A Father For Poppy. Abigail Gordon

it.’

      ‘Ah, I see,’ he said, and added, with a last look at the child in her arms, ‘I’ll be off then, to let you get on with the bedtime routine and maybe see you somewhere on the job tomorrow.’

      ‘Yes, maybe,’ she replied.

      She was relieved to see him go. Her heartbeat was thundering in her ears, her legs were weak with the shock of his surprise call, and she didn’t know how she was going to cope with having Drake so near yet so far away in everything else. He probably thought she was crazy to be taking on the role of mother to someone else’s child.

      As he walked down the drive to his car she couldn’t let him go without asking, ‘Did you find somewhere to stay?’

      He turned. ‘Er, yes. The keys for the mausoleum, along with a welcoming note to use it if I so wished, were waiting for me, and as it’s so near where I’m going to be working, and I didn’t feel like looking for anywhere else, I took advantage of the offer.’

      ‘You don’t sound too keen on the accommodation,’ she commented.

      ‘It’s a roof over my head, I suppose, but it’s rather dark and dreary. I’m more into light and colour, if you remember.’

      She remembered, all right, remembered every single thing about him from the moment he’d knocked on her door early one morning until the day he’d packed his bags and left. But the memories had been battened down for the last three years and she wanted them to stay that way.

      He had his hand on the car door and as he slid into the driving seat and waved goodbye, she carried a sleepy Poppy up to the pretty bedroom next to hers. Looking down at her, the feelings that being near him had brought back disappeared as her world righted itself again.

      Tessa didn’t sleep much that night. She usually went to bed not long after Poppy to recharge her batteries for the next day, but not this time. Her moments of reassurance when Drake had gone and she’d carried Poppy up to bed hadn’t lasted.

      She kept remembering how his face had changed colour from a healthy tan to a white mask of disbelief when he’d thought that Poppy was his, and when she’d told him that she wasn’t, she could tell that he’d thought she was crazy to adopt a child. Clearly nothing had changed with regard to what he saw as his priorities, and they obviously didn’t include parenthood.

      Why did he have to come back into her life and disrupt her newfound contentment? she thought dismally as dawn began to filter across the sky.

      In her role as health and safety manager Tessa went round the wards each week, chatting to patients at their bedsides about what they thought of the food, cleanliness and general arrangements of the famous hospital, taking note of any comments that were made. The morning after Drake’s surprise visit it was down as her first duty of the day.

      As she made her way to the children’s ward, where it would be parents she was chatting to rather than the small patients, one of the nurses who had been there when Poppy had been admitted caught her up on the corridor and asked when she was going to bring her in to see them.

      The plight of her small adopted daughter had pulled at all their heartstrings when she’d been admitted frightened and hurt after the car crash that had taken the lives of her parents. But Tessa had experienced a strong maternal feeling towards the little orphan that had made the promises she and Drake had made to each other seem selfish and immature.

      At that time she’d had few expectations of ever seeing him again, but she’d been wrong and thought guiltily that she should be happy for the hospital’s sake that he had taken over, instead of complaining about the effect he was having on her life.

      ‘I’ll bring Poppy the first chance that comes along,’ she told her. ‘It is just that the days seem to fly.’

      On the point of proceeding to wherever she was bound, the nurse said, ‘What about Drake Melford? Wow! If I wasn’t so fond of my Harry I’d be tempted. That man is every woman’s dream!’

      He was certainly that, Tessa thought, and when she looked up the man himself was moving quickly along the corridor in their direction and the nurse made a swift departure.

      She felt her shoulders tensing, but then reminded herself it was Drake the surgeon coming towards her, not the dream lover of the past, and with a brief ‘Hello, there,’ he was gone.

      Drake had driven the short distance back to the hospital car park the night before in a state of amazement. The scene he’d just been confronted with at Tessa’s cottage had revealed that the person she’d moved house for was a parentless child, a small girl without a father. He could hardly get his head around what was certainly the last thing he’d expected to find on his return to Glenminster.

      A husband and a child of her own wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, but the dark-haired little tot at the bottom of the stairs had been nothing less than a shock to his system, and after seeing Tessa in the corridor just now, he had to admit that he was still reeling.

      She had done the rounds of patient appraisals and been closeted with the laundry manageress for the rest of the morning. Then, after a bite of lunch, she’d spent the rest of the day in her office, dealing with the demands of the busy eye hospital, and it wasn’t until Tessa was leaving at the end of the day to go to collect Poppy that she saw Drake again on his way to Theatre. He nodded briefly in her direction, but instead of accepting thankfully that it was a sign he was keeping the low profile that she wanted from him, Tessa was filled with sudden melancholy.

      It came from the memory of strong passions and their fulfilment in a relationship that for her had been transformed into a love that was strong and abiding, and not according to the promises they’d made to each other when they’d first met. If she’d told Drake back then how she’d felt he would have seen it as not keeping to her part of the pact they’d made and so she’d stayed silent.

      And now when he had finished for the day, whenever that might be, he would be alone in the huge house that he had reluctantly opted for, while she would be alone in her living room, Poppy asleep upstairs. It was a matter of minutes between their respective homes, but an unimaginable distance in every way that mattered.

      Why couldn’t he have stayed away, she thought anxiously as she set off to Lizzie’s, instead of coming back to awaken memories from the past that she’d finally been able to put aside because her life had been made liveable again since she’d adopted her precious child.

      She’d seen his expression when she’d explained who Poppy was, as he’d observed her at the bottom of the stairs, and he’d actually gone pale.

      Yet there was no one better than Drake for bringing a smile to the face of a frightened young patient in the children’s clinic, having them laugh instead of cry while he was making a shrewd assessment of their problems.

      They’d been in a similar professional situation when they’d first met. He’d been on the staff of a less famous place than Horizons but had been moving up the ladder fast, already a name that was well known in the profession, and she’d been employed as a mid-level manager where she was now, which had brought her into his line of vision when he’d been the speaker at Horizons that night.

      His had been a personality that had drawn her to him like a magnet. From the moment of their meeting she had been enraptured, and, being just as much a free spirit as he was, had thought that the pact they had made would survive any hazards or setbacks.

      But lurking in the background had been his ambition, his determination to be at the top of his profession, and he’d gone and left her to pick up the pieces, taking her silence on the matter as her acceptance of the open-ended arrangement they’d agreed on.

      Tessa had been thankful they hadn舗t lived together, had each kept their own space, that there had at least been one aspect of his going that she hadn舗t been left to face.

      As days had turned to weeks and weeks to months she had felt only half-alive until Poppy had become part of her life and her own unhappiness had seemed as nothing compared to what