For His Baby's Sake. Jessica Hart
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with anyone that night. I thought I was just going out for a few drinks, but one thing led to another, and then Hannah was inviting me back to her flat, and…When things started getting a little…you know…’
‘I know,’ said Rose expressionlessly.
‘I think I did say that I didn’t have anything with me, but Hannah was insistent that she was on the Pill and…’ He glanced at Rose’s face. ‘Don’t look like that! I know it was irresponsible, but it wasn’t as if she was a total stranger.’
‘Hannah lied to you?’
‘She wanted a baby. That’s what her parents said, anyway. It was just luck, from her point of view, that she managed to get pregnant that night, but apparently she knew that she was ovulating and all the signs were good. It even suited her that I was going away a couple of days later, as I wouldn’t be around to put two and two together.’
‘She told her parents all this?’ said Rose in disbelief. Her own parents had died in an accident when she was nineteen. She had loved them dearly, and missed them still, but she certainly couldn’t imagine telling them that she was ovulating and hoping to become pregnant by a man she knew didn’t want to be a father. It would have been hard enough to tell them about Jack.
‘Hannah was a very strong personality. You’d have liked her,’ said Drew. ‘No, you would,’ he insisted, when she looked sceptical. ‘Her parents told me that she’d been completely straight with them about wanting to do it on her own. All she would say about me was that I worked at the office and that she liked me, but that I was the last person she wanted to get involved with.’
He didn’t add that Hannah had told her parents that he was still in love with Rose, and that she knew that any attempt at getting together for the baby’s sake would be doomed to disaster.
‘So you went off to Africa none the wiser?’
‘Exactly. Hannah was very casual about it when I saw her the next day. She said it was just a fling for both of us, and that as far as she was concerned we were just friends. And that was a bit of a relief, to be honest.’
‘I’m sure it was,’ said Rose acidly. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to have to take any responsibility for your actions, now, would you?’
A dull flush crept up his cheeks. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said. ‘And I’ve taken responsibility now. When I heard that Hannah had died, I wanted to see her parents and say how sorry I was, how much I’d liked her…it seemed like the right thing to do somehow.’
It had been. Rose studied him, a little frown between her brows. She had been so staggered to see him, and so thrown by the news that he was a father, that she hadn’t had a chance to look at him properly yet. Now she looked at him more carefully. He was browner, yes, and leaner. There were more lines around the green eyes, but otherwise he looked just as she had remembered him.
But something had changed. He seemed more solid somehow. His face was still humorous, with that long, curling mouth and the glinting amusement in his eyes, but there was a new assurance to him now, a thoughtfulness that hadn’t been there before. Africa had changed him. His time there seemed to have made him responsible rather than reckless.
He was different. Rose couldn’t quite put her finger on why or how, but she knew that it was true. And it wasn’t just to do with the baby sleeping in his lap.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘I wasn’t looking forward to it,’ Drew said. ‘I didn’t know what on earth I was going to say, but in the event I didn’t really have to say anything. As soon as Mrs Clarke opened the door she just stared at me, and then stood back to let me inside. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but she showed me into a sitting room and there was a baby in one of those bouncy chair things.’
‘This is Molly,’ Hannah’s mother had said.
‘Is she Hannah’s?’ he had asked, and she had nodded with a wavering smile as Drew approached the baby. His tentative smile had been wiped off his face as he’d looked at her properly and seen the telltale splodge in the baby’s soft dark hair. Dumbly, he had raised his eyes, and Betty Clarke had nodded again.
‘And yours,’ she had said.
Now Drew pulled the cap off Molly’s head, and Rose saw for herself. It hadn’t taken her long to get so used to Drew’s hair that she hadn’t even noticed it after a while, but she vividly remembered how startled she had been to meet his father and see exactly the same pattern on his head.
‘It’s a form of vitiligo,’ Drew had explained to her once. ‘It’s an auto-immune thing. For some reason melanin isn’t produced, and in our family it’s inherited, a sort of genetic quirk, because if we get it at all, it always shows up in exactly the same pattern.’
Molly was dark-haired, with a distinctive star-shaped streak of pale hair above her right eyebrow. Exactly like Drew.
There was no doubting whose daughter she was.
Rose watched Drew tentatively smooth Molly’s hair, and something painful—jealousy? Bitterness?—gripped her heart so hard that she had to look away.
‘Didn’t Hannah’s parents try and find you when she died?’ she asked after a moment.
Drew shook his head. ‘She’d been very careful not to give any information away, but they’d noticed that she’d smiled when she’d seen that streak when Molly was born. “Just like your dad,” she’d told Molly. So at the funeral they hoped that someone with that hair would turn up, but of course, I was overseas. They didn’t have much choice but to carry on looking after Molly themselves, but they’re struggling. Betty—her mother—is due a hip operation soon, and her husband has a bad heart. They were just wondering whether they would have to call in the social services when I turned up at the door. It seemed like providence. There’s no need to do a DNA test with that hair—all the babies in my family have that.’
‘I remember,’ said Rose slowly.
Drew looked down at Molly and then straight at Rose. ‘I couldn’t just walk away when they needed help. It takes two to make a baby, as you pointed out, and I had to take some responsibility, so I said I would look after her at least until after her grandmother’s operation, and then if that goes well we would try and sort something out.’
‘But you don’t know anything about babies,’ Rose protested. ‘I can’t believe they just handed her over to you.’
‘Betty was a little reluctant at first, but there didn’t seem to be any option, and I…I told them you would help me,’ he confessed in a rush.
Rose drew a sharp breath of exasperation. That was typical of Drew. He had always taken her for granted, always believed that he could charm her into doing whatever he wanted. ‘You hadn’t even told me that you were back in the country, Drew!’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I only got back yesterday. It all happened so suddenly. Everything was going well on the project when we had word that insurgents were making their way towards us. We were ordered to withdraw to Ouagadougou, and then the decision was made to repatriate us until the situation became clearer, and who knows when that will be?’
‘So you suddenly found yourself back in London?’
He nodded. ‘I’d been seconded to the project in Burkina Faso from my company, so I reported back to head office to see what I should do in the meantime.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They told me to take a couple of weeks’ leave, and if I’d heard nothing by then they’d find me another job. I could probably go back to the team I was working with before I left. I went to see them, and that’s when I heard about Hannah…’
Drew sighed. ‘You know, there’s part of me that wishes I’d never gone to see the Clarkes.’ He glanced down at his daughter. ‘Molly has changed everything,’ he