by Holly Martin
Skye watched her go. Well, that was interesting.
Chapter Four
Jesse watched Skye as she moved around the café, chatting and laughing with the customers, engaging with the waiters and waitresses. Whenever he came over to see her, he would end up helping her in the café – he loved working alongside her and he had no doubt that he would be working here again during his stay. Watching her now, she was completely captivating.
‘Do you love her?’
Jesse snapped his eyes to his daughter who he’d thought had been engrossed in her book. She was watching him, her green eyes completely unwavering.
He cleared his throat. ‘Who?’
She let out a bark of laughter and he sighed. ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Because you haven’t been able to take your eyes off her all night. Because when she comes over to talk to us, your whole face lights up. Because you have tons of friends around Canada and America, and you never go and see them but you’re quite happy to fly halfway across the world to see Skye. Because when we were together, the three of us as a family, even if it was a fake family, I have never seen you so completely happy. You weren’t even that happy when Mom was around. So do you?’
He stared at her in shock. Clearly subtlety wasn’t his strong point.
‘It’s, umm… complicated.’
‘Not really. Love is pretty straightforward. You either do or you don’t. It’s complicated if you put obstacles in the way or if the other person doesn’t feel the same, which I’m pretty sure she does, but whether you love her or not is the simple part.’
He had no words.
‘Where did you get all that from?’
Bea shrugged. ‘Dr Jermaine. He wrote one of Mom’s self-help books. She had loads lying around the place that you boxed up and threw in the garage after she left. I dug a few out. Most of it is a load of crap but some of it has good points.’
‘Why are you reading self-help books?’ Christ, his daughter was twelve and now she was becoming some kind of guru.
She shrugged. ‘Boredom. I’ve read all the books in the house and then I found Mom’s old ones in the garage. I thought why not. I’ve also read all of her Velvet Steele books; she seems to know a lot about love too.’
Jesse was pretty sure there was sex in most of the Velvet Steele books. God, he hadn’t had that talk with her yet.
‘Was there…’ he swallowed. ‘Did you understand all of that? I mean, those books are meant for adults.’
‘You mean the sex scenes? Yeah, we learned all about that in school.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes, you signed a consent form to let me do it.’
‘I did?’ He never paid any attention to the stuff Bea got him to sign.
‘Yes. And we watched a film about how babies are made.’
Holy shit.
Jesse swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. ‘Did you have any questions about the film?’
‘No. And if I did there’s always Google.’
He dreaded to think what kind of search results Google would return if Bea typed in anything to do with sex.
‘I think if you have questions about that sort of thing, you should probably ask me.’ He rubbed his chin as he thought. Maybe it would be easier if Bea talked to a woman about this; she might be a bit more comfortable talking to his sister. ‘Or you could talk to Madison or even Skye.’
‘OK. I will,’ Bea said, easily.
‘So what did the film… show you?’
‘There were two naked cartoon figures chasing each other around the room with a feather.’
‘A feather?’ What the hell was this video?
‘And then they started having sex,’ Bea said.
Christ, he’d been hoping for a more scientific video about the sperm and the egg. Why was his twelve-year-old daughter watching a video about how to have sex? She wouldn’t be having sex until she was at least thirty-five, at least not if he had anything to do with it.
‘Right, well… the feather isn’t really part of it. Well, I suppose it can be, but it’s not part of the normal checklist.’
‘One of the boys asked about condoms.’
‘Umm, yes. That’s probably more important than a feather.’
‘But you can’t make babies if you’re wearing a condom.’
‘Well, no.’ That wasn’t entirely true, Bea had been conceived when he’d been wearing a condom, but there was no reason to get into that.
‘The other kids didn’t understand why, if you don’t want to make a baby, you would have sex – they didn’t really see the point of the condom. I said that when you love someone you have sex for fun and the other children didn’t believe me. They think the whole thing is really gross. Is it?’
‘No it’s not.’
‘So you can have sex for fun?’
He glanced around the café and noticed there were a middle-aged couple sitting at the next table, spoons poised halfway between their bowls and their mouths as they sat listening to his conversation.
He returned his attention to Bea. Sex was nothing to be embarrassed about and he needed to show his daughter he was comfortable with this.
‘Yes.’
‘So have you and Skye had sex?’
Well, this had just escalated. He was not going to lie to her but equally he didn’t want to tell her the truth. He had tried very hard to keep his weird relationship with Skye a secret from Bea over the years. He didn’t want her to develop an attachment to Skye and then get hurt all over again when it came to an end. Although it seemed that attachment had already been made; she adored Skye.
He had questioned his decision to divorce Skye as they had originally planned several times over the last few years. He’d told Bea, all the way through their fake marriage, that it wasn’t real, that it was just an arrangement so Skye could stay in Canada and that it was only going to last a year. He’d maintained that façade so that when the year came to an end and they divorced, Bea would know it was going to happen and wouldn’t get upset that Skye was leaving. So as far as Bea was concerned they had been friends, sharing a house, sleeping in the same bed, as she hadn’t understood what sex was back then. What she didn’t know was that Jesse was making love to Skye every single night in his bed.
