The Accidental Family (3 page)

“They’d think you stayed the night and then, seeing Daddy in such a good mood, they’d wonder if they could score Coco Pops for breakfast two days in a row even though they’re only supposed to have them twice a week,” Louis said. “They wouldn’t care, Sophie, I think they’d be happy about it.”

“I can’t,” Sophie replied uncertainly. “It wouldn’t be right. They aren’t ready for that.”

“They do know we’re going out together, you know,” Louis said wryly. “All the hand holding and ‘I love yous’ have given it away. I think you’re the one who’s not ready.”

Sophie dropped her gaze momentarily. Perhaps Louis was right. Everything seemed so perfect, so wonderful now, that she sometimes felt as if her happiness was balanced on a high wire. She was afraid of changing anything lest the perfect peace she’d found here teetered and crashed. And staying the night, living here, meant letting real life creep in and she wasn’t ready for that quite yet. Sophie eyed Louis from beneath her lashes. It was odd that she could lie here, naked, with him but wasn’t sure she could tell him her fears about moving ahead with their relationship. She wasn’t sure he’d understand.

“So we are going out together then?” Sophie teased him instead.
“Only you’ve never formally asked me, so I did wonder. Look, it’s just that the children are only seven and four. I can’t possibly stay over—not when we’re not …”

“What?” Louis had propped himself up on one elbow and looked at Sophie, his gaze traveling slowly up from the tops of her thighs, over her breasts, and finally meeting her eyes with the kind of look that made her blood fizz.

“We’re not, you know …,” Sophie said, her mouth curling into a smile as she wound her arms around Louis’s neck and drew him down to kiss her. But his lips stopped short of hers by a hairs-breadth.

“Marry me then,” Louis had whispered.

Instead of answering, Sophie kissed him hard, pushing him onto his back on the carpet and climbing on top of him with the kind of unbridled abandon that, had she stopped to think about it, she would have found rather embarrassing. But she didn’t stop to think, because one of the best things about being in love with Louis Gregory was that when she made love to him, she didn’t think about anything apart from how very wonderful it made her feel.

Still, as delightful a distraction as that had been, Sophie had not answered or even acknowledged Louis’s question. And while it had not gone unnoticed, neither of them mentioned it because Sophie and Louis did not talk about much besides the children and that day’s events. Sometimes the thought would creep into Sophie’s mind that all she and Louis knew about each other, apart from the history they had shared through Carrie and her children, was how to make each other laugh and their bodies sing, but Sophie didn’t dwell on it.

Then, as on most evenings, after spending a few minutes talking to her cat, Artemis, who had moved in with Louis on the very first day they arrived from London and lorded it over the resident ginger cat, Tango, with the ferocity and splendor of a feline Boadicea,
Sophie would get in her car if she hadn’t been drinking, or take the local taxi if she had, and go back to the B & B to sleep alone.

It wasn’t that she didn’t long to wake up with Louis’s arms around her, because she did. It was just that before she moved any further along that precarious high wire, she wanted to be absolutely sure that what she was doing was the right thing and that she wasn’t making a terrible, terrible mistake.

Sometimes she worried about how her relationship with Louis looked to people on the outside. She and Louis, essentially strangers to each other, had been thrown together by circumstance. People might think that, as fond as he was of her, Sophie was little more to Louis than a rather convenient replacement for his children’s lost mother, one who’d come ready-made with his children’s trust and love already assured. And because she was a person who had always been desperate for other people’s approval, it was hard for her to throw caution to the wind and decide that she didn’t care two hoots about what other people might think.

Although the general feeling of contentment and joy that had pervaded her daily life since she had come down to Cornwall supported a favorable outcome, Sophie was waiting for something, some tiny, indefinable piece of information to fall into place before she could know for sure she was meant to be here permanently. The problem was, Sophie wasn’t sure exactly what it was she was waiting for.

A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts and she ran to hide in the closet.

“Aunty Sophie?” Bella called out as she pushed open the bedroom door.
“We’re coming to get you!”

“You is going to get got!” Izzy giggled as she galloped into the room with Bella, the two of them sounding like a herd of small elephants.

