‘I was such a fool. I had no idea how lucky I was.’ A single tear wobbled over Nell’s lashes and trickled down the side of her nose until P.J. wiped it away tenderly with his thumb.
‘Nell, it was a long time ago.’
‘I just wish I could do it all again better.’
‘But then you wouldn’t have Clara, and I wouldn’t have my company. The last sixteen years haven’t been all bad, have they?’
‘No,’ Nell had to agree, thinking of her daughter.
‘I have missed you, though,’ P.J. confessed.
‘For sixteen years?’ She smiled, still a little tearfully. ‘I don’t believe you’ve been pining all that time!’
‘I wouldn’t say I’d been pining exactly,’ he admitted. ‘I haven’t been unhappy, and there have been women, yes. But none of them were you, Nell. Another of Janey’s theories is that all my girlfriends looked like you, and that I spent my time trying to find a substitute for you. She thinks that’s why my relationships never came to anything. I wanted them to, but subconsciously maybe I was comparing them to you.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘The crazy thing is that if you’d told me yesterday that that was what I felt-as Janey always did-I would have insisted that it wasn’t true, but all I had to do was look at you this morning, in your old jogging suit and trainers, and I knew that I had loved you all along.
‘I went straight into work and rang Janey and tried to get out of the date she’d set me up on tonight, but she wouldn’t let me. I should have guessed what she was up to, but I didn’t. I thought I was going to have to spend the evening making polite small talk with a divorcee when all I wanted was to be with you.
‘Janey was right.’ Still holding her hand, P.J. looked deep into Nell’s grey eyes. ‘It’s only ever been you, Nell. You’re my one and only, just like they used to say. Being near you again was like coming home for me. I was so desperate to see you again, and it was a real blow when you said you didn’t want to see me.’
Nell tightened her fingers around his. ‘I was afraid,’ she said honestly, and his brows drew together slightly.
‘Of me?’
‘Of the way you made me feel,’ she said. ‘I’m like you. I’ve spent sixteen years telling myself I’d forgotten you, and then a couple of weeks ago Thea mentioned your name… Since then I’ve been remembering, and regretting, and just wanting something I knew couldn’t have.’ Her smile twisted. ‘I’m not sure what it was. I think probably I just wanted to be that confident and certain again. I wanted to be loved the way you used to love me.’
‘Then why not have dinner with me when I asked you this morning?’
Nell sighed. ‘I don’t know… It all just seemed too difficult somehow. We were different people, and I thought everything had changed, but the more I saw of you today, the more it seemed that nothing had changed at all, and that made it even worse!
‘I told myself that it would be easier if I didn’t get involved, that it would be better to draw a line under the past again, all of that. I did my best to resist,’ she told him as if he had accused her of not making enough of an effort to forget him. ‘It didn’t do any good, but I couldn’t admit that deep down I wanted to see you again desperately. I was afraid you would think that I only loved you for your money now.’
‘Do you?’ asked P.J. urgently.
‘Of course not!’
His grip on her hands tightened. ‘No…I mean, do you love me?’
Nell let her eyes rest on the familiar, exciting lines of his face, seeing there the boy who had loved her, the man who loved her still, and her heart swelled with happiness.
‘Yes, I do.’ It was such a relief to be able to say it at last. ‘I know it’s crazy when we’ve only been back together a day, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Not loving you, letting myself forget you… It was like losing part of me, and, this morning, it seemed as if I had found it again.’
‘That’s how I feel, too.’ The smile that had started in P.J.’s eyes when she’d told him that she loved him spread over his face, and the strength of his feeling seemed to reverberate through the touch of his hands all the way up Nell’s arm. ‘I love you, too, Nell. I’ve always loved you. There’s been a bit missing from me, ever since we’ve been apart, and you’re the only person who can put it back.’
‘P.J…’ At the look in his eyes, the air evaporated from Nell’s lungs.
‘Come here,’ he said softly, leaning forward and pulling her towards him so that he could kiss her across the table.
The touch of his lips unlocked a torrent of emotion in Nell. It cascaded through her, a joyous blend of relief and release, of pleasure and promise, of excitement and the sheer exhilaration of loving and being loved. She had forgotten what a wonderful feeling that was, and she kissed him back with a kind of desperation, needing to show him how he made her feel.
‘Let’s go.’ P.J.’s voice was ragged as they broke the kiss at last. ‘I can’t kiss you properly here.’
Nell’s bones were liquid with desire, but somehow she got to her feet, belatedly remembering her bag and the phrase book. ‘My wine…’ she said, groping for some money.
