Her Boss's Baby Plan

Martha met his gaze directly. ‘I’m not looking for paradise in St Bonaventure,’ she said.

‘What are you looking for, then?’

For a moment, Martha hesitated. She had hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary to tell Lewis Mansfield the whole story at this stage, but it was probably better to be open.

‘I’m looking for Noah’s father,’ she said clearly.

If she had expected a sympathetic response from Lewis she was doomed to disappointment. ‘Careless of you to lose someone as important as that,’ he commented, and then lifted a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Or did he lose you?’

Martha flushed slightly. ‘It wasn’t like that. Rory is a marine biologist. He’s doing a PhD on something to do with ocean currents and coral reefs…I’m not sure exactly, but he’s doing his fieldwork on some atoll off St Bonaventure.’

‘If you know where he is, he’s not exactly lost, is he? Why do you need to go all the way out to the Indian Ocean when you could just contact him? If he’s a student he’s bound to have an email address, if nothing else. It’s not hard to track people down nowadays.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ said Martha. ‘I need to see him. Rory doesn’t know about Noah, and it’s not the kind of thing you can drop in a casual email. What would I say? Oh, by the way, you’re a father?’

‘It’s what you’re going to have to say when you see him, isn’t it?’ Lewis countered.

Martha bit her lip. ‘I think it would be better if Rory could actually see Noah. He won’t seem real to him otherwise.’

‘You mean you think you’re more likely to get money out of him if you turn up with a lovely, cuddly baby?’

The dark eyes flashed at his tone. ‘It’s not about money,’ she said fiercely. ‘Rory’s a lot younger than me. He’s still a student and finds it hard enough to survive on a grant himself, never mind support a baby. I know he can’t afford to be financially responsible for Noah, and I’m not asking him to.’

‘Then why go at all?’

‘Because I think Rory has the right to know that he’s a father.’

‘Even though presumably he wasn’t interested enough to keep in touch with you and find out for himself that you were all right?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Martha a little helplessly. How could she make someone like Lewis understand?

‘I met Rory at the beginning of last year. It wasn’t just a one-night stand,’ she added, hating the idea that he might think there had been anything sordid or casual about the affair. ‘I liked Rory a lot and we had a very nice time together but at the same time we both knew that it wasn’t a long-term thing.

‘We had completely different lives, for a start. He was only in the UK to go to conferences and write up some of his research, and I had a great job in London. It was always clear that he had to go back to St Bonaventure to finish his thesis, and we both treated it as…’ she shrugged lightly, searching for the right description ‘…as a pleasant interlude.’

‘So he didn’t know you were pregnant?’

‘Yes. I found out just before he left, so I told him. I felt I had to.’

‘And he left anyway?’ Lewis sounded outraged and Martha looked at him curiously.

‘We discussed it,’ she told him, ‘and we agreed that neither of us was ready to start a family. It was obviously out of the question for him, and I was very involved in my own career. I was incredibly busy then too. There was no way I could imagine fitting a baby into my life…’

She trailed off as she remembered how obvious everything had seemed at the time. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, recollecting herself, ‘the upshot was that I told Rory that I was going to be sensible. I said he didn’t need to worry, I would take care of everything.’

For a moment the image of Rory’s expression of stunned relief as he realised what she was saying was vivid in her mind. ‘It didn’t feel like a big deal, then,’ she remembered. ‘I just thought it would be a straightforward operation and that I would be fine.’

Martha looked down at Noah and smoothed his dark, downy hair. Just the thought of how close she had come to never having him made her shudder now.

‘So Rory went back to St Bonaventure,’ she finished, glancing back at Lewis. ‘And I…changed my mind.’

Of course she had changed her mind, thought Lewis with a jaundiced expression. Changing their minds was what women did, and to hell with the consequences for anyone else involved!

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said dourly. ‘Your body clock was ticking, everyone else was having babies and playing at being perfect mothers and you wanted to play too?’

Martha was taken aback by the edge of bitterness in his voice. What was his problem? Don’t let him wind you up, she reminded yourself. He’s your ticket to St Bonaventure.

