by Cara Colter
He was pretty sure, according to the employment standard act, you weren’t allowed to say anything like that to a prospective employee. It was probably sexist as all get-out to offer conjecture about her lifestyle but he was deliberately trying to provoke her.
“Are you reaching these conclusions because I think your oven is ideally suited to the preparation of traditional feasts?” she asked. “Or because I think your house is more like a hotel than a home?”
“Traditional,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. You seem more traditional than career oriented.”
“And yet,” she said calmly, “I’ve enjoyed great success in my career. I assume that’s part of why I was invited here.”
Sitting here on his deck, the sounds of New York calming for the night, the warm summer air embracing them, it felt as if he needed to know more about her than the career synopsis that had been put together for him by an office assistant. Admittedly, he had not even glanced at it until he got to JFK to pick her up.
“Though I did grow up with very traditional values and a lifestyle very close to what you described,” she said, after a moment. “It’s the life my parents had, and the life I always thought I would have, too.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She hesitated. “That solid guy who adored me died.”
“I’m so sorry.” He looked at her face. He hadn’t turned on the patio light, and it was alabaster in the subdued secondary lights from the city and the other apartments. Really, his intent had been a kind of casual job interview, not a prying into her personal life. But suddenly, he had to know. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“The world I grew up in, and that I always wanted—safe, predictable, traditional—was shattered in a second. Devon died in a skiing accident.” Softly she said, “I don’t want to leave myself open to believing in happily-ever-after again.”
But he had the feeling she did, she just didn’t want to believe she did.
“Tell me about the two of you.”
Really?
Good night, Miss Winton, nice to make your acquaintance would have been the wiser choice!
Jamie did not have these kinds of conversations with people. And especially not female people who might be working for him someday soon.
“We grew up together,” Jessica said. “I started preschool the same day Devon did. We had the same friends. Our parents were friends. We lived down the block from each other. We enjoyed all the things that growing up in a place like Timber Falls had to offer—hiking and camping, skiing and snowshoeing.
“We never really fell in love. We were always in love. We always knew, both of us, that we had been together forever and we always would be. But then, we weren’t. He died our senior year in high school.”
“He asked you to marry him in high school?” He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice.
She nodded, and tilted her chin at him, with faint stubbornness that said, Just because we were young doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
Jamie grappled with what he was hearing. He knew from the fact sheet he had been given about her that she was twenty-six years old. That meant high school was seven or eight years behind her. It troubled him that even before high school she had been making huge choices. It sounded awfully young to be mapping out the entire course of your life, and choosing a life partner. It seemed criminal, somehow, that she had missed out on the experience of falling in love.
Not that he was one to talk about that! He’d avoided the complications of falling in love like it was a plague.
So, instead of saying any of that to her—that she had been too young, that she had missed something—he was shocked to hear himself saying, “I was only eighteen when my dad died, so I know how tragedy shapes a person.”
She cocked her head at him. A man could fall toward what he saw in her eyes: someone who knew what it was to have your heart break in so many pieces it could not possibly be put back together again.
It felt imperative he get this back on track—that he not fall toward the respite offered by her eyes—so he carefully rephrased his original question. “So what makes a woman like you leave everything she knows in search of a new start?”
“I do have a really good life in Timber Falls,” Jessica said hastily. “I have my bookstore and my family...” Her voice trailed away.
“But?” he asked her.
“You’re probably absolutely right. I don’t think of myself as the marketing type, but there must be a reason I came to JHA’s attention. I made it clear that I’m not at all sure about this position, but I love bookstores, I love books, I love authors and I love readers. I’ve come up with an equation for putting all those elements together successfully. I can’t take it any further in Timber Falls and sometimes I feel a longing for more, even though I don’t know what that more is.”
She had thrown that love word around pretty casually, but what if that was what she was really longing for? What if that was her more? The one she wasn’t admitting, even to herself.
Jamie could feel a longing, unknown to him before this very second, rise up in his own soul.
“A couple of years ago, I met a guy online,” she admitted, embarrassed. “He was from Europe. We met for the first time in Copenhagen. It was a disaster.”
She was telling him it wasn’t love she was after, after all. It should have been a relief to hear it, and yet...
“So when the invitation from JHA came, 95 percent of me said don’t be ridiculous and 5 percent said just go see. And here I am.” She smiled at him. “Seeing.”
In the darkness her eyes seemed luminous, and her lips lush. He could smell the scent of her above the scent of the pizza.
It felt as if he was seeing something, too.
He had every trapping of success, and yet she was making him aware, again, of some dangerous emptiness. There was something about her that was fresh and tantalizing and as foreign to his world as all this was to hers. He felt a pull to see where the merging of their two worlds could lead. It felt utterly dangerous.
And irresponsible, as well.
