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‘Fire your lawyer.’
Urszula turned a glazed look to Elizabeth. ‘You’re fired.’
Tyler curled Urszula’s arm around his and swept his bride-to-be into the register office. Joshua belatedly followed, looking perfectly relaxed about all that had transpired.
‘No, Urszula, no!’ her brother yelled, running after her.
‘Go and marry Elizabeth,’ Urszula hurled back at him. ‘I’ve got what I want.’
Elizabeth screamed a tirade of abuse after Tyler’s retreating back. What she would do to him in court would be nothing compared to what she would do if she ever had him at her mercy.
‘Time for us to leave,’ Nathan said to Sasha. ‘Now we can start planning a proper wedding and a proper honeymoon and a proper everything.’
‘Don’t they need a second witness in there?’ Sasha didn’t want any hitches in phase two of the plan.
‘Let the brother come to his senses. I’m sure he will. Otherwise they’ll have to use a clerk.’
The door of Elizabeth’s Mercedes slammed shut. The car surged forward, away from the kerb, and Nathan stood looking after it for quite some moments.
‘What are you thinking, darling?’ Sasha asked, drawing his attention back to her.
‘Elizabeth is a most erratic driver,’ he said cheerfully, taking her hand. ‘Let’s go home. For ourselves. And for the children.’
* * *
WHEN NATHAN explained what their marriage meant to his son, Matt’s eyes glowed with satisfaction in his own inner belief. ‘I knew she was my mother. She’s not my pretend mother any more. She’s real.’
Nathan clearly had no inclination to correct him, yet fact was fact, and he could hardly ignore Elizabeth’s natural claim on their son. Matt did have to understand in case Elizabeth still persisted in wanting custody.
‘Matt, the other lady who came last week...’
‘You were wrong about her, Daddy,’ the little boy said with unshakeable conviction.
‘Why am I wrong, Matt?’
‘Cause it wasn’t in her eyes.’
From the mouths of babes came the simplest of truths, Sasha thought. Elizabeth was his biological mother, but that had no meaning whatsoever to Matt. Maybe he was right.
He turned to Sasha, his eyes clear with the knowledge that was so clear to him. ‘I felt it inside when you looked at me. Like at the park when you said you were sorry you had to go. And at playschool when I told the other kids.’
Her empathy for his loneliness.
‘I felt it too, Matt,’ she said softly. She crouched down to draw him closer to her, their eyes sharing the same knowledge. ‘What your daddy was trying to tell you...the other lady is your birth mother. But I’m your real mother in here.’ She pressed one hand to her heart and the other over Matt’s heart. ‘I always will be.’
They shared a secret smile of perfect understanding.
Then Matt turned his smile up to his father, ‘See, Daddy?’
‘Yes, I see, Matt.’ The look he turned to Sasha was all she wanted to see. The deep forever love that would see them through their lives.
* * *
SASHA TOLD Nathan the proper wedding and proper honeymoon could wait until some time in the New Year. What she wanted most of all was a family Christmas.
The next day a huge van arrived in the driveway. It took four men to carry a large fir tree in a huge pot into the lounge. Only a room with a fourteen-foot ceiling could have accommodated such a tree.
They spent hours decorating it. When the happy task was finally completed, and Nathan switched on the string of coloured lights he’d draped around the branches, Bonnie thought it so wonderful, she took her first tottering steps.
