In Bed with a Stranger

‘Love,’ Sophie said simply, taking a mouthful of gin. ‘And maybe, having been on the move constantly all my life, I’m just ready to stay still now.’ She glanced at him guiltily. ‘I keep sneaking into furniture shops to look at sofas and I’ve developed a terrible obsession with paint colour charts. I suppose I just want a home.’

‘Well, Kit’s pad in one of Chelsea’s most desirable garden squares isn’t a bad start on the property ladder,’ Jasper said, scooping up crab pâté on a piece of rye bread. ‘Better than Alnburgh, anyway. You had a narrow escape there.’

‘You can say that again. So, are you planning to move in when you get back from LA, then?’

Jasper grimaced. ‘God, no. The windswept Northumberland coast is hardly the hub of the film industry and I can’t exactly see Sergio walking down to the village shop and asking Mrs Watts for foie gras and the latest copy of Empire magazine.’

Taking another mouthful of gin, Sophie hid a smile. He was right; Sergio had shown up in Alnburgh for Ralph’s funeral and it had been like seeing a parrot at the North Pole.

‘So what will happen to it?’ She speared an olive from her salad. Curiously, she cared much more about the future of Alnburgh Castle now there was no question of it involving Kit or her. She’d been so miserable there when she’d gone up to stay with Jasper last winter that the thought of actually living within its cold stone walls was enough to bring her out in goosebumps. But now that possibility had been removed,

and sitting in the sunshine in the middle of Covent Garden, she could feel a sort of abstract affection for the place.

‘I don’t know.’ Jasper sighed again. ‘The legal situation is utterly incomprehensible and the finances are worse. It’s such a bloody mess—I still can’t forgive Dad for dropping a bombshell like that in his will. The fact that Kit isn’t his natural son is just a technicality—he was brought up at Alnburgh and he’s taken responsibility for the place almost single-handed for the last fifteen years. I guess that if I’m gutted by the way things have turned out, it must be even worse for him. Has he mentioned it in his letters or anything?’

Not meeting his eye, Sophie shook her head.

‘No, he hasn’t mentioned it.’

The fact was he hadn’t mentioned anything much. Before he went he’d warned her that phone calls were frustrating and best avoided so she hadn’t expected him to ring, but she couldn’t help being a bit disappointed that he hadn’t. She had written to him several times a week—long letters, full of news and silly anecdotes and how much she was missing him. His replies had been infrequent, short and impersonal, and had left her feeling more lonely than if he hadn’t written at all.

‘I just hope he doesn’t hate me too much, that’s all,’ Jasper said unhappily. ‘Alnburgh meant everything to him.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault that Kit’s mother disappeared with another man when he was just a little boy, is it? And anyway, it’s all in the past now, and, as my barking-mad mother would say, everything happens for a reason. If Kit was the heir there’d be absolutely no chance I’d be marrying him. He’d need a horsey wife who came complete with her own heirloom tiara and a three-year guarantee to produce a son. I’d fail on all counts.’

Her tone was flippant, but her smile stiffened slightly as she said the bit about the son. Jasper didn’t seem to notice.

‘You come closer than Sergio. You’d both look good in a

tiara, but you certainly have the edge when it comes to bearing heirs.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

It was no good. To her shame both her voice and her smile cracked and she had to press her hand to her mouth. Across the table Jasper looked horrified.

‘Soph? What’s wrong?’

She grabbed her drink and took a gulp. The gin was cold, bitter, good. It felt as if it was clearing her head, although that was probably an ironic illusion.

‘I’m fine. I finally saw a doctor about the monthly hell that is my period, that’s all.’

Jasper’s eyes widened. ‘God, Soph—it’s nothing—?’

She waved a hand. ‘No, no, nothing serious. It’s as I thought—endometriosis. The good news is it’s not life-threatening, but the bad news is that there’s not much they can do about it and it could make getting pregnant a problem.’

‘Oh, honey. I had no idea having children was so important to you.’

