Three Weddings and a Baby (18 page)

Mollie shook her head and dived under the covers.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, walking back over to the bed and flipping the duvet aside. ‘Come and look.’

Mollie just squealed and shoved the pillow over her head.

‘There are no monsters,’ Alex said, aware that if he’d had a playful edge to his voice to start off with, he’d definitely lost it now. ‘Monsters aren’t real.’

A muffled voice came from under the pillow. He looked at Jennie, hoping she’d translate. She gave him an exasperated look and said, ‘They’re invisible monsters, apparently. And just because they’ve disappeared now, doesn’t mean they won’t come back again.’

He handed her the torch. ‘If you’re such an expert, perhaps you’d like to deal with them?’

Jennie stood up and put her hands on her hips. ‘Since it seems our dashing hero has turned into a grumpy old troll,’ she said, talking to Mollie but looking pointedly at him, ‘I’ve got something in my room that will help us deal with those monsters.’

She left Alex standing there and left the room, only to return a few moments later, holding something in her hand. She sat down on the bed and prised the pillow from Mollie’s grip. ‘Look.’ Jennie dangled a pink plastic jewel on a pink ribbon in front of Mollie, who sat up and grabbed it instantly. ‘Now,’ said Jennie, sliding Mollie onto her lap, ‘you have to promise me you’ll look after this because it’s very special.’

Mollie’s eyes grew large and round and she nodded at least six times.

‘This is a magic pendant that is very good at scaring away monsters. Can you hand me Teddy?’ Mollie stuck an arm under the duvet and produced her favourite bear. ‘It’s not good for little girls to wear necklaces while they’re sleeping, so I’m going to let Teddy look after this.’ She fastened the pendant around Teddy’s neck and gave him to Mollie, who squeezed
him tight. ‘But as long as you’re cuddling Teddy it won’t matter even if the monsters do come back, because that jewel means they can’t hurt you.’ She looked upwards and smiled, as if she’d just remembered something. ‘In fact, when Teddy’s got the necklace on, if you even
look
at a monster it’s going to shrivel up and turn to dust. So, if you think they’ve come back, shine your torch on them and say the magic words…’

She turned to look at Alex and raised her eyes. What? He was supposed to know what the magic words were? If he knew any magic words, he’d have used them on himself to stop himself turning invisible, because that was what seemed to be happening to him.

Look at Jennie, making monster-catching fun. It should be him doing that. He should be the one protecting his daughter. All he’d had to do was join in, shine a torch around a cupboard and say a few nonsense words, and he hadn’t even been able to manage that. He finally had the family he’d always dreamed of, but, ironically, he didn’t seem to be part of it. He couldn’t even keep his daughter safe from
imaginary
monsters, for goodness’ sake!

‘Well, now we’ve sorted all of that out, I’ve got to finish getting ready,’ Jennie said brightly. She kissed Mollie on the forehead
and disappeared back to their bedroom. Mollie looked at him.

‘What?’ he said. Was there something else he was expected to do? Dance a little jig? Stand on his head?

‘Jennie’s busy,’ Mollie said and held a book up.

Alex took it from her and sat on the far end of the bed. ‘I’m not sure I can do the voices as well as Jennie, but I’ll give it a go.’

Mollie smiled sweetly at him and, instead of tucking herself in down the other end of the bed as he’d expected, she climbed into his lap, settled herself there and tapped the book with a finger.
‘Read.’

For a moment Alex didn’t move. It felt so alien, having a little warm body curled up against his. Mollie tapped the book impatiently once more and he opened it and started to read. It wasn’t long before his mind was elsewhere, only involving itself in the story enough to keep the words falling out of his mouth.

This was what he’d been waiting for.

All he’d wanted since he’d known Mollie might be his was to have her in his arms, to share the easy affection he’d seen other fathers share with their kids. It was almost as if he’d known that, when this moment came, the last piece of his disassembled life would
clunk back into place and the world would start spinning again.

He held his breath. He waited. But nothing happened.

He felt the warmth of her skin through her pyjamas, did his best to mould into her, but he felt stiff and cold. What was wrong with him?

Coreen winked at Jennie and Alice as the barman placed identical gaudy-looking cocktails in front of them.

‘What on earth is
that?
‘ Jennie said, lifting the umbrella out and looking warily at it.

