The Bachelor's Baby

“Go away, Jake. This has nothing to do with you,” Amy said.

“Are you saying this is not my baby?”

“No, she is your baby. But if it bothers you, go away. Forget you ever met me.”

He stared at her. Was she serious?

“You said you don’t do commitment, Jake. I promise that you’re not committed to me or my baby. Financially or emotionally.”

She crossed to the door and opened it.

Standing on the threshold, his thoughts in turmoil, Jake realized that he didn’t want to go. He just didn’t know how to stay. He headed for the gate. If she was bluffing, well, he was calling her.

The door clicked shut and he swung round, taken by surprise.

She really meant it!

Well, that was just fine. So did he. Now they both knew where they stood.

What happens when you suddenly discover your happy twosome is about to be turned into a…family?

Do you panic?

Do you laugh?

Do you cry?

Or…do you get married?

The answer is all of the above—and plenty more!

Share the laughter and the tears as these unsuspecting couples are plunged into parenthood! Whether it’s a baby on the way, or the creation of a brand-new instant family, these men and women have no choice but to be

When parenthood takes you by surprise!

Look out in October for

Claiming His Baby #3673

by Rebecca Winters

The Bachelor’s Baby

Liz Fielding

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

JAKE HALLAM couldn’t take his eyes off her. She arrived late for the christening, caught in one of the showers that had been chasing across the valley all day, and as she walked towards him a sudden shaft of sunlight lit up in the raindrops that clung to her.

They sparkled against the silver-grey velvet cloak that swirled around her ankles. Sparkled on the spray of flowers she was carrying. Sparkled on long dark lashes that curtained her eyes.

Then she pushed back the wide hood of her cloak and the sun, slanting through the stained glass of the old church, lit up the short, elfin cut of her pale blonde hair.

The baby, nestling in his mother’s arms, whimpered restlessly and the newcomer leaned over, touched his cheek. ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she cooed softly, in a voice like melted chocolate. The infant’s complaint was immediately transformed into a smile.

And then she looked up, straight into his eyes, and repeated the soft, ‘Hello’. Even without the ‘gorgeous’ tag, he felt the same instant desire to grin as she offered him a slender hand. ‘I’m Amaryllis Jones.’

‘Amaryllis?’

‘That’s just for formalities,’ she said gravely. ‘Now we’ve been introduced you may call me Amy.’ He would have done, if he could have caught his breath. ‘And you’re Jacob Hallam. Willow and Mike have told me all about you.’

‘It’s Jake,’ he said quickly. ‘And whatever Willow and Mike have told you—’ he bit back the denial as he remembered where he was ‘—is probably true.’

‘Really?’ The corners of her mouth tucked into a small, teasing smile as she tilted her head thoughtfully to one side. ‘I wonder. So few people live up—or down—to their reputations.’

Even as he struggled to remind himself that he was in church, godfather to the infant about to be baptised and with no business to be thinking the kind of thoughts that were racing through his head, she turned away to kiss Willow, the baby’s mother, and apologise for her lateness.

‘I noticed the bluebells in the orchard as I was leaving. They’re just the colour of Ben’s eyes so I stopped to pick some.’

That was all. Normality returned. Amy took baby Ben from his mother. The vicar ushered them towards the font and Jake thought he must have imagined the spark of something hot and sweet that had crossed the space between himself and Amy. An unspoken promise that said… Not now. Later.

As if she’d read his mind Amaryllis Jones lifted her lashes, flickered a sideways glance at him.

Her eyes weren’t blue. They were green and ocean-deep and he was suddenly out of his depth and floundering. It was an unfamiliar sensation and every instinct warned him that he should head for the door while he still could. But he was keeping a promise he’d made to stand as godfather to Mike and Willow’s first child and escape wasn’t an option.

