A pile of clippings she’d cut from various catalogues and magazines littered her desk. She’d discovered over the years that she worked better with physical images she could mix and shuffle around until she found the perfect design combination. Picking up a picture of a set of bedding covered in delicate cherry blossoms, she stuck it on one of the suites she had in mind for a single guest. She was just adding a masculine alternative of deep navy and pale blue stripes when a knock at the door was followed immediately by a buoyant looking Tristan.
Ignoring her, he made a beeline for the large playpen in the corner where Isaac was sprawled on his belly watching episodes of In the Night Garden on a loop and swooped down to pick him up. ‘Guess how many bookings we’ve taken overnight, sunshine,’ Tristan said to Isaac as he lifted him high over his head. ‘Go on, guess how many.’
‘Tris, Tris, Tris!’ Isaac crowed, stretching out his chubby little hands towards Tristan who drew him in for a cuddle.
‘That’s right, you clever little sausage, it’s three!’
Forgetting all the angst he’d been causing her, Jess spun around in her seat to face him. ‘Three! Seriously? That’s brilliant.’
Perching on the corner of her desk, heedless of the mess he was making of her pile of cut outs, Tristan jogged Isaac up and down on one knee. ‘Only two more to go and we’ve got ourselves a full house.’
‘Singles or doubles?’ She asked, reaching for her red marker.
‘Two singles and a double. I’ve sent confirmation emails, including your preferences questionnaire.’ In order to try and offer a truly tailored experience, Jess had drawn up a list of questions to send out with each booking, including dietary requirements, favourite drinks and foods, reading and other entertainment. ‘And,’ Tristan continued. ‘I’ve already received deposits in the bank from two of them and a promise the third will pay this evening when they’re home. The singles are both female, and the couple are empty nesters looking for a distraction as it’s going to be the first Christmas when none of their children are coming home. They sent a lovely, chatty reply and I’m sure we’ll get lots more useful info from them when they return your questionnaire.’
‘Great,’ she muttered as she inked three more red asterisks on her working wall.
‘Well, you could sound a bit more enthusiastic about it. I thought that was the kind of stuff you wanted to know about the guests.’
Sinking back into her chair with a sigh, she held out her arms to Isaac and tucked him onto her lap for a comforting cuddle. Not that he was the one in need of any comfort, but Tristan’s comment about empty nesters had reminded her of something she’d been avoiding. Namely what she was going to do about Christmas with her own family. Though she’d told her parents exactly what her temporary role at the castle entailed, she hadn’t made it explicitly clear that she would be busy over the whole of the holiday period. There was also the tricky situation of Steve to tackle. Naturally, he would want to see the boys, but quite how they were going to manage that when he lived in student digs two hundred and fifty miles away she had no idea. ‘Sorry, I was thinking about Steve,’ she said without thinking.
‘Right, okay. Well, I leave you to it.’ Posture as stiff as his words, Tristan rose and marched from the room before she had chance to call him back and explain her offhand comment.
As the door clicked shut behind him, regret sparked into anger. Why should she feel the need to apologise to Tristan for the mere mention of her ex’s name? How on earth did he think they might have any kind of future together if he bristled anytime she spoke about Steve. Did he expect her to pretend the past six years hadn’t happened? That her children were some fatherless miracle visited upon her from up on high? Besides, he had no right to behave like this; it wasn’t as if she’d made any promises in return.
The unfairness of that popped the little bubble of anger. She’d made no promises, sure, but she also hadn’t set him straight. Every day that passed without her being honest with him and telling him there was no chance of a future between them, she was stoking his hopes. She would have to set him straight – and the sooner the better. Whatever lingering crush she might have on him were the foolish dreams of a naïve girl. Life wasn’t fairy tales and happy ever afters, and for her to even contemplate starting a new relationship when she was still hurting from the failure of her marriage was beyond stupid. ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’, or so the saying went. No thanks. ‘Once bitten, twice shy’ needed to be her motto for the foreseeable future. And Tristan wasn’t the only one she needed to be straight with. She needed to sort out with Steve when and how he was going to see the boys, and also make sure her parents were aware she wouldn’t be around for Christmas.