Sophie remained silent in the wardrobe, secreted between business
suits and party dresses that hadn’t seen the light of day since she’d arrived in St. Ives. Her job on the days Louis picked the children up from school and brought them round was to wait to be found. And even though she knew the girls knew exactly where she was hiding, she had to wait nevertheless. Sometimes Izzy wouldn’t be able to stand the excitement and she’d open the closet door in less than a minute. On other days though, the game could take quite a long time and by the time she had been discovered, Sophie would have quite a crick in her neck and pins and needles in her calves.

“Is she …under the bed?” Bella’s muffled voice suggested that she had crawled under there to check.

“Is she in the toilet?” Izzy’s giggle bounced off the walls in the tiny bathroom and Sophie smiled to herself. Izzy had changed a lot in the last six months, but her devotion to toilet humor had never wavered.

“Is she up the chimney?” Bella called out.

“Or on the lamp shade?” Izzy suggested.

“Of course she’s not on the lamp shade, Iz,” Bella said matter-of-factly. “The lamp shade is tiny and small and made of paper and Aunty Sophie is
huge
!”

Sophie pursed her lips and silently swore off clotted cream and scones for about the seventh time that week.

“I think …,” Bella said in the tone of voice that meant Sophie had to prepare to be discovered, “that she might be …in …the …closet!”

In the second that Bella flung open the door, Sophie leaped out yelling, “BOO!” at the top of her voice, an event that never failed to make both girls scream and giggle, and jump on Sophie and propel her in one very girlish heap onto one of the room’s twin beds.

“You got me,” Sophie said when she had got her breath back. “Where’s Daddy?”

“Downstairs talking to Mrs. Alexander about sandwiches,” Bella said, sitting up, pushing her bangs out of her eyes. Sophie brushed the child’s dark hair off her forehead and, sitting up, kissed her on the cheek.

“You need a haircut again,” she said. “Your hair grows faster than anything else I know.”

“What about me, do I need a haircut?” Izzy wound her arms around Sophie’s neck and rested her cheek against Sophie’s.

Sophie wound one of Izzy’s caramel curls around her finger. “You have hair just like your mother’s,” she told the younger girl, knowing how much Izzy liked to talk about Carrie. “You can cut it and brush it and wash it all you like but it will do exactly what it wants to do …which reminds me of the little person it’s attached to!”

“I’m not little anymore,” Izzy protested. “I go to school now, and anyway, are you coming for a cream tea?”

“Of course she is,” Bella said. “Aunty Sophie always comes for cream teas.”

“I can’t deny it,” Sophie said. “But today is absolutely my last one.”

“You said that yesterday,” Bella reminded her.

“I know something,” Izzy said with big, round eyes and in a typically dramatic tone of voice. “A really, really specially secret thing that Daddy says I’m not to tell you!”

“Do you?” Sophie said, mildly anxious. The last major secret Izzy had had involved Artemis and an entire packet of smoked salmon that she had fed the cat under her bed in a bid to make Artemis love her more than Bella. What Izzy had failed to understand was that Artemis would never turn down food, not even from her worst enemy, and it was a miracle that she actively liked any human at all. Artemis had lived with Sophie for years in her flat in London and had barely ever spoken two words to her, so to speak. For some
reason Bella was the only human Artemis loved, whether it was because the once mistreated cat saw something in Bella she recognized or because Bella was the only person on the planet who knew how to tickle Artemis behind her ears the way she liked it, Sophie didn’t know. But she did know that all copious amounts of smoked salmon would achieve was piles of orange fishy vomit deposited all around the house.

“Have you been trying to make friends with Artemis again?” Sophie asked.

“No, it’s even better than that!” Izzy said, giggling gleefully.

“It’s not really,” Bella said firmly. “It’s not anything at all. It’s really best forgotten about.”

“Yes, we are not to tell because Daddy says he has something very important to ask you but we mustn’t say what it is,” Izzy said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand and then her hand on Sophie’s fuchsia candlewick bedspread.

“Izzy!” Bella hissed, digging her little sister in the ribs. “Shush.”

