Loe raamatut: «His Baby!»

To my sister and brother-in-law—the learned (and learning!) Tracey, and her gourmet husband, Mick Maguire

CONTENTS

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘WELL, that’s that!’ Mrs Hamilton put the phone back on the hook and smiled at Daisy. ‘Matt’s coming home for Christmas!’

Daisy had thought that the call might have been for her. Her mother was away, waiting for Daisy’s sister to have her first baby. Never in her wildest dreams would she have thought that Matt was coming home.

But wasn’t that what she’d wanted, been secretly hoping for—ever since Patti had died? That Matt would come home and make everything right in Daisy’s world?

Matt.

Her heart pounded with excitement. ‘He is?’ she queried breathlessly, suppressing a great whoop of joy. ‘Oh, but that’s wonderful!’

Mrs Hamilton smiled. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘How long for?’

‘He didn’t say exactly. But apparently he’s going to be working in London for a few months before going back to the States. He wants to oversee a few property deals here.’

London? A ripple of excitement whispered its way down Daisy’s spine. If Matt was working in London, then he would only be a couple of hours away by car—giving her plenty of opportunities to see lots of him, surely?

‘He’s bringing Sophie with him, of course,’ continued Mrs Hamilton. ‘So we’ll need to get hold of a cot from somewhere.’

‘And I haven’t even bought them a Christmas present!’ said Daisy in dismay. ‘When is he arriving?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘That soon?’ But that was Matt for you—man of action.

‘Mm,’ said his mother. ‘You know Matt; once he’s made his mind up about something, he doesn’t hang around. The flight from New York gets in to Heathrow mid-afternoon and he’s arranged for a hire-car to meet him and then he’ll drive straight here.’

‘Did he sound very ... upset?’ asked Daisy tentatively, but Mrs Hamilton shook her head emphatically.

‘No. That’s the extraordinary thing; he didn’t. He sounded just like Matt.’

So outwardly, at least, he wasn’t playing the grieving widower, thought Daisy. But hadn’t Matt always been a past master at keeping his feelings hidden beneath that devastating exterior? You never really knew what was going on behind those clever grey eyes or that coolly enigmatic smile. Daisy had once overheard one of his countless girlfriends complaining bitterly to him, ‘You’re nothing but a machine, Matt Hamilton—a beautiful, unfeeling machine!’ And Daisy had jealously listened to his low, mocking laughter, his murmured reply, then silence, and had known that the ‘unfeeling machine’ was kissing his willing victim into submission.

‘He must be feeling terrible,’ said Daisy slowly. ‘But I’d imagine he’d be very brave about it all; he always was brave, wasn’t he? And it must have been the most awful thing in the world—his wife dying and leaving a tiny baby behind.’

Mrs Hamilton narrowed her fine grey eyes and gave a tiny frown. ‘It must have been unspeakable. I just wish that he’d shared his grief with us, instead of staying on in New York with Sophie. But nothing changes the fact that I always thought that it was the most unexpected of marriages,’ she said, with her familiar candour.

Daisy looked at her, open-mouthed, in amazement. ‘You don’t honestly believe that? What man wouldn’t want to be married to a woman like Patti Page? International rock stars who look like top models aren’t exactly ten-a-penny!’ she added, unable to keep the trace of wistfulness out of her voice as she remembered Matt’s stunning wife.

‘For which we must be thankful,’ said Mrs Hamilton drily, still smarting over the fact that her only son hadn’t invited her to his wedding.

And then an awful thought occurred to Daisy. ‘Mrs Hamilton,’ she said slowly. ‘You won’t tell him, will you?’

‘Tell him what?’

Daisy blushed. ‘You know very well.’

‘That you’ve foolishly chosen to leave school without taking any exams, thereby kissing goodbye to a promising career in mathematics? Is that what you don’t want me to tell him, Daisy?’

Daisy’s colour heightened even further. ‘Er—yes,’ she said, for once uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘You know what Matt can be like.’

‘I most certainly do. And, knowing Matt, I expect he’ll find out whether you want him to or not.’

Daisy raised her rather square chin with determination, and her hair shimmered in a silky golden-brown curtain all the way down her back. ‘Then we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t find out. Now, shall I go and get his room ready for him?’

Mrs Hamilton smiled at her affectionately. ‘Would you, dear? I think we’ll put him in the blue room, shall we?’

