The Baby Group (2 page)

‘Then don't go back,' he said, smiling with one corner of his mouth. He had a very nice mouth and a pleasant smile.

Natalie sat back in her seat. She wished she could be sure whether or not he was chatting her up. The ambiguity annoyed her slightly. The thing was, she liked him, or liked the look of him at least. She liked the fact that he talked to strangers on a train, that he seemed impulsive and in control of his own life. Of course, that could mean that she was trying to establish a flirtation with a psychopath, but at least that made him more interesting than the average man. She was trying to think of something else to say when he spoke again.

‘Come to lunch with me,' he almost commanded, before adding with a tad less certainty, ‘if you like, I mean. I know a really nice little Italian quite near to this station.'

Natalie looked back up at him. Now was not the time to be enigmatic.

‘Are you asking me on a date?'

‘I am,' he said, as if he had only just decided himself. ‘Do you mind?'

She smiled at him; he was a strangely appealing mixture of confidence and vulnerability.

‘Why not,' she replied, deciding that Alice would approve of her seizing the moment, even if it meant several hundred apologies and an extensive period of grovelling.

‘I'm Natalie, by the way.' She held out her hand for him to shake.

‘Jack Newhouse,' the man said, taking her hand. His fingers were strong and warm. ‘Pleased to meet you.'

‘I'm pleased to meet you too,' she said.

And then the train moaned into life and began to ease slowly into the tunnel.

There was no way Natalie couldn't have known that from that moment on, her life was about to take a new and very different course.

Lunch had been good.

Once they were out of the Tube and in the sunshine he relaxed a little more, talking to her easily. He was very charming and there was a spark about him, as if he was brimming with life and energy, that was very compelling.

‘This place isn't at all glamorous,' he told her as they made their way into the small restaurant, its walls thick with Artexing and tiny red glass lanterns hanging from the fishing nets that adorned the ceiling. ‘But it serves excellent, honest food.'

‘I love Italian food,' Natalie said as they ate. ‘Well, to be honest, I love food full stop. But especially Italian – somehow I've never quite managed to go to Italy. I keep meaning to, but being self-employed makes taking holiday so difficult.'

Jack looked almost personally affronted.

‘That's impossible,' he said. ‘You must go, you have to. Italy is the most beautiful, most wonderful, warm, fabulous country in the world. The best food, the best culture, the best-looking people – mostly.'

Natalie laughed at his enthusiasm. She liked the way he approached life, as if he were open to any eventuality. He had an indefinable air about him she couldn't quite quantify. It seemed that, despite his boldness earlier, he wasn't used to seducing women, because unlike some he didn't trot out a parade of hackneyed phrases and clichéd lines. He was very easy to be with and talk to. The conversation flowed so comfortably that they might have known each other for much longer than just under an hour. And the more relaxed with her he felt, the more attracted to him Natalie was.

‘My mother is Italian,' Jack said. He paused for a second as if he had just remembered something rather troubling, but then his smile returned and he went on. ‘She's a genuine Venetian, would you believe? All my childhood holidays were spent there and my mum and dad live just outside Venice now, they retired there. In fact, I am one of the few men entitled to be a gondolier because you have to be born there to be one, and I was.' He paused again and then added regretfully, ‘When I was a boy all I wanted to be was a gondolier.'

‘So why aren't you?' Natalie said, smiling at the thought of Jack in a stripy top and straw hat. ‘I bet you do a great “O Sole Mio”.'

‘Who knows, I might be one day,' Jack said and they both laughed, their eyes locking. It was Natalie who, disconcerted by the sudden intensity in his eyes, had to look away first.

‘It is an incredible place,' he told her. ‘You never tire of just looking at it; even the grubbiest back alley is a work of art.'

‘It sounds wonderful,' Natalie said, thinking briefly of her own far less appealing girlhood.