Coreen sipped hers through the glittery straw, not pausing until she’d run out of oxygen. ‘It’s called a Runaway Train. House speciality. Just the thing when the man in your life is driving you crazy.’

Jennie took a tentative sip.
Wow!

And then she took another.

‘Is
there a man in your life?’ she said. ‘I thought you were between lovelorn swains.’

Coreen grimaced. ‘That, my darling, is the problem.’

Jennie just laughed. The idea of Coreen not being able to command male attention was just plain ridiculous. With her wild vintage look, her glossy red lips, her eye-popping
curves, well, you could sum her up in one word—naughty. And, last time she checked, the male of the species liked
naughty
.

‘There’s this guy…’ Coreen’s shoulders sagged forward and she took another sip of her cocktail. When she’d finished, she looked at Jennie. ‘How did you get Alex to propose so fast?’

Jennie had been getting ready to quip about man-eating Coreen finding a man who didn’t want to nibble her back, but Coreen’s question took her by surprise.
Whoa
. For her friend to be thinking proposals, this guy must be something else.

‘I didn’t
get
him to do it,’ she replied. ‘He came up with the idea all by himself.’

Coreen nodded encouragingly. ‘Okay…so how did you get him to come up with the idea all by himself?’

Jennie laughed again and cooled herself with a sip of Runaway Train. Coreen had spent so much of her life winding men around her little finger that she’d forgotten they often had a will of their own.

Alice’s eyes opened wide. ‘You’ve got it bad!’

Coreen sighed. ‘He thinks I’m a minor annoyance—if he thinks of me at all.’

‘Ouch,’ Jennie said.

Coreen picked the slice of pineapple off the rim of her glass and sucked it. ‘So how
did
Alex propose, anyway? You kept it all such a secret we never found out. Was it wildly romantic?’

‘Yes…and no. It wasn’t flowers and champagne and fireworks—’

Coreen bounced on her chair. ‘Ooh! I love fireworks. If I ever get a proposal, I want there to be fireworks!’

Jennie shrugged. ‘Sorry. None of that stuff. But it
was
romantic.’

‘Cameron’s proposal was
very
romantic,’ Alice sighed. ‘It was just before Christmas—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Coreen said with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘We’ve all heard the story a million times before! What I want is to hear about
Jennie’s
proposal.’

Alice narrowed her eyes at Coreen, even as an indulgent smile played on her lips. She got her revenge, though. Coreen leaned forward, her elbows on the bar and rested her chin on her knuckles. While she wasn’t looking, Alice swapped her mostly empty cocktail glass for Coreen’s almost-full one.

Jennie was about to laugh, but Coreen’s expectant stare stopped her.

How did she explain it to Coreen without it seeming ordinary and run-of-the-mill?
Because Alex’s proposal hadn’t felt that way at all. They’d both been working hard, hadn’t seen each other for almost a week, and she’d come to meet him at King’s Cross station as he’d returned from working on a case in Manchester. He hadn’t known she was coming so she’d had to resort to scanning the crowd and, as rush hour had got underway, the concourse had got busier and busier and she’d started to panic she’d missed him altogether.

She told Coreen and Alice all of this.

‘It’s silly, really,’ she added, blushing slightly. ‘I couldn’t see him anywhere…’ She paused and pulled the tissue-wrapped memory from its careful storing place. She smiled dreamily, and the bar, the cocktail, all drifted away.

‘And suddenly there he was—running towards me.’

Just thinking about it made her heart turn over. She’d sensed something moving fast in her peripheral vision and had turned around, and he’d been running towards her, not even looking at the commuters milling around waiting for their train to show up on the departures board. He’d just dodged them on instinct, never taking his eyes from her.

‘It was the way he was looking at me,’ she
said. ‘As if he couldn’t see anything else. As if he didn’t
want
to see anything else.’

Coreen clasped her hands together and sighed. ‘See? That’s what I’m talking about!’

Alice took a slurp of her drink. ‘What happened next?’

Jennie’s lips tingled. ‘He kissed me.’ Alex had kissed her until she’d felt giddy and alive and totally, totally lost in him. ‘He was laughing…’ She was almost whispering now. ‘Even as he kissed me, he was laughing, and then he just said, “Let’s do it” and I didn’t even have to ask what he meant. I knew. I don’t know how, but I knew.’

