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New Year Wedding For The Crown Prince
Meredith Webber


Can the charming prince Claim his gorgeous bride?When Crown Prince Charles of Livaroche turns up on Dr Jo Wainright’s Australian doorstep, their two worlds collide. Only while Charles is seeking clues to his past, Jo is determined to forget the heartbreak of hers. Stranded together this Christmas, they find their magical connection hard to ignore… But when Charles proposes will Jo dare reveal the reason that’s standing in the way of her becoming his New Year bride?







Can the charming prince

Claim his gorgeous bride?

When Crown Prince Charles of Livaroche turns up on Dr. Jo Wainright’s Australian doorstep, their two worlds collide. Only while Charles is seeking clues to his past, Jo is determined to forget the heartbreak of hers. Stranded together this Christmas their magical connection becomes hard to ignore... But when Charles proposes, dare Jo reveal the reason that’s standing in her way of becoming his New Year bride?

“The way this story ended had me cheering for this couple’s happy ever after because the plot twist made it palpable these two are meant to be. I would recommend...if you enjoy the fake relationship trope or a story where the hero and heroine are meant to be.”

—Harlequin Junkie on A Forever Family for the Army Doc

“From the beginning of this book I was hooked, I loved every minute of it.... It is a fascinating book set in paradise which I thoroughly enjoyed.”

—Goodreads on A Miracle for the Baby Doctor


MEREDITH WEBBER lives on the sunny Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, but takes regular trips west into the Outback, fossicking for gold or opal. These breaks in the beautiful and sometimes cruel red earth country provide her with an escape from the writing desk and a chance for her mind to roam free—not to mention getting some much needed exercise. They also supply the kernels of so many stories that it’s hard for her to stop writing!


Also by Meredith Webber (#u6f30add9-87ed-556c-8d21-07280cbae406)

The One Man to Heal Her

The Man She Could Never Forget

A Sheikh to Capture Her Heart

Healed by Her Army Doc

The Halliday Family miniseries

A Forever Family for the Army Doc

Engaged to the Doctor Sheikh

A Miracle for the Baby Doctor

From Bachelor to Daddy

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).


New Year Wedding for the Crown Prince

Meredith Webber






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


ISBN: 978-1-474-07543-5

NEW YEAR WEDDING FOR THE CROWN PRINCE

© 2018 Meredith Webber

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Contents

Cover (#ub1885293-50e6-595c-95c6-a8bedccc2ec4)

Back Cover Text (#uf1591cc1-d760-5bcc-b094-5f8a358d7f73)

About the Author (#u4e41ce03-4183-5a38-80d1-e767bcf3a78e)

Booklist (#u02d498d3-7105-543e-b216-d5c69cd327b9)

Title Page (#u27546cb1-d9d2-5429-94eb-7e91d43e63b9)

Copyright (#u7cc52231-03ac-5664-9462-62bdc52be614)

CHAPTER ONE (#u4af2f4f7-2957-5c1e-a6c2-77cb10235d2e)

CHAPTER TWO (#ub5a40bef-4314-5cb9-adaa-d78b2e4be108)

CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE (#u6f30add9-87ed-556c-8d21-07280cbae406)

CHARLES EDOUARD ALBERT CINZETTI, Crown Prince of Livaroche, gripped the armrest of his seat as the small plane in which he was travelling—foolishly, he now conceded—was tossed around in gale-force winds and lashing rain.

The journey had been interminable: long hours in the air, lengthy delays at foreign airports and now this. The pilot’s laconic apology for the rough flight—‘Sorry about the bumps, folks, bit of a low off the coast’—had hardly been reassuring, although Charles began to see lights through the rain, growing steadily brighter, and then they were down, with every passenger on board heaving a huge sigh of relief.

Not that Charles’s journey had ended. He had to find his way to the seaside town of Port Anooka, another thirty miles from the airport.

‘Just down the road,’ the travel agent had told him. ‘You could hire a car.’

Which had been a good idea back in Sydney, where the weather was clear and bright, but in this deluge?

No way!

‘Just a bit of a low off the coast,’ the cab driver told him, as he steered his vehicle through practically horizontal rain. ‘Port’ll be cut off, and that place you want, the old lady’s house on the bluff—well, you won’t even be able to get back to the village once the tide comes in and the road floods.’

Charles wondered if it was jet lag that made the conversation—carried out in clear, everyday English words—unintelligible.

A village that was cut off and flooded at high tide?

Coming from a tiny, landlocked principality, he knew little of tides but surely villages were built above high-tide marks?

And what was this low everyone was talking about?

He gathered it was a meteorological depression but he didn’t know much about them either. At home, it might mean rain, or in winter snow, but obviously here it brought a deluge and wild wind.

‘The old lady’s barmy, ya know,’ the driver continued, breaking into Charles’s consideration of the limits of his very expensive education. ‘Livin’ out there on her own, the place fallin’ to bits around her.’

Place falling to bits? Charles thought. He thought of the comfortable apartment he’d left behind at the palace. Of the snow, already deep on the mountain slopes, and Christmas lights slung along the streets; rugged-up carollers knocking on doors, and the city’s Christmas tree ready to be raised into pride of place in the city square.

Had he made a mistake, coming here?

But how else could he get to know at least something of the mother who’d died giving birth to him—the woman his father had loved, married and buried, all within eighteen months of meeting her?

His father would talk of how she had made him laugh, how kind she had been to everyone she’d met, and how they’d fallen in love at first sight.

Not much help in putting together a picture of the whole woman, but Charles did know they’d met at Christmas, which was why he’d chosen to come now to see what she’d seen, do what she’d done, and hopefully get to know his grandmother—and to learn why she’d never contacted them. Something his father had never been able to explain—or perhaps had not wanted to explain.

As far as Charles was concerned, someone as loving and giving as his mother—gleaned from his father’s description of her—must have grown up in a warm, loving family. He wasn’t personally familiar with normal families, but anyone who’d worked in children’s wards in a hospital had seen loving families up close, and knew they existed. Not in every case, of course, but in enough to have learnt how strong the bonds of family love could be.

His father had encouraged him to come, perhaps hoping once his son had it out of his system, he’d settle down, marry and have the children so important to the continuation of the royal line.

Charles sighed.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to marry, but no woman he had ever met had made him feel the way his parents must have felt when they’d run away together.

‘Port Anooka!’ the driver announced, breaking into his thoughts as they entered another lit-up area. ‘Not that there’s much of it these days, and you’re still ten minutes from the house.’

He half turned.

‘Sure you want to go out there? Look how high the tide is already. You won’t get back in an hour.’

Charles peered through the streaming windshield and was startled to see huge waves crashing onto the promenade along the foreshore, not a hundred yards from the cab.

Was he sure?

Shouldn’t he book into a hotel, and perhaps go out tomorrow?

But the journey had already been too long.

‘Of course,’ he said, hoping the words sounded more positive than he felt. He’d come all this way, so there was no turning back.

Not now he was so close...

Besides, there, ahead of him, was the house, rising up two stories, high on a bluff above the ocean, looking for all the world like something out of a horror film, wreaths of sea mist wisping around it in a temporary lull in the rain.