Standing to place Isaac back in his playpen she winced at the thought of her mother’s reaction. If Jess thought things were frosty between the two of them now, she needed to brace for the arctic conditions to come.
The matter of access came to a head a lot sooner than she’d anticipated when she wandered into the boys’ bedroom later that evening as their scheduled Skype chat with their father was winding up. ‘Say good night to Daddy, Eli. It’s almost your bedtime.’ She busied herself with folding and putting away the clean laundry in the washing basket Mrs W had brought up earlier as Elijah and Steve exchanged silly kissing noises and said good night to each other. Isaac had already crashed out and she paused to slide his sleep-heavy body under the quilt and settle his head on the pillow.
As she reached for the tablet to turn it off, Steve surprised her by saying. ‘Hey, Jess? Can we have a quick chat?’
Other than a hello and goodbye when he spoke to the children, most of their current communication was via quick emails, confirming convenient times for him to Skype, sorting out the last of the bills which had come through from the old house, that kind of thing. They kept it short and brisk, polite but careful to avoid slipping into the old patterns of conversation which had been second nature during their marriage. ‘Okay,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Can I call you back once I’ve got them down?’
‘Of course, speak soon.’
It didn’t take long to get Elijah into bed, and she gave a little prayer of thanks to the technology gods as she found a story for him to listen to quietly on the tablet and turned off all the lights apart from the little night light that cast stars onto the ceiling. She took a few more minutes to make herself a cup of tea, then curled up in the armchair in her sitting room and clicked the Skype app on her phone.
‘Everything all right?’ She asked by way of greeting as Steve’s image filled the screen. He looked tired from what she could see of his face in the dim light cast by the lamp on his desk.
‘Busy. And my brain hurts. I don’t remember university being this tough the first time around.’
‘That’s because you spent most of it getting pissed in the student bar,’ she said, with a smile.
‘Yeah.’ He scrubbed a hand over his already messy hair. ‘God, how did we cope burning the candle at both ends like that and still make it to lectures?’
‘Not all of us were party animals.’ Jess had spent her first year too worried about failing to go to more than the odd party and found herself hiding in the corner of the few she did attend. Everyone had seemed so much more confident than her, so full of certainty about everything from their career ambitions to their politics while she’d still felt like an unmoulded lump of clay.
She’d finally begun to get into the swing of uni life in her second year when, Marcus had been admitted to hospital for the first time, so out of his head on drugs and drink he’d been close to a fatal overdose. As she’d raced down the motorway in her little second-hand Fiesta, she hadn’t realised it would be the first of many such desperate dashes home. Any taste for a party lifestyle had been shocked out of her at the sight of him strapped to a gurney, her white-faced parents perched on a pair of uncomfortable plastic chairs beside his bed.
‘By the time I make it through the required reading, al
l I’m fit for is a cup of tea and my bed.’ Steve’s rueful grin chased away the ghosts of the past and she managed a little chuckle.
‘Poor old man. Now what did you want to talk to me about?’
Slumping back in his chair, Steve reached for a can of Diet Coke and took a long mouthful. ‘My mum’s been on at me about when she can see the kids.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yeah. She’s been talking to your mum and they’ve clearly been winding each other up. You know what they get like.’
She did, indeed. Friends since they’d been at primary school, the two women saw each other almost every day, and spoke on the phone on the rare days they didn’t. The move by both sets of parents to the same small village in Somerset had been their idea, and they’d often said they felt more like sisters than best friends. Jess and Steve had grown up enduring endless comments about how it was ideal they’d had a boy and a girl so their children could get married one day. When that prediction had come to pass, their mothers had been ecstatic, neither woman capable of comprehending that Jess and Steve had been running away from them rather than towards each other. They thought it was some kind of master plan, a love story written in the stars, and other such nonsense. Jess got the impression from Steve that his mother wasn’t any nearer to accepting the finality of their split any more than her mum was. Both were in for a serious disappointment.
