Matilda Next Door - Kelly Hunter Page 0,45

She tried to solve her own problems. Cancer beat her. Cancer beats a lot of people in the end. I think she tried to anticipate your wishes, by not foisting the unintended consequences of your night together off on you. And you might think less of her for that, and I see your point of view, but she doesn’t get a do-over. Amanda will never see her baby grow to be an amazing young woman. She’ll never get to see you be the wonderful dad she thought you could be. You didn’t put one rock on the cairn I made for her this morning.’

He shoved his hands in his pockets, a defensive gesture of old, but he held her gaze, his eyes a study in conflict. ‘You shame me.’

She didn’t mean to. She simply wanted to get to the meat of this issue, because it wasn’t going away any time soon. ‘I’d rather love you.’ She couldn’t hold his gaze. ‘I always thought it would be so easy to do. Nothing so far has made me change my mind. Not even your sock drawer.’

He huffed a laugh. ‘God, Tilly.’ His voice was rough. ‘I do not deserve you.’

Seriously? Was he taking the piss? She risked a glance. He looked sincere. ‘So, we’re good? This talking business is working for us?’

‘Insofar as when I go to London next, I’ll be bringing back a box full of Amanda photos and trinkets and things she might have valued, yeah. For her daughter.’

Tears were not appropriate, thought Tilly, blinking wildly. So not appropriate over cookies and tea, and with a baby at her side who understood none of what they’d been saying, but whose future seemed brighter and more loving on account of it. ‘I’ll pack those treats for Beth.’

‘How many children can you see yourself wanting?’

His question came out of nowhere. Her answer did too. ‘Oh, another few.’

Such a presumptuous answer given the baby at her elbow wasn’t even hers. ‘I mean—’

‘I know what you mean.’

Oh, she was so screwed.

‘You don’t mind that Rowan wouldn’t be your flesh and blood?’

‘Love doesn’t sweat the small stuff.’ She believed this with every beat of her heart. ‘I’d love all my children with a full heart.’

‘We’re leaving early in the morning. Come over later, for dinner. Spend the night with me. I’ll cook.’

‘You cook?’ Because, seriously, she’d seen no evidence of it.

‘For you, I do.’

Chapter Ten

Henry had never learned to cook. Not in his younger years, when his mother’s idea of cooking was thrusting a packet of rice cracker biscuits in his direction; not in his later years, when sitting at his grandmother’s table. Certainly not in London when income was plentiful and there were a couple of hundred restaurants within a few blocks of where he lived.

It therefore made perfect sense to him that he’d be at Maggie’s Wirralong station at four that afternoon, daughter in tow, as he threw himself on her dubiously tender mercy.

He didn’t remember her from school, because she’d been educated out of town. He remembered her from the school bus stop, on occasion, crazy uniform on and straw hat in hand as she attempted to get to her aunt’s house for the holidays, her aunt, like as not, having forgotten she was due to arrive. Maggie Walker had been another orphan for the town to look down on and the other kids to mock. Solidarity and all that.

Which was why her bemused advice to keep it simple, stupid—while wrapping two smallish potatoes up in alfoil and handing them to him and then going back to the cool room for two enormous pieces of fillet steak, which she told him on pain of death to keep out of the fridge until he was ready to cook them, and then give them three hot minutes either side and then put them in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree oven for another ten, then rest them beneath alfoil for another five before serving—made mostly good sense.

‘What’s a hot minute?’ he wanted to know, because details were his business.

‘Do you have a gas hotplate?’ she demanded.

‘No.’

‘Oh, you poor, poor soul. I’ve had a change of heart.’ The steaks went back in the cool room and she emerged with a yoghurt-and-herb covered slab of meat that she put in some type of see-through plastic bag and tied off with a twist. ‘This is butterfly Greek lamb from here on the farm. Tilly will know it’s from here, but you’ll still get brownie points for cooking it right. This entire