Yet all through the service Jake was distracted by the scent of the flowers she carried. It wove a spell through his mind so that all through the tea that followed, and the champagne and the toasts to baby Ben’s health and happiness, he was intensely aware of her presence shimmering on the edge of his consciousness. Once the photographs had been taken, and escape was possible, they had circled the company, keeping the maximum distance between them as if by unspoken agreement, understanding that to be close was to risk instant conflagration.

But when he’d glanced in her direction he’d had the feeling that he’d just missed meeting her gaze. Maybe it was simply his imagination working overtime. Maybe. Yet without a word spoken, without a gesture or so much as a lift of a brow, they arrived at the door at the same time, ready to leave.

‘Hold on, Amy, it’s raining again,’ Mike said, as he walked them to the door. ‘You’ll get wet on your broomstick. I’ll run you home.’

‘Broomstick?’ Jake repeated, turning to risk the heat of those dangerous eyes.

And for the first time since she’d arrived in church Amy met his gaze head-on. ‘Mike thinks I’m a witch.’ She should have been smiling. She wasn’t. ‘Don’t you, Mike?’ she asked, but her eyes continued to hold Jake prisoner.

Mike hesitated, and she tilted her head back and laughed, her throat a perfect white curve that Jake’s hand ached to cradle. Then Willow called from the nursery and Amy said, ‘You’re needed, Mike.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I’ll take Amy home,’ Jake said.

‘You’re quite sure? It’s out of your way…’

‘Quite sure.’ He’d been going that way ever since Amy had looked at him. Maybe Mike was right. Maybe she was a witch.

‘Oh. Right. Well, thanks… And thank you for today. Both of you. Give us a call when you get back from the States, Jake. Come and stay.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, Mike added, ‘And take care.’

They paused on the doorstep and there was a moment of silence while Amy, her eyes level with his, regarded him thoughtfully. ‘You’re quite sure?’ she asked after a moment, echoing Mike’s words.

She wasn’t talking about the lift.

Neither was he when he replied, ‘Quite sure.’ Jake led the way to his car, opened the door. Her cloak trailed over the edge and he bent to lift it, tuck it inside. The material was soft, sensual beneath his fingers. Silk velvet. Like a woman’s skin. Maybe that was why his hands were shaking as he slid the key into the ignition. ‘Which way?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Left.’ He glanced at her. ‘I live on the other side of the village. It’s not far.’

Not far, but it was a different world. Mike and Willow’s home was minimalist modern, a labour-saving miracle of architecture designed for busy people and set in a low maintenance courtyard garden with a small paddock beyond that was grazed by a neighbour’s elderly pony.

Amy, in total contrast, lived in a piecrust cottage surrounded by an old-fashioned garden filled with spring flowers that bloomed with wild abandon. They spilled over onto the brick paths, splattering their legs with raindrops as they ran for the door.

Once they’d reached the shelter of the pitch-roofed porch they paused for breath. And to look at one another. Take a moment to consider. Nothing had been said, but they both knew that once he was beyond the front door all the thoughts that were now safely in their heads would spill over into unstoppable action; there would be no stepping back.

It was as if she was saying, You’re quite sure? again. But this time silently. His own silence was all the answer she needed, and she held out her key to him. It hung there between them, shimmering dull silver in the stormy light, and at the back of Jake’s mind warning bells began to ring.

‘I don’t do commitment,’ he said roughly. Almost hoping that she would tell him to go. Leave. Get out.

She didn’t say any of those things. She said nothing, her green eyes holding his, demanding that he make his own decision about whether to go or stay. The warning bells clanged with a desperate urgency but all afternoon her eyes had silently promised him everything he had ever wanted from a woman. Promised that she would fulfil his every dream.

She was wasting her time. He had no dreams. He was a hollow man, rich in the stuff that money could buy, but without a heart, incapable of love.

Most of the time he lived with it, scarcely noticing the emptiness. Today, wrapped in the warmth of friends whose love for each other, whose happiness had reached new heights with the birth of their baby son, he had been painfully aware of his own shortcomings.

Amy Jones was offering him a chance to forget, lose himself for a few hours, and without a word he gathered in key and woman in one movement. For a moment he simply held her, breathed in the scent of rain-washed earth and wallflowers and bluebells. For a moment anything seemed possible.

