The Accidental Mother

Six-year-old Bella looked at Sophie, her dry eyes burning.

There had to be a moment like this, Sophie thought, in everyone’s life, when the very next thing you say might change you and the world as you knew it forever. She felt her stomach dip and churn as if she had just run headlong at a cliff edge and brought herself to a stop at its very brink.

“Then we’ll work out what’s best,” she answered, feeling like a coward.

“What’s best?” Bella said dimly, staring down at her feet again. Then she sat up a little and lifted her chin. “Okay,” she said with a look of weary resignation that should never have visited her young face.

There had to be something, Sophie thought, some promise she could make to Bella and Izzy that she absolutely knew she could keep. Some promise that could give the children something solid to rely on.

S
ophie considered the question Jake Flynn had just asked her.

It wasn’t a difficult question. It didn’t require a degree in anything to understand it, or any special knowledge of semantics. No, it was much more tricky than that. Jake Flynn had just asked her out to lunch, but that wasn’t really the question. The question was—what kind of lunch had he asked her out to?

As Jake waited on the other end of the line for her reply, Sophie sat back in her desk chair and swiveled it so that she could see out of her office window and down onto the plaza below where the wind swept an errant piece of brightly colored litter in whirls and swoops across the near-empty expanse. One of Sophie’s main difficulties in life (not a problem, she refused to admit that she had a problem despite her personal assistant, Cal, constantly assuring her that she did), was knowing when men were attracted to her. Other people, other women and most of her friends—okay, all of her friends—seemed to have an innate intuition that kicked in at least a month before Sophie’s did. While her friends had frequently planned short engagements and long marriages based solely on thirty seconds’ worth of eye contact in a nightclub, Sophie was far too afraid of getting it wrong to wait for anything less than large bouquets of flowers delivered to her desk and an invitation for a romantic break in Venice as signs that a man was interested in her. And because only one man (Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, Alex) had offered these in the last decade, her relationship experience was somewhat limited to him and a handful of hopefuls that friends and colleagues had lined up for her. All of whom admitted defeat at the first obstacle.

The first obstacle having been Sophie herself.

In this instance the confusion arose from the fact that Jake Flynn was a client. Sophie’s newest and most important client in some weeks and the one she hoped was going to help give her the edge she needed to secure a hotly contested promotion when she wowed her boss, Gillian, with the lucrative long-term contract she was planning to negotiate with the Madison Corporation, Jake’s company.

Cal had declared after the very first meeting they’d had together almost three months ago that Jake fancied her.

“He does not,” Sophie had told him. “He’s just being friendly and, you know—American. Americans are very friendly.”

“Not that friendly,” Cal had retorted. “Not unless they want a lawsuit slapped on them.” Sophie had shot him one of her best silencing glances and told him that the most important thing was persuading Jake Flynn that McCarthy Hughes was the best corporate events company to organize his organization’s first U.K. event. And showing him that Sophie’s ideas, plans, and budgets knocked all the competition into a cocked hoop, as her mother would say.

And she had.

“I’ve never met a party planner quite as serious as you,” Jake had told her after he left their first meeting. “You could be a general in the army!” Sophie had laughed politely and shaken his hand (and wondered if his comment had anything to do with her forgetting to wax her top lip the previous evening) and walked him to the lift.

“
That
was called flirting,” Cal had informed her as she got back to her desk.

“Cal,” Sophie had warned him. “He wasn’t flirting, and even if he was—which he wasn’t—I wouldn’t date him because he is my client.”

“You’re a party planner, not a lawyer,” Cal had said. “I don’t think it’s against the rules.”

“It’s against
my
rules,” Sophie had retorted.

“Everything’s against your rules,” Cal had told her.

The trouble was that Sophie was not good at working out if a man was attracted to her. In fact, she was terrible at it, so mostly she didn’t bother trying to think about it. But as soon as Cal had told her so bluntly that even she could understand it that he thought Jake liked her, she couldn’t stop speculating about whether he was right. It was like part of a crossword puzzle that she could not solve.

