Read Online Sweet Surrender by Catherine George - Free Book Online

home for once. What did he want?’
    ‘Officially to confirm dinner with him tomorrow night. So he said.’ Frances smiled smugly over the baby’s head. ‘But I think he just wanted a chat with you.’
    ‘So what did you tell him?’
    ‘That you were out with a friend. I asked if I could take a message, and he told me to say he’d call for you at seven tomorrow.’
    Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘We’d already arranged that.’
    ‘Aha, he’s keeping tabs on you. I hope you said Kate was with a male friend, Frances,’ said Gabriel, laughing.
    ‘I thought I’d better leave that to her!’
    Kate glanced at Gabriel’s heavy eyes. ‘Tuck Hal up in his buggy and I’ll take him for a stroll now it’s cleared up a bit. Go home for a nap. Auntie’ll take over for a couple of hours.’
    Kate was very thoughtful, later, as she pushed thebuggy down a quiet lane in an afternoon bright with sunshine now rain had washed the snow away. She found it increasingly hard to believe in this new, persistent Alasdair who rang her so often. In their Cambridge days he’d treated her with affectionate indulgence, as though she were a clever child rather than an attractive female, with a full set of the normal feelings and needs that implied. Yet now that he apparently did see her as an attractive woman, she was no longer starry-eyed about him. Nor about any other man. Kate smiled down at the small sleeping face just visible above the covers in the buggy. Amazing that all men were as cute and helpless as this to start with. Even Alasdair.
    This was hard to believe when Alasdair Drummond presented himself prompt at seven at Friars Wood the following evening. In a khaki crew neck sweater and black denims, a khaki reefer jacket hanging loose from his shoulders, he looked tall and tough and anything but helpless. Or cute.
    ‘Hi. Are you ready, Kate?’ He gave her the familiar bone-dissolving smile as she beckoned him inside.
    ‘You’re on time, Alasdair. Have a chat with my father while I get my coat.’ She left him with Tom Dysart in the study and went to the kitchen, where her mother was humming along to the radio while she put the finishing touches to the evening meal.
    ‘Alasdair’s here,’ Kate announced. ‘He seems anxious to get going.’
    Frances eyed her, frowning. ‘I thought you were going to wear the gold dress again.’
    Kate shook her head. ‘It’s cold, and the Forrester’s is only a pub, no matter how good the food is, so I thought I’d be comfortable.’
    In actual fact she had put the dress on at first, thenchanged into jeans and a cinnamon wool sweater which clung even more than the dress. And instead of leaving her hair down she’d twisted it up securely, but with the odd curling tendril left to look as though it had escaped by accident.
    ‘You look very pretty just the same,’ conceded her mother. ‘What coat are you wearing? Surely not the windbreaker you wear for school?’
    ‘Why not?’ said Kate carelessly. ‘Come and say hello to Alasdair while I fetch it.’
     
    ‘Did your mother tell you I rang the other night?’ asked Alasdair, when they were on their way.
    ‘Yes. I was out with a friend.’
    ‘The man I saw at your place the other day?’
    ‘No. A different friend. Son of my mother’s bosom pal. Toby’s the junior partner with a firm of local accountants.’
    Alasdair drove in silence for a while, then cast a frowning glance in her direction. ‘Harking back to the man I ran into at your place—you said he was important. How important?’
    ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t known him long.’
    ‘Has Adam met him?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Does he approve?’
    Kate gave him a hostile glance. ‘It doesn’t matter whether Adam approves of Jack Spencer or not, but as it happens he does.’
    ‘So why didn’t you ask the man along on Sunday?’
    ‘Because it was a family thing.’
    ‘ I was there,’ Alasdair pointed out.
    ‘Not by my invitation.’
    He threw a hostile glance at her.