She smiled at Sophie, a wide, toothy grin that Sophie had seen once before, when Bella denied using Sophie’s steak knives as tent pegs to make a den out of her best and, for that matter, only leather coat.

“Oh come on, girls, what are you two hiding? Is your dad finally going to strip that hideous wallpaper in the living room?”

“It’s much more exciting than that,” Izzy told her. “It’s the excitingest, biggest thing
ever
!”

“No it is not!” Bella tried to urge her little sister into discretion by waggling her eyebrows, which might have worked if her bangs hadn’t been so long that they obscured them. “Daddy has nothing to say to you whatsoever.” She pronounced the new, unfamiliar word with great care. “I expect he won’t want to talk to you about anything of consequence at all.”

“Except that don’t forget he’s going to ask her to …,” Izzy began.

“Pay for the cake because he’s lost his …money,” Bella interrupted her.

“Or at least he hasn’t got any monies left because he’s spent them on this most beautifulest—”

“Hat,” Bella finished for Izzy. “He’s bought a completely
enormous
hat.”

Sophie looked from girl to girl. It could never be said that she was the world’s most intuitive woman. It had taken her a rather long time to realize, for example, that Louis loved her back and that the feelings she had for him weren’t just an unrequited, slightly psychotic, and rather ill-advised crush. Yet here was Izzy seething with secrets, talking about something exciting and big that Louis wanted to ask her, and there was Bella gamely trying to cover up with a tale of lost money and an enormous hat. A few months ago Sophie would have been wondering what on earth Louis wanted with an enormous hat, but she had changed from that blunt black-and-white woman, and these children had helped her do it. That and the fact that they were dreadful at keeping secrets led her to believe that unless she was very much mistaken, what the girls were trying not to tell her was that their father was going to ask her to marry him. Again.

Only this time she wouldn’t be able to pretend she hadn’t heard him, and there would be no opportunity for distraction sex right in the middle of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.

Two

Carmen Velasquez looked exactly like her name. A few years older than Sophie, at thirty-seven she had olive skin, dark pool-like eyes, and shiny black hair that fell in a neat cut to her shoulders. She looked, Sophie remembered thinking the first time she had met her, like a Spanish rose. Which was interesting because she sounded exactly like what she was—an Essex girl through and through.

The story of how Carmen had come to be running a tea shop in St. Ives was nearly as far-fetched as the one that made Sophie the second-longest-staying guest at the Avalon B & B. Carmen had fallen for a strapping young man, twelve years her junior, at a nightclub in Chelmsford. She had been dancing on a podium when she’d been literally whisked off her feet by a decidedly Nordic-looking young man who hadn’t bothered to ask her name or inquire about her marital status. He’d pressed her up against a wall and kissed her until the fluorescent lights finally flickered on
at 2:00
A.M
. They had spent a night of unbridled passion together whereupon it became clear that the young man’s name was James, he was on a stag night out with his best mate from school, and he was currently employed as a long-line fisherman off the coast of Cornwall. Carmen Velasquez, who at that point in her life had been called Carmen Higgins, had kissed James good-bye as the sun came up and sadly supposed that that brief but joyful intermission in her life was over and she would never see him again. But she had been wrong.

Less than two weeks later, James appeared at the office where Carmen worked, in human resources for a small children’s charity, and told her he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. After giving the matter some thought, Carmen took the afternoon off and booked a hotel room in which they discussed the matter further. She’d told Sophie on the very first afternoon that the two women met that she would probably have felt guiltier about betraying her marriage if it hadn’t been for the fact that she didn’t have any children and her husband was a jerk, to quote Carmen directly. From that fateful afternoon onward, Carmen and James shared various hotel rooms located around the southern half of the country for over a year, Carmen all the while expecting the younger man to tire of her at any moment, and bracing herself to get on with her loveless marriage, but with the knowledge that she had at least tasted happiness for a short while.

Only, James didn’t tire of her. James fell in love with her and begged her to run away to Cornwall to live with him. Finally, after eighteen months of minibars and shredded credit card statements, Carmen had taken the plunge, left her husband, and reclaimed her much more impressive maiden name.