Filled with trepidation about where the conversation was leading, she took a careful sip of her tea. ‘Dare I ask?’
‘They’ve got it into their heads that the eight of us should spend half-term together at Centre Parcs.’
‘What?’ Jess bolted up in her chair, spilling tea on her lap and almost knocking her phone off the arm rest. Yanking a tissue from a box on the table, she blotted the tea stain on her leggings. ‘Please tell me you’re kidding, that’s the week after next.’
‘Hey now, don’t shoot the messenger,’ Steve said, holding up his hands, palms facing the screen. ‘I’m not exactly thrilled about the idea. I’ve got a massive project due in the first week of the new term, but they seem dead set on it. Mum sent me a load of links about the one at Sherwood Forest which looks to be about an hour and half from you.’ He paused, then pulled a face. ‘They’ve already booked and paid for a four-bedroom luxury lodge.’
‘Without speaking to either of us first? Christ, they are unbelievable!’ Even as she said it, she knew it was all too believable. Once they got something into their heads, Wendy Wilson and Isla Ripley were an unstoppable force. The fact neither of their husbands ever showed much inclination to thwart their plans only added fuel to their fire. ‘How come this is the first I’m hearing about it?’
‘I guess I’m the advance party, and Wendy will be on the phone to you in the morning.’ Steve raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Parents, who’d bloody have them?’
Hold on a minute. ‘Advance party? Don’t tell me you’re going along with this madcap scheme of theirs.’
‘Well, it would be nice to spend some time with the boys, even if the timing isn’t brilliant’ Steve admitted. ‘I really miss them.’
Jess closed her eyes. They really missed him too, for all they got to chat to him, it didn’t make up for physical contact. Oh, bloody hell, she was going to have to go along with it too, wasn’t she? ‘I’ve got so much work to do, I can’t come for a whole week.’ She hugged her knees close to her chest and propped her chin on them, feeling suddenly chilly. ‘And we can’t play happy families and pretend nothing’s changed, no matter how much either one of them might wish us to.’
‘I know,’ Steve agreed. ‘I was thinking we could find a way to divide the week between us. If you could spare a day at the beginning and the end of the week to bring the boys down and back again, then I’ll do the rest. I’ll fit in my study around their bedtime, and I’m sure the olds won’t mind if I shut myself away for a few hours during the afternoons. If you want to stay over either night, I’ll sleep on the sofa.’
‘You know they’re going to get on our backs about giving things another go.’ She buried her face in her knees, already picturing her mum and Isla on the wrong side of a bottle of wine and holding forth on the difficulties of marriage, telling her she needed to try a bit harder.
‘Jess.’ Steve rapped a knuckle on the screen to capture her attention. ‘Jess, look at me.’ When she lifted her eyes, he was sitting forward, his face filling almost the entire screen. ‘No matter how much I miss the boys, and God knows, I do, I haven’t had any second thoughts about this.’
‘Me either.’ A guilty flush stole up her throat, and she was glad of the shield her knees provided to conceal it. She hadn’t given getting back with Steve any thought, because she’d been too preoccupied with the possibility of being with Tristan at some point in the future. ‘I’m happy here, and so are the kids.’
‘I’m glad. You look better than you have in ages.’
‘Thanks. I was just thinking how tired you looked!’ They laughed, and she realised she’d missed this part of them. The thing they had always been and should’ve remained – friends. ‘Send me through the dates and I’ll square away a couple of days off. At least it will give the boys something to look forward to. And while you are at it, have a think about what you want to do over Christmas. I’ll be flat out here, so you need to decide if you want the boys for part of the holidays, and how you’re going to manage it. I’d like to present a united front when we see our parents before they get any more ideas.’