Fantasy, he knew, but his mouth came down on hers with a deep hunger, a longing to be proved wrong.

CHAPTER ONE

FIRST MONTH. Your pregnancy will not have been confirmed yet. Many women, however, feel pregnant without knowing quite why.

AMY didn’t need the test to confirm what her body was already telling her. What, in her mind, she already knew, had known from the moment when the early-morning sun had turned the world gold in a moment of pure magic.

Even before that.

She’d known how it would be in that first second when Jake had turned and watched her walk towards him. Known that this was the man she’d been waiting for. That this was the moment.

Afterwards Jake had held her, and although he’d said nothing she’d known that he, too, had felt something way beyond his expectations of a casual encounter with a woman he’d made it clear he was making no promises to see again. But she’d looked into his velvet-brown eyes and seen something beyond the moment. She’d seen fear, too.

He was afraid of this. Not just of giving, but of receiving love.

She smiled as she waited, remembering. He’d given generously. Far more than he’d intended. Now, maybe, she’d have to convince him that it was enough. Which might be more difficult. For both of them.

She glanced impatiently at her watch. Despite her certainty, she’d left her assistant to close up the shop and rushed home, impatient for chemical proof, to be reassured that hope and imagination weren’t simply working overtime.

And now it was taking all her will-power not to stare at the little plastic wand, willing the blue line to appear and make it official.

The time waiting for the result of the test seemed far longer than the two weeks since Jake had left her bed. Said goodbye with a kiss that had somehow lingered and, in that golden dawn, had deepened and erupted into something else entirely before he’d dragged himself back to reality and raced away to catch a plane without so much as an ‘I’ll call you’ or ‘I’ll see you’ to suggest he’d be back. She’d expected nothing else. Not from Jake.

He’d warned her. He didn’t pretend.

Lying alone in the warm nest of her bed, listening as he’d moved swiftly through the cottage, snapped the door shut behind him as if to convince himself of the finality of his departure, heard his wheels spin against the gravel of the lane as he’d sped away from her, she had wondered what made him so afraid.

Wondered what had happened in the past to send him racing away from the warmth of a woman’s arms, even when he’d plainly longed to stay.

Cross with herself for standing there, waiting for the test to develop, she put the wand down on the edge of the bath. She didn’t need it. She had better things to do.

She opened the door to the small front bedroom she’d been using as an office. Her hand briefly touched her waist. She’d be working from home more in the future; she’d need her little office.

The other spare room was stacked with stock from her shop. Boxes of handmade soaps, scented candles, essential oils. She’d have to rent more space from Mike, she decided as she looked about her, run her mail-order business from the craft centre.

She’d have to totally reorganise the shop, too. It was time to promote Vicki, give her more responsibility, take on someone else part-time. She was going to need help. A lot more help. A sudden tremor of doubt shivered through her. Suppose she couldn’t cope on her own?

For a moment her hand touched her waist. No, not on her own. Never again. Her baby might be no bigger than a match-head, there might be nothing yet for the world to see, but inside her something amazing was happening. Already her baby had a backbone, a primitive heart…

The low afternoon sun was shining in through a window that overlooked the rear garden. Yes, this would make a perfect nursery. She could see it already…had the colours picked out in her mind…

And she stopped being cool and serious and totally in control and rushed back to the bathroom.

Yes!

Her hand was shaking as she snatched up the tester. A blue line. Did that mean it was a boy? No, no. Stupid. Of course it wasn’t a boy. She was going to have a girl. She and Jake were going to have a baby girl.

Her legs went suddenly wobbly and she clutched at the sink and lowered herself onto the edge of the bath.

She was pregnant.

It wasn’t just a feeling any more; it wasn’t just something she ‘knew’. It was fact. Not just some airy notion that couldn’t, shouldn’t be true. Jake wasn’t a man to take risks. But that last time something extraordinary had happened and neither of them had thought of anything but a deep and desperate need to be held, to be loved. Without limitation, reservation, conditions attached.

