Deep Waters Read Free Page A

planning to tell him.
    ‘It’s not like I wouldn’t have figured it out eventually,’ Neville said wryly. ‘But she didn’t want me to feel like I had to marry her. Even after I proposed, and she told me about the baby, she said that if it made any difference to the way I felt, then we’d call it off there and then.’
    Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘And how do you feel about it?’
    There was a long pause while Neville emptied his glass. ‘It scares the crap out of me,’ he said frankly. ‘I just never thought… I never really thought about having kids. I know that sounds stupid. But it’s like…being old or something. A wife is one thing. But a kid?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m still getting my head round it, to tell you the truth.’
    That sounded a bit worrisome to Mark. ‘You need to be sure,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t marry her if you’re not sure—about the whole package.’
    ‘That’s what Triona said.’ Neville stood up, ready to go to the bar to get the next round. ‘So we’re not rushing into anything. We’re going to wait a couple of months, to give me time to get used to the idea. But I am going to marry her, mate,’ he added firmly. ‘So you can start working on your speech now.’
    The wedding had taken place the previous weekend, and now Neville was on his honeymoon. Mark thought about it as he finished his sandwich.
    It had been a small wedding, held at a posh hotel in the City. Neville had cleaned up well, looking positively handsome in his hired dinner jacket. And Triona, her bump unabashedly visible beneath her gown of clingy, creamy bias-cut satin, was a radiant bride. The guest list was limited to a few friends on either side: Triona’s solicitor pals, and Neville’s police colleagues. Mark was best man, and Callie’s great friend Frances Cherry was Triona’s attendant.
    No family—not on either side. That seemed the strangest thing of all to Mark. He couldn’t imagine a wedding without family. If it had been his wedding, it would have been awash with them, streaming in from near and far. Nonna—his grandmother —would have come from Venice, and no doubt other Italian relations as well.
    Nonetheless the wedding had moved Mark deeply. As the couple said their vows he watched Neville’s face, and his friend looked as if he’d won the lottery and inherited a brewery on the same day. And Triona, when the ring was slipped on her finger, glowed with a transcendent beauty which was partly to do with motherhood and all to do with love.
    It made Mark want to rush to Callie’s side, throw himself at her feet, and beg her to marry him. During the wedding breakfast , as she sat beside him looking as lovely as he’d ever seen her, the urge was powerful.
    So why hadn’t he done it?
    Mark still wasn’t entirely sure. It was partly to do with a failure of imagination. Their wedding: what would it be like? Yes, there would be family there, in abundance. But that in itself would be an issue rife with possibilities for problems. His ardently Roman Catholic family would take a dim view of a wedding held in an Anglican church. Yet that wasn’t just a possibility—it was a certainty. Callie was an ordained clergywoman, within a few months of being a priest. It was who she was , not a merereligious preference. Her wedding should by rights take place in her own church. What would his family make of that?
    Even more than that, though, he had been constrained by something Serena had said to him on the evening he’d introduced Callie to the family, just before Christmas. He and his sister had had a heart-to-heart talk in the kitchen over the washing-up.
    ‘What do you think?’ Mark had asked her; he knew that she knew the answer he wanted.
    ‘She’s lovely,’ said Serena. ‘Very nice, Marco.’ If her voice conveyed a bit less enthusiasm than her words, at least the words were the right ones.
    ‘I really love her,’ he confided. He wouldn’t have told his mother that, but he