A Mother by Nature

‘From one of category romance’s most accomplished voices comes a beautifully told, intensely emotional and wonderfully uplifting tale of second chances, new beginnings, hope, triumph and everlasting love. Caroline Anderson’s Wedding of the Year is an engrossing, enthralling and highly enjoyable tale that will move you to tears and keep you riveted from the first page until the very last sentence. Moving, heartbreaking and absolutely fantastic, with Wedding of the Year Caroline Anderson is at her mesmerising best!’ —www.cataromance.com on St Piran’s: Wedding of the Year

‘Photojournalist Maisie Douglas and businessman Robert Mackenzie have been more or less amicably divorced for almost two decades, but the upcoming marriage of their daughter, Jenni, stirs up old emotions on both sides. Very young when she married him, Maisie—pregnant and disowned by her family—was miserable living in Scotland with Rob’s judgmental parents, and left after little more than a year. Maisie hasn’t found another partner and neither has rob. Can they find a way to trust each other again, after all this time? This lovely reunion romance is rich with emotion and humour, and all of the characters are exquisitely rendered.’

—RT Book Reviews on Mother of the Bride

About the Author

CAROLINE ANDERSON has the mind of a butterfly. She’s been a nurse, a secretary, a teacher, run her own soft furnishing business, and now she’s settled on writing. She says, ‘I was looking for that elusive something. I finally realised it was variety, and now I have it in abundance. Every book brings new horizons and new friends, and in between books I have learned to be a juggler. My teacher husband John and I have two beautiful and talented daughters, Sarah and Hannah, umpteen pets, and several acres of Suffolk that nature tries to reclaim every time we turn our backs!’ Caroline also writes for the Mills & Boon® Cherish™ series.

Recent titles by Caroline Anderson: Mills & Boon® Medical Romance™

THE SECRET IN HIS HEART

FROM CHRISTMAS TO ETERNITY

THE FIANCÉE HE CAN’T FORGET

TEMPTED BY DR DAISY

ST PIRAN’S: THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR* THE SURGEON’S MIRACLE *ST PIRAN’S HOSPITAL

MILLS & BOON® CHERISH™ THE VALTIERI BABY VALTIERI’S BRIDE THE BABY SWAP MIRACLE MOTHER OF THE BRIDE

A Mother

by Nature

Caroline Anderson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

HE STOOD in the bay window, his eyes scanning the dimly lit street with quiet contentment. It was a pleasant street, the large houses set back from the road and shielded from prying eyes by an avenue of old flowering cherries.

Their branches swayed in the wind, leafless still, the whispered promise of spring barely showing in the brave shoots of daffodils nudging the earth under the garden wall, but the signs were there, and he guessed it would be glorious when the trees blossomed.

A movement in the house opposite caught his attention, and he focused on it. There were lights on downstairs, and he could see people moving about, settling down for the evening.

His house was settled already, silent now except for the running footsteps on the stairs. They ground to a halt by the door.

‘Adam? I’m going out now, OK?’

He looked towards the disembodied, slightly accented voice with resignation. ‘OK. What time will you be back?’ he asked, without any real hope that he would like the answer. He was right. He didn’t.

‘Late,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the pub again—maybe meet my new friends. I’ve got my keys.’

‘OK. Goodnight, Helle.’

The front door slammed behind her, echoing through the house and making the windows rattle. Her feet crunched against the gravel of the drive, and she slipped through the gateway and disappeared, swallowed up by the eerie night. Adam dropped his head back against the edge of the window and let out a quiet sigh.

He was tired. It had been a hectic week. The move had taken three days, and he’d spent the next four unpacking and slotting things into their new places while the children had got under his feet and rushed about excitedly and Helle had done the bare minimum. The big Edwardian semi still seemed empty, the huge rooms swallowing up their meagre possessions with ease, but given time he could decorate all the rooms and buy more furniture to fill them.

It was a daunting thought, but there was no hurry, and just for now they were enjoying the novelty of having too much room. After nearly three years of battling for elbow room and falling over toys and clutter, it was wonderful to have the space to spread out.

