Page 13 of The Baby Plan

She parked her car in the same car park as earlier, though she struggled to find a space now the day was warmer and the beach busier, and walked over to the campervan. It was closed up, but continuing down onto the rocks, and scanning around her, she quickly spied Alana and Samson by the edge of the water, and she wandered down to them.

Samson was crouched down with Alana in his arms, letting her kick her feet in the waves. Alana was giving little shrieks of happy laughter. Sophie almost didn’t join them as they were having so much fun together. She was considering heading back up the beach to get a coffee and give them some more time, when Samson turned around, waved and pointed her out to Alana.

When they reached each other, Sophie was thrilled that Alana held out her arms to have a cuddle with her aunt. Samson handed her over straight away, saying, “I know she’s in the sun, but it was only for a few minutes and she’s got her hat and sun cream on.”

“Don’t worry,” said Sophie. “It looks like she’s had a wonderful time.” She couldn’t help doing a surreptitious check to make sure none of Alana’s skin was turning pink. It was fine.

“She didn’t sleep for ages, but she ate all her lunch,” Samson said. “How did your meeting go?”

“Not great,” Sophie admitted. “They weren’t happy for me to work from home or go part-time. I can kind of understand why.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t want to go down the legal route — it’s too much right now. I told my boss I’d have to leave. So I have. I typed out my resignation letter in my office and handed it in straight away. I had a load of holiday still left over, and they were happy for me to use it to see out my notice period.”

“Wow, are you OK with that?”

“I think so. My plan, as far as I have one, is to become self-employed and work from home. I’ve got some contacts, but it’ll take a little while to get up and running properly.”

“So are you going to stay living in Natasha’s place?”

“I can’t, it’s owned by the council. I’ve got to have it all cleared out in a couple of weeks. I guess I’ll go back to my flat in London, but I’m going to have to think about selling up and moving somewhere cheaper.”

“Well... You could rent it out and move in with me,” said Samson simply.

“What?”

He shrugged. “I want to get to know Alana better. That’s the most important thing to me right now, and it’ll be a lot trickier over a longer distance. And I have plenty of space. It could be a workable solution. If we can be civil with each other for more than a few hours,” he joked, smiling to remove any sting.

Sophie couldn’t stop herself glancing incredulously at the campervan. She didn’t want to be rude to the man, especially given the generosity of his offer, but ‘plenty of space’? Really? What was he thinking?

Samson followed her gaze and burst out laughing. “This isn’t my house! This is where I store my surf stuff. I stay in it sometimes if I want to catch the waves early, like this morning.”

“Where do you live then?”

“In a house. Like a regular person.” He laughed.

Sophie blushed, embarrassed her presumption had been so caught out.

“But I don’t know you. I can’t move in with you,” she said.

“I can’t see another way for you to be able to set up a business, and for Alana not to be in childcare,” Samson said bluntly. “I’m freelance too — I’m an architect. I work a lot from home, and can usually shift what hours I’m working around so I can have her when you’re busy. It doesn’t have to be a permanent solution. We could give it a trial for a couple of weeks and see how things go.”

Sophie was very uncertain. She was thrown first of all by the thought of Samson being an architect and living in a house. She was needing to swiftly rework her opinion of him, having got him completely wrong.

It would make sense financially to move into Samson’s home she supposed, and having someone to help with Alana would make a huge difference, especially as she was just starting out as a freelancer. And it would mean both she and Samson would get to be with Alana which, for the time being at least, would ease her worries about him deciding he wanted sole custody of her niece. But she couldn’t move into a stranger’s house!

Sensing it would do no good to force the issue and that Sophie needed time to mull things over, Samson suggested, “Think about it overnight and come round tomorrow to see the house.”

Sophie found herself nodding her head in agreement. She supposed people did take in lodgers, didn’t they? It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary.

“I’ll text you the address. Come at one, I’ll make lunch.”

“All right,” Sophie said. It wouldn’t do any harm to take a look. If it turned out to be a complete hovel, or he had a mad wife locked in the attic, she’d tell him the whole idea was a no go and move back to London, while planning to find somewhere cheaper to live as soon as possible.

But as logical as Sophie was trying to be about the whole situation, she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was looking forward to seeing Samson’s home. She was intrigued by how different he was turning out to be from what she’d originally assumed. And the thought of sleeping in the same house as him was definitely not as unappealing as she would have thought merely a few days ago. She found herself singing along happily to the radio on the short drive back to Natasha’s flat, not acting at all like someone who’d just had to give up her job and had no concrete plans for what she was going to do to earn a living or even where she was going to live. In fact, she was acting very unlike herself indeed.

Chapter 5

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