He paid the driver, thanked him for his further warning of being stuck out here on the bluff, grabbed his hold-all, and headed for the two low steps leading up to the front door.

He’d barely raised his hand to knock when the door flew open and a bucket of water was tossed onto him.

Barmy old lady?

He knew that in England barmy meant a bit mad.

But was she really mad, and this her way of repelling intruders?

Perhaps not as good as the boiling oil of olden days, but still reasonably effective as it had sent him tripping backwards into a large puddle at the bottom of the steps.

He struggled to his feet, still clutching his bag, and faced his opponent.

But the thrower wasn’t an old lady. She was a heavily pregnant woman, surely close to giving birth, who was turning away from him, shouting up the stairs to some unseen inhabitant.

‘Of course you knew the roof was leaking, Dottie. Why else would you own twelve buckets?’

She was swinging the door shut when she must have caught a glimpse of him, hesitantly approaching the bottom step, drenched in spite of the umbrella he still held with difficulty above his head.

‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here?’ A slight pause in the questions, then, ‘You’re wet!’

He watched realisation dawn on her face and saw her try to hide a smile as she said, ‘Oh, no, did I throw the water over you? You’d better come in.’

‘What is it? Who’s there?’

The querulous questions came from above—nothing wrong with the barmy old lady’s hearing apparently.

‘It’s just some fellow I threw water at,’ the woman yelled back, not bothering to hide her smile now.

She was gorgeous, Charles realised. Tall, statuesque, carrying her pregnancy with pride. And the condition suited her, for her auburn hair shone and her skin was a clear, creamy white tinged with the slightest pink of embarrassment across high cheekbones.

‘Don’t let him in,’ came the instruction from on high, but it was too late. He was already standing, dripping, in the black and white tiled entry, watching the woman disappear into the darkness beyond.

She returned with a large towel, but as she handed it to him she laughed and shook her head.

‘That won’t do, will it? You’re drenched. Come through, there’s a bathroom off the kitchen—a little apartment from the days when the house had servants. Mind the bucket! Have you dry clothes in your bag or shall I find something for you?’

* * *

Of course he’d have dry clothes in his bag, Jo thought, but she was in such a muddle she barely knew what she was saying. It was shock, that was what it was! Opening the door to find a man standing there—a man at whom she’d just hurled a bucket of water. A man so stunningly attractive even her very pregnant body felt the heat of attraction.

And Dottie was probably right, she shouldn’t have let him in. But he’d been drenched, and he didn’t look like an axe murderer.

In fact, even wet, he was the visual representation of tall, dark and handsome.

Was she out of her mind?

Tall, dark and handsome indeed.

All this was flashing through her head as she led him through the kitchen to the minuscule bathroom beyond.

‘Servants obviously didn’t get many luxuries,’ she said as she waved him through the door and watched him duck his head to get in.

Which was when she recovered enough common sense to realise she had no idea who the man was!

Or why he was here!

Well, she could hardly ask now, as he’d shut the door between them, and she was not going to open it when he was doubtless undressing.

Or think about him undressing...

She didn’t do men—not any more, not seriously...

She shook away painful memories of that long-ago time when a man had betrayed her in the worst possible way.

Had being pregnant brought those memories back more often?

Think of this man. The stranger. The here and now.

She’d ask his name later.

The growling noise of the stair lift descending told her Dottie had tired of waiting for an answer and was coming to see what was going on for herself.

Jo hurried back through the kitchen, meeting Dottie in the hall.

‘Who is it? What’s going on?’ the old lady demanded.

‘It’s a man,’ Jo explained. ‘He was on the doorstep and I didn’t see him as I emptied the bucket. He was soaking wet so I’ve put him in the downstairs bathroom to dry off.’

‘You invited him in?’

Incredulous didn’t cut it. The words indicated total disbelief.

‘Dottie, he was wet. I’d thrown a bucket of water over him, on top of whatever rain he’d caught getting to the house.’

‘He had an umbrella!’ Dottie retorted, pointing to where the large black umbrella stood in a pool of water in a corner of the hall.

Jo took a very deep breath and changed the subject.

‘I need to check the buckets upstairs,’ she said. ‘According to the radio reports, the weather is going to get worse.’

Better not to mention that the road to the village was likely to be cut, and the man, whoever he was, might have to stay the night.

Would have to stay the night most probably!

‘You can’t leave me down here with your stranger,’ Dottie told her.

He’s hardly my stranger, Jo thought, but said, ‘Well, come back upstairs with me. I’ve just emptied the one down here.’

She waved her hand towards the bucket responsible for all the trouble.

Dottie glared at her for a moment, five feet one of determined old lady, then gave a huff and stalked into the living room, which was bucket-free as there were bedrooms or bathrooms above most of the downstairs rooms.

‘I won’t be long,’ Jo promised, taking the stairs two at a time, glad she’d continued her long walks up and down the hills around the village right through the pregnancy.

There were six buckets upstairs and she emptied them all into the bath before replacing them under the leaks. How Dottie slept through the constant drip, drip, drip she didn’t know. For herself, too uncomfortable to sleep much anyway, the noise was an almost welcome distraction through the long nights.

She was back downstairs when their visitor returned to the hall.

‘I left my wet clothes over the shower, if that’s all right,’ he said, his beautiful, well-bred, English accent sending shivers down Jo’s spine.

‘That’s fine,’ she said, ‘although I could put them in a plastic bag for you if you like, because you really should be going. The road to the village will be cut off any minute. The weather bureau’s warning that the place will flood at high tide.’

‘So everyone keeps telling me,’ the stranger said with a smile that made Jo’s toes tingle.

But Dottie was made of sterner stuff. Ensconced in her high-backed armchair in the living room, she made her presence known with an abrupt, ‘Fiddle-faddle! Stop flirting with the man, Joanna, and bring him in here. If he had any manners he’d have introduced himself before he came through the door.’

Jo shrugged and waved her hand towards the inner door.

‘After you,’ she said, smiling at the thought of the diminutive Dottie coming up against the stranger.

‘Who are you?’ Dottie demanded, and Jo watched as the man pulled a chair up close to Dottie and sat down in it, so he was on a level with her, before replying.

‘I’m Charles,’ he said. ‘And I believe I’m your grandson.’

His voice was gentle, so hesitant Jo felt a rush of emotion that brought a wetness to her eyes. Pregnancy sentimentality!

She held her hand to her mouth to stop her gasp escaping, and waited for Dottie to erupt.

She didn’t have to wait long.

‘Are you just?’ Dottie retorted. ‘And I’m supposed to believe you, am I? You turn up here with your fancy voice and good shoes and expect what? That I’ll leave you my house?’

Trust Dottie to have checked his shoes, Jo thought. Dottie was a firm believer that you could judge a person by his or her shoes...

‘No,’ Charles was saying politely. ‘I wanted to know more about my mother and her family—my family—and you seemed like the best person to tell me.’

‘You can’t ask her?’

Not a demand this time, but a question asked through quivering lips, as if the answer was already known.

The stranger hesitated, frowning as if trying to make sense of the question, or perhaps trying to frame an answer.

Maybe the latter, for he leant a little closer.

‘I’m so very sorry but I thought you’d been told. She died when I was born.’