Skye had her own bedroom for the first time, the boys’ room was big enough to have a separate area for each of them, and Helle, their Danish au pair, had a room on the top floor, a huge room with a little shower off it next to the spare bedroom that would double as his study. That gave her privacy, and he had privacy and space of his own in the master bedroom suite at the front—most particularly space.

The size of his bedroom was the only incongruous thing. Like Helle’s room above him, it ran across the full width of the front of the house, excluding the bathroom at the end, absurdly big compared to the middle bedroom he’d had at the other house and somehow highlighting his loneliness in a way which that cluttered little room had never done.

He dropped into a chair and closed his eyes, suddenly weary, and wondered how the children and Helle would cope without him tomorrow, his first day in his new job. How would he cope, come to that? It was not only a new job, but his first consultancy, and he felt a little rush of adrenaline at the thought. Nerves?

Absurd, Adam told himself. He was more than capable of doing it, more than ready for the responsibility and the challenge. It was just that with the move to a new area and a new house, a new school for Skye and Danny and a new nursery school for Jaz, there was so much change, so much to deal with.

Someone to share it with would have made it all so much easier, he thought with an inward sigh, but that hadn’t been an option. And Helle had been more of a hindrance than a help since they’d moved. She’d been unhappy before, restless and discontented, and now, since they’d moved, she’d seemed permanently attached to the cordless phone, drifting aimlessly around and talking into it in Danish whenever she thought he wasn’t listening. Phoning home? Lord alone knows what the phone bill will be, he thought grimly.

He had a feeling his au pair was destined for a fairly imminent departure, which would mean replacing her and settling the new girl in with the children while coping with the new job and trying to sort out the house.

That in itself would be no mean feat. They’d only been able to afford it because it needed to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the next century. The plumbing was ancient and suspect, the heating was intermittent and unreliable, the wiring was safe but woefully inadequate, and there wasn’t a single room that didn’t need decorating and a new carpet and curtains.

Even on his new consultant’s salary he couldn’t afford to deal with it all at once, and he certainly couldn’t afford to pay anyone to do it for him. Catapulting restlessly out of the chair, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine. His eyes scanned the room without the benefit of his earlier rose-tinted spectacles, and the enormity of what he’d taken on swamped him.

It was the little things—the cupboard door that hung at a crazy angle because the top hinge had gone, the worktop that had a hole burned in it next to the cooker, the cracked and broken tiles, the broken sash cord that dangled from the window, taunting him.

How many others were on the point of breaking? What else was wrong that he hadn’t noticed or worried about on the building society’s huge and extensive survey report? OK, structurally it was sound, but everything he looked at seemed to need some attention. The loo off the hall needed to have its door rehung because it smashed into the basin behind it if you opened it more than halfway, the fireplace in the dining room needed to be opened up and revealed—the list was endless.

Endless, but cosmetic. Nothing time wouldn’t cure. Once he’d had time to deal with it, it would be warm and light and a wonderful family home.

One day.

Adam went back to the drawing room, threw another shovel full of coal on the fire, put on a CD and settled down in the chair with his eyes firmly shut against the list of chores awaiting him in that room.

He didn’t want to see the crack across the corner of the ceiling, the wallpaper easing off the wall just below it, the chipped paint on the skirting board, the worn and frayed carpet begging to be replaced.

There would be time for that later, once they were settled. In the meantime, he’d relax and try and get himself into the right frame of mind for tomorrow, and try not to think about Helle and the fact that she would probably disturb him coming back in the wee small hours of the night, doubtless utterly wasted after her evening in the pub, and would be hell to get up in the morning in time to get the children ready for school. Which meant he’d have to do it, yet again.

He put it out of his mind. He’d deal with tomorrow when it came. One day at a time, he reminded himself. It had got him through the last two years since Lyn had left. It would get him through the next twenty.

Please, God …

Damn. He was going to be late. His first day in his new job and he was going to be late.

