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Gill hadn’t mentioned anything about him being the human equivalent of the north face of the Eiger either, thought Martha. You could hardly hear yourself think for the sound of illusions being dashed all round.
Not that she really blamed Gill. The other woman had taken over from her as fashion editor at Glitz, and she was clearly keen to pack Martha off to the Indian Ocean where she wouldn’t be in a position to angle for her old job back. Martha could have told Gill that she was welcome to the job, and she certainly would have done if it had meant that she had been rather better prepared to face Lewis Mansfield.
As it was, things seemed to be going from bad to worse. She would never get to St Bonaventure at this rate.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said carefully. ‘I assumed that Gill would have told you about Noah.’
‘She just said that you were experienced with babies, that you were free for six months and that you could leave almost immediately,’ said Lewis, as if bedgrudging allowing even that much. ‘She also said that you were very keen to go to St Bonaventure.’
Thanks, Gill, said Martha mentally, revising her earlier, less grateful opinion of her successor.
‘All that is true,’ she told Lewis. ‘I’m very—’
She stopped as Noah threw his rattle at Lewis with a yell. ‘Shh, darling,’ she admonished him, reaching over to retrieve the rattle, but it was too late. The baby sleeping in the carrycot had woken up and was uttering sputtering little cries that signalled a momentous outburst.
Lewis rolled his eyes. ‘That’s all I need!’
Leaping to her feet before Lewis could get too harassed, Martha went over to pick up Viola and cuddled her against her shoulder until her cries subsided into hiccuping little sobs.
‘Now, let’s have a look at you,’ she said, settling back on the sofa and turning Viola on her knee so that she could examine her. ‘Oh, you’re very gorgeous, aren’t you?’
All babies were adorable as far as Martha was concerned, but Viola was exceptionally beautiful, with her golden curls, pansy-blue eyes and ridiculously long lashes where the tears still shimmered like dewdrops. She looked doubtfully back at Martha, who smiled at her.
‘I think you probably know it too, don’t you?’ she said, and Viola dissolved into an enchanting smile that in anyone older than a baby would have undoubtedly been classified as a simper.
‘How old is she?’ Martha asked Lewis as she tickled Viola’s tummy and made her giggle.
‘What?’ Lewis sounded distracted.
‘She looks about the same age as Noah.’
Annoyed for some reason by the unexpected sweetness of Martha’s smile, Lewis pulled himself together with an effort. How old was Viola?
‘She’s about eight months,’ he said after a mental calculation.
‘Oh, then she is the same as Noah.’
Noah was beginning to look a bit jealous of all the attention Viola was getting, so Martha put them both on the carpet where they could sit and subject each other to their unblinking baby stares. She watched them fondly for a moment.
‘They could almost be twins, couldn’t they?’
‘Apart from the fact that one’s blonde and the other is dark?’ countered Lewis, determined not to be drawn into any whimsy.
‘OK, not identical twins,’ said Martha mildly. ‘When’s Viola’s birthday?’
‘Er…May ninth, I think.’
‘Really?’ Forgetting his disagreeable manners, Martha beamed at Lewis in delighted surprise. ‘That’s Noah’s birthday, too! Isn’t that a coincidence? You really are twins,’ she told the two babies on the floor, who were still eyeing each other rather uncertainly.
She glanced back at Lewis. ‘It must be fate,’ she said hopefully.
Lewis looked discouraging, not entirely to Martha’s surprise. She hadn’t really expected him to be the type who set much store by signs and superstitions and intriguing coincidences. No point in bothering to ask him his star sign, she thought resignedly. He was the kind of man who would just look at you in disgust and not only not care what sign he was but not even know.
‘You haven’t told me why you’re so keen to go to St Bonaventure,’ he said, disgruntled in a way he couldn’t even explain to himself. It was something to do with the way she had held Viola, with the way she had smiled at the two babies on the floor, with the way her face had lit with surprise. He didn’t have time to notice things like that, Lewis reminded himself crossly.
‘Does one need a reason to want to spend six months on a tropical island?’ Martha turned his question back on him. Her voice was light, but Lewis had the feeling she was holding something back and he frowned.
