soft voice sounded dismayed now rather than suspicious.
‘Once I had explained the reason for my call, yes,’ Nick answered with rising impatience. Really, he didn’t have time for this. He still had several meetings to get through today, before he would be able to leave his office just after lunch so that he could attend Bekka’s Nativity Play this afternoon—thankfully the last school event before it closed down for the holidays.
Which, with his parents flying to America to spend Christmas with his sister, and so not able to help look after Bekka as they usually did, was going to provide Nick with yet another headache.
How had Janet managed? Nick wondered, for what had to be the hundredth time. Although their divorce three years ago had resulted in Janet being more than adequately provided for. Enough so that she didn’t have to juggle a job as well as motherhood, in the way that Nick was trying to juggle his business interests and recently acquired single parenthood.
Get over it, he instructed himself impatiently.
This was just the way it was.
The way it was going to remain.
Nick had no intention of ever remarrying. Things might be hard now, with a constant juggling act of Nick’s time, but Bekka wasn’t going to be with him for ever, whereas a second wife would be!
Hiring a nanny was the obvious answer, of course, but Nick had already tried that—twice—when Bekka had first come to live with him after Janet died. Both those nannies, for different reasons, had been a disaster.
The first nanny, a woman in her fifties Nick had thought would be a perfect surrogate grandmothertype, had turned out to possess the disposition of a drill sergeant. The second, much younger nanny, had been waiting for him naked in his bed when he’d returned late home from work one evening!
As Bekka was actually at school most of the time, and his parents had always been willing to help out with Bekka whenever they could, Nick had decided, after those two disastrous attempts, to dispense with the nanny idea altogether.
‘And exactly what is the reason for your call, Mr Steele?’ Mrs Morgan spoke slowly now.
Get it over with, Nick, he instructed himself impatiently. Ask the woman, make polite murmurings at her refusal, and then just hang up. ‘Bekka would like—Bekka and I were wondering if you would care to spend Christmas Day with the two of us…?’
There was complete silence on the other end of the telephone line. As the woman tried to think up an excuse for refusing, Nick hoped.
‘Are you being serious, Mr Steele?’
Nick scowled darkly as he detected the tone of disbelief. ‘Of course I’m being serious, Mrs Morgan. Christmas Day also happens to be Bekka’s birthday, and she—Bekka and I,’ he corrected again through gritted teeth, ‘would love you to spend the day with the two of us.’
There was another loaded silence. Finally, there was a gruff reply. ‘Let me see if I’ve understood you correctly, Mr Steele. You knocked me down with your car two days ago. I’ve had the most dreadful cold as a result of the soaking I received. And now you’re inviting me to spend Christmas Day with you and Bekka…?’
Nick reeled from the absolute shock of realising that paranoid and old Mrs Morgan was, in fact, the definitely un-paranoid and very young red-haired woman he had accidentally knocked over with his car two days ago…!
Chapter Three
‘HAVE I understood the situation correctly, Mr Steele?’ Beth repeated as she stood in the privacy of the corridor outside the teachers’ staffroom, talking on her mobile. ‘Mr Steele…?’ she prompted sharply as he still made no reply.
It had been a struggle for Beth to come into school at all for these last two days of term, after she had woken on the morning following that disastrous meeting with Nicholas Steele with a debilitating cough and a sore throat.
She was actually feeling a little better today, but not enough to deal with the lethally attractive and—as one of the school governors and the parent of one of her pupils—potentially dangerous Nicholas Steele!
Her fingers curled tightly about her mobile. ‘Mr Steele—’
‘You can’t possibly be the same Mrs Morgan my daughter talks about all the time!’ he burst out disbelievingly.
Beth frowned slightly. ‘Obviously I have no idea whether or not Bekka has been boring you by talking about me, Mr Steele, but I assure you I am indeed your daughter’s biology teacher, Bethan Morgan.’
‘Mrs Morgan?’ he bit out harshly. ‘The widowed Mrs Morgan?’
Beth felt a familiar ache in her chest at the description: ‘the widowed Mrs Morgan’.
The accurate description.
Her name was Morgan, and she was a widow.
Only twenty-six years old, and already a widow.
Shockingly.
So much so that Beth still sometimes had difficulty in believing it herself. In accepting that all of Ben’s incredible happy-go-lucky life force, along with that of Beth’s parents, had been wiped out in a single moment. Gone for ever, when Ben had crashed the car he had been driving the three of them in two years ago.
She and Ben had been the same age. Had grown up together in the same village. Attended school together. Gone off to university together. Become engaged, and then married once they had both attained their degrees—Beth in teaching, Ben in economics.
Losing both her parents and Ben in that sudden way had been as painful for Beth as she imagined having a limb severed might be.
She certainly didn’t appreciate having Nick Steele—a man who had been less than sympathetic after knocking her down two days ago—call and invite ‘the widowed Mrs Morgan’ to spend Christmas with him and his daughter. As if Beth were some sort of charity case. A lonely widow in need of his pity!
Beth might spend a lot of time alone, might be lonely on occasion, but it was a loneliness of choice; she had spent the past two Christmases alone because she wanted it that way, not because she had nowhere else to go. She had plenty of aunts and uncles, grandparents too, that she could have spent the holidays with. She had just chosen not to—too aware, still, of their sympathetic glances, the awkward omissions in conversation of all mention of both her parents and Ben.
‘Bethan…?’ Nick prompted when the woman’s silence became uncomfortably long. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I seemed less than polite just now, but—’ He broke off with an impatient shake of his head. ‘Surely you can understand my surprise at discovering that Bekka’s teacher, Mrs Morgan, and the woman from two days ago are one and the same?’
‘I perfectly understand, Mr Steele,’ Bethan Morgan came back softly. ‘I also accept, given the circumstances, that Bekka must have somehow forced you to make the invitation for me to join the two of you on Christmas Day.’
‘I rarely allow anyone to force me into doing anything, Mrs Morgan!’ Nick cut in; he preferred to think that Bekka had coerced rather than forced him!
‘I—Excuse