The words were softly spoken, the stranger bowing his head as he said them, but Jo was more concerned with Dottie, who was as white as the lace collar on her dress.

But even as Jo reached her side, Dottie rallied.

‘So, who’s your father? No doubt that lying vagabond she ran away with. I suppose you’ve proof of this!’

If the man was disturbed by having his father labelled this way, he didn’t show it.

‘My father is Prince Edouard Alesandro Cinzetti. We are from a tiny principality in Europe, a place even many Europeans do not know. It is called—’

‘Don’t tell me!’ Dottie held up her hand. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Some place with liver in the name, or maybe the vagabond’s name had liver in it.’

‘Liver?’ Jo repeated faintly, totally gobsmacked by what was going on before her eyes.

The stranger glanced up and smiled.

‘Livaroche,’ he said, imbuing the word with all the magic of a fairy-tale.

But Jo’s attention was back on Dottie, who seemed to have shrunk back into the chair.

‘Go away, I don’t want you here,’ she said, so feebly that Jo bent to take her arm, feeling for a pulse that fluttered beneath her fingertips.

‘Perhaps if you could wait in the kitchen. This has been a shock for Dottie. I’ll settle her back in bed and make us all some supper.’

Dottie flung off Jo’s hand and glared at the visitor.

‘You can’t stay here!’ she said. ‘If you are the vagabond’s son, next thing I know you’ll be making sheep’s eyes at my Jo, and whispering sweet nothings to her.’

Dark eyes turned towards Jo, his gaze taking in her bloated figure, and the man had the hide to smile before he answered Dottie.

‘Oh, I think someone’s already whispered sweet nothings to Jo, don’t you?’

The rogue!

But he’d turned her way again, serious now, frowning.

‘That’s if you are Jo! I’m sorry, we didn’t meet—not properly. You know I’m Charles, and you are?’

His aunt? Charles wondered, though why that thought upset him he didn’t want to consider.

No, Dottie had said ‘my Jo’, but it was impossible she could be Dottie’s daughter. Dottie must be touching ninety, and if Jo was much over thirty he’d eat his hat.

Maybe a cousin...

But the statuesque beauty was talking.

‘I’m Jo Wainwright, local GP in Port Anooka. I took over the practice a couple of years ago, but I have a locum there at present.’

‘Then why are you here? Is D—my grandmother ill?’

Somehow saying Dottie seemed far too informal—inappropriate really.

Jo was shaking her head, the red in her hair glinting in the lamplight.

‘Dottie is probably the fittest eighty-five-year-old it’s ever been my pleasure to meet. She’s also the stubbornest—’ She broke off to smile at the old woman. ‘And she’s not entirely steady on her feet, while as for the stair lift—you’d swear she was taking off for Mars, the speed she roars up the stairs on it.’

‘Fiddle-faddle!’

Charles ignored the interruption.

‘So?’

But again it was Dottie who answered.

‘Oh, she thinks I’m not safe to be out here on my own, and she knows darned well I won’t move to one of those nasty places where old people rot away and die, so now she spends all her spare time here, eating me out of house and home, and leaving spies here during the week to report back to her.’

As the words were warmed by fondness, and Dottie was clinging to Jo’s hand as she spoke, Charles knew it was only bluster, and understood there was a special bond between the pair.

‘Dottie’s right,’ Jo told him. ‘I don’t like her being out here on her own, but I’ve grown to love the place almost as much as she does, so staying out here when I can is no hardship.’

She paused, looking a little rueful as she added, ‘Mind you, I didn’t know about the roof. I keep asking Dottie what needs maintenance and although we’ve done a bit, there’s been a long dry spell so the roof didn’t get a mention.’

She had such an animated face the words seemed to come alive as she spoke them, but he could hardly keep staring at her, any more than he could ask her what her husband thought of this arrangement.

So he watched as she spoke quietly to Dottie, helping her to her feet.

‘I usually take Dottie her supper in bed. Would you excuse us?’

For the first time, he actually took in the long Chinese robe the older woman was wearing. Had she been settled in bed when he’d arrived and thrown them both into confusion?

‘Can I be of assistance?’ he offered, and was rewarded with a ferocious scowl from the woman he’d come so far to meet.

‘You’ve caused quite enough drama for one day, thank you very much. You’d best be getting back to the village and we can discuss your visit in the morning.’

‘The tide, Dottie,’ Jo said gently. ‘He won’t be able to get back to the village now. He’ll have to stay the night.’

‘Then put him in the front room,’ Dottie said, with such malicious glee Charles knew it was either haunted or, more prosaically, lay beneath the worst of the roof damage.

Left on his own, Charles prowled around the room, aware through all his senses that his mother had once walked here, sat here, maybe helped decorate the ragged imitation tree that stood forlornly in one corner. The need to know more about her had brought him all this way.

He tried to imagine her living in this house, but his thoughts turned to Jo, and it was she he pictured in his mind, maybe on a ladder, laughing as she tried to fix a star to the pathetic tree.

He closed his eyes, replacing Jo’s image with one of his mother that he had only formed from pictures, and the stories his father would tell. Would Dottie tell him more stories, the ones he’d come so far to hear? Stories of his mother as a child, her likes and dislikes, anything at all to turn her into a living person instead of a picture by his bed.

It had been close to Christmas back then, too, some annual event having brought his father to the tiny seaside town, and he knew it was a degree of silly sentimentality to have come now, to find out what he could before he married and settled down, taking some of the burden of official duties from his father.

Had his mother prowled the room as he now prowled, arguing with herself—or her parents—about leaving with the lying vagabond?

He knew that had to be his father, because neither of them had ever loved another. And a vagabond he might have been, only even then, Charles was sure, he’d have been called a backpacker. Travel had been something his father had been determined to do, the only time he’d ever argued with his parents. But although it had disturbed his relationship with them, he’d known he had to see something of the world, to mix with ordinary people, the kind of people he would one day rule.

He himself had done much the same, he realised, when he’d insisted on studying medicine in Edinburgh, with men and women from all layers of society. Eton had been all very well for an education, but he knew how his fellow students had thought and how that layer of society worked. He’d needed to know everyday people.

Even back home for holidays, he’d worked in bars and cafés in the summer, and been a ski instructor in the winter.

But getting back to his father...

A lying vagabond?

Jo returned before he had time to consider the word Dottie had used, bringing light into the gloomy room with her smile.

‘Been looking for memories of your mother?’ she said. ‘I’ve done the same, but sadly never found a thing.’

She paused, then added, ‘Though I don’t pry to the extent of going through drawers. I wouldn’t take advantage of Dottie that way, but I do shake out the books I borrow to read, just in case there’s a photo been left to mark a page.’

Charles looked at the wall of books at the back of the room and shook his head. It would take for ever...

‘Has she not spoken of her to you?’ he asked.

Jo shook her head.

‘Not a word, and apparently there’s enough solidarity in the village that no one else ever talks about her. I know there has to be a reason because although Dottie’s a bit eccentric—well, pretty eccentric—she’s not irrational.’

She sighed, shook her head, and bent over to pick up a glass bauble from a box of decorations that stood by the tree, hanging it on a low branch before turning back to Charles.