Finding a good time to broach the topic of having time off was taken out of her hands at breakfast the next morning when an over-excited Elijah announced to everyone he was going swimming in the park with Mummy and Daddy. Wishing she’d waited until she’d spoken to Arthur and Tristan first, Jess hastily explained the whole family was getting together for half-term. She kept it succinct, the breakfast table not being an appropriate place to discuss awkward sleeping arrangements and interfering parents. ‘It will be a couple of days, not the whole week.’
Arthur smiled at her over Elijah’s head. ‘Not a problem with me. We deliberately made your hours flexible to cover stuff like this. Besides, you’re entitled to time off, isn’t that right, Tristan?’
‘Of course.’ For all their similarity in looks, his smile was a bland mask compared to Arthur’s open countenance. ‘Jess has autonomy to manage her workload.’ He cast a cursory glance at the watch on his wrist then folded the napkin from his lap and placed it on the table. ‘Speaking of which, the lighting guy will be here soon, and I need to do a few bits of final prep. If you’ll excuse me?’ From the glances exchanged around the table, Jess wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the stiffness in his posture. Cheeks flaming, she made a fuss of wiping Isaac’s messy hands and face and knew she’d have to bite the bullet and talk to him soon. Only, how on earth was she going to find a way to let him down without making her position at the castle impossible?
Chapter 10
Tristan had been in a shit mood for ten days. The fact it was a situation entirely of his own making didn’t make it any easier to shake off. It was his own damn fault, for speaking up in the first place. If he could turn back the clock and take back that embarrassing declaration, he’d do it in a heartbeat. He’d jumped the gun and shot himself in the foot in the process. If only he’d been patient, the way he’d intended to be then there might have been a possibility of something developing naturally between him and Jess, the way they had in his siblings’ relationships. Only Tristan couldn’t keep his big mouth shut, and now Jess was running scared. Perhaps even running back into the arms of her ex. They must be reconsidering things if they were holidaying together so soon after splitting up. He swished the stick he’d picked up off the ground at a pile of leaves one of the gardening staff had painstakingly raked up, sending them scattering into the wind like the tatters of his hopes and dreams.
‘I knew you couldn’t be trusted to look after my gardens.’ Turning at the sound of his sister’s familiar voice, Tristan fou
nd his temper easing at the sight of Iggy and Will striding hand in hand towards him.
‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ He opened his arms to a hug from Iggy, then exchanged a warm handshake with Will.
‘Spot inspection,’ Iggy said. ‘And none too soon by the looks of it. I hope you haven’t made a complete hash of everything in my absence.’
If only she knew. ‘Your plans have been followed to the letter, your majesty, don’t worry. I’ve also signed off on the design for the lighting plan for the woods, it’s in my office if you want to check it out?’
‘Maybe later, after hours being cooped up in the truck, I need some fresh air.’ Come to think of it, she did look a bit pale.
‘Everything all right?’ He glanced from Iggy’s white face to a frowning Will. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Everything’s perfect thanks to Will Talbot and his super sperm,’ Iggy grumbled, rubbing a hand over her belly.
‘You were the one who said you wanted to try for a baby,’ Will said in the exasperated tones of a man who’d made the same point on more than one occasion.
‘Try, I said.’ Iggy snuggled into Will’s side, her arms curling around his waist. ‘Trust you to be an overachiever and manage to knock me up at the first attempt.’
Hugging her close, Will pressed a kiss to the top of head. ‘What can I tell you? I’m that good.’
‘Arrogant pig.’
‘Grumpy mare.’
Tristan watched the interaction play out between them with some bemusement. ‘Is this the point where I’m allowed to say congratulations?’
Loosening her hold on Will, Iggy stepped once more into Tristan’s arms for a hug. ‘I’m scared,’ she whispered. ‘Happy, but absolutely terrified, and if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll pull the heads off all your action men.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me, sis,’ Tristan promised, smiling in amusement at the memory of when Iggy had done just that. It hadn’t been funny at the time, especially as she’d swapped them all with heads off her own collection of Barbies and refused to tell him what she’d done with the originals. ‘What did you do with those heads, by the way?’
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