Her Boss's Baby Plan. Jessica Hart

in her mouth.

      ‘Sorry about that.’ Martha looked back at Lewis. ‘You were saying?’ she asked him politely.

      Lewis watched his niece glaring haughtily over Martha’s lap at Noah and looking for a moment so like her mother that he almost laughed. He glanced at Martha with reluctant respect. He had to admit that she seemed surprisingly competent for such an unlikely-looking nanny.

      Viola, as her current nanny was always telling him, could be a handful, and if she took after her mother, as she was already bidding fair to do, that would turn out to be a masterly understatement. But Martha seemed to have got her measure straight away, dealing with her with a combination of tenderness and firmness.

      Belatedly, Lewis became aware that Martha had asked him a question and was waiting expectantly for the answer. Cross with himself for letting himself get diverted from the issue, he scowled.

      ‘You were telling me about conditions on St Bonaventure,’ Martha prompted kindly.

      Not that that made Lewis feel any better. He didn’t like looking foolish, and he suspected that was exactly how he did look right then. Abruptly getting to his feet to get away from that dark stare, he prowled around the room.

      ‘The island was hit by a cyclone last year which wiped out most of the infrastructure. That’s why I’m going,’ he told her. ‘The World Bank is funding a new port and airport with access roads, so it will be a major project.’

      ‘But surely all that will take longer than six months?’ said Martha in surprise.

      Lewis gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It will certainly do that! We’re going to be doing the design and overseeing the construction, so there’ll be a resident engineer out there for the duration of the project, but I want to be there for the initial stages at least. It’s a prestigious project and this is a critical time for the firm. We need it to be a success.’

      ‘So you’ll spend six months setting everything up and then come back to London?’

      ‘That’s the plan at the moment. I might end up staying longer—it depends how things go. We’ll need to do various surveys, which may mean incorporating various changes into the design, and it’s important to establish a good working relationship with all the authorities and suppliers. These things take time,’ said Lewis, very aware of Martha’s eyes on him.

      He wished she would stop looking at him with that dark, disturbing gaze, stop sitting there with a baby tucked under either arm, stop being so…unsettling.

      ‘In any case, Savannah should be able to look after Viola herself in six months’ time,’ he concluded brusquely, uncomfortably conscious that he had lost the thread of what he was saying. Martha didn’t need to know about the project, or why it was important to him. Anyone would think he cared what she thought. ‘It would be a strictly short-term contract as far as a nanny is concerned.’

      ‘I understand,’ said Martha.

      ‘The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not going to be an extended beach holiday,’ Lewis persevered. ‘St Bonaventure isn’t developed as far as tourism goes, and there’s a very small expatriate community. I’m going to be extremely busy, and will be out all day and probably a number of evenings too.

      ‘Whoever comes out to look after Viola is going to be in for a very quiet few months. She’s going to have to look after herself. Sure, the weather’s nice, but once you’ve been down to the beach there’s nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. The capital, Perpetua, is tiny and there are hardly any shops, and where you do find one it’s dependent on imports that can be erratic, to say the least. Sometimes the shelves are empty for months, which can make the diet monotonous.’

      ‘I think you’ve made your point,’ said Martha, smiling slightly, as if she knew that he was doing his damnedest to put her off and wasn’t having any of it.

      Lewis scowled and dug his hands in his pockets. ‘All I’m trying to say is that if you’re expecting paradise you’d better think again!’

      Martha met his gaze directly. ‘I’m not looking for paradise in St Bonaventure,’ she said.

      ‘What are you looking for, then?’

      For a moment, Martha hesitated. She had hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary to tell Lewis Mansfield the whole story at this stage, but it was probably better to be open.

      ‘I’m looking for Noah’s father,’ she said clearly.

      If she had expected a sympathetic response from Lewis she was doomed to disappointment. ‘Careless of you to lose someone as important as that,’ he commented, and then lifted a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Or did he lose you?’

      Martha flushed slightly. ‘It wasn’t like that. Rory is a marine biologist. He’s doing a PhD on something to do with ocean currents and coral reefs…I’m not sure exactly, but he’s doing his fieldwork on some atoll off St Bonaventure.’

      ‘If you know where he is, he’s not exactly lost, is he? Why do you need to go all the way out to the Indian Ocean when you could just contact him? If he’s a student he’s bound to have an email address, if nothing else. It’s not hard to track people down nowadays.’

      ‘It’s not that easy,’ said Martha. ‘I need to see him. Rory doesn’t know about Noah, and it’s not the kind of thing you can drop in a casual email. What would I say? Oh, by the way, you’re a father?’

      ‘It’s what you’re going to have to say when you see him, isn’t it?’ Lewis countered.

      Martha bit her lip. ‘I think it would be better if Rory could actually see Noah. He won’t seem real to him otherwise.’

      ‘You mean you think you’re more likely to get money out of him if you turn up with a lovely, cuddly baby?’

      The dark eyes flashed at his tone. ‘It’s not about money,’ she said fiercely. ‘Rory’s a lot younger than me. He’s still a student and finds it hard enough to survive on a grant himself, never mind support a baby. I know he can’t afford to be financially responsible for Noah, and I’m not asking him to.’

      ‘Then why go at all?’

      ‘Because I think Rory has the right to know that he’s a father.’

      ‘Even though presumably he wasn’t interested enough to keep in touch with you and find out for himself that you were all right?’

      ‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Martha a little helplessly. How could she make someone like Lewis understand?

      ‘I met Rory at the beginning of last year. It wasn’t just a one-night stand,’ she added, hating the idea that he might think there had been anything sordid or casual about the affair. ‘I liked Rory a lot and we had a very nice time together but at the same time we both knew that it wasn’t a long-term thing.

      ‘We had completely different lives, for a start. He was only in the UK to go to conferences and write up some of his research, and I had a great job in London. It was always clear that he had to go back to St Bonaventure to finish his thesis, and we both treated it as…’ she shrugged lightly, searching for the right description ‘…as a pleasant interlude.’

      ‘So he didn’t know you were pregnant?’

      ‘Yes. I found out just before he left, so I told him. I felt I had to.’

      ‘And he left anyway?’ Lewis sounded outraged and Martha looked at him curiously.

      ‘We discussed it,’ she told him, ‘and we agreed that neither of us was ready to start a family. It was obviously out of the question for him, and I was very involved in my own career. I was incredibly busy then too. There was no way I could imagine fitting a baby into my life…’

      She trailed off as she remembered how obvious everything had seemed at the time. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, recollecting herself, ‘the upshot was that I told Rory that