‘Dottie and I usually have grilled cheese on toast for supper, but if you haven’t had dinner and would like something more substantial, there are lamb cutlets and plenty of salad things.’

Charles shook his head.

‘Grilled cheese on toast sounds fantastic. Takes me back to student days when it was one of the few things I could cook—cheese on toast, beans on toast, eggs on toast!’

That won another smile, which was so open and honest and full of good humour that it caught at something in his chest—just a hitch, nothing more...

You cannot be attracted to a very pregnant stranger, he told himself as he followed her to the kitchen, narrowly missing the bucket in the entry.

But the sway of her hips mesmerised him...

It had to be abstinence. How long since he’d been with a woman? The experience of the match his father had promoted, with a young woman who had a very dubious family connection to the old Russian royalty, had been enough to put him off women for life.

Well, for several months at least!

She’d been nice enough, attractive enough, but her conversation began and ended with horses and although he quite liked horses and rode occasionally himself, as a conversational topic, they were way down his list of favourites.

He doubted the woman with the swaying hips would talk horses.

‘There’s the toaster, and the bread’s in the cupboard underneath it. You can do the toast while I grate the cheese. I think it melts better grated. Do you like relish or chutney under the cheese? My dad used to slice up pickles under his.’

Jo only just stopped herself from explaining how her mother had liked Vegemite, and she herself didn’t mind the pickles. After all, there was only so much conversational mileage you could get out of grilled cheese on toast. And it had all been a very long time ago.

The memory of that time made her shudder—so much sadness, so much despair and emptiness and loss.

Don’t think about it now—concentrate on toast but don’t babble on.

She was embarrassed, that was why she’d been talking so much and there were no points for guessing why!

This man’s presence—or perhaps her own hyper-awareness of him—was embarrassing her. For some peculiar reason, she’d felt his eyes on her as she’d walked to the kitchen. Not casually on her, but studying her, although that was ridiculous. She’d been imagining things. Why would a man like him be studying a slightly damp, very untidy, very pregnant woman like her?

For a start, being thirty-eight weeks pregnant would announce her as unavailable!

She hauled butter and cheese out of the refrigerator, then milk for Dottie’s cocoa, relish in case Charles wanted it, the bottle of pickled gherkins to slice for under her cheese, set it all on the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the big kitchen, then turned to their guest.

He was waggling the handles on the doors of the toaster.

‘You realise I’m touching something my mother probably touched. This toaster has to be at least fifty years old.’

Jo grinned at him.

‘At least,’ she agreed, ‘and it doesn’t flip open when the toast is done so you have to stand there and watch it and open it before it burns then turn it to do the other side.’

He gave her a ‘can you believe it’ look and a shake of his head before turning to watch his toast.

Setting the grill in the oven—which was probably older than the toaster—to high, Jo grabbed the grater and a wooden board and began her job.

And if she glanced at their visitor from time to time it was only to see he wasn’t burning the toast.

Wasn’t it?

He’d found plates and soon delivered a pile of perfectly browned toast to the table.

Toast done, she set him to buttering it—although that meant he was standing close to her, and the discomfort that caused had to be because he was a stranger...

Surely!

She was slicing gherkins when her belly tightened.

Braxton-Hicks! Her body’s practice contractions. She moved a little, knowing that usually stopped them, and kept grating. Charles was now piling grated cheese on the toast he’d buttered.

‘I’ve done two slices each, will that be enough?’ he said.

Jo turned to face him, saw a smile lurking in his dark-enough-to-drown-in eyes, and hesitated, her mouth suddenly so dry she couldn’t speak.

She had to be imagining whatever it was that was zapping between them.

Had to be!

‘You might want more than two slices,’ she finally managed, ‘and I have sliced pickles under my cheese.’

‘Like father, like daughter,’ he teased, and she blessed the distraction of another twinge in her belly.

She would hate to think she was anything like her father...

Although maybe that was unfair. He’d been a good and loving father up until her mother had died and it probably hadn’t been his fault he’d gone to pieces then...

Charles had turned away to put more bread in the toaster, apparently deciding he might need more than two slices, and Jo used the respite from his presence to slide the cheese-laden slices under the grill.

The extra hormones that pregnancy had sent spinning through her body—they must surely be the cause of her...

Her what?

Distraction, she decided, and said it firmly enough in her head to pretend she meant it.

Well, it could hardly be anything more than that, now, could it? She’d seen tall, dark and handsome men before and had never felt the slightest attraction, and so what if his broad shoulders curved in to a neat waist, and his jeans clung to neat buttocks?

She heated milk on the stove for Dottie’s cocoa, vowing for the fiftieth time she’d buy a microwave for the house next time she was in town. She put on the kettle for tea and turned to Charles.

‘Would you like tea or coffee?’

He smiled—she wished he wouldn’t—and said, ‘Could I please have cocoa? This has taken me back to student days and it seems right I should be drinking cocoa.’

Jo tore her eyes away from his face. What had she been waiting for, another smile? She poured more milk into the pot on the stove, told the visitor to watch the toast under the grill while she found mugs for the three of them. Even Dottie, to whom tea must be served in fine china cups, drank her cocoa from a mug, and a mug of tea was far more satisfying as far as Jo was concerned.

Charles, who was proving quite proficient in the kitchen, had found more plates and was cutting a couple of bubbling, lightly browned cheese toasts into fingers.

‘Two for Dottie, two with pickles for the pregnant lady, and I’ll look like a pig eating four, but it seems a very long time since breakfast.’

‘You haven’t eaten since breakfast?’ Jo said in disbelief, but the milk was close to boiling, and she had cocoa to make, so she could hardly pursue the conversation.

Not that Charles—the name was coming more easily into her head—had replied. Instead, he was moving around the kitchen, poking into nooks and crannies, finally finding the trays, hiding in the space beside the ancient refrigerator.

‘I’m assuming Dottie has the silver one,’ he said, smiling so broadly Jo had to smile back.

‘Yes, and slightly better china than you’ve found there.’

She opened a high kitchen cupboard and produced a fine china plate, bedecked with flowers and edged with gold.

‘Just because she’s old, she says, she doesn’t have to lower her standards,’ Jo quoted in explanation.

‘Bless her heart!’ Charles said, and the phrase must have startled him for he added, very quickly, ‘As my nanny would have said.’

Bless her heart indeed!

And a nanny?

No wonder he spoke like an English toff.

Only it wasn’t really like that—just beautifully pronounced words that seemed to fill the air with music.

What would it have been like to have been raised like that?

Or even in a normal household.

Another twinge reminded Jo she shouldn’t be thinking about the past and definitely not about a man she’d barely met, no matter how pleasant his voice might be.

And weren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions supposed to be irregular?

Still, she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get the tray up to Dottie, and then...

She didn’t know what.

She usually took her tray up and ate in Dottie’s bedroom, but would Dottie want the stranger in her bedroom, related though he might be?

And could she, Jo, leave him alone in the kitchen no matter how inhospitable that would seem?

She’d take Dottie’s tray up and see what transpired.

Dottie was sitting, propped up on pillows, in the middle of the big bed, the ornately carved bedhead a spectacular backdrop to the minute occupant. Resplendent in her colourful Chinese robe, she was every inch an empress, ready to receive her subjects.

