The Girl He'd Overlooked (4 page)

James flushed darkly.

‘Nothing changes,’ she said scornfully.

‘Really? I wouldn’t say that’s true at all.’

‘You still go out with the blonde airheads. Daisy still despairs. You still only have relationships that last five seconds.’

‘But you don’t still have a crush on me…’

That softly spoken remark, a lazy, tantalising question wrapped up in a statement, was like a bucket of freezing water thrown over her and she stepped back as though she had been slapped.

What had she been thinking? Had she been so shocked to find him in the cottage that she had forgotten how efficiently he could get under her skin? She had managed to keep her distance so how was it that they had somehow drifted into a conversation that was so personal?

‘That was all a long time ago, James, and, like I said, there’s nothing to be gained from rehashing the past.’

‘Well…’ He finally began strolling to where his coat was hanging over the banister. She wondered how she had managed to miss that when she had walked in but, of course, she hadn’t been expecting him. ‘I’ll be heading off but I’ll be back tomorrow and please don’t tell me that there’s no need. I’ll roll the other carpets. Get them into one of the outbuildings and keep them dry so that they can
be assessed for damage when this snow decides to stop and someone from the insurance company can come out.’

‘I’m sure that can wait,’ Jennifer said helplessly. ‘I won’t be here long. I plan on leaving… well… if not tomorrow evening, then first thing the following morning…’

James didn’t say anything. He took his time wrapping his scarf round his neck, then he pulled open the front door so that she was treated to the spectacular sight of snow swirling madly outside, so thick that she could barely make out the fields stretching away into the distance.

‘Good luck with that.’ He turned to her. ‘I think you’ll find that we might both end up being stuck here…’

With each other.
Jennifer tried not to be completely overwhelmed at the prospect of that. He wasn’t going to stay cooped up in his house when he thought that she needed help in the cottage. He would be
around
and she had no idea how long for. Certainly, the snow looked as though it was here for the long haul and the house and cottage were not positioned for easy access to handy, cleared roads. They were in the middle of nowhere and it would not be the first time that heavy snow would leave them stranded.

But maybe it was for the best. She couldn’t hide away from him for ever. Sooner rather than later she would be returning to the UK to live. Her father wasn’t getting any younger and she had enough on her CV to guarantee a job, or at least a good prospect of one. When that happened, she would be seeing him once again on weekends.

She decided that this was fate.

‘You could be right,’ she said with more bravado than she felt. ‘In which case, thank heavens you’re here! I mean, I adore Patric, but I have to be honest and tell you that an artist probably wouldn’t be a huge amount of practical help at a time like this…’

A
N ARTIST?
Jennifer had gone out with
an artist
? James could scarcely credit it. She had never shown any particular interest in art, per se, so how was it that she had been enticed into an affair with an artist? And who else had there been on the scene? He was disconcerted to find that she had somehow managed to escape the box into which he had slotted her and yet why should he be? People changed.

Except, there had been something smug about her tone of voice when she had implied that
he
had changed very little over the years. Still going out with the same blonde bimbos.

He was up at the crack of dawn the following morning and one glance out of the window told him that neither of them would be going anywhere, any time soon. If anything, the snow appeared to be falling with even greater intensity. Drifts of it were already banking up against the sides of the outbuildings and his car was barely visible. It was so silent out here that if he opened a window he would have been able to hear the snow falling.

Fortunately, the electricity had not been brought down and the Internet was still working.

He caught up with outstanding emails, including informing his secretary that she would have to cancel all meetings for at least the next couple of days, then, on the
spur of the moment, he looked up Patric Alexander on an Internet search engine, hardly expecting to find anything because artists were a dime a dozen and few of them would ever make it to the hall of fame.

But there he was. James carried his laptop into the sprawling kitchen, which was big enough to fit an eight-seater table at one end and was warmed by the constant burn of a four-door bottle-green Aga. Mug of coffee in one hand, he sipped and scrolled through pages of nauseating adulation of the new up-and-coming talent in the art world. Patric was already garnering a loyal following and a clientele base that ensured future success. The picture was small, but James zoomed into it and found a handsome, fair-haired man surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, standing in front of a backdrop of one of his paintings.

He slammed shut the lid of the computer, drained his coffee and was in a foul mood when, minutes later, he stood in front of the cottage and banged on the knocker.

It was barely eight-thirty and so dark still that he had practically needed a torch to find his way over. Even with several layers of clothing, a waterproof and the wellies he had had since his late teens, he could feel the snow trying to prise its way to his bare skin. His mood had slipped a couple of notches lower by the time Jennifer eventually made it to the door and peered out at him.

‘What are you doing here so early?’

‘It’s too cold for us to make conversation in a doorway. Open up and let me in.’

