‘Oh, Mum.’ Kay grinned at her mother. ‘I do love you.’
‘And I love you.’
Then the car stopped at the little wicker gate in front of the long, winding path leading to the church door, and it was all flurry and movement for a minute as Kay helped her mother out, adjusting her hat and handing her the posy once she was on the pavement.
‘Grandma! Grandma!’ The twins had been waiting just inside the gate, holding Mitchell’s hands, and now they came dancing out, small faces aglow as they caught sight of Leonora and their mother.
Kay smiled at her husband.
They had married within six months of his proposal, a quiet summer wedding with just family present and the girls as bridesmaids, dressed in fairy-tale dresses of white muslin and pink rosebuds. It had been wonderful, magical.
Now the twins were being bridesmaids again, but this time they were in blue satin with fake fur muffs and little warm cloaks. Her mother—the most conventional of women normally—had cut with pro
tocol and insisted she wanted Kay to give her away, and with Mitchell being Henry’s best man it was a real family affair.
Kay looked at her husband now as he hurried up the church path to take his place beside Henry, ready for when they came in. She touched the round mound of her stomach briefly wherein their first child, a little boy with strong, healthy limbs, from what the scan had revealed, lay.
Mitchell had cried with joy when he had seen his son on the monitor; in fact he’d had them all crying—the doctor and herself as much with the look on his face as the wonder of the new little life growing inside her.
And it had happened at just the right time. With Henry now leaving their house to live with her mother in Ivy Cottage, and Kay just having fini