The dreaded blue room. Daisy gritted her teeth as she remembered that dawn morning a year and a half ago, when she’d spotted a scantily clad Patti Page creeping out of the blue room where Matt had been sleeping, her hair all tousled—the look of a smug and satiated cat all over her face. Daisy might have been innocent, but you wouldn’t have needed to be Einstein to know what she and Matt had been up to.

‘Why not make up his old room?’ she suggested quickly. Because surely it would only make his pain all the harder to bear if he was put in a room where he’d spent a night making passionate love with the woman he was later to marry? ‘It might help him feel less miserable if he’s in the room he had as a boy—surrounded by all those trophies he won at school and college.’

‘What a good idea!’ said Mrs Hamilton fondly, and the two smiled at one another in perfect accord, with the easy familiarity of two people who went back a long way.

Mrs Hamilton was almost like a second mother to Daisy. Daisy’s mother and Matt’s mother were the best of friends, had been at school together, had been bridesmaids at each other’s wedding, then godmothers to their first-born—Matt and Daisy’s elder sister, Poppy. So that when Daisy’s father had run off to India to ‘find himself’, leaving behind a penniless wife with two children to support, Eliza Hamilton had offered her best friend what help she could.

Daisy’s mother had become housekeeper to the immensely rich Hamiltons, though the only formality was in the title itself, and when Matt’s father had died the two women had become even more like companions than employer and employee.

And Daisy had grown up alongside Matt. Ten years older than her, in Daisy’s starry eyes Matt had been the expert on everything; he had taught her everything. It had been Matt who had shown her how to fly a kite; Matt who had discovered her outstanding talent for maths when he’d started teaching her chess. And Matt whom she had hero-worshipped ever since she could remember.

Daisy had fulfilled all Matt’s predictions for her academic career. She had done outstandingly well at school. She had worked hard because she really wanted to shine—partly for herself, and partly to make Matt proud of her. But then one day he had run off and secretly married Patti Page, the world’s most glamorous rock star, destroying all Daisy’s secret dreams in the process. And after that nothing had ever seemed quite the same again . . .

But perhaps all that was about to change, she thought hopefully as she opened the door to his bedroom and gazed wistfully at all the trophies which dazzled in a silver line on the window-ledge which overlooked the paddock.

* **

The hours before Matt was due home whizzed by faster than a big-dipper at the fairground, and Daisy and Mrs Hamilton rushed around the place like dervishes.

‘Do you think this laurel garland is a bit over the top?’ enquired Daisy as she leaned precariously over the oak bannister to fasten it so that it hung in fragrant green loops.

‘A bit,’ said Mrs Hamilton. ‘But I expect he’ll love it. He’s been away too long—let’s give him a really English Christmas.’

Daisy thought that she heard the sound of a car’s tyres swishing to a halt on the gravelled drive, and she quickly ran downstairs to peep out of the window.

‘He’s here!’ she said, her voice rising with the excitement which had been building up inside her all day. ‘He’s home!’

She watched as the sleek, dark car glided to a halt in front of the big old house. She was, she realised as her heart hammered away crazily, still an absolutely hopeless case where Matt Hamilton was concerned. Some things, she had discovered ruefully, simply never changed.

She peeped out from behind the heavy richness of the crimson velvet curtains into the gloom of the December afternoon, where the first white flakes of snow were beginning to fall from a pregnant, gun-metal-grey sky.

‘What’s he driving?’ asked the car-mad Mrs Hamilton as she patted her hair in front of the mirror.

Daisy, who was completely useless where cars were concerned, screwed her eyes up so that she could just make out the silver badge which adorned the front of the vehicle. ‘It’s a Bentley, I think—a big, dark green Bentley. Very staid.’ She remembered him driving home in the black, phallic Porsche which had so suited his effortless transformation from Cambridge scholar to hugely successful international financier. But Matt was a family man now ... ‘I’ll go and open the door for him,’ she said.

But by the time she reached the heavy oak door the old-fashioned bell was jangling imperiously, followed by a loud thumping which could not possibly be ignored, and she pulled the door open to the tall figure who stood like some dark, avenging highwayman amidst the cold flurry of snowflakes.

It was not how she had dreamed his home-coming would be.

Matt scarcely acknowledged her as he walked straight past her; he was too busy shielding the baby from the snowflakes which had started to come down in earnest. A bundle of thick white blanket was clasped against the shoulder of his black sweater and at that moment it gave a protesting little squawk.

‘Hell! I’ve flown from one blizzard straight into another!’ he exclaimed, then gave his aloof, rather enigmatic smile which nevertheless could melt the coldest heart. ‘Hello, Mother.’

