Christmas with Her Ex(9)

‘Much better. You don’t lighten up enough, my boy.’

He narrowed his eyes at her but he couldn’t stay cross. She was a minx. ‘It’s my training. Normally, I’m responsible for people’s lives.’

‘You’ve thought you were responsible for people’s lives since you were a child. Makes you bossy.’ His grandmother shrugged that away. ‘You’ve been too responsible for too long. You’re becoming downright boring.’

Connor froze in the act of sipping and frowned at her. Did she mean that? Nobody else had complained—but, then, who else was there to complain?

There was a distance between him and most people that he’d acquired early, since the loss of his mother and advent of his stepmother, to be precise, and had never lost. His patients wanted him to optimise the course of their pregnancies. Fertility assistance required set boundaries of safety and precautions. Still, her comments seemed a bit harsh. ‘You don’t know the real me, Gran.’

‘Hmph.’ She snorted and he looked at her quizzically. So older ladies really did that?

She snorted again just to prove it. ‘Hmph. Nobody knows you. Except maybe that girl at the end of the train.’

So this was what it was all about. And how the heck did she know where Kelsie was sitting? He’d bet Winsome had bribed the porters already, though goodness knows when as he’d only been gone a few minutes. The she-menace had probably rung the bell as soon as he’d left.

She knew them all by name because she’d been on this train every year for the last twenty years with his grandfather. Her yearly birthday trip in February she’d missed this year because of his grandfather’s death.

That had really knocked her badly and Connor, alarmed his grandmother might just fade away with grief, had hired a nurse to look after her for a few weeks to ensure she ate enough to survive. She’d begun looking much like her old self since he’d agreed to share a last journey on her favourite train.

But he was very aware this was her first Christmas without her husband and they’d decided this was as good a way as any to get over the lead up to festivities on her own.

So this was effectively a ten-month delay on her birthday train trip.

He didn’t understand how she didn’t get bored.

He was halfway there already, and it would be worse if it wasn’t for the unexpected arrival of Kelsie Summers, and they were only a few minutes out of the station.

He sighed. So she was all over the fact that Kelsie was here! He should have known.

He enunciated carefully, as if to a child, ‘You’ve blown it all out of proportion. She was a kid at my school and I was like the big brother she never had.’

His grandmother nodded and he could tell she wasn’t listening.

She proved it. ‘When you came to me you told me you’d been going to marry her.’

‘Childhood nonsense. An impulse.’ He shrugged. ‘The girl is nothing to me now.’

She nodded, all sweetness and light, and his head went up. ‘I’m pleased. I wouldn’t like to see you upset.’

For some reason he didn’t like the sound of that, or the way she’d said it. She glanced out the window and then back again and a horrible premonition hit him just before her next words.

‘So it should be fine with you that while you were admiring the view I sent her an invitation to join us for lunch.’

Kelsie’s golden envelope arrived, along with her glass of champagne, its embossed VSOE paper and the spidery writing giving a clue to its origin. She’d bet it came from Winsome.

Wolfgang hovered as she opened it and glanced at the bottom. Sure enough, the flamboyant W rolled into an exuberant salute. ‘Please. Come!’

An invitation to join them for lunch at the first sitting. Fun. Not! How the heck did she answer this?

‘Perhaps I should return for your answer in a few minutes?’ Wolfgang wasn’t slow on the uptake.

She guessed he’d been exposed to many such missives and their impact.

Kelsie smiled gratefully. ‘Thanks, Wolfgang.’ His head disappeared from the door and Kelsie looked down at the embossed paper again. So how did she decline politely?

She sipped her champagne, the golden fluid so surprisingly light and dry that the bubbles jumped and tickled her nose until she took it away from her mouth and looked at it. So this is what the other half drank?

Like drinking golden sunshine—no hardship at all—and she needed the courage to make a decision so she took a bigger gulp.

Or maybe she should go? Maybe that was what needed to be done. Surely inside Connor Black there was still a vestige of the hero she’d admired as a young girl and that man might understand her adolescent thinking all those years ago. He’d been her best friend and she had let him down.