‘Daddy, I can’t find my shoes …’

‘Try under your coat on the floor in the dining room where you threw it last night. Jasper, eat your breakfast, please.’

‘Don’t like cornflakes.’

‘You did yesterday. Danny, have you found your shoes yet?’

A mumble came from the dining room. It could just conceivably have been a yes. Then again …

Adam rammed his hands through his short, dark hair and stared at the ceiling. Where was Helle? He’d called her three times.

‘Do we have to go to school? I hate it there. I want to go back to my old school.’

Adam met Skye’s sad blue eyes, old beyond her almost six years, and wished he could hug her and make her better. He’d given up trying. She simply stood and let him hold her, then walked away as soon as he let go. The social worker had said give her time, but it had been nearly three years now, and although she was better, she was still light years from emotional security.

And Lyn walking out on them hadn’t helped one damn bit.

‘Yes, darling, you do have to go,’ he told her gently. ‘You know that. I know it’s hard at first, but you’ll soon settle in and it’ll be much better for us here near Grannie and Grandpa. You’ll like seeing more of them, won’t you?’

She shrugged noncommittally, and he stifled a sigh and went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Helle?’ he yelled, and then remembered the neighbours through the party wall. Damn. At least the last house had been detached. Still, the people next door hadn’t complained about their new neighbours yet, and the teenage girls had been round already to introduce themselves and offer their services for babysitting.

If Helle didn’t get out of bed soon, he might have to take them up on it!

For what seemed like the millionth time, he wondered if he’d been quite mad to continue with the adoption when Lyn had left him. Maybe he should have let the kids go back instead of fighting to keep them. Maybe they would have been better off without him, with someone else instead. Two someones, preferably.

Then Danny wandered out into the hall, tie crooked, shoes untied, hair spiking on top of his head and a grin to gladden the loneliest heart, and he reached out and hugged the boy to his side as they went together back into the kitchen.

‘Look—I made you a card at school.’

He handed Adam a crumpled bit of sugar paper with spider writing on it, pencil on dark grey, almost impossible to decipher and yet the message quite clear. ‘I love you, Daddy. From Danny.’ There was a picture stuck on the front, of a house with a wonky chimney and a red front door just like theirs. Swallowing hard to shift the lump in his throat, he thanked Danny and stuck the card on the front of the fridge with a magnet.

Skye, ever the mother, was coaxing Jasper to eat his now soggy cereal, and she looked up and gave Adam that steady, serious look that made him want to weep for her. ‘Is Helle coming?’ she asked, and he shook his head.

‘I’m going to have to get her up,’ he told them. ‘I have to leave you guys and go to work, and I can’t be late. Not today.’

‘Are you scared?’ Jasper asked, eyeing him curiously.

‘Don’t be stupid—course he’s not!’ Danny said patronisingly.

He sat down. ‘Well, maybe a bit,’ he confessed. ‘Not scared exactly, but it’s never easy to meet new people and settle into a new place. It doesn’t matter if you’re old or young, it’s still a bit difficult at first.’

‘Even for you?’ Danny asked in amazement, gazing up at his hero with eyes like saucers.

He grinned and ruffled the spiky brown hair. ‘Even for me, sport.’

‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see,’ Skye said seriously, neatly reversing their roles, and he felt a lump in his throat again.

No. Whatever chaos and drama they’d brought to his life, he couldn’t imagine that life without them now. They belonged to each other, for better, for worse, and so on. They were a family and, like all families, they had good times and bad times.

Mostly they were good, but if Helle didn’t get up soon, he had a feeling that today was going to be a bad one …

Anna was feeling blue. She’d woken that morning wondering what it was all about, and two hours later she was still no nearer the answer. Wake up, get up, eat, go to work, go home, eat, go to bed, wake up—relentless routine, day after day, with nothing to brighten it.

Was she just desperately ungrateful? She had a roof over her head—more than a roof, really, a lovely little house that she enjoyed and was proud of—great friends, and a wonderful job that she wouldn’t change for the world—except that this morning, for the first time she could remember, she really, really didn’t want to be here.

