Undertaking Love

Chapter Two




Crap, crap and triple crap. Gabriel Ryan was divine. ‘Are you selling lucky heather?’

Marla knew she sounded surly, but come on. Really?

What else could he expect when he turned up on her doorstep uninvited, all rumpled with come-to-bed eyes? The man might hold the future of her business in the palm of his hand, but right at that very moment the only question on Marla’s mind was how on earth the sexiest man on the planet could possibly be an undertaker.

His gypsy-black hair would probably be given to curls if he let it grow, but as it was it had just reached that optimum run-your-fingers-through sexy length without veering too far into goth territory. Truth be told, there was something ever so slightly grungy about him. But cool, louche, stubbly grunge, rather than the patchouli-soaked rocker-in-need-of-a-bath kind.

He was smokin’ hot, and Marla didn’t have a fire extinguisher. Pity he was a funeral director. Eeew. Not to mention the fact that he was in danger of killing her business stone dead. The double reality check was enough to make his halo slip down to his throat, and Marla was only sad it wasn’t tight enough to pose a full on choking hazard. Gabriel Ryan might be easy on the eye, but as far as she was concerned, he was trouble in all the wrong ways.

His face cracked open into a big, easy smile as he lounged against the door frame and held out a chipped, empty mug.

‘Not heather, but any chance I could borrow a cup of sugar please?’

The ‘cup of sugar’ line again. He wasn’t even original. Marla leaned ever so slightly forward and gazed into the empty, tea-stained mug for a long moment before raising her eyes back up to his.

‘You must be Gabriel.’

He pushed his spare hand through his hair and assaulted her with that slow smile again.

Jeez, he had perfect teeth.

Marla was American.

Teeth mattered.

‘Guilty as charged. But please, it’s just Gabe.’

‘Gabe.’

His name felt treacherously good on her lips. A shiver ran down her backbone as he held her gaze for a second longer than strictly necessary. Invisible to the naked eye, a gossamer spider web of attraction spun around them, and undetectable to the human ear, Mother Nature’s wicked laugh tinkled off the chapel’s stained glass windows.

Marla swallowed hard. It was her move, but somehow it didn’t feel safe to invite him over the threshold. He was like a vampire trying to glamour her into submission, and he was doing a pretty good job of it. She gave herself a mental slap and swung the door wide. ‘Come on through.’

He stepped past her into the chapel, and as she closed the door she couldn’t help but take a sly sniff of him.

Not a whiff of patchouli or dead bodies.

Phew.

In fact, he smelled really rather delicious, all lemony-spice shower gel and fresh coffee. And, as it happened, Marla loved coffee. And lemons.

She led him into the small back kitchen and gestured for him to take a seat at the buttercup-yellow formica table. As she flicked the kettle on, she turned to him sceptically. ‘Do you really need sugar?’

He grinned again. He needed to stop doing that. It was distracting.

‘Not especially. But I could murder a coffee.’

Marla made no move to take his bashed up mug from him, but instead took down two pretty duck-egg blue cups from the cupboard and heaped coffee into them. They needed to talk. It might as well be civilised, over coffee. And at least here she had the advantage of being on home turf.

‘Sugar?’ She held the jar up.

He shook his head and laughed. ‘Never touch the stuff.’

Why oh why did he have to have a beautiful voice to match his beautiful face? His soft Irish lilt was full of gravel, as if the man had actually swallowed a bucket full of blarney stones. She placed the cups down on the table before dropping into the seat opposite him.

‘I’m Marla.’

‘Marla. That’s unusual.’

Oh God. Her name sounded bone-meltingly good with his Irish lilt. He rolled the R in the middle, as if he were playing with it in his mouth, and deciding whether or not to let it escape.

He raised his cup in salute. ‘To new neighbours.’

And there it was.

The perfect inroad into the most delicate of conversations. Marla sipped her coffee and eyed him over the rim, suddenly unsure how to begin now show time had arrived.

He lowered his cup and watched her steadily. ‘So … a little bird told me you wanted to see me.’

Marla coughed at the description of Guinness Guts as a ‘little bird’, but at least he appeared to have passed on her message. It was no good; she couldn’t put it off any longer. ‘Look, this is awkward, so I’ll just come right out and say it. I’m afraid you can’t move in next door.’

She breathed out hard and registered the way his eyebrows inched upwards. He nodded and took a long, contemplative sip of his coffee. ‘I know my line of business sometimes makes people a bit squeamish, but honestly, there’s no need to worry. I’ll make sure we don’t cause you any bother.’

Did he really think that that was all there was to this? That she was simply being squeamish? Unfortunately for Marla, he chose that moment to smile at her again and temporarily robbed her of the ability to speak.

‘Look. I promise you won’t be suddenly seeing dead bodies all the time or anything. Scout’s honour.’

He was trying to make light of it. The need to clarify the situation burned in Marla’s gut until she finally regained power over her vocal chords.

‘Gabe, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. This,’ she spread her hands to encompass the building around them. ‘This is a wedding chapel. It’s a happy place.’

Trouble seeped slowly into his dark eyes, but he held his tongue and let her speak.

‘It’s a place where people come to celebrate love, and life, and to enjoy the best day of their lives, you understand?’

He nodded, and for a second he looked as if he really might. Maybe there was hope, after all. Marla crossed her fingers underneath the table and waited.

‘Okay.’

Okay? Even in her wildest dreams, Marla hadn’t expected him to give in that easily.

‘Okay. I can see that our businesses are very different, but I’m also pretty sure we can work something out. A little give and take, you know?’

Damn it. Either he hadn’t listened, or he was being deliberately evasive.

‘Give and take? Give and take?’ She couldn’t hold her voice steady as it helter-skeltered up several octaves. ‘Gabe, people won’t book to get married here if they see a dirty great hearse parked up in the street or a wailing family outside.’

His brows knitted together at her harsh words. Gabe, in turn, watched pink spots burn on Marla’s cheeks.

‘Look, that probably sounded heartless, and honestly, I’m really not, but I … I just won’t let this happen.’

His expression was unreadable as he stared at her across the table. She went for broke.

‘The bottom line, Gabe, is this. Your business will kill my business.’

Gabe steepled his fingers in front of him, and any trace of merriment had died in his eyes when he looked up.

‘Then we have ourselves a problem.’

Marla’s stomach flipped over.

‘Because here’s the thing, Marla.’

His voice was soft enough for her to have to lean in close in order to hear him.

‘People come to me to celebrate love too, it’s just at the other end of life’s spectrum. It might not be happy, or frothy, but my services are just as important as yours. More so, probably.’

Distaste dripped from his every word, and pure steel underscored his deceptively soft tone.

‘You’ve made it very clear that I’m not your ideal neighbour, and trust me, I’ll make every effort to minimise the impact I have on you.’

He shook his head with a look of derision and scraped his chair back. He crossed the tiny kitchen in a couple of paces, before turning in the doorway to deliver his parting shot.

‘But make no mistake. Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely will be opening for business next door.’



Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all too familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely even seen each other, let alone made love.

What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.

Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.

They hadn’t expected to score a homerun on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in Alphabetti Spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?

In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.

‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’

In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.

Emily was just glad Tom was away on business. Again. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.

Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.

Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.

How in hell had it got this bad?

God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.

‘Let’s make a baby.’

He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.

Somewhere along the way since then sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly be any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.

He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.

A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.

But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?

The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.