‘You might be right about the body clock,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I’m thirty-four, and with no sign of another serious relationship on the horizon I had to face the fact that might not have another chance to have a child. It hadn’t been an issue before. I had a boyfriend for eight years and we were both thinking about our careers, not about babies. I thought I was fine with that, but once I was pregnant…it’s hard to explain, but everything changed after Rory had gone. I just knew I couldn’t go through with it and that I wanted to keep the baby.’

Lewis was looking profoundly unmoved by her story. ‘Why didn’t you tell him that you’d changed your mind?’

‘I knew that he wasn’t going to be in a position to help, and anyway I felt that it was my decision in any case. I didn’t want Rory to feel responsible.’

‘And now you’ve changed your mind about that too?’

Martha eyed him warily. There was a current of hostility in his voice that she didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure if it was women generally that he disliked or just single mothers, but there was certainly something about her that was rubbing him up the wrong way.

It was a pity, she thought. She had warmed to him while he was telling her about the project. Striding about the office, the austere face lit with enthusiasm, he had seemed warmer and more accessible somehow. More…well, attractive. She had even begun to think that spending six months with him wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

CHAPTER TWO

MARTHA set her chin. It didn’t matter what Lewis Mansfield was like, or whether he liked her or not. The important thing was to convince him to give her the job. She needed to get out to St Bonaventure, and somehow he had to realise how important it was to her.

She glanced down at her small son. He was why she was here now. ‘When Noah was born…’ she began slowly, only to pause and rethink what she was trying to say. ‘Well, it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had a baby, but my life changed completely. It was as if everything had turned round and the things that had been important before suddenly didn’t matter that much any more. The only thing that really mattered was Noah.

‘I want to give him the things every child needs,’ she went on, picking her words with care. ‘Love, security, support…I can do all of that as a mother, but I can’t be his father. The bigger Noah gets, the more I’ve come to realise that he needs a father as well as me. At the very least, he needs to know who his father is.’

She looked back at Lewis, her gaze very direct. ‘I don’t want Rory to feel that he has to provide any financial support, but I do want to give him the chance to be part of his son’s life, even if it’s only occasional contact.

‘Of course I’m hoping that he’ll want more than that, that he’ll want to see Noah grow up and share his life as part of the family,’ she said, ‘but I’m not setting my heart on that because it might not be right for any of us. But I can’t know any of that until I can find Rory himself and introduce him to Noah and that’s why I need to get to St Bonaventure as soon as I can,’ she finished breathlessly.

Lewis didn’t respond immediately. Instead he came back to sit opposite her and regard her with an indecipherable expression.

‘If it’s so important to you, why don’t you just buy a ticket, go out there and find this guy?’ he asked at last. ‘St Bonaventure is a tiny place. It’s not going to be too hard to track him down. Why complicate matters by getting involved as a nanny?’

‘Because I can’t afford to get there any other way,’ said Martha frankly. ‘You said yourself that St Bonaventure is not a mass market destination for tourists. That means that there are no package deals, and all the flights I’ve looked into are phenomenally expensive, especially when I don’t know how long it would take me to find Rory. I just don’t have that kind of money at the moment.’

She had never met anyone who could use his eyebrows to the effect that Lewis did. One was lifting now, expressing disbelief and disdain in a way no words ever could. ‘I’m no expert,’ he said—and looking at his conventional suit and tie Martha could believe that!—‘but those look like pretty expensive clothes to me.’

His slate-coloured gaze encompassed her soft suede trousers, the beautifully cut shirt and the stylish boots. There was nothing obvious about the way she dressed, but she still managed to ooze glamour. ‘If you can afford to dress like that I’d have thought you could afford a plane ticket.’

‘I bought this outfit a long time before I had Noah,’ said Martha, acknowledging the point. ‘I couldn’t afford any of it now and, to be honest, I wouldn’t buy it even if I could.’ She looked ruefully down at the stains and creases that Lewis obviously couldn’t see from where he was sitting. ‘It’s totally impracticable for looking after a baby!’

‘Presumably when you talked about the great career you had, you didn’t mean being a nanny then?’ he asked sardonically.

‘No. I was a fashion editor for Glitz. You won’t know it,’ she told him before he could say anything, ‘but it’s a glossy magazine for women, and very high profile. I loved my job and I had a good salary, but unfortunately I had a very expensive lifestyle as well.’