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Caroline Anderson has the mind of a butterfly. She’s been a nurse, a secretary, a teacher, run her own soft-furnishing business and now she’s settled on writing. She says, ‘I was looking for that elusive something. I finally realised it was variety and now I have it in abundance. Every book brings new horizons and new friends, and in between books I have learned to be a juggler. My teacher husband John and I have two beautiful and talented daughters, Sarah and Hannah, umpteen pets and several acres of Suffolk that nature tries to reclaim every time we turn our backs!’ Caroline writes for the Mills & Boon Romance and the Mills & Boon Medical™ series. Make sure you look out for her latest books!
A Special Kind of Woman
by
Caroline Anderson
CHAPTER ONE
‘THAT’S it, there.’
Cait looked up at the grim and forbidding exterior of the halls of residence and her heart sank. Oh, lord. Her baby was going to be living here in this dismal grey pile, hemmed in by endless buildings and concrete and dirt and vice—
‘Look, Mum, there’s a parking place, by that Mercedes.’
So there was. What an unfortunate contrast. She zipped her modest old banger across the road into the space just ahead of another car, triggering a blast on the horn and wild gestures the meaning of which she could only guess at.
She resisted the urge to gesture back, and reversed neatly into place behind the Mercedes. ‘OK. I wonder if we’ve got enough money to feed the meter and keep it quiet for an hour or so?’
‘It won’t take that long,’ Milly said naïvely. ‘I’ve only got a few things.’
Cait glanced in the rear-view mirror at the teetering pile of essentials Milly had simply had to bring with her, and sighed. A few things? In her dreams.
She fed the meter—copiously—and then they had to run the gauntlet of the security system to gain access to the entrance hall. Milly went up to the porter behind his desk in the porter’s lodge and smiled a little uncertainly. ‘Hi. I’m Emily Cooper. I’ve got a room here this year?’
‘Sure. Cooper—here it is. Here’s your swipe card, your room key, information about the phone system, rules of the hall…’
He handed over a sheaf of papers, rattled off some instructions and dropped the key in Milly’s outstretched hand. ‘Give me a shout if you need any help.’
‘Right, let’s go and have a look,’ Cait said. ‘We’ll bring in your things in a minute.’ She summoned up an encouraging smile, and Milly smiled back, her face a little tight and pale.
To be fair, it was probably pale because of all the wild partying and farewells that had been going on for the past few days, but Cait knew she was also apprehensive.
It was a huge step in her life, and one Cait had no personal experience of to fall back on in her encouragement. She couldn’t give her the ‘don’t do this and you’ll enjoy that and try the other’ sort of talk she might have been able to under other circumstances, because she’d never made it to university, despite her ambition to read Law. Instead she’d been struggling to raise Emily and keep a roof over their heads.
Not that she’d ever been as clever as her brilliant and multi-talented daughter. Still, she’d done her best for her, kept her nose to the grindstone and been there for her for the last eighteen years.
And now it was time to let go.
Oh, help.
‘It looks quite decent,’ Milly said slowly, as if she was trying to convince herself. ‘At least the paint’s new.’
On old and crumbling walls, Cait thought with a return of her maternal panic. Oh, yipes. She dredged up a smile. ‘Here’s your room! Look, it’s handy for the kitchen. That’ll be nice.’
‘Not when everyone’s making tea in the middle of the night,’ Milly said pragmatically and shoved her key in the lock.
The door swung open to reveal a fairly small and barren room. Although like the corridor outside it had been recently decorated, still it seemed bare and forbidding, and Cait’s heart sank. There was a bed, a chair, a battered old desk with some wonky shelves over it, a wardrobe in the corner and that was it. Home from home it was not, even though their home was far from luxurious. Poor baby.
‘Well, at least it’s clean, and the carpet’s new, by the look of it,’ she said with false cheer. ‘What’s the bed like?’
Milly bounced experimentally. ‘OK. Bit soft.’ She stood up and looked out of the window into an inner courtyard, and her face fell. What a dismal view, Cait thought. The bins. Oh, lord.
‘At least you won’t have the traffic noise from the street,’ she said bracingly, and Milly made a small noise that might have been agreement. ‘Come on, let’s get your things and you can unpack and put everything out on the shelves. It’ll look a lot better then.’
Milly made the same noncommittal noise, and with an inward sigh Cait followed her back out to the car. They brought in the cases first, bumping and banging on their legs and the walls of the corridor, and as they struggled up the stairs to the second floor, they had to pause to let two people pass.
The man went first, tall and rugged, flashing her a brief, impersonal smile of thanks that for some reason made her heart beat faster, then a young man Cait thought was probably his son paused beside Emily.
‘Hey—Milly, isn’t it?’ he said, and Milly flipped her hair out of her eyes.
‘Hi, Josh!’ she exclaimed, and smiled up at him with every appearance of delight. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Same as you, I guess.’ He lounged against the stairwell wall and grinned. ‘So, did you make it to medicine?’
‘Yes—did you?’
‘Yeah—hey, that’s really cool!’ His grin widened, and Milly’s smile lit up her face.
She’s really beautiful, Cait thought with a lump in her throat. Oh, heck. Will she be all right?
‘Josh?’
The voice echoed back up the corridor, and he pulled a face. ‘Coming!’ he called, and flashed her another grin. ‘I’ll see you around, Milly.’ He bounded down the stairs two at a time and disappeared round the corner.
Cait watched him go, tall and gangly but with a cheerful friendliness about him that lightened her spirits. ‘So who was that?’ she asked Milly casually.
‘Oh, his name’s Josh something—can’t remember. He was at one of the other schools in town—I’ve seen him around. He went out with Jo for a bit. I met him on a conference in Cambridge as well, but I haven’t seen him for ages.’
‘Well, it’s someone you know, anyway,’ Cait said, relieved as much for herself as for her daughter. ‘It’s always nice to see a familiar face, and he seemed pleased to see you. Come on, let’s get these bags in.’
The bags were the easy bit. The boxes were much more of a challenge, and Cait was wondering how on earth she was going to get up the stairs with the last one, a hugely awkward lump that seemed determined to defeat her, when she felt the weight taken out of her hands.
‘Here, let me,’ a soft, deep voice murmured.
‘Thanks.’ She stepped back and smiled, then their eyes met and her heart hiccuped behind her ribs. ‘Oh—you’re Josh’s father,’ she said inanely.
‘That’s right. Owen Douglas.’
‘I’m Milly’s mother—Cait Cooper.’
‘Her mother? Good heavens. I thought you were her sister or aunt or something.’
Flattery?