Twins Included

“So this baby’s father isn’t going to be in the picture?” he said.

“That’s right. I’m on my own.”

And it won’t be the first time. Liz didn’t say the words. She didn’t need to; her expression said it all.

“I want to talk about that,” Matt said softly. “You shouldn’t be standing around.” He set his hand in the small of her back and steered her firmly across the foyer and into the sitting room. “I want you to rest on the patio, in the shade, while I make our dinner.”

She came to a sudden halt. “I’m perfectly able to make my own din—”

He pressed a fingertip against her lips. “No slaving over a hot stove for you. Doctor’s orders.” Her full lips were soft and warm; he had to fight a sudden impulse to run his fingertip over the upper curve—

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!

The Bachelor’s Baby

by Liz Fielding

#3666

Twins Included!

Grace Green

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU’RE pregnant?”

Liz Rossiter felt a stab of apprehension as she saw angry crimson color mottle the face of the man seated across from her. “Yes, darling, I—”

“Dammit, Liz!” Colin Airdrie lurched forward in his chair and punched a fist down on the surface of their elegant Horrocks & Vine patio table. “You know I don’t want any more kids. I’ve been there, done that. What the devil are you trying to do? Trap me?”

Déjà vu.

A fragment of memory—from the past that Liz had buried so carefully thirteen years before—suddenly broke free and surfaced, chilling her to the bone despite the sun beating down on their rooftop garden from a hazy New York sky.

This couldn’t be happening.

Not now.

Not again.

“Colin,” she said pleadingly, “it was an accident. I don’t know how it happened.” She tugged at her filigreed platinum choker, which all at once seemed to be strangling her. “But now that I am pregnant, I want this baby!”

Colin shoved back his chair and swung to his feet, his expression grim.

“Liz, I’m forty-five, as you well know. You also know that I have an ex-wife to support and three children to put through university—Amy’s already there, the twins go next year. There’s no way I want to start another family—”

“But…we love each other.”

“Right. And we’ve been in a committed relationship for more than five years. But you’ll recall,” he added tersely, “that before we moved in together, we agreed that it would be just the two of us. And I haven’t changed my mind. I don’t want this baby. That’s final.”

She stared at him, and it was like looking at a stranger. “Surely,” she whispered, “surely you’re not suggesting I should…should…”

She couldn’t even bring herself to think it, far less say it. But she didn’t need to. She could tell by the curt nod of his head that the unthinkable was exactly what he was suggesting.

“The choice is yours.” Stepping behind his chair, he curled his fingers tightly around the top slat and fixed her with a hard implacable gaze. “You can have either me or this child, Liz. You can’t have both.”

Matthew Garvock flicked up his umbrella as he emerged from his Main Street law office in the small town of Tradition, British Columbia. Heavy rain had been pelting down all day and showed no signs of letting up.

He’d had a hectic week—and he rarely worked on Friday evenings but business was booming and he wasn’t about to complain. The harder he worked, the more money he earned.

And it was money he could put to good use, he reflected as he strode along the rain-splashed sidewalk toward the brightly lit Pizza Palace in the next block. The down payment for his new home had taken a huge chunk out of his savings—

A passing car suddenly veered too close to the gutter and sluiced muddy water in his direction. He jumped back, but it was too late. The damage was done. His pants were soaked, he could feel the fabric stick unpleasantly to his legs.

He glowered through the lashing rain and caught a glimpse of the offending vehicle just before it disappeared around the corner. It was a midnight-blue Porsche.

Didn’t belong to anyone in town, he decided as he tugged sopping wet fabric from his knees before continuing on his way. Most folks in this neck of the woods drove pickup trucks. A Porsche was a city car—and this particular one had been driven by someone with city manners…which meant no manners.

He had occasion to visit Vancouver on business several times a year and was always glad to get home. People down on the Lower Mainland were all so damned busy going where they were going, they didn’t care a hoot about anybody else.

He pressed his thumb against the top spring of his umbrella and shook the umbrella out as he walked into the Pizza Palace. It wasn’t a place he regularly frequented—he didn’t have to, Molly and his mother were forever bringing him casseroles or inviting him over for meals.

But tonight, because Molly had taken the kids to a movie, and his mother had gone to Kelowna for the weekend, he was on his own.

And he was looking forward to having the house to himself. Stressed-out after his hectic week, he needed some time alone. What he planned to do as soon as he got home was have a quick shower and change into dry clothes. Then he’d pour himself a beer and take it—along with a few slices of steaming Hawaiian pizza—through to the sitting room where he would spend a couple of mindless hours flaked out in front of the TV.

“Well, hallelujah, it’s still here!”

Despite her aching fatigue and her screaming muscles, Liz managed a shaky smile as she dug up her old house key from among the clothes pegs stored in a wooden box by the back door of Laurel House.

