‘And you’ve told me this because… you want to warn me off getting too involved with you,’ she surmised thoughtfully. ‘You don’t have to worry on that score.’
‘Because I’m your unfinished business?’
‘I’m sorry that you found that offensive. I’d always wondered…’
‘You don’t have to explain, Jen. I’ve wondered too.’
‘You have?’
‘I’m only human. Of course I have. I had very graphic dreams about you for a long time after that incident.’
‘What was I doing in those dreams?’
‘When you’re back in London and we have the benefit of a bed with a wrought-iron bedstead and some cloth, I’ll demonstrate…’
As she had predicted from past experience, the snow stopped abruptly overnight and the temperatures rose sufficiently for the settled snow to start thawing.
They went to sleep that night and by the following evening, the outlines and contours of the fields around the house and cottage were slipping back into focus. His back was still not in top condition but between them they could clear the drive and he disappeared up to the house to get his car, which he drove down to the cottage. There was snow on the roof and the bonnet but it was melting almost as she looked at it.
In the space of a few days, she felt as though her well-ordered life had been turned on its head. She had grown, developed, matured and become an ambitious, successful and single-minded career woman in Paris, but emotionally she now thought that she had been sleepwalking. She hadn’t moved on from James, she had just held herself in abeyance until they met again.
He wanted her to quit her job but he had been careful to give her no promises of a future. They would be lovers. He had treated her the same way he had treated all the women he had ever gone out with. Up front announcing his lack of commitment, making sure she didn’t get it into her head that long term was part of his vocabulary.
By the time they left the estate, the insurance company had been contacted and she had also spoken to her father and emailed him a list of things that would need doing when he returned.
As James drove them away she looked back at the disappearing cottage as though it had been a dream. When she turned to look ahead, she wondered how she was going to fare in the real world and, as though sensing her doubts, James rested his hand over hers and flicked her a sideways glance.
‘I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I should come with you to Paris. It’s been a while since I had a holiday…’
Jennifer had had time to think about everything. From her perspective, she had run into her past and discovered that she had never managed to escape it after all. Locked away in the cottage, she had found how fast a youthful crush could turn into hopeless adult love. She had had no weapons at her disposal powerful enough to protect her against the man who had stolen her heart a thousand years ago.
She wasn’t, however, stupid. James liked her. He certainly adored her body. That was where the story ended. He had warned her off looking for anything more than sex and she had successfully convinced him that they were both on the same wavelength.
She didn’t have enough good sense to walk away from him but she had enough good sense to know that when the time came for them to go their separate ways, she wanted to be able to do so with her head held high.
‘Come with me to Paris?’ she said now. ‘James… Paris isn’t going to be a holiday.’
James stifled a surge of irritation. ‘I realise you’re going to be working but it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for me to arrange to be in Paris for a week or so.’
Bliss, Jennifer thought. That would be absolute bliss. Getting back to her little apartment, knowing that she would be seeing him later. Cooking together and showing him all the little cafés and restaurants where the owners knew her, taking him to that special boulangerie that sold the best bread in the city and the markets where they could stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables and tease each other about who could concoct the most edible meal. She could introduce him to her friends and afterwards they could lie in bed and make love and he could tell her what he thought of them in that witty, sharp, amusing way of his… Bliss.
The pleasant daydream fell away in pieces. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if she was to take that first step down the road of doing whatever he wanted it would the first step down a very slippery slope.
‘You’ve been out of your office for several days. How on earth would you be able to wangle a week-long trip to Paris?’
A slashing smile of satisfaction curved his lips. ‘Because I’m the boss. I call the shots. It’s an undeniable perk of the job. Besides, I’ve always maintained the importance of having good people to whom responsibility can be delegated. I have a queue of people lining up to prove to me how capable they are of covering in my absence.’
‘Well, I’m sorry but I don’t think it would be a very good idea.’
‘Why not?’ He slipped his hand between her legs and pushed his knuckles against her and the pressure was so arousing that she began to dampen in her underwear. The past few days had taught her that he was an intensely physical man. He relied on his ability to arouse to make his point and to win his arguments and it would have been so easy to let him have his way.
He returned his hand to the steering wheel. He couldn’t keep his hands off her and he knew that she felt the same way about him. There were times when he looked at her and he knew, from the faint blush on her cheeks, that if he reached out and felt her she would be hot and wet for him. So what, he wondered with baffled exasperation, was the problem in capitalising on the time they spent together?
‘I feel badly enough about leaving everyone there in the lurch.’
‘You’re not leaving them in the lurch,’ James pointed out irritably. ‘They understood perfectly the circumstances surrounding your resignation. Your father’s getting older… the emergency at the cottage further proof that you will be needed here more and more over time… The fact that there’s the offer of a job that might not be on the cards for ever and you owe it to yourself and your father that you take it while it’s there… You’ve offered to see in your successor and train them up. Why would you think that they’re being left in the lurch?’
