a tangle. As they climbed over the rocks and stones to the harbor wall, Louis would hold her hand in his, reviving her numb fingers with his body heat until she felt the blood tingle and throb in the tips.

She had stayed for the whole fickle summer, which had been a stretch of warm, rainy days occasionally studded with jewel-like
ones bathed in sunshine. During the summer holidays, when Louis was working on building up his fledgling photography business, the girls gave her their own personal tour of the town they’d grown up in. Picnicking among the clover and daisies in the meadow above the whitewashed town that seemed to be perched so haphazardly on the rocky cliffs that tumbled to the sea, dodging the tourists for the roller disco that took place at midday in the guildhall, which Sophie found both exhilarating and humiliating in turn. They took her to the Tate Gallery and showed her the paintings that had been their mother’s favorites, Bella lecturing her confidently about light and perspective. They led her in and out of the maze of tiny cobbled streets, showing her their favorite houses, their window boxes laden with geraniums. And in the evenings before bed, after Louis had got home from that day’s assignment, they’d walk along the harbor wall until they found the family of seals that was always there, lounging on the rocks just out to sea as if they rather enjoyed their celebrity. Izzy would give the seals a new name every day and Bella would tell Izzy stories about them.

For most of that time, Sophie hadn’t thought about the career she’d left behind. It was as if she had finally put her foot on the brake of her life, which had been careering recklessly toward a final goal that she had never been sure of, and taken a moment to look around and feel what it meant to be alive in the world. And then in the last couple of months she’d started to feel restless and irritable. For a while she’d worried that she wasn’t madly in love with Louis after all, and that the whole escapade had been a terrible mistake. But then one evening as they’d strolled along the seafront, the girls bounding along ahead of them, Louis had turned to her and said, “You’re not happy, Soph, and I know why.”

“I am so happy,” Sophie had replied, panicking. “Look at me. I’m delirious!”

“You’re bored,” Louis said, smiling while squeezing her fingers.

“Bored? How could I be bored with this, with you and those two?” She nodded at the girls, who were screaming in delight as the seagulls dive-bombed them, trying to steal their chips.

“Look, it’s okay, you know. I mean I know that I am endlessly fascinating and deeply sexually satisfying and that holding a conversation with either of my daughters is just as intellectually rewarding as reading Shakespeare—but if you need something more in your life, that’s cool. Something just for you. It doesn’t mean you don’t love us or want to be here. It just means you want to be you, and as it’s you I love, I’m all for it.”

“Something just for me,” Sophie mused. “You mean something apart from cakes.”

“Sophie, you’re a doer—a woman with ideas who makes things happen. And I don’t think that includes making beans on toast for the girls’ tea. Look, there’s no high-finance or six-figure jobs around here—but you should look for something to get your teeth into, like Carmen did with the tea shop. Think about it. I guarantee there is something in this town that needs Sophie Mills’s magic touch. And I’m not just talking about my—”

“You’re right!” Sophie had exclaimed in relief. “That’s what’s missing. I need a thing. A thing to do, that’s it! Oh, but what?”

“I can’t answer that, but I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” Louis told her.

“You really know me, don’t you?” Sophie turned to him, tugging at his fingers to bring him a little closer. “I think you might be the first person ever to really get me.”

Louis had smiled at her and kissed the tip of her nose.

“Well, someone’s got to,” he’d said.

Now it was late September and things had stayed more or less the same since the week she’d arrived, a charming mixture of novelty and routine combined with the kind of happiness she had never felt before and the sense that this wasn’t really her life she was
living after all. It couldn’t be. She felt as if she were walking through the pages of a romance novel or had suddenly been given the lead role in a movie, because real life was never this easy.

She saw Louis and the girls every day. Since the new term had started, she’d been taking the children to school now that Izzy had turned four and joined the kindergarten at Bella’s school. And every other afternoon she would pick Izzy up at 1:00
P.M.
and they would go to Carmen Velasquez’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe for a snack before returning to school to fetch Bella at 3:15. Then they’d go for a walk on the beach, making sand castles and chasing each other with lumps of slimy seaweed if it was sunny enough, or hang out making things from dried pasta at Louis’s house if it was rainy. And just occasionally they’d partake of a second snack at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, as it didn’t seem fair that Bella had missed out.

In the evenings, after the girls were in bed, Sophie and Louis would sit in front of the electric fire he kept swearing he was going to replace with a period fireplace to match the house’s Victorian exterior and laugh and talk and share news and hold hands and do a great deal of kissing. And most nights the kissing would lead to touching and the touching would lead to the most wonderful and dazzling sex Sophie Mills had ever known. Louis’s sofa had seen a lot of action over the last six months, and his rug had seen a great deal more. But to date, Sophie had never stayed the night.

“I am fairly sure you could sleep over if you wanted to,” Louis had said one night as the two of them lay sprawled in front of the fire, which they had switched on for old times’ sake even though it was August and one of those rare swelteringly hot nights. He traced a finger along the curve of her breast, which shimmered in the firelight. “I’d love to go to sleep with you, Sophie,” he murmured. “And wake up with you. I’d like to see you in the morning with your hair all tangled and sleep creases in your cheeks. I’d like to
have sex with you in the morning, while you’re still half dreaming and biddable.”

“Well, you’d be unlucky,” Sophie told him as she stretched, wriggling because the rug was a nylon mix and a bit itchy on her skin. “Because I sleep like a princess and I never get tousled or creased. Besides, I am only ever biddable when I want to be, which might be right now if you play your cards right.”

“Stay over,” Louis asked her gently, kissing her shoulder. “Please.”

“I can’t, Louis. What would they think?” Sophie said, pointing at the ceiling. Bella and Izzy were fast asleep upstairs.