Her Ideal Husband

“You’re perfect.”

Nash put his arm around her waist and did what he’d wanted to do since he’d first set eyes on her. He kissed her. Hard and sweet.

Behind him, Clover was standing in the doorway, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Oh, hell! What had she seen? Say something…anything….

“Is Nash going to be my new daddy?”

Stacey managed a laugh. “New daddy?” she repeated, unable to look at Nash.

“He was kissing you.”

“Oh, yes, well, Nash was trying to cheer me up,” she improvised.

Clover didn’t look convinced. “When Sarah Graham’s mummy was cheered up like that, Sarah had a new daddy and a new baby sister.”

Oh, great. Stacey finally looked at Nash, hoping for a little assistance.

“Would you like a baby sister?” he asked Clover.

Born and raised in Berkshire, U.K., Liz Fielding started writing at the age of twelve, when she won a hymn-writing competition at her convent school. After a gap of more years than she is prepared to admit to, during which she worked as a secretary in Africa and the Middle East, got married and had two children, she was finally able to realize her ambition and turn to full-time writing in 1992.

She now lives with her husband, John, in West Wales, surrounded by mystical countryside and romantic crumbling castles, content to leave the traveling to her grown-up children and keeping in touch with the rest of the world via the Internet.

Look out for

The Bachelor’s Baby

#3666

Her Ideal Husband

Liz Fielding

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

NASH GALLAGHER knew he was crazy. He hadn’t intended to stay. He was just passing through, stopping for a last look at the garden before the bulldozers moved in. Keeping a promise to an old man.

It had been a mistake.

Somehow he’d expected it to be the way it was in his memory. Everything ordered, everything perfect, the one place he had always been sure of in a confusing world.

Stupid.

Gardens weren’t static things.

The walled kitchen garden might have survived the break-up of the estate, but the small garden centre his grandfather had run from it had been closed for nearly two years. Everything had run to seed, gone wild...

He dragged a hand over his face in a vain attempt to obliterate the image. He’d sworn he wouldn’t fall for his grandfather’s attempt at emotional blackmail, but maybe the old man knew him better than he knew himself.

It was the peach trees that did it.

Remembering how, when he was a boy, he’d been lifted up to pick the first ripe fruit, the taste of it, the juice running down his chin...

The memory was so strong that Nash rubbed his chin against his shoulder, as if to wipe the juice away, then he angrily pulled away a handful of the weeds that crowded against an ancient trunk, choking it.

Stupid. In a few weeks it would all be gone.

But the old trees were covered with small fruit, swelling in the sudden burst of hot weather, refusing to give up despite the lack of pruning, despite the thick choking weeds at their roots. Like his grandfather, they refused to give up in the face of the inevitable. He couldn’t leave them like that.

He wanted the men with the bulldozers to know they were smashing something that had once been cared for. It wouldn’t take long. He could spare a day or two for the peach trees.

Except it wasn’t just the peach trees.

There were the greenhouses with their old coke stoves and hot pipes. A wonderful place to play when it was too cold outside. A magic place full of warm, earthy scents.

It still was, despite the damage. A thin cat had given birth to a litter of kittens behind the stove. He’d spotted her once or twice, flashing through the long grass with some small creature clamped in her jaws and, as he stood there, the bravest of the kittens ventured out amongst the broken glass that littered the floor.

He moved it out of harm’s way and then reached for an old broom. He was sweeping up the broken glass, wondering at how swift nature was to reclaim its own, when a ball blasted him out of the past as it smashed through the roof and he swore volubly as the fine shards showered him and sent the kitten flying back to safety of the nest.

For a moment he stared at the ball, big, bright red, intrusive, and an unexpected fury boiled up in him. People were so damned careless. Didn’t they know, didn’t they understand how long this had been here? Care about the generations of men who’d spent their lives working, harvesting, loving the place as he did?

He shook the glass out of his hair, carefully peeled off his T-shirt, then bent to pick up the ball, intent on telling the idiot who’d kicked it without a thought for the consequences, exactly what he thought of him.

