Must Be Love by Cathy Woodman

Author:Cathy Woodman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Traditional British, General
ISBN: 9780750534468
Publisher: Arrow
Published: 2010-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The Duck Race

As soon as Alex’s four by four pulls upon the pavement outside Otter House, I grab my bag, run outside and jump in beside him.

‘Have I kept you waiting?’ he asks.

‘I’ve only just finished. My last one wouldn’t stop talking.’ Normally I don’t mind, but it’s Saturday and I wanted to get away. ‘Where were you last night?’ I lean towards Alex and press my lips against his.

‘Sleeping.’ He slips his hand under my jacket and strokes my belly. ‘Like a baby.’

‘You could have rung me. I called you.’

‘I didn’t get round to it. I’m sorry, Maz. You know what it’s like.’

I’m beginning to fear that I don’t. All he had to do was pick up the phone.

‘Are you going off me?’ I glance towards his check shirt and bottle-green cords, and back to my canary-yellow jacket and navy crops, wondering if he thinks my outfit’s a bit over the top for a trip to one of Talyton’s bizarre annual gatherings. I don’t dig deep and ask the difficult questions. Is it down to how I behaved over the funeral, because he didn’t approve of the way I chickened out of it and let Emma down? Is it because I’m not as excited and happy about our baby as he is? ‘Is it because I’m getting fat?’ I go on, instead. ‘Is it because I’m not wearing wellingtons and tweed?’

‘Maz, I like you just as you are.’ Smiling, Alex touches my nose, a gesture that reassures me that he doesn’t think that badly of me after all. ‘Which poor animal’s been under your knife this time? You’ve got blood on your face.’

‘It was a Dobermann that had cut its pad on some glass. I thought it was never going to stop bleeding.’ I grab a tissue and rub it off. ‘Where are the children?’ I say, noticing they aren’t in the back.

‘Mother’s bringing them with her. Seb was having a snack and Lucie wanted a few minutes with her pony. I’m sure she misses him more than she misses me.’ Alex looks at his watch. ‘We’d better hurry. They need a vet down there to check on the welfare of the ducks before they can run the race.’

‘Really? I hadn’t thought of that.’ It occurs to me that I’ve never been presented with a duck before. ‘How do you tell if a duck is unhappy, or if it doesn’t want to race?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Alex says. ‘They’re my department, not yours.’

I might not know much about duck welfare, but Alex and I stop on the way to check on the welfare of a hedgehog that is lying in the middle of the road. It’s dead and so badly squashed I don’t think it suffered. At least it isn’t Spike – Frances is feeding him up in a run in her garden.

‘My grandmother used to take the dead ones home,’ Alex says, driving on. ‘She was very much of the waste-not, want-not generation.’

‘What did she do with them?’ A vision of vol-au-vents stuffed with roadkill enters my head.

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