So what was the matter with her?

Stupid question. Anna knew perfectly well what was wrong with her. She was alone. She was twenty-eight years old, and she was alone, and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be married, and have children—lots of them—one after the other. Children of her own, not other people’s little darlings but her own babies, conceived in love, nurtured by her body, raised by her and a man with dark hair and gentle eyes and a slow, sexy smile—a man she’d yet to meet.

Would never meet, she thought in frustration, if her life carried on as it was. Her biological clock was going to grind to a halt before then at this rate.

Oh, damn.

She pushed her chair back and stood up, her eyes automatically scanning the ward, and stopped dead as a jolt of recognition shot through her.

It was him. Dark hair, cut short but still long enough to have that sexy, unruly look that did funny things to her insides. Tallish, but not too tall, his shoulders broad enough to lean on but not wide enough to intimidate, he looked like a man you could rely on.

Her eyes scanned him, taking inventory. Lean hips. Firm chin and beautifully sculptured mouth. Eyebrows a dark slash across his forehead, mobile and expressive. A smile like quicksilver. He’d paused to chat to a child, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his white coat, and the child was grinning and pointing towards her.

He was good-looking, certainly, but it wasn’t really his looks that made him stand out so much as his presence. There was something about him, she thought as he straightened and turned towards her, something immensely strong and powerful and yet kind—endlessly, deeply kind, the sort of enduring kindness that made sacrifices and didn’t count the cost.

She’d never seen him before, but her body recognised him, every cell on full alert.

He started towards her with a smile, and their eyes locked, and out of the blue, she thought, At last …!

‘Sister Long?’ he said, although he knew quite well who she was, if the badge on her tabard was to be believed.

‘Anna,’ she corrected, looking up at him with startling green eyes, and he felt a shiver of sexual awareness which had lain dormant for so long it was almost shocking. A wisp of dark red hair had escaped from her neat bob and was falling forward over her face, and he had to restrain himself from lifting it with his fingers and tucking it back behind her ear. She smiled and held out her hand, slim and firm and purposeful. ‘You must be our new paediatric orthopaedic consultant—Mr Bradbury, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Adam,’ he said, and his voice cracked and he cleared his throat. ‘Adam Bradbury. Good to meet you. Have you got time for a chat? My department seem to have organised things so that I’m at a total loose end today, so I thought I’d spend it orienteering.’

She chuckled, a low, sexy chuckle that made his hair stand on end and everything else jump to attention. ‘Sure. Come into the kitchen, I’ll make coffee.’

He followed her, his eyes involuntarily tracking over the neat waist, the gentle swell of her hips, the womanly sway as she pushed the door out of the way and turned to hold it for him, flashing him a smile with those incredibly expressive eyes.

She spoke, but his body was clamouring so loud he didn’t hear her.

‘I’m sorry?’

She gave him a quizzical smile. ‘I said, tea or coffee?’

‘Oh—tea, thank you,’ he said, trying to concentrate on something other than her warm, soft mouth. ‘It’s a bit early for coffee.’

‘Well, there’s a thing. A fellow tea-drinker. Everyone else dives straight for the coffee.’ The smiled softened, lighting up her changeable green eyes and bringing out the gold flecks.

Not green at all, he realised, but blue and gold, fascinating eyes, beautiful eyes.

Bedroom eyes.

Oh, lord.

He stuffed his hands back into his coat pockets and angled them across his body as a shield. He had to work with her. He really, really didn’t need the embarrassment of an adolescent reaction!

Anna took him on a guided tour while the kettle boiled. She was glad to get out of the tiny kitchen, to be honest, the current running between them seemed so powerful. Not that he’d really given her any hint that he was interested, but there just seemed to be something that hummed along under the surface.