‘Because I do.’
‘That’s insane feminine logic.’
Jennifer clicked her tongue and sighed because he could be so black and white.
‘From my perspective,’ he continued, proving to her how well she knew his thought processes, ‘you’ve acted in the most sensible, practical way possible.’
‘Well, I don’t want you around distracting me.’
‘But you know how much fun a bit of distraction can be…’ James murmured, savouring that small admission of weakness from her. They were few and far between. Much to his annoyance.
‘I’ll be there for two weeks. Maybe three. Not long. Enough time to clear my desk, pack up the things in my apartment I’ve gathered over the years, go out with friends…’
Which, to his further annoyance, was something else on his mind. The goodbyes to the old friends… everyone knew about making love one last time for old times’ sake… He swept aside that ridiculous concern. Hell, she wasn’t like that! But he was scowling at the mere hint of any such thing, the mere suggestion in his head that she might be tempted to go to bed with the good friend and ex-lover artist of the fedora and the earring.
Jennifer saw that scowl and smiled because, even though she knew where he stood on matters of the heart, his unrestrained possessiveness still gave her a little quiver of satisfaction. She hugged it to herself and savoured it for a few seconds.
‘So let me get this straight,’ he gritted. ‘You don’t want me in Paris and you also don’t want either of us to tell our parents about what’s going on…’ It wasn’t cool to behave like a petulant teenager and he forced a tight smile, which he was pretty sure wasn’t fooling anyone.
‘Well, I explained why I thought it wasn’t suc
h a good idea to tell Dad and Daisy,’ Jennifer said vaguely. Her father knew her better than anyone else. He would never buy the fiction that she was the sort of girl who would indulge in something passing and insignificant with the guy who had stolen her vulnerable teenage heart. He would immediately know that she was in too deep. There would be questions and speculation and she wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of telling him the truth.
‘And I explained why I didn’t get it.’
‘I’m practical.’ She began listing the reasons once again while her treacherous mind broke its leash and started imagining how wonderful it would be if she could shout her love out to the whole world. ‘We both are… we know that this is just about having fun, so why drag other people into it?’ She and James, lovers and in love, building a future together… she and Daisy planning a wedding, nothing too big… just the local church… friends and neighbours… ‘It would just make it awkward when the inevitable happened.’
‘Nice to know you’re planning the demise of what we have before we’ve even begun.’
‘These are your rules, James. You don’t do involvement.’ He couldn’t argue with that. She was the perfect woman for him. She challenged him intellectually, which he found he enjoyed, and they were brilliant in bed together. In fact, they couldn’t have been more compatible. She also respected his boundaries. There had been no coy insinuations about the importance of commitment, no leading questions that involved long-term planning, no shadow of disappointment when he had told her about his ill-timed disastrous affair with Anita and the consequences of it. Nor had she tried to lecture him on the importance of letting go of the past. In that respect, she ticked all the boxes.
He wondered why he wasn’t feeling more pleasantly satisfied.
‘Besides—’ she thought it a good idea to move on from the commitment angle, just in case he got scared that she was hinting that she did do commitment and preferably with him ‘—we’ve both agreed that we’re not each other’s type…’ Or something like that. The night before, when the conversation had mysteriously returned to Patric, even though he was no longer in her life in that way. James seemed obsessed with Patric and she couldn’t understand why unless it was to confirm his singular position in her life, with no spectres at the feast. He wanted her in place and at his beck and call, without distractions from anyone, even an ex-lover, although, in return, she knew that he would never give those assurances back to her. The playing field would never be level as far as James went.
‘So I’m not trying to sabotage what we have,’ she concluded. ‘We both know that this is just physical attraction. It’ll pass in time and we’ll both move on so why involve other people when there’s no need?’
‘Why indeed?’ James grated.
‘Let’s just have fun. And no complications…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
JAMES glanced at his watch for the third time in ten minutes. She was running late, which was unusual for her, but he didn’t mind. For the first time in nearly three and a half months, she had actually suggested meeting up, as opposed to waiting for him to take the lead. She had called him on his mobile and he had immediately booked dinner at an exclusive restaurant where, and this was just one of the upsides of wealth and power, his request for a secluded table at the back was instantly accommodated.
Of course, despite the fact that he had always loathed a woman who tried to insinuate him into a social life he didn’t want and engineer arrangements without plenty of prior notice, it annoyed him that Jennifer was so completely the opposite.
She engineered nothing. She was impossible to impress. She declined his gifts. She was irritatingly elusive. Twice she had laughingly turned down his invitations to the theatre because she was busy and then failed to come up with an explanation why. Busy doing what? Once she had bailed on him claiming tiredness. Admittedly, he had telephoned her at short notice, in fact at eleven o’clock at night, but after a series of exhaustive meetings the only person he had wanted to see had been her. In fact, he had brought the meetings to a summary conclusion because visions of her lying naked in bed had been too much. He had failed to laugh along when she had told him, yawning, that he couldn’t possibly come over because a girl needed her beauty sleep.
