Impossible to Forget(43)

‘Not really. I have all I need.’

Angie wasn’t sure how this could be true. Then again, didn’t she survive for most of the time on her own, Jax only making the trip north every few months? She wasn’t pining away from lack of human touch. But then she knew that it was there for her, however infrequently. Angie had difficulty believing that Maggie was quite the island that she made herself out to be, and yet Maggie just kept proving her wrong.

‘Who’s the lucky bloke?’ Angie asked now.

Maggie’s cheeks bloomed and Angie grinned at her. Here they were, thirty-three years old and Maggie still blushed when she talked about boys. It was sweet really.

‘His name is Adam,’ Maggie said, ‘and he’s a pension lawyer. He lives near Thirsk and he has a golden retriever called Charlie.’

‘I hope he’s more interesting than he sounds,’ Angie said, laughing. ‘Pensions! Christ. Is he sexy?’

Maggie contemplated the question for a moment.

‘Define sexy,’ she replied eventually.

‘You know. Does your heart race when you see him? Does he make you want to pull him into the nearest stationery cupboard and bonk the arse off him?’

Maggie contemplated further.

‘No,’ she concluded. ‘But he is perfectly pleasant, and he doesn’t talk about pensions the whole time.’

‘Oh, well he sounds practically perfect,’ said Angie sarcastically.

Maggie gave her a stern look. ‘It’s just a dinner date, Ange. I’m not about to marry him.’

‘Bloody good job,’ said Angie. She let a beat go by and then she said, ‘Tiger rang last week. He’s in Andalucía, near Granada somewhere. He says the Alhambra is beautiful and that I need to get myself over there. Practical to the last, eh?’

Angie knew it was wicked of her to tag Tiger on to a conversation about sexy men, but she couldn’t help herself. She watched Maggie carefully for the reaction that she knew would come.

Maggie set her face into an expression of feigned indifference and said, ‘Oh? How is he?’

‘Same as ever,’ replied Angie. ‘The happy wanderer.’

Maggie nodded, and Angie let a pause punctuate the conversation. Maggie would never be drawn on her feelings for Tiger. Angie had thought it was something to do with not wanting to step on her toes, and she had tried more than once to make it clear that her own friendship with Tiger was almost totally platonic, but still Maggie kept her counsel.

‘Is Adam the Pensions Lawyer as sexy as Tiger the Nomad?’ she teased.

Maggie gave her a withering stare. ‘I’m sorry I mentioned Adam now,’ she said. ‘I shan’t next time and you’ll need to get your gossip fix from somewhere else.’

She was grinning.





22


Business was brisk at Angie’s wellness centre. As well as the reiki, she was now offering energy psychology and well-being coaching. She had also taken on a reflexologist, Kate, who she had met on a training course, and the pair of them had moved into premises off Fossgate and rebranded the place as Live Well. It was a world away from working out of her lounge. The centre had a little reception area and two treatment rooms, and there was even a tiny shower room that had been craftily shoehorned into what had once been a storage cupboard. Her clientele was growing all the time, and mainly by word of mouth, which Angie found very gratifying.

Of course, things would have to change when the baby was born, but Angie was certain that she could take the baby to work with her. Babies were small and portable, weren’t they? And they slept a lot. So, by reshuffling her hours a bit and maybe taking someone else on part-time, she could keep things ticking over until she was ready to go back full-time. She wasn’t fazed by what lay ahead. Like everything in her life, she would just make it up as she went along.

What was currently taking her attention were the difficulties that came with working through her constant nausea. Whilst she had been mercifully spared full morning sickness, the waves of low-level queasiness could come upon her at any minute, which she found just as stressful. She had tried ginger in all its forms – raw, crystallised, tea, and even just as a plain ginger snap – but it did little to quell the fear of constantly being on the brink of disaster. Acupuncture was also supposed to help, so she had booked herself an appointment with a practitioner that she knew. The results, she had to admit, were mixed, despite her strong desire for this to be the panacea she sought, but it had given her something else to focus on for a while. She had just been on the verge of having to tell Kate what was happening to her body and why she had caught her devouring a packet of salt and chemical-laced prawn cocktail crisps at eight in the morning, when the sickness finally lifted, and she began to feel more like herself. It was such a relief to feel normal again, and she congratulated herself on having made it through the first three months relatively unscathed.

But Jax still didn’t know.

Angie had told herself that this was because she wanted to tell him face to face and was waiting for his next visit before she broke the news. It was a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and so it had allowed her not to examine her motives too closely. The Easter holidays were almost upon them and Jax had managed to swing the bank holidays off, so he was planning to come north for a long weekend. Angie’s excitement at seeing him was barely tainted by the apprehension of how he might react to their news. The longer she had to get used to the idea of the baby herself, the stronger her conviction that Jax would be fine with it. There was even the tiniest hint of a bump now for him to relate to. How could he not fall in love with the idea when he could rest his hand on his growing child?