Undertaking Love Page 0,55

a hundred different ways in her head and none of them had felt right.

‘I don’t know. Probably.’ She knotted her shaky fingers in her lap. ‘Yes, I think it is.’

‘Fuck.’ Dan watched the footballers again and rubbed his stubble with one hand.

‘Look, Dan …’ she wasn’t sure how to say that there was no need for him to feel obliged to play any part in his child’s life.

‘Does your husband know?’

‘No. I’ve tried to tell him, but the words won’t come out.’

‘I see.’ Dan nodded, and turned to search her eyes with his own. ‘So … what am I supposed to say now, Emily?’

This was her one chance to make the best of this for all of them. She couldn’t blow it. ‘I think you’re supposed to say that it’s best Tom never knows.’

‘Right … right.’ He stared at the ground. ‘And what if I don’t say that?’

Terror held Emily’s breath captive in her chest.

‘What if I said that I need to know for certain if it’s my baby?’

‘I’d say that you were within your rights. It’ll probably destroy my marriage and make me a single mother, but you’re within your rights.’

‘And what about the baby’s rights, Emily? To know its real dad?’

And there it was. The other question that worried her daily.

‘I don’t have all the answers, Dan.’ Her shoulders slumped in desolation. ‘Do you want to be a father right now?’

He put his head in his hands and groaned.

‘Because Tom does. Desperately. And I know he’ll be brilliant at it.’

‘So you’re saying, what? I should just walk away?’

‘Can you?’

‘I don’t know, Emily. I honestly don’t know.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ She bit her lip. ‘Sorry.’

They stared in silence at the footballers playing 5-a-side across the park.

‘I don’t want to smash your marriage up.’

‘No. Thank you. Me neither.’

‘I need to get out of here.’ He pushed his hands through his hair and stood up. ‘I’ll call you sometime. Maybe we can talk again, when I’ve got my head around it.’

Emily nodded, and the sincerity in his blue eyes reminded her why he’d been the one she’d turned to when the chips were down. His gaze dropped to her bump.

‘It suits you.’ A tiny, sad smile glanced across his mouth. ‘This pregnancy thing. It really suits you.’

Emily watched him walk away. His usual swagger was nowhere to be seen. He looked like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘Yoohoo! Marla, honey!’

The distinctive squawk assaulted Marla’s ears across the crowded arrivals hall. She held her arms out and her mother tumbled into them, all suntanned wrinkles and expensive jewellery that jangled every time she moved.

‘Let me look at you.’ She gripped Marla hard by the upper arms and leaned backwards.

‘Still too pale.’ She clucked her tongue then reached up and pinched a cheek. ‘Are you using that juicer I sent you?’

Marla laughed. It had taken all of forty seconds for her mother to find fault. She just couldn’t help herself. Moments later she noticed the short man a few steps behind her mother, locked in a battle with two trolleys piled high with coordinated luggage.

‘Honey, this is my fiancé, Brynn. Brynn, meet Marla. Isn’t she every bit as gorgeous as I said she was?’

Brynn shuffled forward, a vision in crumpled cream linen and an ivory fedora. Marla shook his outstretched hand and tried not to wonder where a taxidermist’s hand might spend the majority of its time.

And fiancé? Was it her mother’s life mission to reach double figures?

‘Good to meet you, Marla. Cecilia has told me so much about you.’

He had a thin voice, and when he fixed her with his gimlet eyes, Marla got the alarming feeling that she was being sized up for a glass display case.

She forced a smile, but her heart had well and truly sunk at the thought of her serene cottage being invaded by her mother, the lover and their luggage. She eyed the trolleys to double check Brynn hadn’t smuggled any dead foxes or such like through customs, before leading them outside to her car.

Neither of her passengers offered to help as Marla loaded the cases into the boot. Nor when she took them all out again because they wouldn’t fit. She heaved the largest case onto the backseat next to Brynn, and then shoe-horned the rest into the boot space.

‘Have you been to the UK before, Brynn?’

‘Only on a one-night stopover a couple of years back en route to the Austrian taxidermy championships.’

‘Oh.’ Great. He was a conversation killer

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