And now there was a baby, his baby, their baby, growing inside her. A life begun. It was totally, seriously true.

A smile forced its way across her face, erupting into a disbelieving laugh that faded as quickly as it came.

Falling in love with Jake Hallam had not been a good move. Head-over-heels-at-first-sight falling in love was never a good idea, especially not with a man who’d made a point of explaining his attitude to commitment before he’d stepped over her threshold.

But it had been too late then.

She’d tried. She’d known it was pointless, but she’d made an effort and really tried. After that first moment, when their hands had touched and their gazes had locked and all kinds of incredible sensations had made concentration on anything else very, very difficult, she’d kept her distance. Kept the length of the room between them. She’d sensed that he was doing the same thing, unnerved by the certainty that their fates were inextricably linked.

Yet they had both arrived at the door at the same time, ready to leave. If they’d planned it, it couldn’t have been better timed.

The only comfort was that he didn’t know she was in love with him. Men distrusted that kind of emotional stuff. Not that he’d have believed her anyway. If she’d used the ‘L’ word, Jake would have panicked, certain that she’d cling. If she wasn’t very careful, he’d see the baby as an attempt to entrap him.

Amy laid the flat of her palm against her stomach. No. He must never feel that. If he came back it must be because he wanted to. Because nothing could stop him.

She knew he’d try to stay away.

He’d found it too difficult to leave her not to recognise the danger. He’d driven away from her cottage as if the hounds of hell were on his back. Which was, she decided, promising. It suggested a certain unease, a fear that saying he ‘didn’t do commitment’ wouldn’t be enough.

He was mistaken. It would be. If he wanted it that way. His decision.

She’d have to tell him about the baby, though. Before he heard it from someone else. She had three or maybe four months’ grace, but after that it would be difficult to hide the fact that she was pregnant, and Mike had seen them leave together, had been aware of the tension between them.

His parting ‘Take care’ had been loaded with apprehension…As if he would have protected each of them from the other, but had sensed the attempt was futile.

But once Mike knew about the baby it wouldn’t put a strain on his powers of deduction to put two and two together and come up with the date of Ben’s christening.

The phone began to ring and she let the thought go. She had plenty of time before she had to worry about Jake’s reaction to fatherhood. He was in America, would be gone for weeks. He’d stressed that. As if he needed to reinforce the message. So, she had ages to work out the best way to break the news to him.

Just for the moment it was her secret, and she planned to keep it that way.

Then, as she headed for the door, she realised she was still holding the little plastic spill. Even as her hand moved towards the wastebin she discovered she was totally incapable of throwing away the precious evidence of her baby’s existence. Instead she popped it into a little glass jar standing on the bathroom windowsill and went to deal with her call.

‘Jake? Are you happy with that?’

Jake had been miles away. Thousands of miles away. His body might be sitting in a boardroom in downtown New York, but his mind was on the other side of the Atlantic. Suddenly, he couldn’t get Amaryllis Jones out of his mind.

He’d done a pretty good job of it during the last month. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he sensed it would be a wise move to forget all about her.

Okay, so he hadn’t been able to totally eradicate the searing memory of the way they’d been together. But working hard on setting up a partnership with an American telecommunications company whose CEO had been determined to give him the VIP treatment had made it relatively easy—or, if not easy, at least possible—to push her right to the back of his mind.

But now, sitting with their massed lawyers hammering out the final details, nailing down any loose ends, all he could think of was the scent of bluebells and rain on warm English soil, a woman’s touch that had seemed to reach down into his soul.

What on earth had possessed him? They’d been at a christening, for heaven’s sake! He was the baby’s godfather!

Was that it? An atavistic yearning for fatherhood sending him over the edge? No way! He enjoyed being godfather to Ben but that was as close to fatherhood as he ever intended to get.

