Single Dad In Her Stocking / A Puppy And A Christmas Proposal. Alison Roberts
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was very calm as he took control of the situation. ‘I’ll have to call the building manager,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute.’
As soon as he’d made the call, he turned back to Emma. ‘You can’t stay here, obviously,’ he said. ‘We’ll find a hotel nearby—there’ll probably be somewhere we overlooked before. I’ll pay for it.’ He was focused on his phone again. ‘Let’s just see what’s available on one of those comparison sites.’
Emma had taken out her own phone. A minute or two of silence and then they both looked up.
‘Not looking good, is it?’ Emma said. ‘As soon as I put the dates in there’s no availability at all.’
‘There’ll be something.’ Max was obviously trying to sound reassuring. ‘We might have to look a bit further afield, that’s all.’ He hesitated, glancing at his watch. ‘That could take a bit of time but don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you in the lurch. You can come with me for the moment. As I said, the place I’m staying is only twenty minutes away so, even if we can’t find you a suitable hotel room tonight, it won’t be a difficult commute tomorrow morning unless the weather turns nasty.’
‘I’ve got chains,’ she told him. ‘But…this is your father’s house you’re talking about, yes?’ A hotel room would be preferable. Perhaps Emma should just stay in town and keep trying to find something.
‘He’ll be just as concerned as I am that my locum is well looked after,’ Max said. ‘It’s a big house and there’s more than enough room for visitors. It was probably built to cater for a Victorian couple who had twelve children.’ He gestured for Emma to lead the way out of the apartment. ‘They weren’t so worried about global resources in those days.’
He might be making a joke but a glance at his face suggested to Emma that the hypothetical camel’s back might have just been loaded with the last straw.
‘I should keep trying to find a hotel,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to intrude. Not if your father is so unwell.’
‘Unwell?’ Max’s eyebrows rose. ‘He’s as fit as a fiddle.’ He looked at his watch again and stifled a groan. ‘Come on, you’ll have to follow me to Upper Barnsley in your car. We don’t have that much time before the children arrive.’
Children?
But hadn’t Max said that he hadn’t personally contributed to the population statistics? Emma was curious but the look of fierce concentration on Max’s face was enough to stop her asking any more questions as they hurried back to the hospital car park. Besides, the mention of children had reminded her of that assumption he’d voiced—that she would have a husband and a tribe of children by now—and there was a sting in that assumption that needed to be dealt with. Back in those days, she had assumed exactly the same thing so it was no wonder he was surprised. She had been more than surprised herself, of course. Having her life derailed like that had been devastating but at least she was well past the toughest time of her life, when working only with children and babies as a specialist paediatrician had proved hard enough to have dimmed the joy and she’d been tempted to change the direction she had chosen for her career. She could cope with children.
As long as she didn’t get too close to them…
Life had a habit of upending plans sometimes and it appeared that it was happening again, Emma decided, as she followed Max out of town and into the pretty countryside of the Cotswolds with its narrow roads and tiny villages full of trees and stone-built cottages. Her most recent plans had already gone more than a little awry, with her accommodation proving uninhabitable. The person she was replacing was unexpectedly someone she had once been more than a little attracted to, even though she would never have gone there, and she was now being whisked away to some unknown but large house by this still very attractive man and there were children involved, which didn’t make any sense at all. Unless Max had acquired an instant family by marrying someone who already had children? Or this house with far too many bedrooms was being run as some kind of foster home or orphanage?
She hadn’t even started her new locum position and they still had several days before Christmas arrived but it seemed like the chaos had already begun. As a few fat flakes of snow drifted gently onto her windscreen, Emma found she was smiling wryly.
Almost grinning a few moments later, in fact.
She had needed a distraction and it would appear that the universe was providing one.
UPPER BARNSLEY WAS bigger than other villages they had driven through, with its high street full of shops, a village green and a market square with a tall Christmas tree as a centrepiece. Moments later, Emma was following Max’s vehicle down a long, tree-lined driveway to stop in front of a house that took her breath away. She was still blinking up at the huge, three-storeyed gabled mansion with imposing chimneys and ivy creeping up its stone walls as Max opened the heavy wooden front door and waited for her to go inside.
‘You grew up here?’ Somehow it didn’t fit with the image of the contemporary ‘man about town’ she’d met in that London paediatric ward a decade ago. She gazed from one side of the entranceway to the other. There was probably a library in here. And a drawing room like they had in those period dramas on television with dogs lying in front of an open fire big enough to roast an ox. ‘This is amazing.’
Max simply nodded. ‘It’s been in the family for more than a hundred years. Known locally as Cunningham Manor.’ He raised his voice. ‘Dad? You here?’
A woman who looked to be in her late fifties appeared from a doorway at the far end of the entrance foyer. ‘He’s in the west wing,’ she told Max. ‘Oh…who’s this?’ She was wiping her hands on her apron and beaming as she came towards Emma. ‘I’m Maggie—Dr Cunningham’s housekeeper. Dr Cunningham senior, that is,’ she added.
Max took pity on her. ‘The west wing is a private joke. Dad’s the GP for Upper Barnsley and the lower level of that side of the house used to be the stables, I believe. It was converted to be a clinic years before I was born.’ He turned to the housekeeper. ‘This is Emma Moretti,’ he told her. ‘She’s the locum who’s taking over from me at the hospital until we get the nanny situation sorted. She also happens to be an old friend of mine. We worked together in a paediatric ward a very long time ago.’
Emma wasn’t about to contradict him publicly but calling her a friend was stretching things a little. They had been colleagues and she’d totally respected his abilities as a doctor but she’d never trusted him enough to think of him as a friend. Or maybe she hadn’t trusted herself? If they’d got close, she might have given in to that major attraction she’d felt for Max and how embarrassing could that have been? It had only taken one kiss for him to laugh about how she was ‘so not his type’. She’d agreed, of course, and laughed along with him. How else would one save face at a time like that? Besides, he’d been right. He was ‘so not her type’ as well, but it had been a bit of a put-down to find out that the attraction hadn’t actually been mutual.
‘Oh…wonderful.’ Maggie was still smiling. ‘You’ll need all the expert help you can get with these babies.’
Babies? A chill ran down Emma’s spine. Max had said children, not babies.
Children were so much easier to be around than babies. Especially newborn babies. She could work with them, of course, but preferably in a clinical setting rather than, say, an accident scene. And never in a private home. Even in a medical situation, being present at a birth or close to a tiny baby made the scars on her own heart ache. She might have built barriers to protect herself enough to live with the pain of only ever having a few hours with her own precious baby but she had no desire to deliberately test how strong those protective walls might be.
‘I didn’t bring Emma here to stand in for the nanny,’ Max told Maggie. ‘She’s supposed