Huddling under her hooded black slicker, she slipped the key into the lock, and held her breath. For a second, she met resistance…and then the dead bolt slid back.

Her breath seeped out in a relieved hiss and she slumped weakly against the door, heedless of the rain lashing down on her…

Then realizing she was in danger of falling asleep where she stood, she jerked herself upright. She had to stay awake…at least till she had faced her father.

She’d phoned him ten days ago, before setting off from New York, but he hadn’t picked up the phone. She’d listened to his abrasive voice bark: “Max Rossiter here, leave a message after the beep!” but she hadn’t wanted to leave a message. She had just wanted to confirm that he was still living in the family home.

Apparently he was…but this evening he was out.

She’d stood at the front door for a good five minutes, ringing the bell, over and over again. Finally she’d given up.

But she hadn’t left.

On her long drive west, she’d had time to think. And she had made some decisions. One of those decisions was that she was going to stand up to him. She wasn’t going to let him intimidate her, the way he had when she was a teenager. Laurel House was his home…but it was also—legally—her home. And if he tried to throw her out, she would take him to court over it.

She opened the door and stepped inside.

Nothing had changed.

That was her first thought.

But after she’d taken a second look, she saw that some things had indeed changed. The appliances she remembered had been gold. The appliances she saw now were black. Gleaming black stove, dishwasher, fridge, microwave…

Yawning, she walked through the kitchen, out into the corridor and along to the foyer.

The doors to all the rooms were open, and she peeked in every one but they were all empty.

Yawning again, she turned away and ascended the stairs.

“Dad?” she called out as she reached the landing. Her voice echoed back. It had a hollow sound.

She checked his bedroom. He wasn’t there. But everything was just as she remembered it, even to the blue-and-white antique quilt with its log cabin design.

She moved on to her old room. She was surprised but pleased to see that here, too, nothing had changed.

And never had the bed seemed more inviting.

Shrugging off her slicker, she tossed it over a chair. She would lie down, she decided exhaustedly, and have a short nap. But she’d leave the door open to make sure that when her father came home, she would hear him.

She woke from a deep sleep to the sound of movement. The thud of heavy footsteps, someone going down the stairs.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position, and felt her fingers tremble as she brushed her long sleep-mussed hair back. Her father was home. And she had to go down and face him. It was a moment she’d dreaded.

She edged off the bed and crept to the door. And hesitated.

The courage she’d built up during her journey now threatened to desert her. Her father’s rages…they had always terrified her.

But she had to confront him sometime. And what was to be gained by putting it off?

Swallowing down her dread, she made her decision. And before she could change her mind, she walked out of her room, across the landing and then—forcing one foot after the other—she descended the stairs.

Matt had just gulped a mouthful of beer from his can when he heard a sound behind him.

Swiveling around, he spluttered when he saw the pale apparition standing unsteadily in the doorway—a wraithlike figure with long flaxen hair and a perfect oval face.

“What the…?” Wondering if he was dreaming, he stared incredulously. Then shaking his head vehemently, he tried to jar the vision from his head. But…when he looked again, it was still there. She was still there.

And she was staring at him as incredulously as if he, too, were a ghost. Her eyes were starkly wide, her full lips parted in dismay, her oval face as pale as the crumpled ecru suit that hung so loosely on her thin body.

“There must,” he said, “be some explanation for this. Tell me—” he attempted to inject some humor into his tone “—please tell me that you’re not the Phantom Lady of Laurel House!”

“What,” she asked in a voice as insubstantial as her appearance, “are you doing here?”

She was real. No doubt about it. Ghosts didn’t wear perfume and this one was wearing something that made him think of pink roses and summer kisses. Raising his beer can to his mouth again, he regarded her with great interest as he took another long swig.

Then wiping the froth from his lips, he set the can on the counter and settled his fists lightly on his hips.

“I’m here,” he said in an amused tone, “because this is my home.”

Her eyes, if that were possible, widened even further. “Since when?” One of her hands had crept to her throat and she was pulling her delicately fashioned platinum choker from her neck as if trying to keep it from strangling her.

Who the devil was she? And what did she want?

“Since when?” she demanded.

“Since I bought it.”

“You’ve bought it? Bought Laurel House? But you can’t have! What happened to—”

“The previous owner? Max Rossiter?” He shrugged. “He’d been ill for a long time and he passed away a couple of months ago—”

She made an odd sound, like the croak of a parched frog.

Intrigued by her reaction, he kept talking and watched her with fast-growing curiosity. “Shortly before that, he’d put the house up for sale—it’s only two miles out of town and it has the greatest view, so I bought it. It had been mortgaged to the hilt—the old guy had had a stroke several years back and he just couldn’t keep up with his extra expenses so in the end he was forced to sell…”

If she’d been pale before, she was ashen now. Alarmingly so.