‘Here.’ Too impatient to bother about change, P.J. tucked a ten-pound note under her glass. Picking up his dictionary, he took a firm hold of Nell with his other hand and they practically ran for the door.
They could hardly wait until they were outside. P.J. pulled her into the nearest doorway and they kissed hungrily.
This time there was no table between them, and it felt so good to be able to put her arms round him at last, to cling to the glorious granite strength of his body, to hold him and touch him and smell the deliciously clean male scent of his skin. Nell couldn’t kiss him long enough, hold him close enough, and it was only the need to breathe that made her break away at last and rest her face against his throat with a long, shuddering sigh of contentment.
P.J. smiled into her hair as he held her. ‘We could do without all these bags and books,’ he pretended to grumble. ‘They’re hampering my style!’
‘It would be nice to have two hands,’ Nell agreed, laughing. ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit.’
They wandered round the busy piazza in search of a bench, but ended up sitting on some stone steps. At least they could put down the books, and hold each other properly.
‘It feels like being teenagers again, doesn’t it?’ said P.J. as Nell nestled into the circle of his arm. ‘Trying to find somewhere to kiss where no one would walk in on us-particularly your mother!’
Nell smiled, but then sobered at the realisation that they weren’t in fact teenagers anymore. ‘I wish things could be as simple as they were then,’ she said wistfully.
‘I love you and you love me,’ he said. ‘It seems simple enough to me.’
‘But it isn’t, is it? There’s Clara to think about.’
‘Of course.’ P.J. turned to look down into Nell’s face, and he frowned at her worried expression. ‘You don’t think it will be a problem for her, do you?’
Nell thought about what Clara had said about P.J. ‘To be honest, I think she’ll be delighted. She worries about me being on my own, and she liked you. She thought you had smiley eyes.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Clara won’t mind…but will you? I don’t exactly come unencumbered. I’m not the same person I was before, P.J. I’ve got all the emotional baggage of a nasty divorce, and a child who takes up a lot of my attention. Clara’s fantastic, but it’s not always easy.’
She sighed. ‘I wish we could just pick up where we left off, but I don’t see how we can do that.’
‘We can’t, but we can start again, can’t we?’ P.J. took her hand and turned it over, running his finger over the veins and the faint beginnings of fine lines. ‘I did love you in the past, Nell, and it’s true that I carried a dream of you all these years, but I’m not in love with a memory. Clara is part of who you are now, and that’s the you I love. I don’t want you the way you were, be
cause I’m not the way I was then either.’
Gently, he touched the edges of her eyes. ‘I want the Nell who’s older and wiser and has laughter lines around her eyes and wears sensible shoes to walk to work.’
And he drew her close and kissed her again, and Nell felt her last doubts dissolve. ‘Marry me, Nell,’ he said. ‘Marry me, and we’ll take Clara to Africa with us on our honeymoon. Let’s do all the things we always dreamed of doing, but let’s do them together this time.’
Nell drew back slightly, her eyes intent as she looked at him. Like her, he was older, a little bit battered around the edges, but he was still P.J. She loved the boy he had been, and she loved the man he had become, and it was hard to believe how lucky she was. Against all the odds, she had been given a second chance, and she had to grasp it with both hands.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s do that,’ and she smiled back at him as he pulled her towards him to seal their promise with a long, sweet kiss.
It was much later when a yawn caught Nell by surprise, and P.J. hauled her to her feet. ‘It’s time I took you home,’ he said as they laughed ruefully at the stiffness of their definitely non-adolescent bones after sitting still on the stone steps for so long. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘It’s been an incredible day,’ said Nell, rubbing her bottom, weary but ballooning with happiness. ‘I can’t believe how much has happened,’ she marvelled. ‘Twenty-four hours ago, I couldn’t have imagined meeting you again, loving you again, actually agreeing to marry you again, and yet, here we are, just a day later, and my life has changed utterly and completely.’
P.J. smiled and put his arm around her to lead her back to the car and take her home. ‘Sometimes a day is all it takes,’ he said.
Rebecca Winters
Rebecca Winters is an American writer and mother of four. Having said goodbye to the classroom where she taught French and Spanish, she is now free to spend more time with her family, to travel and to write the Harlequin novels she loves so dearly. Readers are invited to visit the author’s Web site at www.rebeccawinters-author.com
Jessica Hart
Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and Outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition PA and English teacher, and she has worked in countries as different as France, Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.
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Here Comes The Bride Page 17