‘Mummy, Clover’s kicked the ball over the wall again!’

At the most trying stage of refitting the handle to a freshly painted door, Stacey couldn’t do much about her youngest daughter’s plaintive cry, other than put her on hold.

‘Tell her she’ll have to wait,’ she called back as she tried to juggle the handle and the screwdriver at the same time as fitting a screw with a life of its own into the hole. There were times, she felt, when two hands were simply not enough. But then, she had never been much use at this sort of thing.

Give her something solid to work with, a spade or a hoe, and she was perfectly at home. She could double-dig a vegetable plot, build a compost heap without raising a sweat. But put a screwdriver in her hand and she was all fingers and thumbs.

Not just a screwdriver. She wasn’t much use with a paintbrush. There was more paint on her clothes and her skin than there was on the door.

‘Mummy!’

‘What?’ The screw took advantage of this momentary distraction to make an escape bid. It hit the quarry-tiled floor, bounced once and disappeared beneath the dresser. Stacey only had four screws, the ones she’d taken out of the door plate when she’d removed it. Now she’d have to strip the dresser of china before she could move it and retrieve the wretched thing. Great. She dug screw number two out of her pocket, then remembered that her daughter wanted her for something. ‘What is it, Rosie?’

‘Nothing.’ Then, ‘Clover says not to worry, she’ll climb over and get it herself.’

‘Right,’ she muttered, through teeth clamped around the handle of the screwdriver. If she could just get one wretched screw in place everything would be easier. She jammed it hard into the hole so that it stayed put while she retrieved the screwdriver and then realised what Rosie had said. ‘No!’

As she spun round to make sure she was obeyed, the metal plate pivoted on the screw and gouged an arc out of the freshly painted surface.

For a moment Stacey stared at the scarred paintwork, too shocked even to let slip the kind of word that mothers weren’t supposed to know, let alone say.

Actually, she felt like screaming, but what would be the point? If she succumbed to the temptation to give in to her feelings and scream every time something went wrong, she would be permanently hoarse. Instead she dropped the screwdriver back into the toolbox, took a deep breath and, doing her best to keep calm, walked out into the garden.

It was not the end of the world, she told herself. She would get there one day. She would finish the kitchen. She would tile the bathroom. She would fix the guttering and decorate the dining room. She would do it because she had to. The house was unsellable the way it was. She’d tried it.

People might turn their noses up at twenty-year-old wallpaper, but there was the challenge to make a house over in their own image. Half-finished jobs just turned people off.

If only Mike had ever finished one thing before he’d started something else. But that had been Mike. There was always tomorrow. Except that he’d run out of tomorrows...

‘Mummy! Clover’s doing it!’ Rosie’s yell wrenched her from the beckoning arms of self-pity and she set off down the garden at a run.

Clover, nine years old and growing like a weed, had shimmied up the apple tree and was now dangling by her long skinny arms from the high brick wall that bordered the rear of the garden.

‘Clover O’Neill, get down from there this minute!’

Clover glared at her younger sister, muttering something unappreciative at her, but she did as she was told, dropping from the wall and flattening a couple of foxgloves in the process.

‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to straighten them.

Stacey just sighed, picked the flower stems and firmed the ground around the plants. The advantage of growing what most of her neighbours sniffily considered to be weeds was that they could take pretty much everything that two lively children could throw at them. ‘What on earth do you think you were doing up there?’

‘You said not to disturb you while you were fixing the door, so I was going to get the ball myself.’ She said this as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world. Clover could have won Olympic gold for ‘reason’.

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, sweetheart, but I’d have been a lot more disturbed by a broken leg,’ she reasoned right back, firmly suppressing a shudder. The wall was a couple of hundred years old at least and in some places it was held together by little more than the mossy stonecrop that clung to it. ‘You are never—I repeat, never—to climb on that wall. It’s dangerous.’ Her daughter rolled her eyes, dramatically. ‘I mean it!’

‘But how are we going to get our ball back?’ Rosie asked.