She wasn’t playing hard to get. Far from it. When they were together, she was everything a man could wish for. She made him laugh, turned him on to the point where he was capable of forgetting everything, argued like a vixen if she didn’t agree with something he said and had no qualms in teasing him on the grounds that everyone needed to be taken down a peg or two now and again. She didn’t play games. She was up front in everything she did and everything she said. He had had no option but to swallow down his intense irritation when she failed to put him first.
And she never talked about a future. Everything was done on a spur-of-the-moment basis and he had gradually, inexorably and frustratingly come to the conclusion that, however sexy and accommodating she could be, he was a stopgap. When he thought about that for too long, he could feel a slow anger begin to build so he didn’t think about it. Instead, he told himself that that was a good thing because stopgaps didn’t lead to attachments and attachments, as he had made perfectly clear to her at the beginning of their relationship, were not on the horizon. Clearly they weren’t on hers either.
A waiter came to refill his drink, a full-bodied red wine, asked him if there was anything, anything at all, they could bring for him while he waited for his companion. The chef, they assured him, would be more than happy to concoct some special delicacies, nothing heavy, perhaps something creative with the excellent fois gras they had only today taken delivery of…
James waved the man aside and turned on his iPad.
He sipped his red wine while lazily scrolling through the pictures in front of him. Pictures of a house, neatly positioned in one of the leafy London suburbs, within handy commuting distance of the offices. Not a flashy apartment, which Jennifer accused his place of being… no porter sitting at the front behind a marble desk, which she found impersonal… no opulent artificial plants in the foyer, which she exclaimed weren’t nearly as good as the real thing and must take for ever to dust, what a waste of someone’s time.
A house in the suburbs that was already part of his vast property portfolio, which had last been rented out over a year ago and which had dropped off the radar since then. It couldn’t compete with the ultra-modern places more centrally located, which appealed to expensive overseas executives. It had been brought to his attention by one of his people three weeks previously as just one of a batch to be considered for sale. He had pulled it out, seen it personally himself and made his decision on the spot to hang onto it. With some decent refurbishment, it would be perfect, and he had relished the thought of how delighted she would be at being able to move out of her poky shared house to a charming little cottage with a small but well-developed garden, a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker within walking distance and a busy but distinct village atmosphere. Since then he had sent an expensive team of decorators in and it had been transformed, updated, modernised but retained its period style, which was the only stipulation he had made to the head of the design team. Perfect.
To think that six months earlier he might have sold it! Who said that life wasn’t full of happy coincidences?
He sat back and contemplated, with satisfaction, the excitement on her face that he predicted he would see when he told her the good news. Whatever rent she was paying, he would make sure to charge less. In fact, he would happily charge nothing but he doubted she would accept that, given her stubbornness and her pride. It would be a done deal and he would no longer have to make allowances for her friend every time he visited her, tiptoeing just in case Ellie was asleep, making sure not to drink wine that wasn’t Jennifer’s or open beer that belonged to Ellie’s boyfriend. Job done.
He glanced up, saw her hesitating by the door of the restaurant, casting her eyes around for him, and he turned off the computer, leavin
g it on the table next to him.
God, she was sex on legs. He had told her to don her finery, that the restaurant was one of the top ones in London, and she had. Winter was finally beginning to lose its icy winter edge as spring made itself felt and she was wearing a slim-fitting, figure-hugging dress in deep reds and browns with a pashmina artfully arranged loosely over her shoulders. Her curves seemed to grow more luscious by the day and his body was predictably reacting to the sway of her walk as she spotted him, to the sight of her cleavage, which even the modest neckline of the dress couldn’t quite hide because her breasts were so lush and abundant.
For the first time, Jennifer watched James’s lazy assessing smile and, instead of feeling thrilled, she felt the knot of tension in her stomach tighten.
How close she had come to cancelling out on this date! What an effort it had been to climb into clothes that had been so horribly inappropriate for her mood!
She had to force a returning smile on her face and by the time she made it to the table, her jaw was aching and her nervous system was in overdrive.
She slipped into the chair facing him, barely aware of the waiter pulling it out for her, and placed her hand over her wine glass, asking instead for a glass of fresh juice.
‘You look stunning.’ Deep blue eyes roved appreciatively over her. ‘I’m going to enjoy taking that dress off you in a couple of hours…’
‘I’m… sorry I’m a little late,’ Jennifer said weakly, fiddling with the end of the pashmina.
‘Traffic!’ He threw his hands up in a gesture of frustration at the horrors of getting around London. He was picking up something, an uneasy atmosphere, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
The Girl He'd Overlooked Page 12