‘I’d want to feel that a nanny who came with us knew exactly what she was getting into,’ he said repressively. ‘St Bonaventure is isolated, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and whichever direction you turn it’s hundreds of miles to the nearest major city. The island is very small, and once you’ve been round it there’s nowhere else to go except for a scattering of even smaller islands with even less to see.’
It was at that point that Viola, after subjecting Noah to a long, considering stare, reached out deliberately and pushed him over. Startled, Noah let out a wail, and Lewis looked irritated.
Oops, maybe putting the babies together wasn’t such a good idea after all. Martha scooped them both up and settled them on either side of her, giving Noah his rattle and finding Viola a dog-eared toy which she promptly stuffed in her mouth.
‘Sorry about that.’ Martha looked back at Lewis. ‘You were saying?’ she asked him politely.
Lewis watched his niece glaring haughtily over Martha’s lap at Noah and looking for a moment so like her mother that he almost laughed. He glanced at Martha with reluctant respect. He had to admit that she seemed surprisingly competent for such an unlikely-looking nanny.
Viola, as her current nanny was always telling him, could be a handful, and if she took after her mother, as she was already bidding fair to do, that would turn out to be a masterly understatement. But Martha seemed to have got her measure straight away, dealing with her with a combination of tenderness and firmness.
Belatedly, Lewis became aware that Martha had asked him a question and was waiting expectantly for the answer. Cross with himself for letting himself get diverted from the issue, he scowled.
‘You were telling me about conditions on St Bonaventure,’ Martha prompted kindly.
Not that that made Lewis feel any better. He didn’t like looking foolish, and he suspected that was exactly how he did look right then. Abruptly getting to his feet to get away from that dark stare, he prowled around the room.
‘The island was hit by a cyclone last year which wiped out most of the infrastructure. That’s why I’m going,’ he told her. ‘The World Bank is funding a new port and airport with access roads, so it will be a major project.’
‘But surely all that will take longer than six months?’ said Martha in surprise.
Lewis gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It will certainly do that! We’re going to be doing the design and overseeing the construction, so there’ll be a resident engineer out there for the duration of the project, but I want to be there for the initial stages at least. It’s a prestigious project and this is a critical time for the firm. We need it to be a success.’
‘So you’ll spend six months setting everything up and then come back to London?’
‘That’s the plan at the moment. I might end up staying longer—it depends how things go. We’ll need to do various surveys, which may mean incorporating various changes into the design, and it’s important to establish a good working relationship with all the authorities and suppliers. These things take time,’ said Lewis, very aware of Martha’s eyes on him.
He wished she would stop looking at him with that dark, disturbing gaze, stop sitting there with a baby tucked under either arm, stop being so…unsettling.
‘In any case, Savannah should be able to look after Viola herself in six months’ time,’ he concluded brusquely, uncomfortably conscious that he had lost the thread of what he was saying. Martha didn’t need to know about the project, or why it was important to him. Anyone would think he cared what she thought. ‘It would be a strictly short-term contract as far as a nanny is concerned.’
‘I understand,’ said Martha.
‘The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not going to be an extended beach holiday,’ Lewis persevered. ‘St Bonaventure isn’t developed as far as tourism goes, and there’s a very small expatriate community. I’m going to be extremely busy, and will be out all day and probably a number of evenings too.
‘Whoever comes out to look after Viola is going to be in for a very quiet few months. She’s going to have to look after herself. Sure, the weather’s nice, but once you’ve been down to the beach there’s nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. The capital, Perpetua, is tiny and there are hardly any shops, and where you do find one it’s dependent on imports that can be erratic, to say the least. Sometimes the shelves are empty for months, which can make the diet monotonous.’
‘I think you’ve made your point,’ said Martha, smiling slightly, as if she knew that he was doing his damnedest to put her off and wasn’t having any of it.
Lewis scowled and dug his hands in his pockets. ‘All I’m trying to say is that if you’re expecting paradise you’d better think again!’
Martha met his gaze directly. ‘I’m not looking for paradise in St Bonaventure,’ she said.
‘What are you looking for, then?’
