The Honourable Midwife. Lilian Darcy

      

      “I don’t care where we go,” he said. “Or what we do.”

      As long as we’re together.

      He didn’t say it, but it seemed so clear.

      “Neither do I…” Emma’s heart gave its usual giddy lurch in her chest, and she wanted his company so badly that she almost felt ill.

      The hospital was so quiet this time of night. Visitors and most doctors had gone home. The two of them were alone.

      “My place, then,” she added shakily.

      They left the building together and walked in the direction of the car park. Pete put his arm around her, drawing her close to his side, and for a moment she let her head dip onto his shoulder.

      It felt too good. She lifted her head again and slid out of the circle of his arm. He let her go without protest, as if he hadn’t wanted more. They both knew quite definitely, however, that he had.

      Dear Reader,

      This is the second book in my Glenfallon miniseries, about four women friends, with satisfying careers in an Australian country town, who aren’t necessarily looking for love, but find it anyhow.

      When she goes away to Paris for three months, Emma rents out her house to one of Glenfallon’s doctors, Pete Croft, whom she’s known casually for years. The e-mails they exchange, and the intimacy of living in the same space, even though at different times, makes them look at each other in a new way.

      I’ve read that actress Meryl Steep and her sculptor-husband went from being casual acquaintances to close friends and then lovers in just this way, and it’s always struck me as an unusual and romantic way to make a connection.

      The connection is only the beginning for Pete and Emma; however, Pete has emotional ties and obligations elsewhere that he can’t ignore.

      You’ll encounter Kit from The Midwife’s Courage in this book, as well as Caroline and Nell, who you’ll be able to read about later on.

      Lilian Darcy

      The Honourable Midwife

      Lilian Darcy

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Introduction

       Dear Reader

       Title Page

       CHAPTER ONE

       CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

      THERE was bound to be something left behind, Pete Croft decided as he walked around Emma Burns’s house and garden one last time. A toy hidden under a flowerpot during a game and then forgotten, or some stray coins in a drawer.

      No, there’d be more than that. Something much more personal. Something that would endure for longer.

      He stood on the back veranda and looked at the garden. It was the start of spring, the first weekend of September, and there were daffodils and blossom trees and golden acacias in bloom.

      The grass was a lush green, and he’d mowed it just this morning, so that the fresh, earthy scent of the clippings still hung in the air. He could hear a couple of other motor mowers going in the distance, too. It was a weekend sound, a hopeful sound, and somehow more soothing to the spirits than such a sound had any right to be.

      Inside Emma’s house, cool polished floorboards gleamed, and spring sunshine made the living room bright. On any other Saturday, Pete might have stretched out on that squishy-cushioned regency-stripe couch with the weekend city newspaper and a cup of good coffee. Today, however, he had to move out.

      I don’t want to leave, he realised.

      He’d been happy here, during the three-month interlude of his tenancy. He’d found a tranquillity and peace he’d never known in quite the same way before, and an odd kind of friendship, via e-mail, with his temporary landlady on the other side of the world in France.

      These were the things he didn’t want to leave behind. The sheer tranquillity. Emma’s e-mails. The sense of her personality lingering like a well-loved fragrance in every room. The sight of his four-year-old twin daughters playing in their ‘cubby house’ under the old hydrangea bushes, without an apparent care in the world, despite the upheaval unleashed on them by the collapsing of their parents’ marriage.

      His marriage. His marriage to Claire.

      This was the reason Pete made another tour through the house. He went down the brick steps at the front, around the slate paved path at the side of the house and into the back garden once more, rebelling against a reality he couldn’t change.

      He didn’t want to leave at all.

      But, of course, he had to. Emma Burns was coming home tomorrow, after her three-month trip, and he was moving into his own brand-new place in Glenfallon’s trendiest suburban housing development. The interlude had to end, and real life had to resume.

      He’d had professional cleaners in, and he’d groomed Emma’s garden himself. The fact that it was spring and flowers were in bloom made it a little easier than it would otherwise have been for him to tell the real plants from the weeds.

      The real estate agent was dropping in this afternoon to satisfy himself that everything was in order, but Pete knew this was just a formality. Everything was in order. There was really nothing more to do. He put the key in an envelope, along with a card he’d written to Emma, left them on the kitchen bench top, let himself out the front door and clicked it shut behind him.

      Dr Croft had left a couple of things, Emma discovered on Sunday afternoon. The card, for one, which was nice. It was thick and expensive, with a lushly colourful painting of poppies on the front. Inside, he’d written, ‘Welcome home, and thanks for renting me