LITMIR.BIZ

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babies woke her, and she rolled to her back, opened her eyes and blinked.

      It was broad daylight, and she could hear Max’s voice in their room. Getting out of bed and wincing at the unaccustomed aches, she pulled her dressing gown on hastily and went out to them.

      ‘Hello, my lovelies,’ she said, going into the room, and they beamed at her from their cots.

      ‘Am I included in that?’ he asked, looking much too sexy for his own good in nothing but a pair of boxers, and she chuckled.

      ‘You might be. How long have they been awake?’

      ‘A few minutes. I’ve changed their nappies and given them a bottle of juice, but I think they want their mum and something rather more substantial.’

      ‘I’m sure they do. Come on, my little ones. Shall we go downstairs and say hello to Murphy?’

      She lifted Ava out of her cot and handed her to Max, and then pulled Libby up into her arms and nuzzled her. ‘Hello, tinker. Are you going to be good today?’

      ‘Probably not, if she’s like her sister,’ he said drily, and carried her downstairs. ‘I’ll do that stairgate this morning.’

      ‘Mmm. Please. I’d hate anything to happen. Hello, Smurfs! How are you, boy? Find anything nice to eat?’

      ‘I’m sure he will have given it his best shot,’ Max said wryly. ‘Won’t you, you old rascal?’

      Murphy thumped and wagged and grinned at him, and she laughed. ‘He’s such a suck-up. Horrid dog, aren’t you? Horrid. Here, Libby, go to Daddy.’

      ‘Da-dad,’ she said, and they both stopped in their tracks.

      ‘Did I dream that?’ she asked, and he laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘Only if I did, too. I thought Ava said “Da-da” yesterday, but then I thought she was just babbling.’

      ‘Da-da!’ Ava chirruped from the playpen, hanging onto the edge and grinning furiously at him, and Julia felt her eyes fill with tears.

      ‘They said your name,’ she whispered, pressing her hand to her mouth, and he swallowed and grinned, and looked as if he’d crow at any minute.

      ‘Well, girls. How about that?’ he said, and put the kettle on.

      Breakfast was over, they were all washed and dressed, and Max was trying not to think about the fact that he couldn’t take Jules back to bed for hours. Unless the girls had a sleep in the afternoon, of course.

      ‘Shall we do some house-hunting?’ he suggested to take his mind off it.

      ‘Sure. If I get the computer we can do it in here. We’ve got wireless.’ And she disappeared and came back a moment later with a laptop. John Blake’s?

      No. Don’t get funny about it. He’s given your family a home.

      ‘Shove up,’ she said, and settled herself down on the sofa with the laptop. She keyed in a password, and he hated himself for memorising it without thinking. Hell, she was right not to trust him, he thought.

      ‘OK. I’m on one of the big property sites. What are we looking for, and how much?’

      ‘I wouldn’t put an upper limit on it. Start at the top and work down.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Well—yeah. Why not? Do you want to live in something horrible?’

      ‘No! I want to live in something normal!’ she retorted, and he sighed.

      Wrong again. Two steps forward, three back, he thought, and wondered why he could never seem to get it right for more than a few minutes at a time.

      ‘Just put in the area you’re interested in, and let’s see what there is.’

      Nothing. That was the simple answer. There was nothing that wasn’t either too small or too remote or too pushed-in or just plain wrong.

      And nothing, but nothing, matched up to Rose Cottage.

      ‘I wish I could stay here,’ she said unhappily.

      ‘He wouldn’t sell it?’

      ‘Would you want it?’

      He smiled at her wryly. ‘It’s not really up to me, is it? We’re talking about your home, your choice, somewhere for you and the babies. And I guess all I’ll do is visit you.’

      Her eyes clouded, and she looked hastily away.

      Now what? ‘Unless I work away during the week and come back for weekends. I’m not really into commuting. I’d rather work a short week.’

      ‘What—only six days, you mean, instead of seven?’

      He sighed. ‘Can we start again?’

      She looked away and bit her lips. ‘Sorry. It’s just—we seem to be getting on so well, and then the future rears its ugly head and there’s no way round it.’

      And the babies were fussing and bored.

      ‘Let’s dress them up and go for a walk,’ he suggested. ‘We could use the slings.’

      They’d bought slings the day before, to carry the babies on their fronts so they could go for walks without taking the buggy, and so they sorted them out. He ended up with Ava and Julia with Libby.

      They swapped them all the time, he realised, as if neither of them wanted to create a closer bond with just one of the twins. Odd, how it had just happened and they hadn’t talked about it, but then it had always been like that with them. They’d hardly ever needed to discuss things, they’d just agreed.

      Until now, and it seemed that sharing the babies equally was the only thing they could agree on.

      Well, out of bed, at least. That, he was relieved to know, was still as amazing as ever. And he wasn’t going to think about it now.

      They strolled along the riverbank for a way, while Murphy rushed around and sniffed things and dug a few furious holes in search of some poor water-vole or other unfortunate creature, and then they walked back to the house.

      ‘Do any of these barns belong to the house?’ he asked, and she nodded.

      ‘Yes, all of them. It was a farm—Rose Farm—but the farmland was all sold off and they took the name, so it was renamed Rose Cottage. Which is silly, really, because it’s a bit big to be a cottage, but there you go.’

      He looked around curiously. There were lots of buildings that were too small to do anything specific with, but others—like the range of open-fronted, single-storey brick cartlodges—could be converted into office accommodation.

      If only they could find something like it for sale, then there was a possibility that he could work from home. Not just him, but one or two other members of the team—a sort of satellite office. He knew lots of people who’d scaled down their operations and ‘gone rural’, as one of them had put it, but he’d never seen the attraction.

      Until now.

      ‘Come and see the garden,’ she said, and led him through the gate at the side.

      He’d been out there with the dog, of course, but he’d never really examined it, and, as she walked him through it and talked about it, he began to see it through her eyes.

      And it was beautiful. A little ragged round the edges, of course, in the middle of winter, but even now there were daffodils and crocuses coming up, and buds were forming on the rose bushes, and, if he looked hard, he could imagine it in summer.

      ‘I’ve got photos of it with the roses all flowering,’ she said. ‘It’s stunning.’

      It would be. He could see that. And he remembered what she’d said, on the day that she’d left him.

      I

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