As Jo settled the tray on the small table over Dottie’s legs, she said, ‘You can bring that man up here to eat his supper. You’ll come, of course, so he might as well. We’ll grill him, find out what he’s up to!’

The last sentence would have startled Jo if she hadn’t known Dottie’s passion for mystery and detective fiction. Perhaps she’d always nurtured a secret desire to grill someone.

Possibly literally!

‘We’ve been summoned,’ she told Charles when she returned to the kitchen, where she found him cutting his extra toast into fingers. He’d also made a pot of tea, though where he’d found the pot she didn’t know. ‘Do you want sugar in your cocoa?’

‘I’ve already helped myself, but left it to you to pour your own tea how you like it.’

Jo did just that, then lifted her tray and led the way upstairs.


CHAPTER TWO (#u6f30add9-87ed-556c-8d21-07280cbae406)

CHARLES LOOKED AROUND the room, realising that when rain wasn’t lashing the windows, Dottie would have an expansive view of the sea from her bed. Here, too, there were the early signs of Christmas decorations—a small, stained-glass decal on one window, a box of tinsel in a corner. Had someone—Jo?—started on the task before the weather turned?

But what really interested him in the room was a chest of drawers to one side of the bed, and the ranks of framed photos taking pride of place across the top of it.

Was there one of his mother?

He could hardly walk over and have a look.

Jo had pulled two chairs closer to the bed from what would be a sitting alcove by the window, and put small side tables beside each of them.

She waved him to one of them, but as she bent to set down her tray, he thought he saw her wince.

Strangers don’t ask questions, he told himself, but the doctor in him had to say, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Practice twinges, that’s all,’ she said, but the pink had gone from her cheeks and she looked a little drawn.

‘I’m also a doctor,’ he said to her quietly, ‘so if your baby decides to come early, and you can’t get into the village, I have delivered them before.’

‘This baby is not coming early,’ was the reply, no less forceful for being whispered. ‘This is to be a Christmas baby, timed to the minute!’

He considered that a bit ambitious. Would she consider having it induced on Christmas morning if it wasn’t showing signs of arrival?

‘What are you two whispering about?’ Dottie demanded to know.

Charles smiled at her.

‘I was just saying it’s a coincidence, Jo being a doctor, because that’s my profession.’

‘Ha!’ said Dottie with malicious glee. ‘I knew that vagabond was lying!’

Charles shook his head—unable to make any connection.

Jo must have been equally confused, for it was she who asked the question.

‘And just why, Dottie, does Charles being a doctor make his father a liar?’

‘Because his father always said he was a prince, and if that was true then his son would be a princeling, or whatever a prince’s sons are called, and this fellow says he’s a doctor.’

She paused, smiling in malicious glee, then went on, ‘Although he could be a liar, too, and the doctor thing just humbug!’

‘Oh, Dottie,’ Jo said, barely able to speak for laughter, ‘you do come up with the most startling logic. If his dad’s a prince then he’s probably one, too, but he could hardly hang around waiting for his father to die so he can have a job. If the liver place is as small as he says it is, there probably aren’t enough duties to keep his father busy, let alone Charles as well. He would have needed a job.’

Charles had watched Dottie while Jo was speaking—better by far than watching Jo with the laughter lingering in her eyes. The old lady didn’t seem at all perturbed, eating her way through her plate of cheese toast and sipping at her cocoa.

But her eyes were on him the whole time.

Trying to make out if he was the imposter she thought him?

Or trying to see some resemblance to his mother? A family likeness of some kind...

He hoped it was the latter, but after thirty-six years would she be able to tell?

The photos up here would definitely be off limits unless Dottie agreed he could look at them. There’d been no obvious photos of his mother in the parts of the house he’d seen so far. And, like Jo, he didn’t want to pry into drawers.

But he had come all this way to learn something of the mother he’d never known, so although her behaviour so far had been hardly welcoming, he had to overcome Dottie’s suspicion and distrust somehow.

‘Why did she call you Charles? Or did your father do that?’

The questions were so unexpected Charles swallowed some cocoa the wrong way and had to cough before he could answer.

‘No, my mother named me—well, she and my father chose the names before I was born. Apparently, they both liked Charles as a name, then Edouard after my father’s father and Albert after hers.’

He looked directly at Dottie.

‘Your husband was called Albert, wasn’t he?’

He thought the scowl she gave him might be all the answer he’d get, but then she said, ‘Bertie—we called him Bertie!’ in such a gruff tone Charles guessed at the emotion she was holding in check.

And why wouldn’t there be emotion? How would he have felt if she’d suddenly turned up at home?

Overwhelmed, to say the least.

He set aside the rest of his toast and moved his chair a little closer to the bed.

‘I know this must be a terrible shock for you, but I did write a couple of times and never received a reply so it seemed the only thing to do was to come. I’ll go away again as soon as your flood goes down, if that’s what you want.’

The scowl turned to a full-blown glare.

‘I do not open letters with foreign stamps,’ she said. ‘You do not know what germs they might be carrying. It’s how they spread anthrax, you know.’

Though slightly startled by the pronouncement, most of Charles’s attention had turned to Jo, who had her eyes shut and her hand to her belly.

That, he knew, was a contraction!

Had his inattention drawn Dottie’s eyes to Jo so that she said, ‘If that was a contraction, look at your watch and start timing them.’

After which she lifted the table off her legs, set it aside on the bed, and clambered out, remarkably spry for someone who looked about a hundred.

‘And don’t worry,’ she added, crossing the room to Jo. ‘I’ve delivered most of the people still alive in the village, grandparents, parents and even some of the older children. I’ll take care of you.’

The look of horror on Jo’s face told Charles what she thought of that idea, but she rallied.

‘That’s very kind, Dottie, but I’m a doctor, I should be able to manage. I mean, don’t women in some developing countries give birth in the fields where they are working, then wrap the baby in a sling on their back and keep working? If they can do that, I should be able to manage.’

She closed her eyes, pausing as another contraction tightened her belly.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I absolutely cannot have the baby now. It’s not Christmas Day, and Chris and Alice can’t get through, and you know they want to be here.’

‘You’ve got no choice, my girl,’ Dottie told her. ‘And too bad if they can’t be here. I never did approve of them using you like this.’

Jo lifted her hand.

‘Please, Dottie, no more of that. And I’ll be glad of your help, but perhaps...’

She turned to Charles.

‘You’d have a mobile, wouldn’t you? If I do go properly into labour, we could start with video chat on my mobile and if it runs out of charge, could we use yours?’

‘You want your labour going out on video chat?’ Charles asked, totally bewildered by the speed at which things had moved from his meeting with his grandmother to possibly having to deliver a total stranger’s baby in the midst of the gale that thrashed the windows and shook the house. ‘With who, and why?’

‘Only to Chris and Alice,’ Jo said. ‘You see, it’s their baby.’

She spoke as if that explained everything, though from Charles’s point of view it only made things more confusing.

Their baby?

‘You’re a surrogate?’

But even as he asked the question he watched the colour drain from Jo’s face, and knew it was another contraction, a bad one. Childbirth hurt. So why would she go through it for someone else?

And how would she feel when it came time to hand over the baby she’d carried—nurtured—for nine months?

