‘Is Adam the Pensions Lawyer as sexy as Tiger the Nomad?’ she teased.
Maggie gave her a withering stare. ‘I’m sorry I mentioned Adam now,’ she said. ‘I shan’t next time and you’ll need to get your gossip fix from somewhere else.’
She was grinning.
22
Business was brisk at Angie’s wellness centre. As well as the reiki, she was now offering energy psychology and well-being coaching. She had also taken on a reflexologist, Kate, who she had met on a training course, and the pair of them had moved into premises off Fossgate and rebranded the place as Live Well. It was a world away from working out of her lounge. The centre had a little reception area and two treatment rooms, and there was even a tiny shower room that had been craftily shoehorned into what had once been a storage cupboard. Her clientele was growing all the time, and mainly by word of mouth, which Angie found very gratifying.
Of course, things would have to change when the baby was born, but Angie was certain that she could take the baby to work with her. Babies were small and portable, weren’t they? And they slept a lot. So, by reshuffling her hours a bit and maybe taking someone else on part-time, she could keep things ticking over until she was ready to go back full-time. She wasn’t fazed by what lay ahead. Like everything in her life, she would just make it up as she went along.
What was currently taking her attention were the difficulties that came with working through her constant nausea. Whilst she had been mercifully spared full morning sickness, the waves of low-level queasiness could come upon her at any minute, which she found just as stressful. She had tried ginger in all its forms – raw, crystallised, tea, and even just as a plain ginger snap – but it did little to quell the fear of constantly being on the brink of disaster. Acupuncture was also supposed to help, so she had booked herself an appointment with a practitioner that she knew. The results, she had to admit, were mixed, despite her strong desire for this to be the panacea she sought, but it had given her something else to focus on for a while. She had just been on the verge of having to tell Kate what was happening to her body and why she had caught her devouring a packet of salt and chemical-laced prawn cocktail crisps at eight in the morning, when the sickness finally lifted, and she began to feel more like herself. It was such a relief to feel normal again, and she congratulated herself on having made it through the first three months relatively unscathed.
But Jax still didn’t know.
Angie had told herself that this was because she wanted to tell him face to face and was waiting for his next visit before she broke the news. It was a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and so it had allowed her not to examine her motives too closely. The Easter holidays were almost upon them and Jax had managed to swing the bank holidays off, so he was planning to come north for a long weekend. Angie’s excitement at seeing him was barely tainted by the apprehension of how he might react to their news. The longer she had to get used to the idea of the baby herself, the stronger her conviction that Jax would be fine with it. There was even the tiniest hint of a bump now for him to relate to. How could he not fall in love with the idea when he could rest his hand on his growing child?
And if he didn’t? Well, that no longer mattered that much. Angie had moved beyond those concerns. She was happy. If he was too, then that was perfect, but if not, she would just manage without him. She was under no illusion that he would up sticks and move to Yorkshire, and so whatever he said, she knew that she would be pretty much on her own anyway.
When he rang the doorbell on Good Friday and she bounded down to open it, it took him less than a minute to realise what had happened. Something about the look on her face, perhaps, her glowing skin, her serenity. Whatever it was, Jax could see it in her straight away.
He looked into her eyes, holding her gaze a moment longer than he might have otherwise, and then let his eyes drop to her stomach.
‘How did that happen, then?’ he asked.
She thought his tone suggested curiosity rather than anger, but she had been hoping for a more enthusiastic response to her revelation. Angie held her breath, ready to defend herself and her unborn child, but hoping that she wouldn’t have to.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, not entirely truthfully. ‘But it did.’
‘And, how are you?’ Jax asked. His features softened a little, as if the shock was wearing off.
‘I’m great,’ she replied. ‘I was a bit sick at the beginning, but now . . .’ She paused, still not sure of how he would feel about her having kept their news to herself, secretly buried deep inside her with the embryo.