Clover glared at her little sister. ‘If you’d kept your mouth shut, we’d have it back now.’

‘That’s enough. Both of you. You’ll get your ball.’ They’d get it the same way they always did. She would climb over when they weren’t around to see the bad example she was setting them. ‘I’m sure someone will see it and throw it back. They did last time.’

‘But that could take for ever,’ Rosie protested. ‘No one goes in there any more, not since it closed.’

It was true that the garden centre that backed onto their garden was rapidly turning into a wilderness since ill-health had forced Archie Baldwin, the old guy that ran it, to retire a couple of years earlier.

She must find time to go and visit him again soon, she thought guiltily. He’d taught her so much. The least she could do was take him a tin of shortbread, tell him all the latest gossip from the village. And maybe ask him about the depressing rumour going round the neighbourhood that he’d sold the land to a developer.

It would be a lot easier to sell her house if the views could be described as rural.

Attractive detached Victorian cottage-style property in village setting with scope for improvement. Interesting wild flower garden.

It sounded appealing. Until you saw it and understood exactly what ‘scope for improvement’ meant. How much money it would take. And, as her sister was fond of pointing out, most people tried to eradicate buttercups and daisies from their borders.

But the garden really wasn’t the problem. It was the house. The estate agent she’d asked to value the place hadn’t pulled any punches. The house needed some serious attention if it was going to make anywhere near the price it should and a housing estate blocking the view was not going to help. Or light industrial units. Maybe she should stop worrying about her precious wild flowers and plant a fast-growing hedge right now...

‘Mum!’

She let go of future worries and returned to the immediate one. ‘I’m sorry, Clover, but you shouldn’t have kicked your ball over there in the first place.’

‘You can’t play football without kicking,’ Clover pointed out, but kindly, as if to someone who wasn’t expected to understand. ‘Come on, Rosie. Mummy’ll get it for us; she always does. She just doesn’t want us to see her climbing over the—’ she made a sign like quotation marks ‘—great big dangerous wall.’

‘Clover O’Neill, that’s—’

‘It’s no use pretending, Mummy. I saw you last time.’

Stacey was not above circumventing the truth in a good cause, but there was no point in perjuring herself to no purpose, so she didn’t deny it, contenting herself with a firm, ‘You were supposed to have been in bed.’

‘I saw you from the bathroom window,’ Clover said, cheekily, and grinned. ‘You will get it, won’t you? Now?’

Since she’d been caught out, there seemed little point in waiting until the girls were in bed. ‘All right. But I mean it. You are not to do this yourself, ever. Promise?’

‘I promise.’ And Clover solemnly drew a cross over her heart. Just the way Mike used to when he promised he’d fix something tomorrow. Just the way he used to promise he’d take care when he went out on his motorbike...

Stacey swallowed. ‘Okay.’ She dropped the flowers, then approached the wall, jumped and grabbed the top, pulling herself smoothly up to sit astride the crumbling brickwork.

The derelict garden centre had once been the walled kitchen garden of a grand house that had long since been turned into the headquarters of some multi-national corporation.

From the top, she could see the south wall and the ancient espaliered peach trees. There were a couple of big old greenhouses that had lost a fair amount of glass in a bad storm. Until then, she’d used them to raise her own seedlings. Well, Archie had told her to help herself.

Now it all looked so sad, grown wild with frightening speed and run to a riot of weeds that were beginning to flower in the gravel paths and between great clumps of perennials that had burst out of plastic pots and made themselves at home.

She glanced back down at the girls. ‘Stay there and don’t move,’ she said, then jumped down into a mini-meadow of buttercups and dog daisies and began to look about her for the girls’ ball.

It was big and red and should have been easy enough to find. The trouble was, she kept getting distracted. First by a clump of poppies with scarlet silken petals. Great. She’d come back for some seeds later in the summer. If she was still there later in the summer. Maybe she would have sold the house by then. Or maybe not.

It was a depressing thought either way.

