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In consternation, Sev watched her push away her glass and stand up. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Home,’ she told him apologetically. ‘I mean... I’ve said all I need to say and so have you. Everything’s up in the air right now, so we don’t need to discuss anything else.’
‘Up in the air?’ he queried with a frown.
‘Well, look at what almost happened to your sister,’ Amy reminded him reluctantly. ‘Sometimes, things can go wrong.’
‘Nothing’s going to go wrong,’ Sev broke in confidently and he closed a hand over hers to hold her back as she began to turn away. ‘And I’m here, always available to help you at any time. You have my number. Anything you need in the future, you can depend on me.’
Tears of surprise and relief burned at the backs of her strained eyes. ‘I tend to try not to depend on other people, Sev,’ she warned him.
‘I’m not other people. I’m the father of your baby,’ Sev contradicted. ‘You can’t go through this alone.’
Amy replayed that conversation in her head and the feel of that warm hand on hers all the way home on the train. There was a note on her door from Harold, asking her to come in fifteen minutes before the start of the morning surgery. Wondering if her boss was planning to come clean and tell her why he had shut the surgery down for a couple of days, she set her alarm and went to bed early, still thinking about Sev. He had been really decent, she conceded grudgingly. He hadn’t got angry or stressed, nor had he tried to impose his views on her. He had been calm and accepting. In truth she could not have hoped for a more positive response.
As she walked into Harold’s tiny office the following morning, she noticed that the older man looked grey and weary, the lines on his face more heavily etched than they had been several weeks earlier.
‘Come in and sit down, Amy. I’m sure you’ve been wondering what’s happening here this week and I’m about to explain. My son will be taking over the practice from next Monday,’ he advised her.
Amy blinked rapidly. ‘Your son,’ she echoed uncertainly.
‘And I’m afraid that for that to happen an awful lot of things will be changing,’ Harold told her heavily. ‘I’ve got cancer. The prognosis for recovery is good but I’m facing a long course of treatment and I can’t put off my retirement any longer.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Amy murmured in shock, trying not to selfishly wonder what the coming changeover would mean to her on a personal basis. ‘I understand your position.’
‘Firstly, I’m afraid the charity will have to be closed down. This place will no longer be a functioning animal shelter. George isn’t interested in taking that on and he intends to expand into that space and use it for other things.’ Scanning her shattered face, the older man sighed. ‘The shelter was always Cordy’s project and I only continued it after her death because I felt that that was my duty. However, that’s no longer possible and our current residents will have to be farmed out to other rescue organisations.’
Amy was so devastated by that announcement that she could barely catch her breath and she simply nodded. Harold knew as well as she did that his decision meant that some of their animals might end up being euthanised. Her throat closed over at the image of Hopper, alone in a cage, awaiting termination. She felt sick.
‘And now we come to the more personal aspects of these major changes,’ her boss continued reluctantly. ‘George has big plans to remodel here and you will no longer be able to use the storage room as accommodation. He’s willing to give you a month’s notice to find somewhere else but, to be frank, I had to argue for that because George doesn’t think I should ever have agreed to let you live on the premises in the first place.’
Amy nodded jerkily, her mouth too dry to form words. ‘And my apprenticeship?’
Harold Bunting frowned, fulfilling her worst fears. ‘George already has a full staff and, as he works in a highly specialised field of surgery, you wouldn’t qualify for his team,’ he admitted apologetically. ‘I have emailed all my contacts to see if I can find another placement for you, because you do only have another few months to do to complete your course. All I can say in finishing, Amy, is that I’m very sorry that these changes will disrupt your life as well. Right now, you have time off. The surgery won’t be reopening until George takes over here.’
Amy tottered up out of her seat, knowing that there was nothing she could say or do to change anything. She expressed her best wishes for the older man’s recovery and promised to start looking for other accommodation immediately. She waited until the nausea receded and then put Hopper on a leash and went out for a walk, praying that the cool air would clear her pounding head.
What on earth was she going to do next? Pregnant, homeless and now out of work as well? The sheer immensity of the blows that had come her way without warning consumed her and, beyond that, fear of what would happen to the shelter animals hung over her like a dark threatening cloud. But she didn’t blame Harold for what was happening, not in the slightest. The rescue shelter had always been Cordy’s particular love, rather than her partner’s, and poor Harold had quite enough to be dealing with right now with his illness. She had kept her composure forhissake, knowing he didn’t need to be faced with a tearful, self-pitying meltdown.
She was in over her head, she acknowledged shakily as she sat in a small park, Hopper stationed at her knee. Twenty-three dogs and six cats and two rabbits needed a home. She needed a home, a job, an income to live on. Her head felt as if it would burst with the number of anxieties that were eating her alive. And she pulled out her phone and breathed in deep and slow. When it came to the needs of the animals she had been looking after and loving for so long, pride didn’t deserve a look-in.
She texted Sev, laid it all out for him—the charity to be closed, the animals to be moved out, her loss of employment and home.
I need your help.
She gritted her teeth as she added the words, because approaching him warred with every proud, independent skin cell she had, and she had to stiffen her backbone to hit ‘send’.
CHAPTER NINE
SEVREADTHEtext in the middle of a board meeting and his shrewd brain homed straight to the essentials: twenty-three dogs, six cats, two bunnies and Amy to house. Fate was giving him a second chance, he grasped, a chance to redeem himself.
Why? Amyhatedhim and he could not afford to ignore that and hope she got over it if he wanted a future relationship with his child. In the bar, she had shrunk away from him when he’d grabbed her hand to stop her leaving. She had avoided eye contact, indeed had evaded any hint of the personal in their conversation. Her lack of understanding and forgiveness, her failure to warm up on meeting him had come as a shock to Sev, who had assumed that the essential caring softness of her nature meant that she would be more pliable, more easily brought round to his way of thinking. Only she hadn’t even given him the chance to change her outlook and then she had stopped him dead and silenced him with her announcement.
He was excited about the baby and that had shaken him even more. He didn’t even care how it had happened. He knew it was the deserved result of a man who had forgotten birth controlonceby accident and then had deliberatelyrepeatedthe oversight for the remainder of the night because he had enjoyed it so much. In other words, whatever flaw her contraception had developed was as nothing when set next to his own sheer recklessness. Beyond that, Sev was struggling to deal with the problem of what might well prove to be one of the most important relationships in his life, with Amy, when he had already wrecked it.
The mother of his child didn’t trust him, and he had only himself to blame for that state of affairs. Even worse, he had hurt her and now she was on her guard. Sev didn’t want to be treated like the enemy, he wanted tosharethe experience, but Amy was already putting up barriers. He knew how much pain his own father had suffered at being excluded from his son’s life and the guilt he still felt at his failure to gain access to Sev as a little boy. Regrettably his father had not been wealthy enough to field a legal team capable of taking on the top-flight Aiken lawyers. Lack of money, however, was the least of Sev’s problems.
For a very rich man, Sev did not own many homes. In fact, there were only three: two in the UK and one in Italy, and two of those three inherited from relatives. He used hotels when he travelled. But he had one country property in the UK, he reminded himself, the much-fought-over Oaktree Hall in Surrey, the birthplace of his maternal grandfather, gifted to him at twenty-one along with his substantial trust fund. His mother had been enraged because she had long wanted that property for herself, for its snobby ancestral connections and proximity to London, not to mention the homes of several minor royals. He had rented the property out for years, but it was currently empty, a great barn of a place with a vast cluster of outbuildings from its days as a working country estate. There would surely be room there for twenty-three dogs, six cats, two bunnies and one petite pregnant woman?