After their divorce, he’d kept up the pretence that they were just friends and, as time went on, it became harder to admit the truth: that he had been lying to his daughter for years. So they’d kept up their no-strings-attached-sex arrangement, no commitments, no one got hurt and Bea would never know so she’d never get hurt either. But she was getting older now, and a hell of a lot wiser. Was it time he came clean? But would it give her false hope, would she be expecting them to get married again? His relationship with Skye was working just fine right now, they didn’t need to change anything. OK, it absolutely wasn’t working. He missed her like crazy. He spoke to her every day and it just wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t going to change. She had a life here in England, she loved being with her sisters, she had worked hard to help with their family hotel and Cones at the Cove looked fabulous, a huge difference from the shack it had been the year before. He had a life in Canada, his sister, friends, Bea had school and friends too. It would be a long and complicated process to move to the UK and, no matter how much he liked Skye, he didn’t exactly trust her enough to commit to a long-term relationship. She was… flighty. And where would that leave him and Bea if it did come to an end? They would have to move back to Canada and that was a lot of upheaval for a girl who’d already had upsetting changes in her life. Maybe it was better if he and Skye kept things as they were.
He thought about the engagement ring that was burning a hole in his suitcase, the one he brought with him on every trip to see Skye and the one he always took back home with him, never having had the guts to ask her or to change things between them. He imagined that the ring would be going home with him on this occasion too, just like it had many times before.
‘I’ll take y
our silence as a yes,’ Bea said, turning her attention back to her book. ‘And I guess that means you do love her.’
He wanted to tell her that sex and love were two different things but that was probably a conversation for when she was older.
‘Why do you have an interest in sex all of a sudden?’
‘Eww, I don’t have any interest in having sex, I’m twelve years old. I won’t be having sex until I’m married and that’s not going to happen until I’m at least thirty.’
He smiled at that attitude.
‘I have my own life to lead first before I get tied down with a husband and kids that won’t leave me alone.’
He frowned. ‘Where did you hear that?’
He prayed that it was in one of the books she’d read.
She shrugged. ‘Mom used to say she regretted getting married so young, that she wished she’d had a life first before she got tied down. She said that neither of you wanted kids and it was a bit of a disappointment when I came along.’
He stared at her. ‘Shit, Bea…’
‘Don’t swear.’
‘Sorry. Bea, that isn’t true. I wanted children.’ He thought carefully about what to say next. He didn’t want to paint Ginny in a bad light. But there was no way he wanted Bea to think she was unwanted, that simply wasn’t the case. ‘When me and your mom got together, she said she didn’t want kids and I took that to mean she didn’t want them right then. I soon realised that she didn’t want them at all. I was disappointed but I respected that. Children aren’t for everyone and it was her body at the end of the day. I wasn’t going to coerce her into doing something she didn’t want to do. Of course it was a bit of a surprise to find out your mom was pregnant, we had been so careful, but it wasn’t an unwelcome surprise, not for me. There has not been a single day since you were born that I ever regretted having you. You are my entire world and I love you with everything I have.’
She stared back at him. ‘I know. Mom was kind of a crappy mom, wasn’t she?’
Ginny had been a terrible mom and an awful wife. She’d had an affair, something that Bea still didn’t know about. He himself hadn’t found out about it until the very end of their sham of a marriage, but it had turned out that every time Ginny had gone off for weeks at a time under the pretext of finding herself or needing a break, she had been with him, the man she was now happily married to.
There’d been many times, like now, that he wished he’d never met her. Except that she had given him Bea and he could never ever regret that. But although it had been five years since Ginny had even seen or spoken to her daughter, he refused to bad-mouth her to Bea. There might come a time later, when Bea was older, when she would want to rekindle her relationship with her mom and he didn’t want to do anything to taint Bea’s view of Ginny with his own.
‘I think she had some issues,’ Jesse said, carefully.
Bea snorted. ‘That’s putting it mildly. But anyway, I don’t think marriage is really for me.’
God, this conversation was going from bad to worse. ‘I don’t think you should be put off marriage just because mine and your mom’s marriage didn’t work out.’
‘And yours and Skye’s.’
‘That wasn’t real, you know that.’
‘I saw you two kissing once. That looked pretty real.’
Oh man. How could he explain that one?
‘And when marriages end, it hurts. You were hurt when Mom walked out on us. I could see that. And when you and Skye got divorced, Skye didn’t want that and I don’t think you did either.’
He swallowed the lump of emotion in his throat. ‘What makes you think Skye didn’t want that?’
‘Because when you got the letter saying the divorce was final, I came into the kitchen when she was alone and she had the divorce letter in front of her and she was crying.’
Jesse went very still. ‘What?’
‘She didn’t know I was there. I watched her read it, and then she burst into tears. Her head was in her hands and she was sobbing. I’d never seen her cry before. I was going to go in and hug her but then she got up and walked out and I thought she might want to be left alone.’
