A Father For Poppy. Abigail Gordon

Poppy had. She had wriggled down off her chair and gone round to the other side of the table, and climbing up onto Drake’s knee was sitting there, sucking her thumb. After a moment of complete astonishment on his part, his arms closed around her.

      This is madness, Tessa thought wildly. Not only was Randolph impressed by Drake’s easy charm, but her beautiful Poppy must be seeing in him something she hadn’t seen in any other man since she’d lost her father. It had to be him of all people, him, for whom babies and mortgages were no-go areas.

      Drake was reading her mind as clearly as if she was speaking her thoughts, and putting Poppy gently back onto her feet he led her back to where Tessa was sitting and said softly, ‘Yours, I think.’

      ‘You think correctly,’ she told him levelly, ‘and now, if you will excuse us, Poppy’s grandfather always takes us up into the hills when we’ve had lunch, don’t you, Randolph?’

      ‘Er, yes,’ he replied uncomfortably, and turned to their host. ‘It has been good to meet you, Mr Melford. Maybe next Saturday we could take you for a meal, if you aren’t too busy.’

      Tessa noted that he didn’t say either yes or no, just smiled, and she thought, Please, let it be a no when next I see him.

      When they were clear of the restaurant Randolph asked curiously ‘So what is it with you and the man back there, Tessa? What have you got against him? I thought he was most pleasant. We butted into his mealtime with our requests and interruptions and he never batted an eyelid.’ He looked down at Poppy’s dark curls. ‘Whatever you might think of him, our young miss took to him like a duck to water.’

      ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I saw that. It is just that Drake and I had a misunderstanding a few years ago.’

      ‘And you still bear a grudge?’

      Not a grudge, she thought. It was scars that she carried, mental and physical ones, but she wasn’t going to tell Randolph that, so she just let a shrug of the shoulders be the answer to that question, and he let the matter drop.

      Randolph was very fond of both Poppy and Tessa, whose loving role of a second mother to his granddaughter took away some of the dreadful feeling of loss that he had to live with, and no way did he like to see her unhappy in any way.

      But as he drove the last stretch homewards he was reminding himself that all he knew of her was what he saw now, in her early thirties and beautiful. There had to have been men in her life previously, if not at the present time, and it seemed that Drake Melford might have been one of them, though clearly not any more.

      When the little family had left the restaurant after the uncomfortable moments when Poppy had been drawn to him, Drake sat deep in thought. It had been a mistake to come back to where his roots were, and where he’d had the mad fling with Tessa. Yet what was it he’d been expecting when he did? That nothing would have changed and Tessa would be waiting, patient and adoring, after the abrupt way their affair had ended?