She stopped to look at a huge blousy peony. Not her kind of flower but it broke her heart to think of it being torn up by a bulldozer. Even if she lifted it, though, it probably wouldn’t survive. Peonies hated to be moved. They had her sympathy. She didn’t want to move, either. She was comfortable where she was and she’d put down long roots, but, like the peonies, she didn’t have a choice.

At least in her case the move wouldn’t be fatal. Just very painful. And the end of any chance of getting her own wild plant nursery up and running.

She pushed her way along the overgrown paths, looking for the ball and wondering just how far it could have gone, when she caught a glimpse of red beyond a row of overgrown bushes. She pushed through and saw the strawberries. Big and red and luscious.

Nash emerged from the greenhouse and looked around. Nothing. No one. Then at the far side of the garden he saw someone peering over. It was a child. A little girl. Then she disappeared and his anger evaporated with her.

She meant no harm. It was an accident. The place was a wreck and she could hardly make it worse. He began to pick his way around the raised beds, the thicket of waist-high weeds, planning on tossing the ball back over the wall.

He was about halfway there when another, much older girl appeared, her baggy shorts giving him ample opportunity to admire her long legs as she flung them over the wall. Not a little girl, this one, not if the skimpy top she was filling out so nicely was anything to go by. And he found himself grinning as she jumped down to wade through the knee-high flowers, the sun backlighting the strands of chestnut hair that had escaped the little bobble thing she’d used to hold it back from her face.

She was too busy checking the ground to notice him and he remained quite still, watching her as she waded through the long grass looking about her for the ball. Every now and then she would stop to look at a flower. Not picking it, but just looking, gently touching the petals of the big daisies, the vivid poppies as if saying hello.

Definitely not a vandal.

Then, as she stopped by one of the peonies, the sun lit up her face and he saw a look of genuine pleasure lift the corner of her mouth, before her smile faded to sadness. She wasn’t a girl at all, he realised, but a full-grown woman.

He took half a step, opened his mouth to call out to her, but she turned suddenly. And he knew she’d spotted the strawberries.

It would be a criminal waste to leave them to the slugs, Stacey thought. The wretched creatures already feasted like kings in her garden, despite all her environmentally friendly attempts at controlling them. It was only fair to share, she reasoned, as she got down on her hands and knees and picked half a dozen of the biggest strawberries she could find as a treat for Clover and Rosie.

Then she picked one for herself and ate it warm from the sun, the way strawberries should be eaten. The juice dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers and then licked them. Heaven. She couldn’t think how the slugs, or the birds, had missed them, but she was glad they had and took one more.

In fact, if the garden was going to be bulldozed for housing, she might as well come back when Clover and Rosie were at school and get some runners; then they could have their own strawberries next year. She checked to see how soon the little plantlets would be ready. Then she stopped.

What was the point? They wouldn’t be there next year.

Okay, so she’d been saying that for the last two years, but time was running out. She might not be saddled with a mortgage, but there was no chance that she could sell enough wild plants to keep up with the outgoings. And if she was reduced to producing boxes of petunias and bizzie lizzies, she might as well get a job in an office. And with that miserable thought, she began to back out of the strawberry bed.

Her feet encountered an obstruction and she stopped, frowning. She hadn’t noticed anything on the path as she’d crawled in amongst the strawberries and, puzzled, she turned to look behind her.

The obstruction was wearing a pair of well-worn boots with thick socks rolled down over them. Above the boots were two long, well-muscled legs with scarred brown knees, hairy thighs and a pair of denim cut-offs, worn duster-soft with use, clinging to the kind of hips that should be carrying a health warning.

‘Can I help?’ The voice that went with the legs was duster-soft, too.

Stacey felt her face turn the colour of the poppies. To be caught trespassing was bad enough. To have a handful of filched strawberries as evidence of her fall from grace rang a loud nine on the Richter scale of embarrassment; yet to abandon them would only compound her crime. She was still trying to think of something to say when Clover rescued her.

‘Mummee! Have you found it yet?’ Her oldest daughter, paying technical lip-service to her promise not to climb the old wall, was instead perched on a branch of an equally ancient apple tree and peering anxiously over the wall.