‘Hello, darling.’ Mrs Hamilton offered him her cheek.

And then the smoky grey eyes were turned in Daisy’s direction. ‘Hello, Daisy,’ he said slowly, in the familiar, deep voice, but she thought that it sounded harder, more cynical than she remembered, and his smile was strangely gritty.

‘Hello, Matt,’ she whispered.

The years had only increased the sheer physical impact he made when he walked into a room. He was tall and lean and rangy, and his eyes were the colour of a stormy sea, his hair as black as a moonless night. The angular slant of his high cheekbones and the firm, jutting squareness of his jaw made him look like some chivalrous Knight of the Realm, who had strayed inadvertently into the wrong century.

The bundle at his shoulder gave another protesting squawk, and his mouth underwent a dramatic and devastating transformation as it widened into the tenderest smile Daisy had ever seen.

‘And this is Sophie,’ he said softly, loosening the top blanket to reveal a chubby-looking baby of about eight months. ‘Little Miss Sophie Hamilton. Say hello to Grandma and to Daisy, darling.’

‘Hello, Sophie,’ beamed Mrs Hamilton, and two wide grey eyes looked around at her with interest.

The baby was the absolute image of her father, Daisy realised as she stared into the smoke-coloured eyes which were so like Matt’s, and at the thatch of dark hair which was already beginning to hint at a recalcitrant wave. ‘Oh, she’s absolutely beautiful!’ exclaimed Daisy involuntarily, and Matt looked down at her and gave her that swift, indulgent look he had always reserved just for her, and for a moment Daisy’s heart stirred into ecstatic life—as it had always stirred when Matt looked at her like that.

‘Isn’t she?’ he said quietly as the baby wrapped her tiny fist around his finger.

‘Shall we take her into the drawing room?’ asked Mrs Hamilton. ‘It’s much warmer in there.’

‘And I’ll make a tray of tea,’ said Daisy, and shrugged when Matt looked at her questioningly. ‘Mother’s away—Poppy’s baby is due any time now.’

‘So Daisy’s filling in for her,’ put in Mrs Hamilton quickly. ‘Doing all the cooking and housework until her mother comes back. Isn’t that good of her?’

‘That depends on whether your cooking has improved,’ he said, giving a theatrical shudder, ‘since you made me that disastrous birthday cake for my eighteenth.’

She remembered the chocolate-covered confection which had looked exactly like a cow-pat. ‘Of course it has!’ she answered indignantly.

He looked unconvinced. ‘Well, I’m not risking it for Christmas lunch,’ he drawled. ‘Think you can book us a table somewhere, Daisy?’

‘I can try.’

‘Good. Oh, and Daisy?’

‘Yes, Matt?’

‘All this domesticity—it isn’t affecting your schoolwork, I hope?’

‘Of course it isn’t!’ she answered hurriedly, and she sped hastily off in the direction of the kitchen before he could read the damning lie in her eyes.

She slammed around putting scones onto a plate and adding hot water to the teapot, thinking that he had always been such a tyrant where she was concerned. Didn’t he realise that she was no longer a child he could boss around? She was eighteen, for goodness’ sake! Old enough to vote. To get married . . .

She added a milk jug to the tea-tray, mentally trying to justify to herself why she had left school so suddenly.

Part of the trouble had been that she had been a year older than the rest of her class-mates, thanks to a badly set broken leg which had had her in and out of hospital for the best part of a year. That year had isolated her, so that when she had eventually returned to school she’d felt an outsider. Added to which she’d been left with a slight limp in her left leg, which had only recently disappeared completely, and she had been badly teased about it for a long time.

In fact the limp had been a pain—in more than just the literal sense. Because it had altered everyone’s attitude towards her. Her mother had fussed. Mrs Hamilton had fussed. Only Matt had refused to let the slight physical defect make any difference to his attitude towards her.

The scent of apple-logs filled the air as Daisy carried the tea-tray into the room. Mrs Hamilton had Sophie dangling on her lap over by the big bay window in which the Christmas tree glittered, and Matt immediately rose to his feet and took the tray from Daisy.

His grey eyes glinted as they looked her up and down assessingly and Daisy found herself, absurdly, blushing.

‘Risking circulatory problems, aren’t you, Daisy?’ he said in a low murmur his mother couldn’t hear.

It was a tone he would never normally have used with her, accompanied by a hostile look on his face that she wouldn’t normally have seen there. Daisy stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about?’

His face was most definitely disapproving. ‘Just that your jeans are so tight, I’m surprised you haven’t cut off the blood supply to your feet altogether.’

