A Baby In His In-Tray. Michelle Douglas
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boss,’ Liz corrected. If a voice could sound green, hers sounded green.
‘My boss,’ Liv managed through gritted teeth.
Never had agreeing to stand in for her twin at her day job seemed a crazier move than it did right at this very moment. But it was only for a week and Sebastian Tyrell—Liz’s boss—was away. Not that he sallied forth all that often from his estate in Lincolnshire, from where he apparently oversaw operations. But with him being away it meant she shouldn’t even need to speak to him on the phone. This week should’ve been non-eventful, mission possible, a walk in the park. Liz had promised her it’d be a piece of cake.
Except now there was a baby.
Somewhere in the back of her mind maniacal laughter sounded.
She stared into the carrier at the cherubically sleeping baby—the teensy-tiny baby. ‘Heavens, Liz, it’s little. She can’t be more than four or five months old.’
‘Oh, God.’ If possible, Liz’s voice turned greener. Liv grimaced. Her twin had never been good with babies. And now—
‘Have you read the letter?’
Liv swung away from the baby, seized the letter and paced to the window overlooking a busy inner-London street, a sliver of the Thames in the distance, glinting silver in the afternoon light.
‘Of course I’ve read the letter!’ It was why she’d rung. It gave no clue whatsoever to the baby’s identity. And she had no idea what to do. ‘It says “Sebastian”—not Dear, not Seb, but “Sebastian—I can’t do this any more. It’s not fair. You owe me. Do not let baby Jemima down!”’ She glared at the inoffensive-looking piece of paper. ‘“Not” is underlined three times. It ends in an exclamation mark.’ She pulled in another long breath. ‘It’s not signed.’
‘Not signed?’ Liz’s voice rose. ‘Dear God, Livvy, I’m stuck in Turkey in the middle of a plane strike. It’ll take me days to get home and—’
‘Relax, Liz!’ The words shot out of her with more confidence than she’d dreamed possible, but she recognised the panic in her twin’s voice and needed to allay it. Liz was pregnant and she needed to stay calm. ‘I’m not asking you to come home. You need to stick to your plan.’
What Liz didn’t need was additional stress. Dear God, her sister had enough on her plate at the moment. Liv mentally kicked herself for troubling Liz with this except...except she’d panicked herself. ‘Look, seriously, I can take care of everything at this end. I was just keeping you apprised of developments like I promised I would.’ She dragged a hand back through her hair. ‘And I thought you might have some idea where this baby had come from.’
‘I haven’t the foggiest. I can’t think of a single baby he has in his life.’
‘Well...obviously somewhere along the line he became a father.’
A strangled noise on the other end of the phone was Liz’s only reply.
She swallowed. Did Liz’s boss even know he had a child?
‘Oh, what a mess! But Livvy, I can’t shed any light on this at all. I wasn’t joking when I said the most personal thing Mr Tyrell and I have ever shared was our mutual concern over an accountant I’d hired. I mean, I hardly ever see him, the only thing we ever discuss is work...and that as briefly as possible as a rule. He’s not a chatty man.’
‘Seriously? Nothing personal? Ever?’ She still couldn’t get her head around that.
Liz was silent for a moment. ‘When I returned from my holiday he asked me if I had a nice time. I said yes. That was the extent of the discussion.’
The holiday where Liz had become pregnant to her hot mystery man?
‘No passing comments about politics and the state of the nation, or a book you’ve been reading, or a movie you’ve seen?’ she persisted.
‘No! We have a weekly phone call—the Tyrell Foundation is his baby and it’s obviously close to his heart—but that’s it. He’s busy doing whatever it is lords running their estates are busy doing. It’s the reason I was so convinced we could pull this switch off.’
They’d thought it so unlikely that Liv would even need to speak to him that they’d practically considered it a fait accompli. But now... She swallowed and nodded. She could do it. She could pull it off. After all, she’d had no trouble convincing Judith that she was Liz.
Still...deceiving the sixty-two-year-old Judith who did a solid job at maintaining the foundation’s database but who was more interested in sneaking in a surreptitious game of Solitaire than gossiping with Liv was one thing. Deceiving a businessman in his prime was a different matter altogether.
‘Livvy?’
‘This new development might mean me and your Mr Tyrell have to come face-to-face.’
‘Will you be OK with that?’
She could practically see the grimace on her twin’s face. ‘Yes.’ She gave a silent scream and then stuck out her chin. ‘But I’m not changing my hair.’
Finally Liz laughed. ‘We already agreed I’d have to lop a few inches off mine before I came home. And in the unlikely event he even sees it, let alone mentions it, I’ll tell him I’ve gone back to being blonde.’
For a moment she could almost picture her twin waving an unconcerned hand through the air, treating the issue of hair as a matter of little importance. Liv couldn’t help smiling. She loved her hair. ‘Right. We’ll call that Plan A, then.’
‘What are you going to do now, though? About the baby?’
She suspected what she should do was call the police, but...
‘Please don’t lose me my job, Livvy.’
But there was that—it was what she was here for. Everything else in Liz’s life was up in the air and she was clinging to the security of her job like a lifeline. Liv couldn’t jeopardise that.
And if Mr Tyrell did happen to be the father of this baby...well, it wouldn’t be fair to call the authorities until after she’d spoken with him.
‘I’m going to ring your—my—boss and ask him what he wants to do about the situation. I’ll do my best to sound cool and efficient—’ like her twin ‘—but if I sound a tiny bit flustered I think, given the circumstances, that’ll be understandable.’
‘Oh, Liv, are you sure you don’t want me to come home? I can do my best to get back asap. Given this rotten plane strike, if Mr Tyrell is out of the country it could take him days to get home too. And in the meantime you could be literally left holding the baby on your own.’
‘Which sounds like more fun than doing government grant acquittals. There’s not been a peep from the little tyke. And before you ask—yes, she’s breathing. I checked. Besides, I love babies—you know that. And thankfully they’re not actually all that much trouble at this age.
‘Except for the four-hourly feeds and the sleep deprivation.’ Liv glanced down at the baby and grinned. ‘Not much sleep deprivation happening here. Besides, Mr Tyrell is bound to know who Baby Jemima is and what I should do with her. We’ll sort it out.’
‘I’m so, so sorry, Liv. If I’d thought for a moment that anything like this would happen, I’d have never asked you to fill in for me.’
‘I know. But don’t fear—I’ll muddle on through. You just focus on sorting things out at your end. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.’
Liv hung up from her twin and tucked her phone back into her handbag. She stared again at the sleeping baby and bit her lip. It was usual for babies to sleep a lot, right? She touched her fingers to the baby’s forehead, but the baby didn’t feel hot or feverish.
What on earth was the poor little mite going to