Now Dottie was issuing orders so he couldn’t pursue the matter.

‘Take the supper things down to the kitchen,’ she was saying to him. ‘Then when you get back I’ll tell you where to find clean linen. There are some sheets that are washed so thin they’re soft, and plenty of old towels. We’d better use this room, because the others all leak. The little chaise longue should be ideal because the back of it only comes halfway. And gloves, I suppose. There might be gloves in the kitchen!’

‘Washing-up gloves?’ Jo said faintly. ‘You’re going to deliver Lulu with washing-up gloves?’

‘You just relax,’ Dottie ordered. ‘We’ll do whatever is necessary.’

Charles carried the half-eaten meal down to the kitchen, wondering whether he should get out of this madness before he caught whatever brought it on!

Was the road really flooded?

And that thought horrified him!

Surely he wasn’t thinking of leaving these women on their own—one to deliver her baby, the other as dotty as her name.

Of course he couldn’t, flooded road or not.

So he carried his burden to the kitchen, noticed the bucket was full on the way and came back to empty it, checking there was no new stranger standing at the door before he threw the water.

Back upstairs for more orders! That part at least was a novelty. At home, and at the hospital, he was more likely to be giving them...

* * *

Jo closed her eyes and wondered if she willed it hard enough she could stop the contractions.

Forget about it!

But what about Chris and Alice? her mind protested.

Charge your mobile.

She stood up, ignored Dottie’s shriek that she needed to wait for the next contraction to time it, and went to her bedroom, where, by some miracle, her mobile was already on the charger and, even more wonderful, fully charged.

The linen cupboard was her next destination. He might be willing, this Charles who’d appeared from nowhere, but she doubted he’d fathom the system in Dottie’s linen cupboard.

But Dottie had been right, there were sheets washed to a softness that could be used to clean and wrap a newborn, and plenty of old towels—Dottie rarely parted with anything—on which the baby could be delivered. And she could cut up some of the old sheets to use as nappies—they’d be softer than the towels...

She pulled out an armful of each, then, because it felt good to be standing, she walked along the hall, avoiding buckets on the way, then back again.

Walking was good, until the next contraction came—far too close to the previous one—and she leant against the wall, the linen pillowed in her arms.

‘Was that a contraction?’ Dottie asked, peering out the bedroom door to see where her patient had gone.

Jo nodded, so bemused to discover she was thinking of herself as Dottie’s patient she couldn’t manage words.

The pain passed and she carried the linen through to Dottie’s room, then turned back. What she really needed was a shower—and just in case this baby really was coming, she’d have a shower, put on a clean nightdress and—

And what?

No! The baby couldn’t come. She wasn’t ready! Chris and Alice weren’t ready! And worst of all, there was this stupid low off the coast with wind gusts too strong for a helicopter to make it out here if anything went wrong—not with her so much, but with the baby...

She considered crying, so great was the frustration, but she wasn’t the crying type—tall, well-built women couldn’t get away with tears the way petite women could. Besides which, she’d never seen the point. What good did it do? And it made her eyes red! She’d have a shower. That way, if she did happen to cry—well, in the shower, who could tell...?

She stood under the streaming hot water for so long it began to turn cold. She knew the ancient hot-water system would take hours to heat it again and felt guilty about using it all, though Charles and Dottie had already showered.

The next contraction was strong enough for her to grab the washbasin to hold herself steady until it passed.

This couldn’t be happening!

It was bad enough that she’d spent the last weeks of this pregnancy wondering how she could stop herself shrieking or swearing in front of Chris and Alice, but in front of Dottie and the stranger?

Dear Heaven! What was she to do? Didn’t soldiers in bygone times bite on bullets while surgeons extracted other bullets from their wounds.

How did they not break their teeth? she wondered as she walked back to her room.

Not that Dottie would have a bullet to bite on—at least Jo hoped not, although with Dottie you couldn’t be sure of anything.

Another wave of pain washed over her. This was ridiculous, she thought as she gripped the end of the bed for support. Baby was two weeks early when the obstetrician had assured her it would be late, and she was out on the bluff with the worst weather in a hundred years raging all around her, and a total stranger and an eighty-five-year-old midwife for support!

Not that she doubted Dottie’s ability to do anything she set her mind to—sheer stubbornness would see to that!

As the pain ebbed, Jo pulled out a clean nightshirt, packed because it was slightly more decent than the long T-shirts she usually wore to bed, and she’d thought she might have to get up to Dottie in the night. She put cream on her face and sat on the bed, her hands on the low swell of her belly.

And images she didn’t want came flooding back, sitting like this on a hospital bed at fifteen years old, a child still herself, about to have a child—a child she was going to give away.

Then Gran had been there, in her head, Gran’s arms around her shoulders, telling her it would all be all right and to think how happy someone would be—the couple waiting for the baby, as Chris and Alice were waiting for this one.

And everything had been all right.

Another contraction brought her back to the here and now—with a vengeance! She rode the wave of pain, checked her watch, and realised she’d have to leave the sanctuary of her room.

At least if she had the baby here and now she’d be spared the indignity of a hospital gown that invariably left the wearer’s backside hanging out. Should she phone Chris and Alice now, or wait until she was certain this was going to be the main event?

Unable to decide, she emptied the upstairs buckets again, then paced the corridor, up and back and up and back, not wanting to return to Dottie’s room with nothing more than a purple and white striped nightshirt covering her body.

Charles appeared at some stage of her pacing, fitting his step to hers.

‘I know it probably helps to keep moving but at some stage I need to check on your cervix to see how dilated it is.’

A complete stranger checking out her cervix?

Particularly this handsome and apparently princely stranger...

Panic welled inside her and for all she told herself that most of the doctors she saw were strangers at first, nothing eased the disturbing thought of this man looking at her most private parts.

‘Dottie can do that,’ she said, and the man had the hide to smile.

‘I have no doubt at all about that,’ he said. ‘I rather imagine she can do anything she sets her mind to, but she is frail, and a little arthritic, I imagine. It would be easier for me to check.’

And as another wave of pain was clutching at Jo’s body she couldn’t argue. In fact, it was bad enough, she realised as it waned, that she wasn’t really going to care who did what to her as long as they got Lulu safely out.

And soon!

‘Do you have to do it now?’ she muttered ungraciously at him.

‘I think so,’ he said, putting an arm around her waist to steady her as she straightened up from the wall. ‘It will give us some idea of how far along you are, and if Dottie has happened to keep an old stethoscope, I should be able to hear the baby’s heartbeats as well, to check it’s all right.’

‘Her heartbeats—she’s all right!’ Jo reminded him, but all he did was smile and continue to guide her towards Dottie’s room with his arm around her waist.

Totally unnecessary—at least until she stiffened as her belly tightened and another wave of pain rose inside her. She clung to him, and felt the strength in the arms that held her. Wondering how a prince might get strong arms diverted her momentarily, until keeping back the urge to yell blocked everything but the pain from her mind.

Dottie had covered the end of the low chaise longue with clean towels and was now engaged in tearing the fine old sheets into large squares.

‘We can dry it with some of these then swaddle it. We’ll think about nappies and such later.’

