Her One and Only Read Free Page B

asked him, dropping the fake accent as she saw the way he was watching her.
    ‘I was just remembering the way Luke’s brother was watching you at Luke and Bobbie’s wedding,’ he told her coolly. ‘ His eyes were brown, if I remember correctly.’
    ‘James...’ Samantha frowned. She couldn’t quite remember what colour his eyes had been and most certainly James had been a real honey, seriously good-looking and seriously open about his own desire to settle down and raise a family, no commitment phobia there and most definitely no bias against tall independent women. No sirree.
    ‘Mmm...you’re right, they were, ’ she agreed, giving Liam an absent smile.
    ‘Of course, we’d have brown-eyed babies.’
    ‘ What did you say...’
    Vaguely, Samantha looked at Liam. She had just had the most wonderful idea.
    ‘Brown-eyes genes dominate over blue, don’t they?’ she asked him, not expecting a response.
    ‘Sam, just what the hell is going on?’
    Liam grabbed hold of her upper arm, not painfully but firmly enough for Samantha to recognise that he wasn’t easily going to let go of her.
    She gave a small sigh and looked up at him.
    ‘Liam, would you say that I was the kind of woman who couldn’t...who a man wouldn’t...’ She stopped as her throat threatened to clog with tears, swallowing them down fiercely before continuing gruffly, ‘Someone told me today that I’m not woman enough for a man to want her to...to...to become a mother. Well, I’m going to prove him wrong, Liam... I’m going to prove him so wrong that...
    ‘I’m going to go to England and I’m going to find myself a man who knows how to love and value a real woman, the real woman in me and he’s going to love me and I’m going to love him so much that...
    ‘Let me go, Liam,’ she demanded, aware that he’d tightened his grip on her. ‘I’ve already overrun my lunch hour and I’ve got about a million and one things I have to do...’
    ‘Samantha,’ Liam began warningly, but she’d already pulled free of him and was walking away. Her mind was made up even if rather ironically it had taken Liam of all people to point her in the right direction and there was no way she was going to let anyone change it. In England she would find love just as her twin had done. Why on earth hadn’t she thought of that...realised that before? English men were different. English men weren’t like Cliff. English men... One Englishman would love her as she so longed to be loved and she would love him right back.
    Already she was regretting having told Liam as much as she had. Oh, that wilful impetuous tongue of hers, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone else—not even Bobbie. No, her quest to find her perfect Mr. Right, the perfect father for the babies she so longed to have, was going to be her secret and hers alone.
    Her eyes sparkling with elation, Samantha walked back into her office building.

CHAPTER TWO
    ‘J UST THINK , in a little over a week I shall be in Haslewich with Bobbie.’
    Samantha closed her eyes and smiled in delicious anticipation, looking more like the teenager she had been when Liam had first met her than the sophisticated, independent career woman she now was.
    On the opposite side of the elegant mahogany dining table, which was a family heirloom and which her mother had insisted on bringing with them from the family residence in the small town which her husband’s family had virtually founded to the Governor’s residence where they now all lived together, Sarah Jane Miller smiled tenderly at her daughter.
    ‘I really do envy you, darling,’ she told her. ‘I just wish that your father and I were coming with you but it’s impossible right now.’
    ‘I know, but at least you’ll be getting to spend Christmas with Bobbie this year. Dad’s term of office will have finished by then.’
    ‘Mmm... I must admit I shan’t be sorry,’ her mother responded, and then looked apologetically across the table to the