Free A Shameful Consequence by Carol Marinelli Page B

for the endless silent innuendos, for the smile on his face as she washed him.
    For so many things.
    Except it was here or the street.
    ‘I’ll check on you later,’ Connie said when Henry was settled, but still her baby wept.
    ‘I’d like that.’
    She did not respond, tried to ignore his veiled meanings, because, as she told herself so very often, he was all talk—but how she loathed it.
    Loathed it so much her skin crawled in his presence, but she tried to look for the good in things. It was hereshe had worked through her pregnancy and Henry
had
hired someone to care for him for three weeks after a very difficult delivery and allowed her to stay there.
    She picked up her babe and held him, closing her eyes against dizzy fatigue, and hoped against hope that the tablets the doctor had given her would work, that the cloud would soon lift and she could start creating a proper future for herself and her son.
    ‘We’ll get there,’ she said to her tiny baby, holding him tight, but he would not be soothed. All he wanted was to be fed. ‘Soon,’ Connie hushed, because first there was a difficult conversation to have, an unexpected visitor to attend to, and, most importantly, Henry must have no idea she had allowed someone to enter his home.
    Nico watched as she came down the stairs, holding the still crying baby, and she pressed her finger to her lips, warning him not to speak. She gestured for him to follow, which he did, down the long hallway to the rear of the house where she pushed open a large door. He found himself in a kitchen area, much brighter than what he had seen of the rest of the house. There was a certain homeliness to it—there was a crib and there was also a sofa decorated brightly with cushions.
    She turned on the television and still she did not speak, placing the baby in his crib and trying to placate him with a dummy. She stacked and turned on the dishwasher and then turned the television up louder and only when there was enough noise filling the room to disguise their words did she speak.
    ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Keep your voice down.’
    ‘I’m not the one making the noise,’ Nico pointed out, because the baby had spat out his dummy and was again shrieking.
    ‘I need to feed him.’
    ‘Then feed him,’ Nico said. ‘I’ll make a drink.’ He found his way about the kitchen as the woman he had spent but a few hours with picked up her child and sat on the sofa and started to feed her babe.
    It was not as awkward as she expected, just a relief to finally sit and feed him, to let her brain catch up with the turn of events as Nico boiled the kettle and read the instructions on a jar of instant coffee.
    ‘A teaspoon,’ Connie said, ‘and two of sugar.’
    ‘It looks revolting,’ Nico commented, because he had never had instant coffee before and certainly not the powdered home brand that was available to him now.
    ‘Don’t talk about my friend like that,’ Constantine said, because coffee was possibly her only friend at the moment. It was her saviour at two a.m. and again at four, and it woke her up in the mornings, and now, after this one, she could tackle the mountain of washing both Henry and the baby created. She watched Nico’s lips move into a small smile as he got her wry humour.
    He was really rather patient, making her a drink and letting her feed her baby in gentle silence for a little while. Patient was something she would never have expected a man like Nico to be in a circumstance such as this.
    She had read more about him, of course, since then.
    A man who jetted around Europe and America, a man of many lovers and deals, he bristled with restless energy and yet, as she fed the baby, he sat on a barstool and sipped on his coffee. Then he looked, not in an embarrassed or awkward way because she was feeding, he just looked straight into her eyes and his voice when it came seemed to reach into her soul, because he was the first person to ask without accusation, the first