Daisy bristled. They were new jeans, and she’d saved up for ages to buy them. She liked the way they hugged her small, high bottom and the way they clung lovingly to the long lines of her slender legs. And yes, OK, they were a little on the tight side—but that was the fashion—to wear them looking as though they’d been sprayed on. And the deep green sweater which picked out the unusual flecks in her golden eyes and which she wore tucked into the jeans—well, there was certainly nothing untoward there.

Of course Matt hadn’t seen her for almost two years, and her body had developed rather alarmingly during that time. From being almost flat-chested, her breasts were now two rather lush and heavy curves which made her waist look far more slender than it had used to.

And unfortunately the newly curvaceous Daisy seemed to inspire most of the young men in the village to loudly whistle their appreciation at her every time she strolled down Cheriton High Street. Now, that she didn’t like—but what was she supposed to do? Lock herself away in a nunnery?

She had let her hair grow, too, since she’d last seen Matt. Gone was the functional bob of yesteryear. Now it reached almost to her waist. Dead straight and lustrous, it was a rich golden-brown colour, thick as an armful of corn, and it spilled over her breasts like streams of satin.

She met a pair of mocking grey eyes. ‘So you don’t like what I’m wearing?’ she challenged him.

‘That isn’t what I said,’ he answered obliquely.

‘And everyone’s wearing this style at the moment,’ she told him superciliously. ‘Don’t you know anything about fashion, Matt?’

‘Enough,’ he said curtly, ‘to know that women who follow it so slavishly risk burying their individuality and end up looking rather like sheep.’

Mrs Hamilton, who had been busy clucking over Sophie, lifted her head and frowned as she heard the tail-end of the conversation. ‘Sheep, did you say, Matt? What are you talking about? Daisy looks nothing like a sheep! Pour the tea, will you, darling?’

‘Sure,’ he said immediately, but there was a sardonic glint in his eyes as he handed a cup to Daisy and she had to fight very hard not to let the hurt and bewilderment show in her face, because this new and highly critical Matt seemed so different.

But why shouldn’t he be different? she thought sadly as she sipped at her tea. Why shouldn’t he be cold and hard and aggressive? He had been married and widowed within the year, left with a baby daughter to look after. His wife’s funeral had been just over a month after the birth of their child, and grief did strange things to people.

He leaned back in his chair and drank his tea, tall and dark and very faintly forbidding. He looked remote—a glamorous, stylish stranger. It was hard to believe that this was the same Matt who’d taught her to ride, told her which books to read, described the world he’d seen in all his travels. Matt whom she had adored and worshipped for just as long as she could remember.

She had been only eight when he had gone up to Cambridge, but she could still remember how bitterly she had cried that first night after his departure. Nothing, she had thought, would ever be the same with Matt gone. And how right she had been—for nothing had ever been the same with Matt gone.

Daisy had been unable to repress that painful jealousy she’d felt whenever he had come home in the college vacations, usually with some bright, smiling golden girl clinging onto his arm, though she’d taken great care not to show him how she felt.

And now, as she covertly watched those long, lean legs which seemed to stretch endlessly in front of him, Daisy wondered how on earth she had ever had the temerity to imagine that someone as gorgeous as Matt Hamilton would ever be remotely interested in someone like her.

He finished his tea and when he’d put the cup down he rose elegantly to his feet. ‘Shall I hold Sophie for you while you drink your tea, Mother?’ he said, and at the sound of his voice the baby turned and gurgled, dropping her fluffy pink bear on the carpet as she virtually launched herself out of his mother’s arms and into his, and he smiled, his hard face relaxing again as the baby joyfully settled herself into her father’s embrace.

Daisy stooped to pick up the bear Sophie had dropped, and when she straightened up it was to find Matt staring at her again, an almost imperceptible disquiet shadowing the narrowed grey eyes.

Mrs Hamilton was looking from one to the other of them with an expression very like bemusement, and she shook her head slightly as she stood up. ‘I have to ring Harry down in the village to check what time he’ll be delivering the champagne for Christmas morning. Don’t forget that the hordes will be arriving for drinks, will you, darling?’ she asked her son.

Matt pulled a face and Sophie giggled. ‘Will I be allowed to forget?’ he murmured.

‘No, you won’t,’ answered Mrs Hamilton firmly as she breezed out of the room. ‘It’s a family tradition!’

Matt scooped Sophie further up his chest, so that she was looking with perky interest over his shoulder, and then he indicated a hold-all he’d brought in. ‘Would you mind unpacking that bag for me, please, Daisy?’