He walked over to her. “You need to sit down.” He reached out a hand to take her arm in support, but she tried to twist away and his fingertips accidentally brushed her breasts before he cupped her elbow. “You look all in—”

She wrenched herself free and stumbled back. “Don’t touch me!” She glared at him. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

Stunned by her hostility, he stepped back, his palms up. “Whoa, hold on, lady. You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not looking to ravish you.”

Her eyes had become icy cold, but her cheeks were fiery red. “If you were, Matthew Garvock, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Jolted more by the bitterness of her tone than the fact that she knew his name, he gaped at her. Had they met somewhere before? If so, he had no memory of it. He tried to see beyond the pale skin and the pale hair and the pale clothes, to the person vibrating with such blatant antagonism behind them.

And finally, just as he was about to give up, he recognized her.

“Good Lord.” He felt his heart tremble. “It’s Beth.” Emotion threatened to close his throat. “I can’t believe you’ve come back. After all this time.”

She had regained her composure. And she fixed him with a gaze so stony it tore him apart.

“Yes, it’s me, Matt. I’m back…and I’m here to stay. As to Laurel House being your ‘home’—”

At last he’d found his voice again. “You’re welcome to stay here, for as long as you want—”

Her laugh was harsh. “Oh, I plan to. You see, Matt, this is rightfully my home, despite what my father may have led you and his lawyer to believe—”

He was hardly listening to her. He could scarcely believe she’d come back after all these years. Thirteen years. Thirteen years during which he’d never managed to shake free of the racking guilt and the aching regrets—

“…so tomorrow,” she was saying, “I’ll go see Judd Anstruther, my father’s lawyer, and I’ll sort everything out.”

With an effort, he focused on what she was saying.

“Judd’s retired,” he said.

“Who took over his practice?”

“I did. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll be involved.” Agitatedly he raked a hand through his shower-damp hair. “Beth, we have to talk. About…what happened, thirteen years ago—”

“No.” Her throat rippled convulsively. “You have nothing to say to me that I would want to listen to. But I have two things to say to you. And I want you to listen, because I don’t want to say them twice. The first is, don’t call me Beth. I’m no longer that naive teenager, and I no longer go by that name. If you have to call me anything, call me Liz. Or Ms. Rossiter. Either will do and I answer to both…but in your case, I’d prefer the latter.”

He had slipped the pizza into the oven to keep it warm while he had his shower; now he noticed the steamy smell of pepperoni and grilled cheese, and he knew he would always associate that specific aroma with this specific moment.

“And the second thing?” he asked.

The faint lines bracketing her mouth deepened. “Don’t ever,” she said, “try to talk to me about the past.”

Uh-uh. No way. He wasn’t about to go along with that. “But I want to t—”

“You want to what? To say you’re sorry?”

“I want you to know that afterward I tried to—”

“Afterward?” Her mocking tone made him wince. “Matthew, I have absolutely no interest in what happened afterward.”

“But—”

She stopped him by slashing a hand between them. “But what?” she asked fiercely. “Do you have anything to say that can change what happened? Can you change the past?”

She had broken his heart when she’d disappeared out of his life. But he knew he must have broken her heart, too. And while he had deserved all the agony he’d suffered, she had not.

“No,” he said wearily. “No, I can’t.”

“Then please don’t try.” Her tone was crisp. “And please don’t ever bring up the subject again. I’ve put the past behind me. And you,” she said as she turned away, and started toward the door, “would be wise to do the same.”

He moved fast and got to the door before she did. Blocking her exit, he said, “Where are you going?”

“To bed.”

“I’m not budging from the house. I paid good money for it. And I have all the papers to prove it.”

As soon as he’d spoken, he felt like a heel. Now that he was close to her, he realized she was even more fragile than she’d seemed. Fragile and vulnerable.

And here he was, confronting her, in the way a school bully would challenge a weaker child. Remorse poured through him like bile.

“So what are we going to do now?” he asked gruffly. “It looks as if we’ve reached an impasse.”

Fragile and vulnerable she might be, and bone-tired by the looks of her, but she was one thing, he saw as she straightened her spine, that she hadn’t been as a teenager.

Liz Rossiter was a fighter.

She looked up at him, and in her beautiful khaki eyes he could have sworn he saw a spark of cynical humor.

“You’re bigger than I am,” she said, “and as I recall you were a champion amateur boxer, so I won’t even try to throw you out. At least, not bodily. But you’d better start looking for another place to stay, because I promise you, Matthew Garvock, I’m going to win back this house.”

“Is that,” he asked softly, “a declaration of war?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, in a tone that was equally soft—as soft as steel, he thought, sheathed in a velvet glove!— “a declaration of war is exactly what it is!”

