CHAPTER SEVEN
‘ICAN’TBELIEVEIT. Have I said that already? Yes. I have. But it’s...well, pet, you know the old saying...you spend a lifetime waiting for a bus and then two come along one after the other. First Dan and lovely, lovely Julie and now you and Leandro. You know your dad and I couldn’t be happier...’
Celia made a game effort to smile. She and her mother were in the kitchen clearing away the dishes. Leandro and her father had remained in the sitting room for a while, bonding over a glass of port, which, for her father, could be classified as a celebration after-dinner drink, and had then retired for the night. Leandro had swanned into the kitchen, given her mother a hug and a peck on the cheek, effusively thanked her for the best roast dinner he had ever had, and announced that he would be heading up.
It had taken a little over a week for her to summon up the necessary courage to make the trip to Shrewsbury so that she could break the joyful news to her parents.
A husband-to-be...a baby on the way...love at first sight...every romantic dream rolled into one with dizzying speed.
They had both patiently explained the situation with Julie and her engagement to Leandro as soon as they had arrived several hours earlier but, as it turned out, both her parents were already aware of the backstory.
Dan had told them all about the engagement of convenience and how it had crashed and burned when he and Julie had fallen in love.
‘I would have told you,’ Lizzie Drew had said sheepishly, ‘but we’d only just about found out ourselves and I thought it best if Dan and Julie told you themselves. Cleared the air. I know they planned on meeting Leandro, but they wanted to reassure Julie’s father first that he had nothing to worry about. It all seemed a bit of a muddle for me to start trying to dissect down the end of the line but now that you’re both here...and, well! What a wonderful turn up for the books!’
As far as her mum was concerned, Celia discovered very quickly that her fairy story of meeting the guy of her dreams was every bit as romantic as Julie and Dan’s had been.
The fact that Leandro had been prepared to marry a woman so that he could rescue her father from pain and penury already spoke volumes. There was already a halo on his head by the time they’d rung the doorbell.
And Leandro had not failed when it came to keeping the halo in place. He had gone full throttle with the charm and, over the course of dinner, Celia had watched her parents visibly melt.
If they had been favourably predisposed towards Leandro to start with, then, by the time the sticky toffee pudding was eaten, they had become full-time members of his fan club.
Not for one single second had either of them had any doubts that she and Leandro were in love.
The pregnancy had said it all.
They had such faith in her, and were so disingenuously convinced that their daughter would never fall pregnant unless love was involved because that was how she had been brought up, that the entire evening had been filled with teary-eyed smiles and congratulations and enthusiastic wedding planning.
Now, with the last dish finally washed and at a little after eleven, Celia felt as exhausted as if she’d run a marathon. She looked around the sparkling kitchen and wondered whether she could hang around for another couple of hours pointlessly wiping the counters, because arrangements on the sleeping front all seemed to be a bit of a nightmare.
‘You go on up, Mum,’ she said faintly as her mother headed to the kitchen door. ‘I’ll stay here...er...’ she looked around her at the spotless kitchen with a hint of desperation ‘...and unload the dishwasher. You and Dad are leaving first thing in the morning for your cruise—you don’t want to come down to a full dishwasher...’
Quite rightly, her mother looked a little startled at this suggestion.
‘I wish you had come sooner, darling. I so would have liked to have spent longer going over all the wedding plans...you know... Dan’s getting married but there’s nothing like a mother and her daughter when it comes to weddings.’
‘Well, like I mentioned, Mum...it’s going to be a small wedding...all under the radar...literally just you, Dad, Dan and Julie and Julie’s dad...piled into a register office...’
She smiled brightly while wondering how her life had veered so wildly off course from what she had always planned for herself.
The girl who had been saved from marrying the wrong guy was now marrying the wrong guy.
The girl who had thought she’d learned lessons had ended up learning nothing at all.
The girl who’d dreamt of a big white wedding, with all her friends and relatives there, was looking forward to a register office and an event that would be a formality, just a piece of paper signed legitimising the union she had been persuaded into. Not that it had taken much persuasion. Not only could she see things from Leandro’s point of view...not only could she empathise with his need to provide two parents for his child where he had had one, but from her point of view, yes, a child should never pay for the mistakes of its parents.
If, in the years to come, their situation became insupportable, then that was another matter.
For the moment, as he had pointed out, they got along very well indeed and how, he had inserted deftly, would she ever be able to explain to their son or daughter that they had been denied the advantages of having both parents because she’d decided that she wouldn’t give it a go?
Celia had seen the harshness on his beautiful face and had known what he had been thinking. That his own mother hadn’t been bothered and look at the legacy she had left behind.
But she knew that she had wandered into a minefield because everything had changed.
She hadn’t been able to fault him. For the past week and a half, he had seen her three times and together, like business associates, they had hammered out their way forward.
He had listened to her concerns and had answered all of them, fairly and gently and with understanding. She had told him that there was no way she wanted to live in London.