Jack watched her over a small vase of three red carnations, tapping his forefinger impatiently on the table top. He glanced at his watch and Natalie wondered if he had somewhere else he had to be. As much as he seemed to be enjoying her company, he also seemed to find it impossible to be still.

‘You're an impulsive kind of woman aren't you, Natalie?' he asked her.

Natalie shrugged. ‘I suppose I must be,' she said, feeling the thrill of the unknown bubble in the pit of her stomach. ‘I'm having lunch with a virtual stranger after all, and a pretty strange stranger at that.'

Jack laughed.

‘Have dinner with me this evening.' Once again it was more like a command than a request, but this time there was no uncertainty at all in his tone.

‘Dinner?' Natalie raised an eyebrow; that wasn't exactly her idea of impulsive.

‘In Venice,' Jack added, his voice light but his eyes crackling with raw energy. ‘Naturally.'

Natalie held his dark-eyed gaze for a long moment and knew without question that as soon as she had caught his eye on the Tube he'd been planning to ask her that question. What she most wanted to know was why. Why had he singled her out?

‘Why not?' she said instead, being very careful not to let her nerves show. ‘Why ever not?'

Alice would kill her. She could be very reasonable about delayed trains and hectic schedules and even unplanned lunches with attractive strangers, but she would not be amused by Natalie taking off for the weekend with said attractive stranger. It would be the ‘stranger' part that would upset Alice, causing her to lecture Natalie at length about potential serial killers and con men and to remind Natalie that she had promised not to get herself into any more silly scrapes after the Paris incident.

But somehow, whatever Alice's warnings and remonstrations might be, Natalie knew she had to go to Venice with Jack Newhouse.

Natalie felt Jack's gaze on her as she watched the sun setting behind St Mark's Basilica. Jack had reserved them a table on the terrace at Cip's Club, at the Hotel Cipriani, situated on an island just across from St Mark's Square. He spoke to all the waiters in Italian. He could have been discussing the waterbus timetable for all Natalie knew, but the rhythm and the tone of the language was certainly beguiling. The animation and sheer joy in his face as he spoke his second language lit him up from the inside.

‘This is marvellous,' Natalie said, tearing her eyes away from the impossibly beautiful view to look at Jack, whose skin glowed in the golden light of the setting sun. ‘You are a very lucky man to have this place in your life.'

Jack looked thoughtful for a moment, dipping his head.

‘It's almost too much,' he said, without looking at her. ‘The more joy or beauty there is in your life, the more you have to lose.'

Natalie didn't respond for a moment. Just as she thought she had this man figured out, he would do or say something to throw her. In that second he looked so intensely sad that she thought he might even shed a tear.

‘I'd rather have happiness for a little while than never at all,' she said softly.

Then his hand reached across the table, his fingertips stopping a few millimetres from hers. They still hadn't touched each other, not since they'd shaken hands on the Tube. The anticipation tingled between them like a promise. Which was why Natalie put the slight tension she noticed in his jaw and shoulders down to his nervous English genes kicking in.

‘Natalie,' Jack said. ‘I have to tell you something.'

Natalie felt her own muscles contract. That was the kind of line that usually prefaced a break-up. It would be a record even by her own standards to get dumped in Venice by a man she had only just met. The terrible thought occurred to her that it might be her, and the awful mistake of bringing her here, that had made him feel so low a moment ago.

‘You do?' she said cautiously.

‘I don't want you to think that I'm this kind of man,' Jack said, gesturing around him with his wine glass.

‘What kind of man?' Natalie asked him.

‘I don't usually bring women I hardly know to five-star hotels on the Continent for dinner. I don't want you to think I'm a . . . a cad, I suppose.'

‘A cad?' Natalie had to choke back laughter.

‘Don't laugh.' Jack smiled ruefully, looking down into his wine glass.

‘I don't get you, Jack,' Natalie said. ‘But I like you. I really like you.'

When Jack looked back up at her his expression was intense.