It was why he was so careful to choose his partners with a detachment that bordered on coldness. He didn’t walk, he ran from any possibility of emotional entanglements. He kept his relationships uncomplicated, the kind he could walk away from without a backward glance.

Love was too easy to say, too difficult to mean. He’d learned that the hard way.

The only person in the world who’d ever been there for him had been his foster mother. Aunt Lucy was a great lady and he owed her a lot, would be grateful to her until his dying day, but he still knew, deep down, that it wasn’t him she cared for.

She opened her heart to any needy child, or puppy, or kitten who hadn’t got anywhere else to go. He had been just one of dozens through the years. She was kind, warm-hearted, totally honest. It was in her nature to take in the heartsore strays, put them back on their feet, head them in the right direction and despatch them into the world. She’d done it for him, saved him from the kind of trouble a hurting youth could all too easily succumb to, but he wasn’t fooling himself. It hadn’t been personal.

And observing Aunt Lucy had taught him the wisdom of keeping a certain protective distance between himself and the risk of pain. Only someone you loved could hurt you.

With Amy Jones alarm bells had rung right on cue, every instinct warning him to stay away. And he had. Kept his distance. But they’d still arrived at the door together as if they’d planned it. Maybe she had. Maybe Mike was right. Maybe Amy had looked at him with those wide green eyes and bewitched him. Nothing else could account for the way he was feeling. Nothing else could account for the fact he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

‘Jake? Do we have a deal?’

He dragged himself back to the air-conditioned chill of the boardroom, looked around the table at the men waiting for his decision and realised that he hadn’t heard a word anyone had said for the last ten minutes. Not a great way to do business. Not the way he did business.

Standing up, he closed the folder in front of him and said, ‘Thanks for your time, gentlemen. I’ll let you know.’

Before anyone had registered that the meeting was over, he was out of the room and using his cellphone to book himself on the next flight back to London.

Amy was working in the garden when she heard footsteps coming round the cottage. She looked up and smiled as she saw Willow Armstrong pushing Ben along the path in his new, all-terrain buggy.

‘Wow! Fancy wheels, Ben!’

‘A present from a doting grandpa,’ Willow said, with a grin.

A grandpa. Her baby wouldn’t have a grandpa. Or a grandma. Not even an aunt to call her own. ‘Lucky Ben,’ she said softly.

‘Am I interrupting something vital?’ Willow asked, looking at the half-dug trench. ‘Only I haven’t seen you since the christening.’ She paused, as if waiting for Amy to offer some exciting reason for her lack of sociability.

‘Is it that long?’ she hedged. As if she hadn’t counted every hour, every day of four long weeks, waiting for Jake to return—the last two searching for the perfect words to break the news of his impending fatherhood.

‘The garden seems to take up every spare minute at this time of year.’

‘Yes, well, I’m here to interrupt you. It’s such a lovely evening I thought I’d give the buggy a test run on the common while Mike gets the dinner. Catch up with the gossip and with luck get a cup of tea into the bargain?’

Amy jabbed her spade into the soft earth and joined her visitors on the path. The baby was lying beneath the canopy shading him from the sun, a little tuft of fair hair sticking up on his forehead. He was gorgeous. Perfect. Without thinking her hand flew to her waist where her own baby was growing, unseen, unknown.

‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she said, snatching off her gardening gloves before Willow had a chance to register the giveaway gesture, hoping that the flash of heat in her cheeks would be put down to nothing more than exertion. She wasn’t ready to share her news yet. Not even with Willow. Not until she’d told Jake. ‘I’ve been meaning to drop by,’ she said quickly, ‘but I’ve been reorganising the shop, and if I don’t get my beans in now…’ Leaving a summer bereft of the delights of home-grown runner beans to her friend’s imagination, she took the handle of the buggy and began to push it towards the door. ‘But I’m ready for a break. Come inside so I can wash my hands and give this little angel a cuddle.’

Ben began to fidget and his face crumpled as he began to grizzle. Willow bent over him and picked him up. ‘Er, I think I’d better change him before you get too close, Amy.’