‘Get down!’ She should have been angry, but her daughter’s appearance at least lent her the cloak of respectability. She was a mother. A widowed mother, moreover. What could be more respectable than that?

She scrambled to her feet and, turning to face her embarrassment head on, found herself looking up at the kind of man who should not only have a health warning tattooed to his backside, but to his chest, his arms and his thoroughly workmanlike shoulders. To say nothing of a lean, tanned face, periwinkle-blue eyes and the kind of floppy sun-bleached hair that had always gone straight to her knees. Which was why she’d been married on her eighteenth birthday and a mother by her nineteenth, sieving vegetables for baby Clover instead of learning the business aspects of growing them at the local agricultural college.

That this delectable hunk of manhood didn’t have a health warning tattooed to his limbs or any other part of him, she could see for herself since, except for a suntan, the cut-offs were all that he was wearing. Apart from the boots and socks. And she had no doubt that his feet and ankles matched the rest of him and were of the killer variety. Like his smile.

‘Is this what you were looking for?’

‘Looking for? Oh, looking for…’ Stacey made a determined effort to drag her chin out of the strawberry bed and get her knees under control. ‘Er, yes.’

‘I was in one of the greenhouses over there when it came through the roof.’ He tossed the football, spun it on one finger, then caught it, balancing it on the palm of his hand. ‘That’s quite a kick.’ His glance measured the distance from the broken panes of the greenhouse roof to the top of the wall. ‘For a girl.’ And he grinned up at Clover, who was still clinging to her tree top perch. ‘Is your dad a professional coach?’

‘No, my daddy’s in heaven.’

Well, as conversation-stoppers went, that took some beating. ‘Clover, if you don’t get down right now,’ Stacey warned, turning away from the disturbing sight of the man’s muscle-packed shoulders, ‘I’ll leave your ball over here.’ Mike had had shoulders like that. All brawn and no brain, her sister had said. Dee had always been the smart one.

While she never learned.

Clover disappeared.

‘I bet she’s a handful.’

‘Oh, no, not really. Just football-mad.’ Other women had dainty little girls who yearned for satin pointe shoes and a starring role at the Royal Ballet. She was usually torn between pride and mortification that her first-born had ball skills that put the boys at her primary school to shame and whose most ardent yearning concerned a pair of football boots way beyond the means of the widow’s mite. His teasing ‘For a girl…’ brought her firmly down on the pride side, for once. ‘She’s captain of the school team.’ Then, ‘Was there much damage?’

‘Damage?’ He needed prompting, too, it seemed.

‘To the greenhouse.’

‘I don’t think one pane more or less will be noticed, do you?’ The grin softened into a smile.

‘N-no, I suppose not…’ she stuttered. A smile like that should be licenced. Then, ‘Oh, Lord, you weren’t…I mean…’ No, of course he wasn’t hurt. She could see for herself that his golden skin was unblemished. Well, apart from the faint white line of an old scar across his collarbone.

Then she saw the sun glint off a shard of glass clinging to his hair and without thinking she reached up and picked it off.

CHAPTER TWO

STACEY stared at the sharp sliver of glass she was holding between her fingers and felt herself go hot all over.

She couldn’t believe she had done that. What on earth was she going to do now?

Despite the fact that she was totally unable to meet his eyes, the hunk seemed to understand her predicament because he dropped the ball and, grasping her wrist to steady a hand that was unaccountably shaking, carefully extracted the sliver of glass from between her fingers. Then he dropped it on the path and ground it to powder beneath his heel.

‘Thanks.’ Her voice was shaking as much as her wrist had done.

‘I think I’m the one who should be thanking you.’ He was still holding her wrist, his long fingers circling it, heating it, melting the bones. For a long moment he kept her his prisoner before suddenly dropping it as if he too were burning, raking his fingers through his hair as if needing to keep them occupied. Then he looked at his hand. ‘See, I’m always doing that. I could have got a nasty cut.’