you do only have another few months to do to complete your course. All I can say in finishing, Amy, is that I’m very sorry that these changes will disrupt your life as well. Right now, you have time off. The surgery won’t be reopening until George takes over here.’
Amy tottered up out of her seat, knowing that there was nothing she could say or do to change anything. She expressed her best wishes for the older man’s recovery and promised to start looking for other accommodation immediately. She waited until the nausea receded and then put Hopper on a leash and went out for a walk, praying that the cool air would clear her pounding head.
What on earth was she going to do next? Pregnant, homeless and now out of work as well? The sheer immensity of the blows that had come her way without warning consumed her and, beyond that, fear of what would happen to the shelter animals hung over her like a dark threatening cloud. But she didn’t blame Harold for what was happening, not in the slightest. The rescue shelter had always been Cordy’s particular love, rather than her partner’s, and poor Harold had quite enough to be dealing with right now with his illness. She had kept her composure for his sake, knowing he didn’t need to be faced with a tearful, self-pitying meltdown.
She was in over her head, she acknowledged shakily as she sat in a small park, Hopper stationed at her knee. Twenty-three dogs and six cats and two rabbits needed a home. She needed a home, a job, an income to live on. Her head felt as if it would burst with the number of anxieties that were eating her alive. And she pulled out her phone and breathed in deep and slow. When it came to the needs of the animals she had been looking after and loving for so long, pride didn’t deserve a look-in.
She texted Sev, laid it all out for him—the charity to be closed, the animals to be moved out, her loss of employment and home.
I need your help.
She gritted her teeth as she added the words, because approaching him warred with every proud, independent skin cell she had, and she had to stiffen her backbone to hit ‘send’.
CHAPTER NINE
SEV READ THE text in the middle of a board meeting and his shrewd brain homed straight to the essentials: twenty-three dogs, six cats, two bunnies and Amy to house. Fate was giving him a second chance, he grasped, a chance to redeem himself.
Why? Amy hated him and he could not afford to ignore that and hope she got over it if he wanted a future relationship with his child. In the bar, she had shrunk away from him when he’d grabbed her hand to stop her leaving. She had avoided eye contact, indeed had evaded any hint of the personal in their conversation. Her lack of understanding and forgiveness, her failure to warm up on meeting him had come as a shock to Sev, who had assumed that the essential caring softness of her nature meant that she would be more pliable, more easily brought round to his way of thinking. Only she hadn’t even given him the chance to change her outlook and then she had stopped him dead and silenced him with her announcement.
He was excited about the baby and that had shaken him even more. He didn’t even care how it had happened. He knew it was the deserved result of a man who had forgotten birth control once by accident and then had deliberately repeated the oversight for the remainder of the night because he had enjoyed it so much. In other words, whatever flaw her contraception had developed was as nothing when set next to his own sheer recklessness. Beyond that, Sev was struggling to deal with the problem of what might well prove to be one of the most important relationships in his life, with Amy, when he had already wrecked it.
The mother of his child didn’t trust him, and he had only himself to blame for that state of affairs. Even worse, he had hurt her and now she was on her guard. Sev didn’t want to be treated like the enemy, he wanted to share the experience, but Amy was already putting up barriers. He knew how much pain his own father had suffered at being excluded from his son’s life and the guilt he still felt at