‘Of course I wouldn’t mind!’ Pleased to have something to do other than try not to keep staring at that peculiarly disapproving face, Daisy crouched down on the floor to unzip the bag, taking out cotton-wool balls and lotion and all the other mysterious baby paraphernalia which lay inside. She could sense that he was still watching her, and it made her conscious as never before of the blue denim clinging to her bottom.

There was an odd kind of silence in the room, which even Sophie’s occasional glug couldn’t dispel. Daisy could feel more of that self-conscious colour stealing into her cheeks and the increased thud of her heart as she acknowledged the unique tingle of self-awareness which Matt seemed to have bestowed on her like an electric charge. Rather desperately she hunted around for something neutral to say.

‘Somehow I can’t really imagine you changing a nappy, Matt!’ she commented, but she saw the sardonic twist of his mouth and knew that she had not succeeded in lightening the mood at all.

‘Why ever not?’ he queried, in a mocking drawl. ‘These are the nineties, after all, and fathers are hands-on these days. Or did you imagine that rich, successful tycoons don’t behave like other fathers?’

There was something so cynical about the way he spoke that Daisy sat back on her heels and looked up at him in bewilderment, wondering what had happened to make his grey eyes shine with that brilliance which was as cold and as hard as a diamond. Was that what bereavement did to you?

‘I—didn’t mean anything like that,’ she said in confusion. ‘I don’t know any fathers of your age, for one thing. And for another you’re not some “rich, successful tycoon”, as you put it—you’re just Matt to me. The same Matt you always were.’ Which sounded so naïve that she bit her lip as she said it, wishing that she’d learnt to think before opening her mouth.

But Matt smiled then, and his real smile, too—not some pale masquerade of the real thing. ‘Of course you didn’t mean it. Take no notice of me, Daisy. I’m tired and I’m jet-lagged and Sophie’s teething—’

‘And you’re still not over Patti?’ she prompted gently, praying that he might confide in her. She might have once felt jealous of the woman who had captured Matt’s heart, but Patti was now dead, and Daisy would have done anything to be able to take that bleak, haunted look from his eyes. ‘Oh, Matt—it must have been absolutely awful—I kept thinking about you. That letter I wrote was painfully inadequate.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Your letter meant a lot to me.’

‘I wanted to come to the funeral, and I know that your mother did too—but since it was being held in New York and you didn’t really seem that keen . . .’ Her words tailed off because she could see the sudden, warning tension in his body.

His mouth tautened as though she’d said something obscene, and Daisy was shocked by the expression which hardened those beautifully angular features. ‘Daisy ...’ He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘I know that you mean well, but I have to tell you that I don’t want or intend to discuss Patti with you. Dwelling on her death will not help anyone, and certainly not Sophie. I have a new life to make for myself, and I have to let go of the past. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Daisy stiffly, and for a moment she felt a fleeting pang of sympathy for his dead wife. Who would ever have dreamed that Matt could be such a cold fish as to dismiss the woman he had married as though she were some troublesome item on an agenda Daisy had been proposing?

What was more, he’d never spoken to her like that before. Never. Not in that curt, abrupt, dismissive manner.

Inevitably Daisy’s mind drifted back, took her to the last time she’d seen Matt Hamilton, eighteen months ago, before his life was to alter irrevocably . . .

He was due back from the States for a short holiday and his mother had decided to throw a summer ball in his honour at Hamilton House. Since he’d gone to live in New York after graduating his visits had been few and far between and they’d all missed him terribly, Daisy especially.

She was over the moon with excitement. Her first ball, and, much more importantly, Matt was to be there . . .

She was in a real panic about what to wear, and eventually her mother sewed her a dress, made from an old ballgown of her own. Her first really grownup dress.

Daisy twirled around in front of the mirror, admiring the pale blue gauzy voile of the skirt which floated over a stiffened petticoat down to her slim ankles. The bodice of the dress was in the same silvery blue, but made of satin, and it was strapless and clung to the faint swell of her burgeoning breasts. It wasn’t a particularly fashionable dress, but she loved it.

The strappy silver sandals were borrowed from a schoolfriend and her hair swung neatly to her small chin in a glossy bob, two boot-lace strands of silver ribbon catching it up at the sides so that it didn’t fall all over her face. She wore a lick of mascara which emphasised the dark lashes which framed her hazel eyes, and a brush of gloss on her lips. For a girl who had never dressed up she felt like Cinderella as she waited for Matt to arrive.