BREAKING POINT

Mia’s smile was all the response needed.

Her mother was smiling, too. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you two hadn’t found me.”

“It was our pleasure,” Joey said. Wasn’t it, Penny?”Property © of NôvelDrama.Org.

“Sure was.” Penny’s smile lit up her face and Joey’s heart gave a curious little extra thump. He turned away from that smile to say goodbye to Mia and her mother. It wouldn’t make any difference because he couldn’t act on that attraction. He wasn’t even going to be in the same house with her soon if everything went well, which was a good thing for him

With the passion she always displayed with Howard and to keep her independence, he knew that Penny was the type of woman who would fall in love and be just as passionate about being a loving and loyal partner. Just as she had been with Jeremy.

The guy that would win that love would be the luckiest man on earth. The image of Penny standing there with her baby in her arms was still in his head even though she was behind him. That unknown man would not only win the love of an extraordinary woman but he would get the bonus of a beautiful baby son.

He’d better love him, Joey thought fiercely.

As if he were his own. And he’d better know exactly how lucky he was and protect both Penny and Howard as if his own life depended on it.

He would…In some ways, it was a damn shame he couldn’t be that man but that was how it was.

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Penny was murmuring as she tucked Howard in for his afternoon nap

“I’m going to miss you so much, but we’ll be okay,” she was saying to the sleeping baby. “We will be very happy. Mummy will be able to work more and you’ll love being in day care with all the other babies…”

Oh, dear… The way her words got caught on the lump forming in her throat wasn’t a good sign. She hated the very idea of it, didn’t she?

Every bit of it. She was going to miss Howard. And she hated the idea of leaving her baby in the care of strangers.

She already felt like she was loosing Joey.

Unconsciously, Penny put her fingertips to her lips. The way she often found herself doing when she thought about kissing Joey.

Just a friendly kiss maybe, she tried to tell herself. The sort you might give to a very good friend to thank them for something important. Like them being okay with knowing that they were never going to be anything more than a friend because they understood exactly why you felt like that.

Trouble was, Penny was only pretending to understand. She was in love with Joey. She wasn’t sure how and when it happened. Hell, after the way things ended with Jeremy she didn’t see herself feeling this way about anyone anytime soon, but here she was. Somehow it had always been there, just that she didn’t let herself think about because she was with Jeremy. But now, she wanted to be with Joey. So much that it ached right down to her bones as she thought about him.

With a sigh, Penny turned away from the baby, checking that the blind was pulled down far enough on the window to prevent any sun shining directly onto Howard in the next hour or so. It wasn’t, so she moved to draw it further down.

Her room was on a corner of the house and this window gave her a view past the edge of the gardens around the kitchen terrace. She could see Joey working in the veggie garden, hauling out the last of the tallest weeds by hand with the garden fork and a spade jammed into the earth nearby, ready for when they were needed for stubborn roots.

He’d been out there working for hours already today, with only a short break for lunch, and he had cleared and turned over the earth of more than half of the large patch of land.

It was clearly harder going now, in the burst of afternoon warmth. She saw him pause to wipe sweat off his face with the hem of his tee shirt and she could see the way he pushed damp strands of hair back from his face. It made her smile because she knew how tousled and disreputable it would make him look-as he did sometimes first thing in the morning before he’d brushed his hair.

Penny loved that look best of all.

She’d take him a cold drink, she decided, picking up the handset of the baby monitor that would let her know the instant Howard woke up. She might even get an hour or so to help dig before that happened, which was when she was planning to take Howard for a ride in Joey’s car to the garden centre to buy trays of vegetable plants to fill in the newly bare stretch of soil.

The cold glass of water was apparently ex-actly what Joey had been hanging out for but it seemed to make him feel even hotter. A few minutes later, he stripped off his tee shirt, rolling it up into a ball to mop his face before he continued digging, now wearing only his shorts and a pair of rubber boots.

Penny was in shorts, too. And a white singlet top beneath a soft, denim shirt. She took the shirt off and hung it over the handle of the wheelbarrow to keep at least one item of clothing clean and then she took the fork and headed for a new clump of weeds, leaving Joey to pull things up by hand and use the spade to turn and chop the soil.

“I’m going to get plants rather than seeds,”  Joey told her, when she carried an armload of rubbish past him as she headed for the wheelbarrow. “That way it’ll give people the idea they’ll be growing all their own food in no time.”

“Good idea” Penny said.

“Yeah…I’m thinking broccoli and cauli-flowers and cabbage. And beans and peas.

Except we’d need frames for them to climb on, wouldn’t we? There’s a fence buried under the weeds here. I seem to remember that was for beans. With a bit of luck, the posts won’t be too rotten.”

“What else you grow? Potatoes?”

“Of course. Not that you can get them as plants but I remember how to mound up the rows and people will know what they’re for.”