Bride By Accident by Marion Lennox

Author:Marion Lennox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIFE was crazy. Life was a muddle of kids and paint and parents and too much food and a house full of chaos. Life was Emma skipping from project to project. Cajoling kids, helping, getting in the way, giggling, putting Dev’s Beatles collection on his stereo and blasting music across the cove. Life was kids covered in paint or kids under vast mounds of gathered weed. Kids racing down to the cove for a swim between tasks, parents rostered to supervise as lifesavers, people wherever he looked.

Life was his mother wandering through the chaos with a look of such bemusement he knew that for the first time since Corey’s death she’d been lifted from the tragedy and into life.

Life was his mother’s eyes resting with silent pleasure on Emma’s swollen figure. Her first grandchild. Child of Corey.

Life was…Emma?

Emma was wherever he looked. Emma was wherever he thought. Emma.

What he was thinking was crazy. It had no basis in cold, hard sense. He had to ignore it.

Luckily there was so much medicine to concentrate on that he could hardly be where Emma was.

Luckily?

No. He wanted to be there. Of course he did.

But he had a life to lead. He had to get on with the life he’d chosen. The fact that a rotund little barrel of blazing energy had mobilised the town, sequestered the house, taken over his life…

She couldn’t be allowed to make any difference at all.

Every night he dropped in briefly between house calls to get a briefing—a slick report on everything that had been achieved that day and a request for approval of what was planned for the next. It took ten minutes. He’d get home, Emma would be waiting for him, he’d take in the report and he’d leave again. Then he’d do house calls or go back to the hospital and catch up on paperwork or he’d visit Margaret.

He didn’t return to the house until he was sure that Emma would be in bed, and he was gone at dawn.

They both knew why he didn’t spend time in the house. Or he thought that maybe they both knew. He certainly knew himself.

She might well guess. Maybe she guessed.

Maybe he was being ridiculous.

But his house was being transformed.

‘We’re doing great,’ Emma told him a week after she’d arrived, and he could only agree. It wasn’t just the children who were working. The community had taken on this project as if it was a way of preventing collective disintegration. The school bus had come so close to sliding into the sea and if it had, every one of these kids would be dead. The townsfolk only had to look at Kyle’s parents to see how close they’d all come to their own devastation.

‘They should be doing something for Kyle’s parents,’ he told Emma, but she shook her head.

‘It’s too direct. Kyle’s parents need this project as much as anyone. You know they all love you.’

‘The hell they do.’

‘That scares you,’ she said thoughtfully, and he felt his gut tighten in irritation.

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