‘You must know that I very much want to take you to bed,' he said. ‘But I don't expect it. If you like I can get you a water taxi back to the airport and you'll be home before dawn.' A hint of that smile lightened his mouth once again. ‘Or you could stay here with me for the weekend. Like I say, I don't expect it. But I want it. I want you.'

As Natalie steadied herself in an attempt to prevent herself from climbing over the table and throwing herself at him right then and there, a sharp breeze swept in from the sea and rippled through the awning over the terrace, making it clatter like an army of tiny feet racing towards them.

‘I'd love to stay here with you,' she said eventually, closing the slight distance left between their fingers. ‘But you already knew that, didn't you?'

And when Jack smiled at her it was with a genuine delight that was utterly irresistible.

‘Thank you,' he said.

When Natalie woke early on Monday morning, she could hear the rumble and burr of something mechanical. It took her a moment to realise where she was, and then she felt a lovely ache in the muscles of her legs and the tingling between them. She smiled and rolled over, enjoying a luxurious stretch. The last few days had been perfect. That was really the only way to describe her time with Jack. Perfect weather, an incredible city, wonderful food – and Jack. It had seemed that from the moment he had asked her to stay the weekend with him, the tension had drained out of his face and body leaving him totally relaxed. And Natalie allowed herself to be flattered by the thought that perhaps all the contradictions in his character up until that point had been due to the nerves and longing she might inspire in him.

After all, since then he had been a wonderfully easy person to be with. So easy, in fact, that it made Natalie realise exactly how much hard work it was to be with some other people. With Jack she felt she could be the rarest of things – herself. No über-flirt mode, no false confidence, no guarded game-playing. For those few days she had felt closer to this man than possibly anyone, excepting Alice, in her whole life. This must be it, Natalie thought, I'm falling in love and it's happening to me here, in Venice. It was almost stupidly perfect and comically romantic, but just then she didn't care, because every single cynical or guarded bone in her body had been melted by Jack and by Venice.

With her eyes still closed she felt Jack's weight on the edge of the bed and his hand on the curve of her waist. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

‘I'm running us a jacuzzi,' he told her. ‘Breakfast won't be here for another half an hour yet. I want to make the most of the last few hours I have until you go back to London.'

‘A jacuzzi?' Natalie yawned as he pulled her into a sitting position and then, with one arm around her waist and the other under her legs, he lifted her from the bed.

‘I want to make love to you in the water,' he told her as he carried her towards the marble bathroom. ‘I've been thinking about it the whole time you were asleep.'

‘Have I had any sleep?' Natalie asked, laughing.

‘Too much,' Jack assured her. He set her down in the bathroom, then slipping his dressing gown off, he entered the deep, bubbling bath. He held out a hand to her. Natalie took it and stepped in, feeling the warm water rush and churn around her calves as he kissed her thighs.

‘I want you
now
,' he said, pulling her down into the water. He turned her around and pulled her bottom towards him and for a brief, fleeting moment Natalie thought about the packet of condoms that were still resting on the table beside the bed. But only for a second, because the next thing she knew Jack was moving inside her and she wasn't sure where she ended and the water began.

Jack Newhouse.

Natalie would reflect on his name several times in the following weeks and months, after it quickly became clear that he had vanished just as suddenly from her life as he had appeared in it.

It was quite poetic really, because when you translated his surname into Italian it seemed to make a lot more sense.

Chapter One

‘You could phone your mum,' Alice suggested tentatively, and only because she was safely on the other end of a phone line and she knew that Natalie couldn't throw something at her.

‘I am
not
going to phone my mum,' Natalie told her sharply, pressing the palm of her hand against her forehead as she spoke. ‘I would rather pull out my own fingernails with my teeth than contact my mother and tell her that not only have I just had a baby when she didn't even know I was pregnant, but I am also unmarried and not in any kind of relationship. I am definitely not asking
her
for any help. She'd be so happy she'd probably drop dead from joy on the spot.' Natalie paused for a moment. ‘Actually, perhaps I will call,' she said.