For a moment, Martha hesitated. She had hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary to tell Lewis Mansfield the whole story at this stage, but it was probably better to be open.
‘I’m looking for Noah’s father,’ she said clearly.
If she had expected a sympathetic response from Lewis she was doomed to disappointment. ‘Careless of you to lose someone as important as that,’ he commented, and then lifted a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Or did he lose you?’
Martha flushed slightly. ‘It wasn’t like that. Rory is a marine biologist. He’s doing a PhD on something to do with ocean currents and coral reefs…I’m not sure exactly, but he’s doing his fieldwork on some atoll off St Bonaventure.’
‘If you know where he is, he’s not exactly lost, is he? Why do you need to go all the way out to the Indian Ocean when you could just contact him? If he’s a student he’s bound to have an email address, if nothing else. It’s not hard to track people down nowadays.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ said Martha. ‘I need to see him. Rory doesn’t know about Noah, and it’s not the kind of thing you can drop in a casual email. What would I say? Oh, by the way, you’re a father?’
‘It’s what you’re going to have to say when you see him, isn’t it?’ Lewis countered.
Martha bit her lip. ‘I think it would be better if Rory could actually see Noah. He won’t seem real to him otherwise.’
‘You mean you think you’re more likely to get money out of him if you turn up with a lovely, cuddly baby?’
The dark eyes flashed at his tone. ‘It’s not about money,’ she said fiercely. ‘Rory’s a lot younger than me. He’s still a student and finds it hard enough to survive on a grant himself, never mind support a baby. I know he can’t afford to be financially responsible for Noah, and I’m not asking him to.’
‘Then why go at all?’
‘Because I think Rory has the right to know that he’s a father.’
‘Even though presumably he wasn’t interested enough to keep in touch with you and find out for himself that you were all right?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Martha a little helplessly. How could she make someone like Lewis understand?
‘I met Rory at the beginning of last year. It wasn’t just a one-night stand,’ she added, hating the idea that he might think there had been anything sordid or casual about the affair. ‘I liked Rory a lot and we had a very nice time together but at the same time we both knew that it wasn’t a long-term thing.
‘We had completely different lives, for a start. He was only in the UK to go to conferences and write up some of his research, and I had a great job in London. It was always clear that he had to go back to St Bonaventure to finish his thesis, and we both treated it as…’ she shrugged lightly, searching for the right description ‘…as a pleasant interlude.’
‘So he didn’t know you were pregnant?’
‘Yes. I found out just before he left, so I told him. I felt I had to.’
‘And he left anyway?’ Lewis sounded outraged and Martha looked at him curiously.
‘We discussed it,’ she told him, ‘and we agreed that neither of us was ready to start a family. It was obviously out of the question for him, and I was very involved in my own career. I was incredibly busy then too. There was no way I could imagine fitting a baby into my life…’
She trailed off as she remembered how obvious everything had seemed at the time. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, recollecting herself, ‘the upshot was that I told Rory that I was going to be sensible. I said he didn’t need to worry, I would take care of everything.’
For a moment the image of Rory’s expression of stunned relief as he realised what she was saying was vivid in her mind. ‘It didn’t feel like a big deal, then,’ she remembered. ‘I just thought it would be a straightforward operation and that I would be fine.’
Martha looked down at Noah and smoothed his dark, downy hair. Just the thought of how close she had come to never having him made her shudder now.
‘So Rory went back to St Bonaventure,’ she finished, glancing back at Lewis. ‘And I…changed my mind.’
Of course she had changed her mind, thought Lewis with a jaundiced expression. Changing their minds was what women did, and to hell with the consequences for anyone else involved!
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said dourly. ‘Your body clock was ticking, everyone else was having babies and playing at being perfect mothers and you wanted to play too?’
Martha was taken aback by the edge of bitterness in his voice. What was his problem? Don’t let him wind you up, she reminded yourself. He’s your ticket to St Bonaventure.
‘You might be right about the body clock,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I’m thirty-four, and with no sign of another serious relationship on the horizon I had to face the fact that might not have another chance to have a child. It hadn’t been an issue before. I had a boyfriend for eight years and we were both thinking about our careers, not about babies. I thought I was fine with that, but once I was pregnant…it’s hard to explain, but everything changed after Rory had gone. I just knew I couldn’t go through with it and that I wanted to keep the baby.’
