Page 49 of The Trouble With Love

There was a cacophony of feet on wooden stairs and Nicholas launched himself into the kitchen. ‘Zac and Freya. The twins. Zac and Freya, Cerys says.’

‘You’re a grandad,’ I said quietly to Kai under the sound of Nicholas extolling the twins’ virtues. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Yeah, I am, aren’t I?’ He made a clear effort to pull himself together. ‘Sod tea, who wants champagne?’

‘You have champagne in the house?’ I grinned at him.

‘Always, Holly, always.’

‘Posh git.’

‘Well, I never know when I might win another award. Get the glasses, Nicholas.’

‘If you’re drinking down there . . .’ A faint voice percolated through the floorboards, ‘. . . just remember who did all the work, and bring up a glass for a new mother.’ One of the babies squawked and she instantly lowered her voice, ‘or you can all die horribly. Your choice.’

Chapter Eighteen

Humdrum cut back in. The wind dropped from gale force to merely breezy and it stopped snowing, Kai went out to chop up enough tree to get the Jeep out. A doctor and midwife arrived, covered in snow to the eyebrows after having had to walk from the road, and were disappointed to have missed the delivery, but they checked Cerys and Zac and Freya and they were all announced to be fit and well. I was congratulated on having done such a good job of midwifery, which I accepted modestly even though all I’d really done was to catch. More tea was drunk, Nick went back to children’s television, and I went up to sit with Cerys for a bit.

‘You were great, Holly.’ She was feeding Zac, Freya lying beside her still wrapped in her towel like a papoose. ‘So calm and organised.’

‘I was terrified,’ I admitted. ‘But you took it like a pro.’

Cerys did the ‘soft faced’ expression of a Madonna. ‘I wish you were my mum,’ she said, eyes on the babies.

‘But you’ve got a mum in Peterborough. And by all accounts she’s a lovely lady.’

Cerys looked at me now. ‘I know that. I didn’t mean that mum, I meant . . .’ and she jerked her head at the door, ‘with him.’

‘I can’t be a step grandma, I’m only thirty. Think of my image! I’d have to get a perm and learn to knit and keep a hanky in my cardigan pocket. And I’ve only just learned that oral sex trick with the ice cubes, it would be a waste.’ I ate some more glucose tablets. Strawberry flavoured, and nicer than Nicholas’s tea.

‘Don’t mention sex, please. I can’t even bear to think about going for a wee.’ Cerys kissed the baby’s head. ‘I thought you and he had a bit of a thing going the other day, in fact, when you came to the door — his bedroom door and don’t tell me you were doing a crossword — you both looked very flushed.’

I thought about my purely visceral reactions to Kai. The way my stomach jumped when he smiled at me, and the tingling of outlying regions when he kissed me. His implicit confession that he, possibly, more than liked me. ‘It’s all very innocent. We like each other’s company, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, right. Now who sounds like a granny? “Liking someone’s company” is what you say when you want a shag but he’s not playing ball. Do you want me to put in a word?’

‘And then I’ll have to kill you.’

She gathered the babies to her. ‘Oh, think of the poor motherless orphans.’ I fought the temptation to throw a pillow at her head because I didn’t want to upset the twins.

I went to go and look for Kai. The sounds of chopping had stopped, so I was presuming that he’d cleared the garage doors, although with the trackway blocked at the road end we were going to have to rally through the woods to get out. Not wanting him to feel that I was chivvying him along by watching over his shoulder, I crept quietly out of the kitchen door and down through the snow towards the garage. There was a huge pile of logs, Kai’s jacket and a large circle of trodden-down snow, but no sign of Kai himself. I peered through the garage window and the Jeep was still inside — well, dur, otherwise there would have been car tracks in the snow, not just footprints.

I looked closer at the footprints. I could see where one single line of prints came from the house to the fallen tree and around either side of the logs. But there was another line of prints. Smaller, deeper. Coming in from the woods which lay away to the east of the Old Lodge, meeting up with Kai’s prints, and then two sets making their way back under the trees, the way the first set had come.

I should have called out. Should have made my presence known, but I didn’t, and I didn’t know why. No, I did. There was something about Kai, something that told me he didn’t only swim with minnows, he hunted with sharks. A darkness, an intensity. Something, and I hated to admit it, that I didn’t quite trust. I followed the double line of footprints, treading carefully on the compressed snow they’d left and trusting to the noise of the wind to cover any telltale crunching sounds.

And there they were, Kai and the ginger man. Ginge was talking, voice low, checking over his shoulder regularly and I dropped to the snow on my stomach, relying on the heaps that were snow-covered bushes to keep me hidden. Kai was leaning against a tree, arms folded across his chest, looking at ease, relaxed. Every so often he would interject in a low-key way but Ginge was definitely doing most of the conversational work, his voice rising in a peevish whine. I couldn’t make out the words and I didn’t dare creep any closer because there was a pheasant in here with me and any movement I made would send it stumbling into heavy flight, and possible discovery. I eyeballed it and silently dared it to react. It stared back with empty-eyed avian insanity.

Finally the men reached whatever consensus they’d set out to. I saw Kai give a deep shrug and Ginge threw his arms wide as if to indicate the whole forest, then he turned on his heel, in a surprisingly military way, and strode off into the trees with his bright hair flaming onto my retina even as he vanished into the dark.

Kai stood a while longer, staring after him. Then he shook his head and pushed himself away from the tree, walking back out of the shelter of the woods and towards the garage again. I stayed crouched until I was sure he was gone. Then I took a big circuit through the woods, so as to approach the house from the other side and not be seen by Kai.

When I circled round he was lugging the final log onto the pile outside the back door. ‘There you are,’ he said.

‘Yes, here I am. Can you get the Jeep out now?’

He looked at me steadily. ‘Yeah, I could, but I was going to suggest you stay here tonight. You don’t want to risk running into your naked man until he’s had time to calm down, do you?’

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