She must have caught sight of Jo’s pale face.

‘Coming faster, are they?’ she said. ‘Well, get up there so we can check your cervix. If it’s not already dilated to seven or eight centimetres, you might as well go to bed in your room and try to get some sleep. It will be a long night.’

Jo, who’d managed between pains to subside onto the chaise, tried to work out Dottie’s thinking. She rarely did any obstetrics work herself but was aware that the cervix started thinning out and dilating over the days and sometimes weeks before the active phase of labour began.

‘I imagine she’s been timing your contractions better than you have,’ Charles said, answering her unspoken question. ‘You’re well into the active phase of labour, hence her guess.’

‘But we’ll have to get the phones ready. Mine’s fully charged in my room across the passage. Would you use yours too? Please?’

‘Will you stop whispering and concentrate on what you’re here to do,’ Dottie said in an exasperated voice, as she threw a light sheet over Jo’s lower body and levered her legs up to they were bent at the knees. ‘I’m quite capable of holding a phone if someone gets the number and sets the camera on go. If this bloke is a doctor, then we’ll let him do the business. You’re pretty low down and I don’t bend as well as I once did.’

But the words were lost in a haze of pain, while Jo gripped the high side of the makeshift bed and gritted her teeth so tightly she wondered if she’d break them.

Even without the bullet, she thought grimly as the wave diminished.

‘Close to ten,’ she heard Charles say, but the wave returned with renewed ferocity, and she heard herself yell to someone, anyone, to get her phone.

‘Chris and Alice, under C in the friends list,’ she panted, now imagining Lulu’s passage down the birth canal. Sliding forward with the contraction, retreating slightly as it passed.

And Chris and Alice not here to experience it...

Tears formed in her eyes and she tasted blood as she bit down on her lower lip.

‘You’re allowed to yell, or moan, or even swear, you know,’ Charles said, squatting at the bottom of the chaise with her phone focused on her dilated cervix.

So moan she did as the next contraction seized her tortured body, although through the haze of pain she heard Charles order Dottie to take over filming, telling them the head had crowned.

Did she push now? She tried to remember her classes. No, maybe not now—let Lulu come out gently. But hadn’t she pushed earlier? Pushed, puffed, panted—she’d been relying on Chris and Alice who’d attended all the antenatal classes with her to tell her what to do when, but now she was too tired to remember any of it, while her first experience had been wiped completely from her memory!

And now the contractions had stopped—well, eased at least—and Charles and Dottie were whispering at the bottom of the bed.

‘What’s happened?’ Jo demanded, as a cold sense of dread enveloped her exhausted body.

‘There, all’s well,’ she heard Charles say, as the small, wet mortal in his hands finally let out a cry.

‘Not a Lulu, I’m afraid,’ he said, coming close to reef open the buttons on Jo’s nightshirt and place the baby on her chest, his head towards her breasts. ‘Let’s see how his instinct is.’

He was beaming down at Jo, while Dottie had come around to the side of the bed, still filming—ignoring the conversations being flung at her from the other end of the phone.

‘See,’ Charles said, while Jo watched in amazement as the tiny newborn wiggled his way across her body to latch onto a nipple. ‘He’s fine—he’ll do. We’ve no drugs to help expel the placenta but if you let him suckle, and I massage you a bit, that should work.’

Dottie, having abandoned the phone now the main event was over, draped a soft sheet across the two of them, then glared at Charles across the bed.

‘My way would have worked just as well,’ she said, so much belligerence in her tone, Jo was frowning as she looked at them.

‘What way? What are you talking about?’ she asked when it became apparent no one was going to enlighten her.

‘He was born flat,’ Charles explained, ‘but I cleared the mucus from his mouth and blew a breath into him and you heard his squawk.’

‘In my day,’ Dottie said, drawing herself up to her full five feet one and glaring at Charles across the bed, ‘we flicked the sole of the foot with a finger and that made them cry—worked every time.’

Jo smiled, then looked down at the little bundle in her arms.

Letting him suckle was good.

They’d agreed, she, Alice and Chris, that the baby should take advantage of the colostrum in her breasts to help ward off infection. Had it all gone to plan, she’d have taken tablets to stop her milk coming in but the early arrival and the state of the floods had put paid to that.

She might have to feed him for a day or two, but that was okay. Right from the day she’d taken the decision to act as a surrogate she’d realised she had to stay focused on the pregnancy as a job, something she was undertaking for someone else, so although her hormones had gone all weird on her, she’d always been totally aware that this baby wasn’t hers, and feeding him wouldn’t change that.

Although she’d hardly have been human if she didn’t feel a thrill to hold the little fellow to her breast, and she smiled up at Charles, thanking him, pleased he’d been here to help her through it all, calm and efficient—a perfect prince of a man, in fact!

She smiled again at the silly thought and, looking up, caught him smiling back, a look of such pride on his face she knew the miracle of birth had affected him as well.

* * *

Charles looked down at the mother and child, full of a feeling of pride that he’d pulled off a successful delivery, mixed with a kind of wondrous pleasure about the miracle of birth.

He saw serenity under the tiredness in Jo’s face, but something else that puzzled him.

Distance?

A lack of pride?

Some kind of pain?

Because the baby wasn’t hers?

Or because of something that had happened in the past?

The dread thought of rape crossed his mind, but he knew that women didn’t have to proceed with an unwanted pregnancy these days.

He studied Jo again—yes, she was tired, but...detached too. That was the word he sought.

Was it not affecting her at all?

Or was she fighting whatever her hormones were telling her to stay detached from this child she had to give away?

But why were his emotions in such an uproar?

Was it being here in his mother’s house that had made him susceptible to this sudden attraction?

Probably!

He looked around the room. Dottie had disappeared, and the phone she’d been using was ringing.

‘Could you answer that?’ Jo asked, gesturing to where it lay on a side table. ‘It will be Chris and Alice—they’ll want to see him.’

He had picked up the phone when Dottie returned to the room with a basin of water—warm, he hoped—more towels, and a hefty pair of scissors dangling from one finger.

‘You’re way ahead of me,’ he told her, as he lifted the phone and pressed the button to answer it.

‘Can we see her?’

Two excited voices rumbled in his ear and he switched the phone back to video chat mode and held it out to show the baby lying on Jo’s chest.

Jo gestured for the phone.

‘He’s fine, although he’s not a Lulu but a Louis. I’m fine, we’ll see you as soon as the water goes down, but right now there’s stuff we have to do, and we all need a sleep.’

She shut down the phone.

‘We’ll have to turn it off, they’ll be ringing every ten minutes.’

‘Damn silly idea, I said so all along,’ Dottie was muttering as she carefully lifted the baby boy and set him on the bed to dry him off.

‘Take these,’ she said to Charles, producing two large stainless-steel pegs from a pocket of her Chinese robe. ‘I’ve poured bleach over them so they should be sterile.’

Charles thought back to training days and knew exactly what was required. He clamped the cord at both ends then cut between the clamps. And with a quick twist of his fingers, the cord on the baby’s end was tied, a little nub still sticking out, to dry, and fall off later.

There, baby boy, he thought as he worked, you’ll have something to remember me for ever, your neat little belly button.

