stood for a moment by the cot, looking down at the sleeping infant. Listening to her soft breathing, assailed by a torment of confused emotions as he considered every possible future. For Posie. For Grace.
Grace laughed as, her bottle empty, Posie turned to nuzzle at her breast, searching for more.
‘Greedy baby,’ she chided softly.
It was just getting light and, miraculously, they had both slept through.
She looked up as the squeak of the door warned her that she was no longer alone.
As Josh padded silently across the kitchen floor on bare feet, unaware that he had company, her first thought was that he didn’t look so hot.
Then, as he reached the kettle, switched it on and stood by the window, staring out of the window at a pink and grey dawn while he waited for it to boil, she thought again.
He might have the hollow-eyed look of a man who’d spent the night staring at the ceiling but, in washed thin jogging pants and nothing else, he looked very hot indeed.
‘Tea for me,’ she said, before that train of thought joined last night’s beach fantasy and got completely out of hand. Then, as he spun around, ‘If you’re offering.’
‘Grace… I didn’t see you there. Why are you sitting in the dark?’
‘I’ve been feeding Posie,’ she said. ‘There’s more chance that she’ll go back to sleep if I leave the light off.’ Then, ‘Is the kettle playing up again?’
He looked at the kettle, which was clearly working, then at her.
‘The one in your flat,’ she said. ‘Phoebe was going to buy a new one before…’ Before the christening. But Josh had been ‘too busy’ to fly home, so she hadn’t bothered.
‘What? No,’ he said. Then, ‘I don’t know. It was claustrophobic in the basement. Since I moved last year I’ve got used to seeing the sky when I wake up.’
‘You have to go to sleep before you wake up,’ she pointed out.
He shrugged. ‘I managed an hour or two. I don’t need a lot of sleep.’
‘I remember,’ she said.
‘Do you?’
It was just as well the half-light was pink because she blushed crimson. That wasn’t what she’d meant….
‘I remember Michael saying that you’d moved to some fabulous new penthouse with views to the end of the world.’ They’d gone out there to visit, just after he’d moved in and BP. Before pregnancy. ‘He said you wanted a closer look at all those horizons still waiting to be conquered.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘I haven’t the first idea what you want, Josh.’ She shifted the baby to a more comfortable position, then said, ‘So? What’s it like?’
He regarded her for a full ten seconds before he turned away, dropped a couple of tea bags into two mugs and poured on boiling water. Then, his back to her, he said, ‘It’s like standing on the high board at the swimming pool without a handrail. You’d hate it.’
That hurt, cut deep, mostly because he was right, but, refusing to let it show, she said, ‘I don’t have a problem with views. I just don’t have your unstoppable urge to find out what lies beyond them.’
‘Still clinging to the safety net of home, Grace?’ he said, lifting his head to challenge her.
‘Still searching for something to cling to, Josh?’ she came back at him.
He was the one who looked away and she realised that she’d touched an unexpected nerve.
‘Will you stay and keep an eye on Posie while I go and take a shower?’ she asked, easing herself to her feet, laying the sleepy babe in her crib, then fetching the milk jug from the fridge. ‘Milk?’ she asked, after fishing out the tea bags.
He didn’t answer and, when she looked up, she realised that he was staring down at the overlarge dressing gown she was wearing, or rather at the way it was gaping open where she’d held Posie against her breast as she’d fed her from the bottle, as Phoebe had, giving the same skin to skin closeness as breastfeeding.
‘This is Phoebe’s,’ she said, self-consciously pulling it around her, tightening the belt. ‘It’s a bit big, but I’ve been wearing it so that Posie has the comfort of her scent.’
‘Until yours and hers become indistinguishable?’
‘No! It was just while she was away.’ Except, of course, her sister wasn’t ever coming back. ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead.’
‘No,’ he said, with a heavy finality that suggested she hadn’t thought very much about anything. ‘Although I suspect that, unless her table manners improve, all she’s going to get is the smell of stale milk or dribble.’
She frowned.
‘There’s a damp patch,’ he said, then, when she looked down. ‘No, on the other side…’
‘Oh, nappy rash! I’m leaking.’
‘Leaking?’
She opened a cupboard, grabbed a sealed pack of sterilised bottles. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I may be a while,’ she said, heading for the door.
‘Wait!’ He caught her arm. ‘You’re feeding Posie with your own milk?’
He sounded shocked. Instantly on the defensive, she said, ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘You have to ask?’
Confused by his reaction, she said, ‘Apparently.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re expressing your own milk, putting it in a bottle and then sitting down and feeding Posie with it. Do I really have to explain what is wrong with that picture?’
‘There’s not a thing wrong with it. Breast milk is the very best start for a baby. Everyone knows that.’
‘In an ideal world,’ he replied, ‘but I suspect that precious few surrogate mothers stick around to play wet nurse.’
‘I’m not!’
‘As near as damn it, you are.’
She stared at him, shaken by the fierceness of his reaction. ‘You know this isn’t a normal surrogacy, Josh.’
‘Really?’
How could anyone invest such an ordinary word with such a mixture of irony, disdain, plain old disbelief? Grace didn’t bother to respond, defend herself, since clearly he was a long way from finished.
‘In what way isn’t it normal?’ he asked. ‘You’re not married, so there was nothing to stop Michael’s name being put on the birth certificate. I assume that happened?’
‘Of