Lewis was looking profoundly unmoved by her story. ‘Why didn’t you tell him that you’d changed your mind?’
‘I knew that he wasn’t going to be in a position to help, and anyway I felt that it was my decision in any case. I didn’t want Rory to feel responsible.’
‘And now you’ve changed your mind about that too?’
Martha eyed him warily. There was a current of hostility in his voice that she didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure if it was women generally that he disliked or just single mothers, but there was certainly something about her that was rubbing him up the wrong way.
It was a pity, she thought. She had warmed to him while he was telling her about the project. Striding about the office, the austere face lit with enthusiasm, he had seemed warmer and more accessible somehow. More…well, attractive. She had even begun to think that spending six months with him wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
CHAPTER TWO
MARTHA set her chin. It didn’t matter what Lewis Mansfield was like, or whether he liked her or not. The important thing was to convince him to give her the job. She needed to get out to St Bonaventure, and somehow he had to realise how important it was to her.
She glanced down at her small son. He was why she was here now. ‘When Noah was born…’ she began slowly, only to pause and rethink what she was trying to say. ‘Well, it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had a baby, but my life changed completely. It was as if everything had turned round and the things that had been important before suddenly didn’t matter that much any more. The only thing that really mattered was Noah.
‘I want to give him the things every child needs,’ she went on, picking her words with care. ‘Love, security, support…I can do all of that as a mother, but I can’t be his father. The bigger Noah gets, the more I’ve come to realise that he needs a father as well as me. At the very least, he needs to know who his father is.’
She looked back at Lewis, her gaze very direct. ‘I don’t want Rory to feel that he has to provide any financial support, but I do want to give him the chance to be part of his son’s life, even if it’s only occasional contact.
‘Of course I’m hoping that he’ll want more than that, that he’ll want to see Noah grow up and share his life as part of the family,’ she said, ‘but I’m not setting my heart on that because it might not be right for any of us. But I can’t know any of that until I can find Rory himself and introduce him to Noah and that’s why I need to get to St Bonaventure as soon as I can,’ she finished breathlessly.
Lewis didn’t respond immediately. Instead he came back to sit opposite her and regard her with an indecipherable expression.
‘If it’s so important to you, why don’t you just buy a ticket, go out there and find this guy?’ he asked at last. ‘St Bonaventure is a tiny place. It’s not going to be too hard to track him down. Why complicate matters by getting involved as a nanny?’
‘Because I can’t afford to get there any other way,’ said Martha frankly. ‘You said yourself that St Bonaventure is not a mass market destination for tourists. That means that there are no package deals, and all the flights I’ve looked into are phenomenally expensive, especially when I don’t know how long it would take me to find Rory. I just don’t have that kind of money at the moment.’
She had never met anyone who could use his eyebrows to the effect that Lewis did. One was lifting now, expressing disbelief and disdain in a way no words ever could. ‘I’m no expert,’ he said—and looking at his conventional suit and tie Martha could believe that!—‘but those look like pretty expensive clothes to me.’
His slate-coloured gaze encompassed her soft suede trousers, the beautifully cut shirt and the stylish boots. There was nothing obvious about the way she dressed, but she still managed to ooze glamour. ‘If you can afford to dress like that I’d have thought you could afford a plane ticket.’
‘I bought this outfit a long time before I had Noah,’ said Martha, acknowledging the point. ‘I couldn’t afford any of it now and, to be honest, I wouldn’t buy it even if I could.’ She looked ruefully down at the stains and creases that Lewis obviously couldn’t see from where he was sitting. ‘It’s totally impracticable for looking after a baby!’
‘Presumably when you talked about the great career you had, you didn’t mean being a nanny then?’ he asked sardonically.
‘No. I was a fashion editor for Glitz. You won’t know it,’ she told him before he could say anything, ‘but it’s a glossy magazine for women, and very high profile. I loved my job and I had a good salary, but unfortunately I had a very expensive lifestyle as well.’
