Midwife in the Family Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’d played cricket in. ‘I’d like to get changed, though.’
    He nodded again. ‘How much time do you need?’
    She thought about it. How much did she really need? Five minutes. ‘Half an hour,’ she said.
    â€˜Good.’ Satisfaction was obvious. ‘Much faster than I expected.’
    She tried vainly not to smile and she hoped he didn’t see or think she was making fun of him. ‘It’s this house, with the roses over the gate.’
    She lifted her hand to the handle and his fingers came over the top to stay it. ‘Please wait for me to open it,’ he said quietly, and her hand froze under his. She sighed and leaned back against the leather.
    She’d been right. His skin was warm and made the gooseflesh pop up on her arms like bubbles in the muddy sand at the edge of the lake. His hand moved away andshe would have sworn his fingers were still there. Hot over hers.
    If he could do that with just a touch, she was in big trouble if she invited anything else. But she wouldn’t. It was just a meal, she was feeling flat after the funeral and Grace was away, and she didn’t get to eat at the Lakeside very often. Never had, actually.
    He opened her car door and she climbed out. It seemed a waste of energy to her but the cosseting was strangely compelling. He ushered her through the gate and up the path to her front door like an old-fashioned footman. Then waited while she unlocked the door and only left her when she entered her house, but he didn’t drive away until she’d shut the door.
    She heard the roar of the car as it accelerated away and Emma’s heart flopped around as she leant back against the closed door. Her hand actually slid to her throat where her pulse pounded. What had happened to her in the last five minutes? It had just been a lift a few hundred metres but she felt vibrantly alive. Ridiculously so.
    There were a hundred good reasons not to be attracted to this man, or any man for that matter, and fifteen good reasons to wallow in it.
    The hundred were all complications and she didn’t need them.
    The fifteen were about the number of good years she estimated she had before the disease that had turned her graceful and gracious mother into a tormented bedridden shell of a woman could begin to do the same to her.
    Fifty per cent chance of having the gene. In the last few years Emma had toyed briefly with the idea of taking the final genetic test, a test that could prove her fate irrevocably, but she’d always come back to that tiny spark of hope she’d not inherited the predisposing gene. She didn’t think she’d cope if that hope was gone. She couldn’t give up that tiny beam of optimism that once lost would never return.
    Her arms crept around her waist and Gianni was forgotten, everything was forgotten, as her worst nightmare touched her again with cold fingers of dread.
    The fear was for Grace, her daughter, and the fact that if Emma was shadowed then Grace had a fifty per cent chance of having it, too. Emma couldn’t do it. At this time in her life she couldn’t live with Grace being positive for Huntington’s disease.
    Instead, Emma lived her life as if she had only until she turned forty, like her mother had before she’d become ill, and she saved every penny to ensure Grace would have the choices for the support Emma might not be able to give.
    But for this moment Emma was alive, she was well, and apparently she was an attractive woman. Not something she’d thought about for a very long time. She didn’t know when she’d decided that she wanted to savour a little of what Gianni had to offer. If he was offering anything apart from a meal, that was.
    She’d never looked for another boyfriend after sheand Tommy had drifted apart. She’d been too busy. Too focussed.
    As two sixteen-year-olds she and Tommy had discovered they’d little in common except Grace, and Emma had