Promoted: to Wife and Mother

‘But you still miss the big city?’

‘Sometimes.’ Ed didn’t say anything, but there was a disbelieving quality to his silence and she glanced at him from under her hood. ‘OK, more than sometimes,’ she conceded. ‘I do like what I do at Bell Browning, but yes, I miss the excitement of the City. It’s not just the shops or the restaurants or the fact that there’s so much to do in London. It’s a kind of energy that you get day and night that you just don’t get in a small provincial city like Ellsborough.’

‘So you don’t regret your high-flying career?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, ‘but we don’t always have a choice, do we? We can’t just walk away from our responsibilities, no matter how much we might wish that we could.’

Her mother had needed her, Nick hadn’t wanted her. At the time, it hadn’t seemed to Perdita that she had much option. Going back to Ellsborough had been the right decision, yes, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t regret the way things had turned out, did it?

Hearing the thread of bitterness in her voice, Ed studied her profile with a new interest, seeing for the first time the faint strain that underlay the surface sparkle. Perhaps her life wasn’t always as much fun as it seemed to a casual observer. Ed knew all about responsibilities, knew all about putting on a brave face for the world. Perhaps he would have to revise his opinion of her, he thought. He, of all people, should know that how things seemed on the surface weren’t always the way they really were.

Perdita had stopped for breath at the crest of a hummock and was squinting into the rain. ‘I can’t see anything,’ she said. ‘Are you sure we’re going the right way?’

‘I think so.’ Ed stood near her to shelter the map from the rain and turned it round so that she could see. ‘I reckon we’re about here,’ he said, pointing.

‘Still miles to go, then.’ Unsettled by his closeness, Perdita took what she hoped would be a casual step back, only to stumble over a tussock of grass. She would have fallen if Ed hadn’t shot out a hand to catch her under the arm and haul her upright once more. His grip was hard and strong, and Perdita felt ridiculously breathless as he let her go.

‘All right?’

‘Yes…yes, I’m fine.’ Her voice sounded all thin and silly. She just hoped he would put it down to her almost- fall.

‘Do you want a rest?’

She shook her head. The sooner they found some other people, the better. ‘We’ll just get wetter and colder if we stop. Let’s go on.’

They set off in a diagonal line across and down the hillside, heading for the river that was hidden in the murky mist at the bottom of the valley-at least according to Ed’s map. Perdita was very conscious of him walking beside her. He never slipped or tripped the way she kept doing, but moved with an easy, deliberate stride.

Of course, that would be the panther in him, Perdita tried to joke herself out of this disturbing awareness of him, but it didn’t really work. Even in this dreary light, he seemed extraordinarily well-defined, with a solidity and a steadiness that was both reassuring and unsettling at the same time. With her head bent against the rain, she couldn’t see much of his face, but if she peeked under her hood she could catch a glimpse of the edge of his mouth and, in spite of her cold feet and the rain trickling inside her collar, something warm would flicker and glow deep within her.

Any extra warmth should have been welcome in this weather but, frankly, it was making Perdita decidedly edgy. A decent jacket, gloves, thick socks…that was the kind of warmth she needed, not this melting, squirmy feeling she got whenever she looked at a man who was not only her boss, but was also responsible for her being out here in the first place.

Huddling herself deeper into her coat, she plodded on and did her best to ignore him, or at least ignore the way he was making her feel, but when Ed broke the silence by asking her what she did with herself when she wasn’t at work, she snapped at him.

‘What’s with the interrogation?’ she asked sharply, and Ed raised his brows at her tone.

‘I just thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about each other,’ he said, lifting his hands in a gesture of conciliation.

‘I’m not learning much about you, I notice!’

‘What do you want to know?’

A little flustered by the open invitation to ask him about himself, Perdita hesitated.

Of course what she really wanted to know was whether he was married, or if had a girlfriend, but she could hardly ask that, could she? Not when he had read her CV and presumably knew that she was single.

‘Why are you moving to Ellsborough?’ she asked instead, mentally shushing Millie, who would be furious to know that she had passed up such a golden opportunity to ask about his personal life. ‘You thought it was odd that I’d ended up there, but I wasn’t nearly such a high-flyer as you,’ she pointed out. ‘We’ve all heard about the companies you’ve run in London, and Bell Browning is a very small fish compared to them.’ She sent him one of her sharp glances. ‘You’re not planning to carve it up and sell it on, are you?’

‘No,’ said Ed. ‘It’s a sound company. There’s plenty to do, of course, but I see no reason to restructure-not yet, anyway.’

Perdita was only partially reassured. ‘Still, it’s not much of challenge for a man who’s been chief executive of some household names the way you have.’

‘I don’t know. It could be quite a challenge dealing with my new staff if you’re anything to go by,’ he said, but his smile glinted and Perdita despised herself for the way that treacherous warmth in the pit of her stomach spread insidiously through her veins at the sight of it.

‘Won’t you miss London, though?’ she asked, mentally dousing herself inside.

‘To be honest, I haven’t had time to appreciate living in London for a while now,’ said Ed with a sigh. ‘I wanted to downsize and move somewhere new, somewhere less frenetic, so when the opportunity at Bell Browning came up, I took it. A small, specialist company targeting niche markets will be an interesting change, and I’m looking forward to it, but it’s not really about me. The whole family needs a fresh start.’

So he had a family. Damn.

Come on, Perdita caught herself up, alarmed by the depth of her disappointment. What were you thinking? How many attractive men in their forties do you know who don’t have a wife and kids? Of course he was always going to have a family!

‘Oh?’ was the best she could manage as a response.

‘My wife died five years ago,’ Ed told her as they scrambled down a steep path, and Perdita was immediately overwhelmed by guilt for having been disappointed, even briefly, at the thought that he was ‘taken’.

‘Since then, I’ve been trying to keep the kids on an even keel,’ he went on. ‘At first it seemed better to keep them in a familiar environment, but…well, the fact is that my son has been in trouble recently,’ he admitted. ‘He’s not a bad boy, but he got in with the wrong crowd.’

He caught himself up with a twisted smile. ‘I’m sure every parent says that,’ he acknowledged, ‘but Tom really is OK.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Perdita quickly. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your wife, Ed,’ she added, picking her words with care. ‘I didn’t realise that you were a widower. It must be very difficult bringing up children on your own.’

‘Especially when they start going off the rails,’ he said ruefully. ‘Tom’s always been quite withdrawn-he’s much less resilient than the girls-which is why I didn’t really know how to cope when things went wrong. I’m hoping the move will give him a fresh start, though. He’s due to start at sixth-form college in September, so the idea is that we’ll move to Ellsborough at the end of the summer and they can all begin a new term at their new schools.’

‘All?’ Perdita wasn’t sure how she felt now. She had gone from an uneasy attraction to disappointment at hearing that he had a family and then guilt at discovering his personal tragedy. The sensible thing would be to feel absolutely nothing for him at all, but that didn’t seem to be an option at the moment. Best to stick to polite interest, she decided, and put her feelings away to be examined later when she was on her own. ‘How many children have you got?’

‘Three,’ said Ed. ‘Tom’s the eldest, and then there’s Cassie, who’s fifteen going on twenty-five, and Lauren is just fourteen.’

Perdita wondered how two teenage girls who were used to the big city would get on in provincial Ellsborough.