It must just be the lateness of the hour making him think these uncharacteristic thoughts. The lateness of the hour, the oddness of having a stranger in his space, in his T-shirt, munching pizza with a most delectable mouth.
He glanced at his phone. “It’s gotten very late,” he said. “Would you be more comfortable if I got a hotel for the night?”
“No, of course not!”
He considered the possibility that he might be more comfortable, and then dismissed it. He found her refreshing and attractive. Disgracefully, there was something he wanted to challenge about her belief in that teenage love. One taste of adult passion—the wilder, the better—could break her out of that almost childish loyalty to old memories.
Jamie drew himself up short. He could handle her under the same roof for one night. He was not a Neanderthal, not a me Tarzan, you Jane kind of guy, at all. And there was nothing he could teach anyone about the complexity of human relationships.
“I had some things arranged for you for tomorrow, but I’m going to have to rearrange them,” he told her, all professional, again. “Getting you a few necessities and getting your paperwork in order seems like it should be a priority. I’ll look after it first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you,” she said.
There, he congratulated himself, very businesslike, indeed.
The moment of temptation had passed, and he would hand her off to his sister and other assistants so that another moment of temptation did not rise up to take its place.
“Good night, then,” he said, got up and quickly went back inside. He dispensed her laundry to the lobby with an urgent tag on it, and had just gotten in his bedroom and closed the door when his phone lit up, an incoming text from Sarah.
Sorry, it
’s late.
It’s okay. I’m up.
Jared’s sick. He was at a birthday party. I think he might have overdone the cake and ice cream. All the evidence points in that direction.
If he encouraged her, he was going to get a picture of the evidence, so he typed in:
Spare me the details.
Not going to be able to make the shopping trip tomorrow. Take her to Hennessey’s on Fifth. Ask for Meredith.
He contemplated that. He’d been planning on turning Jessica over. Getting away from her.
How is she holding up?
Fine.
And then, before his sister could ferret out the fact Jessica was staying here, in the same apartment as him, Jamie quickly typed in that he was sure Jared would be okay.
You always promise that.
He stared at the phone, thinking how odd it was she would say that when he had thought of it today for the first time in a long time.
And you’re almost always right.
That part surprised him. Had those paltry words he had offered his family really brought anyone any comfort? He focused on the almost. It was a good reminder, in the emotional support department, he had nothing to offer.
A case in point: thinking that kissing a young woman, who still held a torch for a long dead young man, could somehow bring her back to life, like a princess who slept.
Jamie shook his head. Fairy tales, now? It wasn’t the Brontë sisters, but it was evidence that the small-town bookstore owner who had invaded his apartment really was a bad influence on him.
He contemplated the unfortunate turn of his life: he was going shopping at Hennessey’s. No, he wasn’t. He was turning Jessica over to some capable shopping person named Meredith, presumably an expert. Then he was walking to his office, which was just off Fifth, and he was assigning one of his assistants all things Jessica-related: police report, passport replacement, a little New York sightseeing, meetings with a few selected clients. He would make sure it was on the assignment list that as soon as she had replaced her ID, they would get her into her own hotel room.
But at the same time Jamie was making plans to distance himself from his guest, he was aware of a little voice in the back of his mind, warning him: from the first moment he had laid eyes on Jessica Winton not one single thing had gone according to his plan.
CHAPTER FIVE
JESSICA SAT OUT on the deck for a while longer, drinking in the sumptuousness of the night. She wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. Jamie’s departure had seemed abrupt.
Had she said or done something? She shouldn’t have told him so much about Devon, about her personal life. It was the long and eventful day that had encouraged uncharacteristic confidences from her.
And yet even with Devon freshly in her mind, she could not help but wonder if Jamie was just as aware as she herself was, that as unlikely as it seemed, there was a chemistry between them.
After a long time of thinking about that, she got up and went to bed. She was still on Canadian time, and it wasn’t that late in British Columbia. There was a television in the room, but she felt no desire to turn it on.
Oddly, she was not missing her internet connection, either.
She felt no need at all to report on the circumstances she found herself in, but rather she wanted to keep them to herself, as if they were a secret she was nurturing. There was something freeing about just allowing herself to have an experience, instead of feeling a need to divulge it to her online world.
She slid between luxurious sheets and snuggled under the lightweight down comforter. It occurred to her she should be worried: she was no closer to having cash, replacing her credit cards or getting a passport so that she could travel home at the scheduled time.
Oddly enough, when she closed her eyes, she realized she had rarely felt less worried in her entire life.
How much did that have to do with Jamie Gilbert-Cooper taking charge? She was asleep before she could answer the question.
* * *
Jessica awoke in the morning to a soft rap on her door. When she opened it, there was no one there, but the laundry bag was outside and her jacket, enclosed in a thick paper wrap, was on a hangar that had been put on the doorknob. There was also a small bag of toiletries: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant.