And as Dottie wasn’t watching, he touched the baby’s cheek, smiling when he opened huge eyes to check out who was near him. And the lump in his throat was probably from tiredness.

Jo had turned on her side to watch Dottie ministering to the baby, and although he guessed she’d have been happy doing that herself, she didn’t want to take the fun away from her old friend.

Once satisfied he was dry and comfortable, Dottie swaddled him in a square of sheet, and handed him back to Jo.

‘Try to keep him suckling, it will help with this last stage,’ she said firmly, although Charles fancied he could see the glassiness of tears in her eyes.

She was as affected as he was by the birth...

By the time the placenta was delivered, Jo had drifted off to sleep, and as he helped Dottie clean up he realised that the wind had lessened and the rain no longer thundered down on the damaged roof.

‘It’ll be gone by tomorrow,’ Dottie told him, peering out the window, a bundle of towels in her arms.

‘And the road to the village?’

‘It’ll go down at low tide. Might flood a little more when the tide comes in again but not enough to cut us off.’

‘And Jo and the baby?’

He had to ask.

Would the parents just turn up and take the infant?

How would Jo feel about that?

Surely it had to affect her—she’d carried the baby for nine months after all.

‘Hmph!’ Dottie said. ‘Damn fool idea right from the start. Would you believe they’d phone poor Jo at all hours of the day and night and she’d have to put the phone on her belly while they talked to Lulu. And they sent music she had to play to her. As if a developing foetus would hear all that going on, let alone understand it.’

‘They took the surrogacy thing that far?’ Charles asked, wondering just how much of a trial this pregnancy must have been for Jo.

‘Oh, she’s told you, has she? Dottie said. ‘Come down to the laundry while I get rid of this lot and I’ll explain,’ Dottie told him, and, sensing a slight weakening towards him on the part of his grandmother, Charles was only too willing to go along.

‘Alice couldn’t carry children and they longed for a baby of their own, so Jo offered to be a surrogate. Stupid idea! Worse timing! She had a perfectly good man who wanted to marry her then suddenly she’s off having someone else’s baby—well, he couldn’t hang around nine months, could he?’

She paused, then, apparently needing to be honest, she added, ‘Not that Jo was all that keen on him. Not keen on marriage at all. I think her home life as a child put her off.’

The slight tightness in his chest as he heard Dottie’s words Charles put down to tiredness. It had been a long night and he hadn’t finished his grilled cheese on toast before he’d been drawn into the drama of the birth.

Down in the antiquated laundry, Dottie was running cold water into a deep stone tub.

‘We’ll soak all this for now,’ Dottie told him, although she was doing all the work. ‘Then get Jo off to her own bed for the night, not that she’ll get much sleep if the baby wakes through the night, which, of course, it will. That Chris and Alice are in for some fun!’

She pushed the towels and sheet into the cold water, pressing them down so they were all covered, then headed for a door he hadn’t noticed before. The place was like a rabbit warren.

‘Box room,’ she said, throwing open the door. ‘See if you can find a decent, dry box we can pack with sheets for the baby. Having got this far, it would kill Jo if she rolled on the little fellow in the night and smothered him.’

Charles had to smile as he peered into the unlit room. It was obvious cardboard boxes had been going there to die for years, possibly decades. Which made the ones at the top of the pile the newest and most likely to be sanitary.

Pleased to have been co-opted by Dottie to help—surely it would thaw her attitude towards him, if only a smidgen—he examined the boxes with care, finally producing a clean-looking one with KURL printed in blue along the top.

He had no idea what KURL might be—tinned food, paper, linen?—but he pulled it out and held it for Dottie to inspect.

‘You’ll have to cut down the sides,’ Dottie told him, after a nod he took for approval. ‘It wouldn’t do for him to suffocate at this stage.’

She turned and led him from the room, through the kitchen where he looked a little longingly at the debris of his supper.

‘The scissors are in still in my bedroom, so we’ll take it up there.’

And if he manoeuvred himself into a good position he might be able to see the photos on the chest of drawers.

Clutching his box like a prize, he waited until Dottie had ascended in her lift, then followed her up to find Jo awake, sitting on the little chaise, holding the baby in her arms and looking slightly bemused.

She smiled as he and Dottie came into the room.

‘I obviously didn’t dream it because there’s this baby here to prove it, but I can hardly believe it all happened.’

‘You’ll believe it soon enough when he wakes you every couple of hours during the night,’ Dottie told her, going forward to lift the infant from Jo’s arms. ‘Now, you go to bed and try to get some sleep. We’ll fix a bed for him and put him by you.’

But Charles and his box had stopped in the doorway, transfixed by the sight of this woman, her red-gold hair wild and dishevelled around her pale face, the baby resting in her arms. It was a scene worthy of the great Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and he could only stare.

She’s not keen on marriage.

‘Well, are you going to cut the box?’

He hoped he hadn’t been standing there more than a few seconds, for all it had seemed like a lifetime. He strode forward, smiling at Jo as he passed, taking the scissors from Dottie and hacking away at the sides of the makeshift crib.

‘You do that and sort through the linen for padding. You need to keep it firm. I’ll take Jo to her room,’ Dottie ordered, still holding the baby and occasionally smiling down at him when she thought no one was watching.

Not as tough as she made out, this grandmother of his, Charles thought, but still a very redoubtable lady.

He’d kind of accidentally moved to the far side of the bed so as he cut the cardboard he could also take in the photos.

But although he’d hoped to see at least one of a young woman, or even a girl, who might be his mother, he was disappointed. There was Dottie as a young woman, in her nurse’s white uniform, clutching a rolled certificate, and a handsome young man in army uniform he assumed would be his grandfather. Unfortunately, the wide-brimmed, slouch hat of the Australian Army shadowed the man’s face and before he could do more than glance at the rest he heard Dottie returning.

Hastily dropping the cut pieces on the floor, he put the scissors on the bedside table, grabbed a sheet and wadded it into the bottom of the box, then put a cut sheet, wide enough to swaddle the baby, over it.

‘That should do,’ Dottie told him, although she seemed reluctant to relinquish the baby into his new bed.

‘You’d better get some sleep yourself,’ she said instead, as Charles picked up the debris from the floor and stood there wondering what on earth to do next. ‘If you turn left at the top of the stairs you’ll come to the front room, though why it’s always called that I don’t know. But it has a view if ever it stops raining—looks south and west towards Anooka.’

He had to say something, Charles knew, but what?

He went with courtesy.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s very good of you to take me in. I hadn’t realised just how isolated this place would be. I had arranged accommodation—well, the hospital at Anooka had arranged it—but having come all this way I wanted—’

‘Why should the hospital have arranged accommodation for you?’ Dottie demanded, definitely frosty now.

Charles shrugged. It seemed silly now, given Dottie’s reaction to his arrival, but the old cliché about a person might as well being hung for a sheep as a lamb seemed appropriate here so he told her.

‘I thought, when I decided to come to see you, that it wouldn’t be fair to either of us if I just came for a few days. I wanted to learn something of what my mother’s life would have been like growing up here, so I came in on a six-week working visa, sponsored by the Anooka and District Hospital Board. Apparently, they are only too happy to have British-trained doctors to fill in as locums, especially over Christmas.’




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