CHAPTER TWO

LIZ slept badly.

Her father had been a difficult man to love but still her pillow had been drenched with the tears she had shed for him before she finally drifted off. Then her dreams had been racked by images of him in one of his rages, so that when she woke up in the morning, it was with a feeling of guilty relief that she would never have to face him again.

Later, as she stood under the hot spray of the shower, her thoughts slid inexorably to Matt.

She’d been stunned to find him in the kitchen—although of course she hadn’t at first recognized him. At some time during the thirteen years she’d been away, someone had—to put it politely!—rearranged his face.

The Matt she remembered had been attractive in a clean-cut way, his lean features symmetrically sculpted and his face unscarred despite his many bouts as an amateur boxer.

“Pretty Boy.” That’s what his university buddies had called him, and he’d accepted the nickname with good humor. But he’d confided to Liz that keeping his face unmarked was a point of honor with him. As a fifteen-year-old, he’d promised his concerned mother that if she gave him permission to join the school boxing club, he’d never hurt her by coming home with his face battered. He’d kept that promise.

At least while Liz knew him. But now…no one would ever call him Pretty Boy again. His hair was the same—black with copper highlights; his eyes still dark-lashed and the incredibly rich green of a glacial lake. But his nose had been broken and was markedly ridged; one cheekbone had been flattened; and his lower lip sported a thin, long scar.

He looked tough now, and he looked rugged.

And he still—heaven help her!—made her heart beat faster.

But he must never know it.

And he must never know that she’d lied when she said she never thought about the past. Now that she was pregnant again, she thought about it all the time. Thought about him, and the sweet love they had shared, and the child they had so passionately, yet so tenderly, created together.

Stepping out of the shower, she reached for a towel and swiped it over the mirror. She stared at herself, her reflection shimmering in the wet glass. It was no wonder, she mused ironically, that he hadn’t recognized her. She barely recognized herself, she looked so colorless. The girl he knew had been vibrant and pretty, with bouncy blond curls and a healthy pink glow in her cheeks.

She sighed as she blow-dried her hair. She and Matt had both changed. And they would never again be the same. They were different people now, with different lives.

And though Tradition was a small town, it was big enough for both of them. It would have to be, she decided resolutely, because she had no intention of leaving.

And once she’d ousted him from Laurel House, she would burrow in and make it her home. A warm and comfortable home, for herself and her new baby…the baby that was now the only important thing in her life.

“You, Ms. Rossiter, are one very careless driver!”

Seated alone at the kitchen table, Liz was startled by the sound of Matt’s voice as he came in through the back door. She jumped, and almost spilled her coffee.

Putting down the mug, she dropped her hands to her lap, and hoped she looked calmer than she felt. She wasn’t used to this new Matt—wasn’t used to the hard, craggy face, wasn’t used to the maturity of his bearing.

In the moments before he shut the door, a draft of morning air swept into the room, making her shiver. Or had she shivered because his powerful tanned body was so blatantly revealed in jogging shorts and a black tank top?

“Careless? Really?” She kept her tone casual. And not unfriendly. “Why would you think that?”

A wary expression flickered in his eyes, causing her nervousness to dissipate in a surge of satisfaction. Her amicable attitude had thrown him off balance…and she liked the feeling of control!

He scowled at her. “The Porsche parked out back is yours?”

She nodded, and quirked a quizzical eyebrow.

“Then you owe me.”

“For what?”

“For splashing mud over my suit,” he growled. “Last night, on Main Street—”

“Oh, that was you!”

“You knew you’d soaked me?” Indignation resonated in his husky voice. “But you didn’t stop to apologize?”

“Sorry. I knew I’d splashed somebody…and if I’d known it was a lawyer…” She chuckled. “So…sue me!”

His scowl deepened. Before he could say anything, she added contritely, “Look, I really am sorry. But truly I couldn’t help it. A cat darted in front of the car and I had to swerve to avoid it. If I’d had time to think,” she added, dead-pan, “I would of course have chosen to kill the cat rather than splatter your suit. I mean, let’s get our priorities straight here. What is it, by the way…just as a matter of interest? An Armani? A Canali?”

He glared at her for a further moment…and then his laughter rolled out, free and easy as an eagle on the wing.

“Sears,” he said. “Off-the-rack.”

She leaned back in her chair, her expression mocking. “Whatever happened,” she asked, “to the teenager who swore that when he graduated from law school, he’d never buy off-the-rack clothes again?”

“What happened,” he retorted, “was that he found much better ways to spend his money. Besides—” he threw her a lazy smile that curled her toes “—most of my clients are from the local farming community. They come into my office in their working clothes—oftimes reeking of manure, if not trailing it in on their boots!—and we all feel more comfortable if I’m not dressed up like some city slicker.”