Blind-Date Baby by Fiona Harper Page A

But, when he imagined her sitting across the table from him at dinner, she refused to look like her picture. Her hair darkened. Her smile became mischievous. One eyebrow arched high.
    Oh, dear. He knew what this meant.
    He’d learned long ago that he was the sort of person who had hunches. Not just run-of-the-mill inklings, but powerful, knock-the-breath-out-of-you hunches. It had started when he’d been a teenager and had always been able to guess theplot lines of all his favourite TV programmes. Even the fiendishly clever detective shows. Sometimes, with very little visible evidence, he just knew how things were going to turn out—in life and on the screen.
    Over the years, he’d learned to follow his hunches, hone his skills. His agent told him his ability to create rich and twisting plots that surprised and satisfied was the main reason his books were so successful. Sometimes his hunches were so strong, so deep-seated, they dug in and refused to let go, even when those around him questioned his sanity. When his subconscious went all Rottweiler on him, there was normally a good reason for it. He just didn’t always know what that reason was until much, much later.
    And his inner Rottweiler had decided it liked the look of Grace Marlowe.
    Frankly, he couldn’t blame it.
    That was it then. No point in fighting it. He could pretend to himself he would test the waters, see how things went, but if he was brutally honest he knew how this would all end. How it must end.
    Grace Marlowe would be his blind-date bride.
    Shaking his head at how sensible that sounded, how right he felt about it, he flicked down to the next email on the list and opened it up.
    Englishcrumpet has sent you the following message:
    Dear Noah,
    Thank you for the lovely dinner and for the beautiful flowers. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, but I’m not interested in another date and I want to be clear about that. Right now, friendship is all I’m looking for and all I can offer you.
    Best wishes, Grace.

    Noah folded his arms and stared at Grace’s message. This was going to make the whole ‘getting married to Grace’ thing interesting. He smiled to himself. He liked interesting.
    Friendship? Well, he’d see about that.
     
    Vinehurst had always been a picturesque corner of London, but it had suffered a difficult period recently, with the small shops like grocers, butchers, ironmongers going out of business as trade moved to the supermarkets and out-of-town retail parks. For a while, many of the little shops on the High Street had been empty, or taken over by cut-price operations selling electrical goods or cheap toys. But in the last ten years the area had undergone a regeneration, with many of the more affluent Londoners looking for more affordable housing away from central London’s rocketing property prices.
    Not surprising, as it had wonderful properties, from charming terraced cottages to grand Victorian villas. He’d seen the potential well before it had become fashionable. That was another hunch that had worked out for him. Friends had told him he was mad to buy the old manor house ‘out in the middle of nowhere’. It was actually right on the edge of the city where it finally ran out of steam and let the fields and woodland remain undeveloped. Those same friends had moaned it was on the ‘wrong’ side of London. Why didn’t he try Buckinghamshire? Or Gloucestershire? The right sort of people lived in Gloucestershire.
    But he hadn’t wanted to try Buckinghamshire. He’d had a ‘feeling’ about Vinehurst. It had excellent transport links to London, an airport nearby for light aircraft and his house had doubled in value in the four years since he’d bought it, thank you very much.
    He stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched into his collar as he walked up the street. A woman passing in theopposite direction caught his eye. She was young and pretty, with long blonde hair, and was pushing a toddler in a