His Baby!

‘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.’