‘We’ve got twenty-one beds,’ she told Adam, walking down the ward towards the orthopaedic section, his area of special interest. ‘Six acute medical, six surgical, six orthopaedic and three single or family suites for more critical or noisy or infectious patients. We’ve got an isolation ward for barrier nursing or immuno-compromised patients—that’s another single, but I don’t tend to count it. It’s the only room that doesn’t get stolen for other things.’

‘Stolen?’ he said with a slow smile.

Anna rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, yes, of course—the lines get blurred and we end up with kids muddled up in the wrong place because of numbers, which drives the bed manager potty and the consultants come to blows over who has which bed for which child.’

His mouth kicked up in a crooked smile of appreciation, and her heart flip-flopped in her chest. Concentrate, she told herself sternly.

‘We keep the age groups together if we can—the long-stay older kids are the worst, as you might imagine, and the teenagers in traction are a nightmare.’

‘Well, there’s a thing,’ he murmured. ‘You could always put any really difficult kids in the Stryker bed for a little while just to get a taste of real deprivation of liberty.’

‘What, like throwing prisoners of war into the cooler? What a fascinating thought …!’

He laughed, and she thought her knees were going to give way. He’s probably married with a million children, she chided herself crossly, and told herself to mind her own business.

‘Have you moved far?’ she asked as they walked down the ward, her insatiable curiosity getting the better of her anyway.

‘About a hundred and fifty miles or so. I was in Oxford.’

‘Oxford? How lovely. How will you cope with the rural isolation of Audley?’ she asked with a laugh, and then her mouth, running on without her permission, added, ‘Doesn’t your wife mind?’

‘She might if I had one, but I don’t,’ Adam said lightly.

‘That must make it easier,’ she replied, trying not to smile with delight because he was free, but his next words took the wind right out of her sails.

‘Not really,’ he told her. ‘I’ve got three children under six and a Danish au pair with attitude, and we’ve bought a huge Edwardian house that needs every nook and cranny kicked into shape. Easier it’s not, but I like a challenge.’

She ground to a halt outside the playroom, and turned towards him, guilt prickling her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said sincerely. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’

‘You’re not intruding,’ he said with a gentle smile that reassured her slightly. ‘I’m just feeling a little overawed by what I’ve taken on. How about you? Are you married? Single, widowed, divorced, or other, please specify?’

Anna laughed, relief flooding through her at his light-hearted tone. ‘Single,’ she replied. Endlessly. Regrettably.

She never found out what he would have said next, because the playroom door flew open and a child came barrelling through it full pelt and nearly knocked her over. Her hand flew out and grabbed him by the shoulder, steadying him, and she looked down into his sparkling, mischievous eyes and shook her head.

‘You’ll never learn, Karl, will you?’

He grinned. ‘Sorry, Sister. I was in a hurry.’

‘I noticed. That was how this happened in the first place, wasn’t it? Too much of a hurry?’ She eyed him thoughtfully. ‘You’re going to hurt someone with that cast in a minute as well. Do me a favour and go and sit down and do something quiet. You’ll be going up to Theatre later this morning, and you really could do with being calm beforehand.’

‘Perhaps Karl should be our first experiment with the Stryker bed?’ Adam said softly under his breath.

‘What a good idea,’ Anna murmured, eyeing young Karl thoughtfully.

He looked from one to the other, not sure what they were talking about but obviously edgy. ‘What’s a—whatever you said sort of bed?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘You lie in it like the filling in a sandwich, and it turns over from time to time. It’s for keeping people with certain conditions like spinal injuries very still.’

‘Or settling down overactive youngsters,’ Adam added with a smile that belied his words.

‘You’re winding me up,’ Karl said, still not quite sure, and Anna laughed and ruffled his hair.

‘You got it. Go and find something quiet to do, there’s a good lad, and I’ll come and give you your pre-med later.’

He shot off, clearly relieved, and with a smile they headed back towards the kitchen. ‘He’s got a nonunion of the radius after a nasty fracture. They just can’t get it to heal, so they’re going to sort him out in Theatre this morning and probably pack it and plate it. I’m not sure if they’ve decided exactly what they’re doing.’