Since that moment, Sophie had tried to push any thought of whether or not Jake Flynn had been flirting with her to the back of her mind, except occasionally while dozing off in the bath or lying in bed on a Sunday morning. Then she couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that Jake Flynn was very handsome in a proper, square-jawed sort of way. And he was dreadfully polite and, Sophie noticed, had very fresh breath. But it would be disastrous to mistake good manners and good dental hygiene for attraction—she would never live it down. Also, Sophie thought it would be a really terrible idea to go out with Jake, her most important client. He really was out of bounds, which made him all the more intriguing. Not because Sophie was the kind of woman to throw caution to the wind and embark on an ill-advised affair with reckless abandon. But because she preferred her love interests to be off-limits. It was much safer and far less time-consuming.

A good five seconds had passed between since Jake had asked her out to lunch later that morning. Sophie did a split-second review of the available facts.

The party was planned, the date was set, and all the arrangements were made. There was more or less no reason for Jake Flynn to be in touch with Sophie now until just before the party itself, and that wasn’t for nearly a month. Still, Sophie could not decide what kind of lunch Jake was asking her out on. But either way, she realized in a moment of clarity, she was going to have to say yes.

“Sorry, Jake,” she said, efficiently covering the pause. “I was just looking at my diary, and there’s nothing in at twelve, so…Oh, hang on, what’s this?” The initials “T.A.” had been penned into the twelve o’clock slot in purple ink. That wasn’t Cal, he was far too organized to deface her diary in such a slapdash way. That was her executive trainee, Lisa. Sophie sighed. There were no other details, just the letters “T.A.,” written in round, girlish letters. How many times did Sophie have to remind Lisa to ask Cal to put any new entries in her diary? The trouble was that Lisa was scared of Cal, and even though technically he was her PA too, she would rather tear out her eyes with rusty nails than ask him to do anything for her.

“Well, whatever it is, it can be moved,” Sophie said, feeling uncharacteristically capricious for a second before feeling her stomach muscles clench and hoping that it wasn’t something desperately important that might secure her the promotion she was working toward. It couldn’t be that important, she told herself. If it was that important, even Lisa would have brought it to her attention.

“Great!” Jake said the word on an outward breath. “Okay if I swing by and pick you up at twelve?”

“Oh, well, you don’t have to do that, Jake…” Sophie began before pausing to consider the ambiguity of the meeting. “But you can if you want,” she finished a little awkwardly.

“I want,” Jake said, with a laugh. “I’ll see you at twelve.”

“Super,” Sophie said.

Jake hung up the phone.

Sophie looked at the receiver and decided that now was not the time to think about the fact she hadn’t had sex for over a year, even if Jake innocently saying “I want” had brought the thought forward. Sophie hadn’t really had time to miss sex, and besides, although she’d never admit it to her sex-obsessed friends, she’d never been that impressed by it. Even more, she worried if she ever ended up in bed with someone again, she would be really terrible at it.

Sophie tucked the worry neatly back in the darker corners of her mind and looked at her watch. Seeing she had five minutes until her next meeting, with Deutsche Bank, she glanced at the pointed toes of her new pink suede boots and smiled. It had taken a good ten minutes longer to get into work this morning simply because she had to take extra care as she picked her way through the puddles and remnants of last night’s dirty, halfhearted snow in a bid to keep the suede pristine. And then, of course, there were the heels. It had to be said that it was tricky and probably even risky to run down a wet and crowded escalator in high heels, but still, as Sophie lifted her right foot and then her left, she felt it had been worth the risk. Of course she could have put her new boots in a bag and worn her sneakers to work, changing them under the desk the moment she got in. She could have, but she didn’t. Sneaker changing was for wimps, and besides, Sophie felt the best thing about her new boots was actually wearing them, come hell or high puddles. Sophie may not have been the world’s most adventurous or spontaneous person, but she was very hardcore about her footwear—all forty-eight pairs.

Cal had said once that her flamboyant love of shoes showed the inner diva in her struggling to break free from her puritanical, sexually repressed exterior.

