Read Online The Fiancé He Can't Forget by Caroline Anderson - Free Book Online Page B

short-staffed, and delighted to have her.
    She’d put herself down for the night shift on New Year’s Eve—better to keep busy, because she was eighteen weeks on that day, and if she hadn’t been busy she would have gone out of her mind.
    Her phone beeped a couple of times—Happy New Year messages from people, she thought, but she was too busy to check it, so she carried on filling in the notes and went back to her mums to check on them.
    But when her night shift finished and she went home in the cold, bright crisp air of the morning, she finally checked her phone and found a text from a friend and a voicemail message.
    From Matt.
    â€˜Hi, Amy, it’s Matt. Sorry to miss you, I expect you’re working. I just wanted to say Happy New Year, and it was good to see you again the other day. I’m sorry it was so brief. Maybe next time…’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘Well, you know where I am if you want me.’
    If she wanted him?
    She sat down on the sofa in her sitting room, andplayed his hesitant, reluctant message again and again and again.
    Of course she wanted him. She wanted him so much it was unbearable, today of all days, the exact stage to the day that she’d lost their first baby. She laid her hand over the tidy little bump—hardly a bump at all. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t guess, but assuming it made it, and it was a big assumption, this baby was going to cause havoc in her life.
    And in Matt’s.
    She had to tell him. Ben was right, she couldn’t just keep relying on them, and he had the right to know about his child. She took the two-week-old scan photo out of her bag and stared at it, tracing the tiny face with her finger. It would be bigger now. As big as Samuel…
    Lord, even the name hurt. She sucked in a breath, the images crowding in on her—the midwife’s eyes so full of compassion as she wrapped his tiny body in a blanket and placed it in Matt’s arms. The tears in his eyes, the searing agony she could see in every line of his body as he stared down at his son.
    He’d lifted the baby to his lips, kissed his tiny head, shuddered with grief. It had broken him—broken both of them—and their relationship, like their son, had been too fragile, too young to survive.
    She almost rang him. Her finger hovered over the call button, but then she turned the phone off and told herself to stop being so ridiculous. She’d decided not to tell him until after the twenty-week scan. Maybe longer. Maybe not until it was viable. He’d been so gutted last time, so deeply distressed, that he’d been unreachable, and she knew—she just knew —he’d be a nightmare if she told him. He’d probably have her admitted so he could scanher three times a day, but she wasn’t having any of it. It was utterly unnecessary, and thinking about it all the time just made it all so much worse.
    So she didn’t ring him, and then she was past the time of the miscarriage, into the nineteenth week. Then the twentieth, and the big scan, which she could hardly bear to look at she was so nervous.
    But it was normal, and it looked much more like a baby now, every feature clearly defined. It was sucking its thumb, and Amy felt a huge tug of love towards this tiny, vulnerable child—Matt’s child. ‘Do you want to know what it is?’ the ultrasonographer asked her, but she shook her head.
    â€˜No.’ Knowing would make it harder to remain detached, and she’d been careful not to look—but the baby was moving vigorously, and she could feel it all the time now, so real, so alive, so very, very strong that finally, at last, she began to allow a tiny glimmer of hope to emerge.
    Was it possible that this baby would be all right?
    She wanted to share it, to tell everyone in the world, but she was still a little afraid she might jinx it, so she took the photo home, propped it up on the bedside