blaming it on the unknown Jake and burying her guilt because she was sick of telling her children that they couldn’t have things when it was all because their unprincipled and disinterested father refused to pay up. ‘It’s not our house, and you know how they drop needles. He might mind.’
‘He won’t mind! Of course he won’t! Everyone has a Christmas tree!’ Kitty explained patiently to her obviously dense mother.
‘But we haven’t got the decorations, and anyway, I don’t know where we could get one this late,’ she said, wondering if she’d get away with it and hating the fact that she had to disappoint them yet again.
They walked on in silence for a moment, then Edward stopped. ‘We could make one!’ he said, his eyes lighting up at the challenge and finding a solution, as he always did. ‘And we could put fir cones on it! There were lots in the wood—and there were some branches there that looked like Christmas tree branches, a bit. Can we get them after lunch and tie them together and pretend they’re a tree, and then we can put fir cones on it, and berries—I saw some berries, and I’m sure he won’t mind if we only pick a few—’
‘Well, he might—’
‘No, he won’t! Mummy, he’s lent us his house!’ Kitty said earnestly and, not for the first time, Millie felt a stab of unease.
But the children were right, everybody had a tree, and what harm could a few cut branches and some fir cones do? And maybe even the odd sprig of berries…
‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘just a little tree.’ So after lunch they trooped back, leaving the exhausted little Rufus snoozing by the fire, and Amelia and Edward loaded themselves up with branches and they set off, Kitty dragging Thomas in the stroller backwards all the way from the woods to the house.
‘There!’ Edward said in satisfaction, dropping his pile of branches by the back door. ‘Now we can make our tree!’
The only thing that kept him going on that hellish journey was the thought of home.
The blissful comfort of his favourite old leather sofa, a bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt and—equally importantly—the painkillers in his flight bag.
Getting upstairs to bed would be beyond him at this point. His knee was killing him—not like last time, when he’d done the ligaments in his other leg, but badly enough to mean that staying would have been pointless, even if he hadn’t broken his wrist. And now all he could think about was lying down, and the sooner the better. He’d been stupid to travel so soon; his body was black and blue from end to end, but somehow, with Christmas what felt like seconds away and everyone down in the village getting so damned excited about it, leaving had become imperative now that he could no longer ski to outrun his demons.
Not that he ever really managed to outrun them, although he always gave it a damn good try, but this time he’d come too close to losing everything, and deep down he’d realised that maybe it was time to stop running, time to go home and just get on with life—and at least here he could find plenty to occupy himself.
He heard the car tyres crunch on gravel and cracked open his eyes. Home. Thank God for that. Lights blazed in the dusk, triggered by the taxi pulling up at the door, and handing over what was probably an excessive amount of money, he got out of the car with a grunt of pain and walked slowly to the door.
And stopped.
There was a car on the drive, not one he recognised, and there were lights on inside.
One in the attic, and one on the landing.
‘Where d’you want these, guv?’ the taxi driver asked, and he glanced down at the cases.
‘Just in here would be good,’ he said, opening the door and sniffing. Woodsmoke. And there was light coming from the breakfast room, and the sound of—laughter? A child’s laughter?
Pain squeezed his chest. Dear God, no. Not today, of all days, when he just needed to crawl into a corner and forget—
‘There you go then, guv. Have a good Christmas.’
‘And you,’ he said, closing the door quietly behind the man and staring numbly towards the breakfast room. What the hell was going on? It must be Kate—no one else had a key, and the place was like Fort Knox. She must have dropped in with Megan and a friend to check on the house—but it didn’t sound as if they were checking anything. It sounded as if they were having fun.
Oh, Lord, please, not today…
He limped over to the door and pushed it gently open, and then stood transfixed.
Chaos. Complete, utter chaos.
Two children were sitting on the floor by the fire in a welter of greenery, carefully tying berries to some rather battered branches that looked as if they had come off the conifer hedge at the back of the country club, but it was the woman standing on the table who held his attention.
Tall, slender, with rather wild fair hair escaping from a ponytail and jeans that had definitely seen better days, she was reaching up and twisting another of the branches into the heavy iron hoop over the refectory table, festooning the light fitting with a makeshift attempt at a Christmas decoration which did nothing to improve it.
He’d never seen her before. He would have recognised her, he was sure, if he had. So who the hell—?
His mouth tightened, but then she bent over, giving him an unrestricted view of her neat, shapely bottom as the old jeans pulled across it, and he felt a sudden, unwelcome and utterly unexpected tug of need.
‘It’s such a shame Jake isn’t going to be here, because we’re making it so pretty,’ the little girl was saying.
‘Why does he go away?’ the boy asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied, her voice soft and melodious. ‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Didn’t Kate say?’
Kate. Of course, she’d be at the bottom of this, he thought, and he could have wrung her neck for her abysmal timing.
Well, if he had two good hands…which at the moment, of course, he didn’t.
‘He goes skiing.’
‘I hate skiing,’ the boy said. ‘That woman in the kindergarten was horrible. She smelt funny. Here, I’ve finished this one.’
And he scrambled to his feet and turned round, then caught sight of Jake and froze.
‘Well, come on then, give it to me,’ the woman said, waving her hand behind her to try and locate it.
‘Um…Mum…’
‘Darling, give me the branch, I can’t stand here for ever—’
She turned towards her son, followed the direction of his gaze and her eyes flew wide. ‘Oh—!’
‘Mummy, do I need more berries or is that enough?’ the little girl asked, but Jake hardly heard her because the woman’s eyes were locked on his and the shock and desperation in them blinded his senses to anything else.
‘Kitty,