Coreen’s eyebrows arched high and she stopped looking wistful. ‘He didn’t even say the words?’

Jennie shook her head, knowing that Coreen wasn’t quite getting it, but it didn’t matter.
She
got it. Who needed words when you could hear someone’s heart?

And Alex’s was such a good heart—strong, courageous, noble.

The image of him laughing returned, and it bothered her.

When had she last seen Alex laugh like that? When had she last seen him laugh at all? The Alex she lived with now was withdrawn
and silent. If his heart was saying anything nowadays, she was deaf to it.

She hoped he’d slowly come out of it. She’d told herself he’d just needed time to recover from the shocks life had landed on him thick and fast but, stopped short by the memory of Alex’s face that day, she couldn’t ignore the truth any longer. Something was wrong between them.

Alice’s voice broke though her thoughts. ‘It’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?’

Jennie made a forgettable comment about the cocktail and Alice elbowed her in the ribs. ‘Not the drink, you dafty!
Marriage!
I feel as if I’m in a perpetual state of bliss, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

That was the answer Jennie was supposed to give but, as she and the girls chatted, her mind began to dissect her answer. She
was
happy with Alex. Wouldn’t ever want to be with someone else, but…how did she put this? If she had to measure her level of happiness against Alice’s
perpetual bliss
, she realised she wasn’t hitting the mark.

On paper, everything should be perfect now between them: she was bonding with Mollie, and she and Alex had put the blip of their early marriage behind them. They had, hadn’t
they? Okay, Alex was working hard, as usual, but Cameron put in long hours, too, and Alice was still floating on a pink satin-lined cloud. Party-girl Jennie would have found that attitude slightly nauseating, but wife-and-mother Jennie was slightly…just a little bit…jealous. Where was her cloud of newly-wed happiness? Had they got past that stage already? It hardly seemed fair!

Coreen was right about the cocktail. A sense of clarity came over Jennie as she sipped it slowly. She listened with one ear as Coreen plotted how to get Mr Unimpressed to notice her and mulled over the problem of Alex.

Hadn’t she struggled with the idea that maybe there had only been enough fuel in their relationship for a whirlwind affair? But she’d tucked that thought into the back of her mind, ignored it. Alex wasn’t a playboy, for goodness’ sake! And he’d had a long marriage with Becky—probably would still be with her, but for Becky’s spectacular departure. So there was nothing wrong with the man she’d chosen.

She’d been sipping her Runaway Train through its straw, and she let it slide from her mouth.

What if Alex wasn’t the problem? Perhaps it was
her?
After all, she’d hardly ever had
a long-term
anything
. Love had always come to her in fits and spurts. It wasn’t a constant thing. There were seasons in every relationship—hot and cold, up and down. People came in and out of focus during the course of a person’s life. That would explain boyfriends who had seemed fun for a while then lost their sparkle. Sometimes people faded away altogether—like her mother—or were a foggy presence in the background, like her father.

But she’d thought that when she got married it wouldn’t be like that, that everything would finally be fixed. A sudden dryness at the back of her eyes made her blink. She didn’t want Alex to fade away!

She’d also thought that when she found the right man she’d be able to retire from being the star of the show, the life and soul of the party. Because all that had just been an attempt to delay the inevitable—the moment when it was time for her to fade into the background, the moment when people looked away.

And she’d given up her attention-seeking ways when she’d met Alex because he’d
looked
. Really looked. Past the glitter and giggles. And he’d kept on looking. She’d said yes to his unspoken proposal because she’d
thought she wouldn’t need all the razzle dazzle to stop him looking away.

Coreen was still talking, and Jennie realised she really wasn’t being a good friend. She tuned back in and listened properly.

‘I’ve even tried going out with other men!’ Coreen wailed.

‘To make him jealous?’ Alice said, shocked.

‘No…’ Coreen frowned. ‘I’ve done that before. It’s a terrible idea. I was just trying to distract myself, forget about him.’

Just trying to distract myself
.

Jennie thought about Coreen’s words constantly on the train home and in the taxi from the station.

Hadn’t she used that word in reference to herself where Alex was concerned? A distraction. That was where the heart of it lay. Distractions were, by their very nature, temporary things. Perhaps her effectiveness had worn off now, maybe because Becky’s death had finally brought him closure. Maybe he didn’t need her in that way any more. Her insides started to ache.