‘Neither did I, until I met Kit.’ Sophie slid her sunglasses back down, feeling in need of something to hide behind. Having spent years listening to her mother and the women in the haphazard commune in which she’d grown up analyse everything in minute, head-wrecking detail, she usually went out of her way to avoid any kind of serious discussion, but there was part of her that wanted to share this bittersweet new feeling. ‘Finding out it might be difficult has made me realise how important it is—how’s that for irony?’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, the doctor didn’t say it was impossible, just that it could take a long time and it was best not to leave it too long.’

He reached across the table and took her hand.

‘So when are you going to start trying?’

Sophie looked at her phone again and looked up at him with a determined smile. ‘In about twenty-seven and a half hours.’

The second hand quivered slightly as it edged wearily around the clock face. Sitting on a plastic chair in Intensive Care, watching it with wide-eyed fatigue, Kit kept thinking that it wouldn’t make it through the next minute.

He knew the feeling.

He had been here since late afternoon, English time, when the emergency medical helicopter had finally landed, bringing Sapper Kyle Lewis home. Sedated into unconsciousness, with bullets in his head and chest, it wasn’t quite the homecoming Lewis had looked forward to.

Kit sank his head into his hands. The now familiar, tingling numbness was back, stealing up through his fingertips until he felt as if he were dissolving.

‘Coffee, Major Fitzroy?’

He jerked upright again. The nurse in front of him wore a blue plastic disposable apron and was smiling kindly, unaware of the stab of anguish her question caused. He looked away, his teeth gritted.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Can I get you anything for the pain?’

He turned, eyes narrowed. Did she know that he was the reason Lewis was in the room behind him, hooked up to machines that were breathing for him as his mother held his hand and wept softly, and the girlfriend he had spoken of so proudly kept her terrified eyes averted?

‘Your face,’ the nurse said gently. ‘I know you were seen to in the field hospital, but the medication they gave you will have worn off now.’ She tilted her head, looking at him with great compassion. ‘They might only be superficial, but these shrapnel wounds can be very painful as they heal.’

‘It looks worse than it is.’ He’d seen his face in the washroom mirror and felt dull surprise at the torn flesh and bruising around his eyes. ‘Nothing that a large whisky wouldn’t fix.’

The nurse smiled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you one of those here. But you could go home now, you know.’ The plastic

apron crackled as she moved past him to the door of Lewis’s room, pausing with her hand on the doorplate. ‘His family’s here now. You’ve looked after these boys for five months, Major,’ she said gently. ‘It’s time you looked after yourself.’

Kit got a brief glimpse of the inert figure in the bed before the door swung shut again. He exhaled heavily, guilt squeezing the air from his lungs.

Home.

Sophie.

The thought of her almost severed the last shreds of his self-control. He looked at the clock again, realising that although he’d been staring at it for hours he had no idea what time it was.

Almost six o’clock in the evening, and he was almost three hundred miles away. He stumbled to his feet, his mind racing, his heart suddenly beating hard with the need to get to her. To feel her in his arms and lose himself in her sweetness and forget …

Behind him a door opened, pulling him back into the present. Turning he saw Lewis’s girlfriend come out of the room, her thin shoulders hunched, her pregnant stomach incongruously out of proportion with the rest of her. Slumping against the wall, she looked appallingly young.

‘They won’t say anything. I just want to know if he’s going to be OK.’ She spoke with a kind of sulky defiance, but Kit could see the fear in her face when she looked at him. ‘Is he?’

‘Wing Commander Randall’s the army medic here. According to him, he’s over the worst now,’ Kit said tersely. ‘If soldiers survive the airlift to the camp hospital their chances of survival are already ninety-seven percent. He’s made it all the way home.’

Her scowl deepened. ‘I don’t mean is he going to survive. I mean is he going to be OK? I mean, back to normal. Because I don’t think I could stand it if he wasn’t …’ She broke off, turning her face away. Kit could see her throat working franticallyas she swallowed back tears. ‘We don’t even know each other that well,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘We’d not been going out long when this happened.’ A sharp gesture of her head told him she was referring to the pregnancy. ‘It wasn’t exactly planned but, as my mum says, it was my own fault. Just got to get on with it now.’ She looked at Kit with dead eyes then; inky tears were running down her face. ‘And what about this? If he’s … I dunno … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? But whose fault is that?’