For one mortifying minute she considered that he was trying to tell her something, but then she realized that was the old Jessica, too sensitive and too serious. Of course he wasn’t trying to tell her something—like that her breath was bad, though after the pizza last night that did seem like a possibility—he was being considerate!
Brushing her teeth felt exquisite. But when she pulled her hair back into its clip, put her freshly laundered clothes on, and looked at herself in the full-length mirror behind the bathroom door, she came face-to-face with that old Jessica.
How could she have changed so much in less than twenty-four hours? She hated the outfit. It seemed dull and conservative, appropriate for the floor of the Canadian House of Commons, perhaps, but for a few days in New York City? Not so much.
When she went shopping with Jamie’s sister today, she was going to choose items that were appropriate business attire, but not quite so staid. But she still had to be practical. She still had to choose things she could wear in Timber Falls.
Could you choose clothes that were practical and sexy? It was a dilemma she had not found herself in before, not even when she was shopping for her trip to Copenhagen. Shouldn’t she have known something was off with her first face-to-face meeting with Ralph when, instead of thinking of items that would be attractive, she had been thinking of travel practicalities, like wrinkle-free?
She realized she was looking forward to meeting Jamie’s sister. She wasn’t going to pry, but she was sure his sister would drop all kinds of clues as to who Jamie really was that his apartment was not giving away.
Jessica also hoped Jamie’s sister was good at fashion. She herself sucked at it. There was nothing about the growing up in Timber Falls experience that encouraged fashion-forward thinking. It was an outdoorsy lifestyle that lent itself to plaid shirts and khaki shorts and sturdy shoes for both genders. Business attire at the bookstore was blue jeans and a blouse in the summer, blue jeans and a sweater in the winter.
Jessica had a book-themed sweater collection that children adored. She felt embarrassed just thinking about it! There would be no sweaters with embroidered cats on them today. No, it was summer and she was in New York. She wanted her style to reflect something a little bolder.
Fashion-wise, would she recognize those things? She didn’t want to go over the top, after all. Once again, she longed for her phone. With it, she could have consulted with Aubrey and Daisy right from the change room, time differences notwithstanding. She could have snapped selfies and sent them, a virtual fashion show and consultation.
She stepped out of her bedroom. At the last moment, she pulled the clip from her hair, and ran a hasty hand through it.
The apartment was flooded with light. The kitchen island had on it a selection of pastries, croissants, bagels, breads and spreads.
“Good morning.” He looked at her only briefly. Did his eyes rest, for a moment, on her loose hair, before he looked hastily away?
Jamie Gilbert-Cooper was standing there, sipping coffee from a take-out cup and leafing through a newspaper he had on the counter in front of him.
She used his concentration on the paper to quickly study him. Yup. Her first impression of him was confirmed: gorgeous. He had obviously already showered: his silver hair was damp and impossibly shiny, his skin had that tender, touchable look of being freshly shaved.
He was dressed, more casually than yesterday, but still in the kind of clothes that in Timber Falls would have been reserved for a wedding. Or a funeral.
Which suddenly struck her as faintly pathetic, though she felt instantly d
isloyal to her hometown.
He was wearing a white shirt, with a subtle pattern in it. It was opened at the throat and rolled at the cuffs. It was tucked underneath a belt that was threaded through the loops of gray, knife-pressed pants. He had on loafers, with no socks. In Timber Falls no one ever wore shoes in the house.
“This one’s for you,” he said, pointing at a coffee. “I didn’t put anything in it, but I brought creamers and sugar packs.”
“You have a coffee maker like that—” she gestured to the machine built into his cabinetry “—and you pick it up?”
He glanced at the coffee maker. “I’m not sure I’ve ever used that. I pick up coffee and breakfast on the way to work. There’s the best little shop just down the street. Taste it and tell me if you think I could do as well.”
She picked up her coffee, removed the lid and added some cream to it. The aroma was heady, and she took a sip.
“That’s not coffee,” she said. “That’s ambrosia.”
He smiled. “Welcome to New York City. A better welcome than yesterday.”
She decided she had not experienced too many things as dangerous as Jamie Gilbert-Cooper smiling at her as she drank the best coffee she had ever had. After a minute, she chose a croissant. It was so flaky, light and buttery, she thought she was going to die. Sensory overload!
“I had a quick look online this morning,” he told her. “You must have travel insurance, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m sure they’ll cover your losses. We’ll need to file the police report in order for you to make a claim, though.”
Her mouth fell open. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“Have some breakfast, and then give them a call.”
“Thank you, I will.” She hoped it wasn’t a weakness to feel so good about having someone to lean on, someone to take charge, to help her navigate all the messy details of putting her life back together.
And it wasn’t just the current messiness. After Devon, she had never really put her life back together. Maybe, just maybe, this was her chance. Maybe this was why she had been drawn to New York as if tugged by an invisible thread.