He had no words at all. He glanced over at Skye, who was laughing at something one of the waitresses was saying. His heart hurt.
‘So if marriage is something that hurts that much, I don’t think I want it.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I think when you fall in love with someone, you won’t think marriage is such a bad thing after all.’
‘But if you love someone, that’s when it hurts the most – when it comes to an end.’
He glanced over at Skye again. He had nothing to say to that because that was the heartbreaking truth.
Chapter Five
It was the early hours of the morning when Skye was woken as Jesse climbed into bed behind her. He and Bea had come back to her cottage after the café had closed and they’d talked for a while but eventually she’d started to flag. Their body clocks were still several hours behind so Jesse and Bea had stayed up chatting for a while. As far as his daughter was concerned, Jesse was sleeping on the sofa but Skye had known that as soon as Bea was asleep he would join her. He curled himself around Skye, pulling her t-shirt off her shoulder as he placed a kiss on the side of the neck. She stretched in his arms.
‘Go back to sleep,’ Jesse said, dropping another kiss on her shoulder and sliding a hand up her bare thigh. ‘I won’t be long.’
Skye giggled. ‘As if I could sleep with you humping me like a wild animal.’
‘Christ, that sounds delightful,’ Jesse said, dryly. ‘No wonder you divorced me if it’s that bad.’
‘I never divorced you, you divorced me and who said anything about it being bad. I like it when you ravage me.’
‘Ravage doesn’t sound good either.’
She rolled onto her back so she could look at him and stroke his face. ‘When you’re on top of me, pinning me to the bed, when you’re inside of me, when your mouth is devouring my body like you’re a starving man being offered steak, when you consume me so there’s only us and nothing else, there is no greater feeling in the world. I certainly couldn’t sleep when you’re giving me multiple orgasms either.’
He smiled slightly. ‘I get carried away when I’m with you.’
‘No complaints from me.’
He smiled, his eyes scanning her face, drinking her in. She ran her thumb over his lips and he kissed it, then kissed her hand. She stroked her hand down his bare tattooed shoulder. He pulled her t-shirt over her head and threw it across the room, his hands immediately caressing her body. His fingers were rough, a lifetime of working with his hands, but she loved the feel of it as he treasured her body. He bent his head and kissed her. God, the taste of him was like coming home. His hands continued to explore and caress her body, and he slipped his hand between her legs, immediately igniting a fire inside of her. She touched his face again, relishing the feel of his beard underneath her fingers. It was mere moments before she was trembling in his arms, moaning against his lips, but he carried on kissing her throughout, swallowing her cries of pleasure, still touching her, stroking her until she was gasping for breath. He pulled back slightly to look at her, his breath heavy. She stared up into his eyes, watching as his face lit up into a smile as he gazed at her. God she loved this man.
He reached over and grabbed a condom from her drawers, barely taking his eyes from hers as he slid it on. He rolled over so he was on top of her, surrounding her with his huge body, then he kissed her as he settled himself between her legs. He was so big, she could barely wrap her legs around him. He pinned her hands above her head, causing her body to curve upwards towards his. As he kissed her, he slid inside her in one swift, exquisite movement. She groaned against his lips as he filled her completely, heart, body and soul.
He pulled back to look at her. ‘Christ, I’ve missed this. Not just sex. You, us.’
‘I’ve missed you too. There’s not a day that goes by that I don
’t think about you, that I don’t crave you. I miss your touch, your companionship, your laughter, this beautiful smile. It hurts when you leave and I start counting down the days until I can see you again.’
‘It’s not enough, is it? What we have isn’t enough,’ Jesse said.
She shook her head.
He frowned slightly and kissed her again, releasing her hands and gathering her close. She wrapped her arms around his neck, running her hands over his broad shoulders as he moved against her.
It wasn’t enough. She wanted forever with this man.
And it was that thought that sent her crashing over the edge as he kissed her hard and she moaned against his lips.
He pulled back slightly to watch her as she fell apart, her breath heavy against his lips. But from the look he gave her as he kissed her again, she knew he was far from finished.
Skye stared at the man she loved. They were lying side by side, staring at each other, stroking and gently touching as if discovering each other all over again.
They’d dozed for a while, wrapped around one another, but now they were both awake, not talking, just touching, enjoying being together. Jesse would have to leave her soon, go back to the sofa in case Bea got up and wondered where he was.
Her heart was so full of him, it felt like it would burst. Should she tell him what she wanted, that she wanted more? He’d already said that what they had wasn’t enough. Would now be a good time to follow up on that? She wanted to tell him how she felt and she had promised herself she would but she was enjoying this moment too much to want to ruin it. What if he didn’t say it back or, worse, if he said something like, ‘That’s nice but I only see you as a friend.’ God, the thought of that made her sick. But as long as she told him at some point while he was here, then she was still keeping that promise to herself. She just had to pick the right moment and maybe now, their first night together in months, wasn’t the right time. Not when they had two weeks ahead of them.