Sophie had pointed out that she frequently wore skirts above the knee and so was neither puritanical nor sexually repressed, thank you very much. Cal had snorted in derision and said that, if there was a closet for straight people, she would be in it. He said she wore sexy shoes to cover up her total lack of sexuality. Sophie had told him that actually it was no such thing. It was just shoes. Shoes and boots and mules and pumps. Sophie loved shoes in all colors, shapes, and sizes; her reaction to seeing a new pair in
Vogue
or
Glamour
was almost visceral. It was a gut-wrenching longing that didn’t abate until those particular shoes were safely nestled in their box and swinging from her wrist in an expensive shopping bag. And then there was a moment of perfect bliss and satisfaction followed by the anticipation of winning that day’s shoe-off with her office rival and general all-around nemesis, Eve McQueen.

Cal often said that there were websites and magazines for people like her, but Sophie shrugged off his comments and told him that actually it was because her mum had made her wear clunky Clarks shoes to school until she was fourteen, even though her friends were wearing gray patent leathers with ankle straps and maroon bows on the sides.

She told him her shoe collection was the little part of her that could be free and creative. Her shoes were what made her stand out from all the other women in gray or black business suits.

Cal said it wasn’t her shoes that did that. Sophie decided not to ask him what he meant.

It might even be, Sophie thought, biting her lip as she straightened her calf and stretched her toes to a point, that her shoes were what had made Jake Flynn ask her out to lunch, if indeed it turned out that he was asking her out to a
lunch
lunch and not a lunch
lunch.

Sophie frowned. She had succeeded in confusing herself. Luckily, Cal snapped her out of the moment.

“The Germans are coming,” he said, opening her door without knocking. Sophie surreptitiously tucked the booted leg she had been admiring behind her desk and sat up. “They’re in the lobby on the way up. Do you want to meet them at the lift?”

“I want,” Sophie said, allowing herself a tiny smile as she pushed her chair back and gathered up the notes she needed for the meeting. “Let’s practice German on the way.”

“Guten Tag, Herr Manners.”
Cal said it first, slowly and carefully. The fact that he was multilingual made him a real asset, as he never tired of reminding her.

“Guten Tag, Herr Manners.”
When Sophie said it, she sounded like her cat, Artemis, when she was coughing up a hair ball.

“Mmmm,” Cal said. “Once more with feeling.”

“
Guten Tag
—Oh, bollocks.” Sophie hated it when she could not get a thing absolutely right, and she especially hated the fact that she was no good at languages. It wasn’t the actual words so much (although she didn’t really know any besides the ones Cal told her), it was the accent. She just couldn’t let go of herself enough to really get the accent right.

“I don’t think our German cousins use that phrase,” Cal told her flatly. “Maybe just stick to English. Germans speak very good English. Most nations speak very good English, and while I approve of your attempts to be transglobal, I think in this case you should take advantage of that.”

“I think you’re right,” Sophie said. “I know,” she said, “I just like to pay—”

“Attention to detail.” Cal mimicked her mantra with eerie accuracy.

Sophie laughed. She was really very fond of Cal, despite his insistence that his innate bitchiness was really more of a lifestyle-guru, tell-it-like-it-is attitude. They had been together for almost five years; it was Sophie’s longest relationship with a man, and she knew she could rely on him absolutely. He was the best PA on the floor. In the early part of their relationship, she had once spent nearly three months being in love with him and wishing that he was straight. But then she’d realized that, if he was straight, she probably would not like him at all, because who likes a straight man who spends that much time reading girls’ magazines? Since then, they had become closer and closer friends, and Sophie had fallen in love with an anonymous risk assessor in the building across the street instead.

“Anyway, where
is
Lisa? She knows we’ve got a meeting at eleven.” Sophie scanned the open-plan area of the office for her trainee, the third and supposedly vital member of her team, although Cal cheerfully refereed to her as the “The Dead Weight.” “She’s got all the costings for this meeting, and they’ll be here any minute—If she’s crying in the ladies’ room again, I swear to God I’m going to—”

“Be nice to her and tell it her doesn’t matter?” Cal said. He had his own opinions on how useful Lisa was, and he wasn’t afraid of sharing them. “You should just toss her, she’s rubbish.”