‘When you said you were going to come over, you never told me that you would be arriving on my doorstep
with the larks
’

‘There’s a lot to do. What’s the point in sleeping in?’ He looked at her as he removed his coat and scarf and gloves and sufficient layers to accommodate the warmth
of the cottage. She was in a pair of faded jeans and, yes, she really
had
changed. Lost weight. She looked tall and athletic. She had pulled back her hair and it hung down her back in a centre braid. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you? I’ve been up since five-thirty.’

‘Oh, bully for you, James.’ The day suddenly had the potential to be unbearably long. He followed her to the kitchen, sat down and seemed pleasantly surprised when she began cracking eggs into a bowl. He hadn’t had any breakfast. Great if she could make some for him as well. Did she need a hand?

‘I thought you said that you had made sure to buy some food?’

‘Oh, the fridge at home is stocked to capacity but I didn’t think to make anything for myself.’

‘Even though you were up
at five-thirty
? It never crossed your mind that you could pour yourself a bowl of cereal? Grab a slice of toast?’

‘When I start working, nothing distracts me. And small point of interest… I don’t eat cereal. Can’t stand the stuff. Just bits of cardboard pretending to be edible and good for you.’

Jennifer had spent a restless night. This was the last thing she needed and she turned to him coolly.

‘This isn’t going to work, James.’

‘What?’

‘
This!
You strolling over here and making yourself at home!’

‘It’s impossible to stroll in this weather.’

‘You
know
what I mean! If you think that you need to help, to get the rugs to the outbuildings, then that’s fine, but you can’t just waltz in here for the day. I have things to do!’

‘What?’

‘I have to clear some cupboards and I have lots of work to catch up on if it turns out that I can’t leave tomorrow as planned!’ She felt his eyes on her as she turned round to pour some eggs into a frying pan.

‘It makes sense for us to share the same space, Jen. What’s the point having the heating going full blast in my house when I’m the only person in it?’

‘The point is
you won’t be under my feet
!’

‘I’m going to be doing some heavy lifting on your behalf today, Jennifer. It’s hardly what I would call
being under your feet.
’

‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered with a mutinous set to her mouth. ‘I’m very grateful for the practical help you intend to give me but—’

‘Okay. You win, Jennifer. I don’t know why you want to draw battle lines, but if that’s what you’re intent on doing, then I’ll leave you to get on with it.’

He stood up and Jennifer spun round to look at him. Was this what she really wanted? To make an enemy out of the person who had always been her friend? Because she found it difficult being in the same room as him?

‘I don’t want to draw battle lines,’ she said on a heavy sigh. ‘I just don’t want you to… to think that nothing’s changed between us.’ She flicked off the stove and moved to sit at the table. The past was still unfinished business. That clumsy pass had never been discussed and she had carried it with her for four years. The memory of it was still so bitter that it had shaped all her relationships over the past four years, not that there had been many. Two. The first, to a young French lawyer she had met through work, had barely survived three months and, although he had laboured to win her over, she had been hesitant and eventually incapable of giving him the commitment he had wanted.

Patric had been her soul mate from the start and they had had three years of being friends before they decided to take that step further. It was a relationship that should have worked and yet, try as they had, she had not been able to capture the sizzle, the breathless excitement, the aching anticipation she had felt for James.

She knew that all of that was just a figment of her imagination. She knew that she had to somehow find it in her to prise herself out of a time warp that had her trapped in her youth, but eventually she and Patric had admitted defeat and had returned, fortunately, to being the close friends they had once been.

He had laughingly told her that there was no such thing as a friend with benefits. She had told herself that she needed to find a way of blocking James out of her head. She wasn’t an impressionable young girl any more.

James looked at her in silence.

‘I know I… I made that awful pass at you all those years ago. We never talked about it…’

‘How could we? You left the country and never looked back.’

‘I left the country and then life just became so hectic…’ Jennifer insisted. ‘I suppose to start with,’ she said, conceding an inch but determined to make sure that an inch was the limit of her concessions, ‘I
did
think that it might be awkward if we met up. I
may
have avoided you at first but then, honestly, life just became so busy… I barely had time to think! I guess I could have come back to England more frequently than I did, but Dad’s never travelled and it was fun being able to bring him over, take him places. It was the first time I’ve ever been able to actually afford to take him on holiday…’ The egg she had been scrambling had gone cold. She relit the stove and busied herself resuscitating it, keeping her back to him so that she could
guard her expression from those clever, perceptive deep blue eyes, which had always been able to delve into the depths of her. She couldn’t avoid this conversation, she argued to herself, but she wasn’t going to let him know how much he still affected her.

She was smilingly bland when she placed a plate of toast and eggs in front of him.

‘I think what I’m trying to say, James, is that I’ve grown up. I’m not that innocent young girl who used to hang onto your every word.’

‘And I’m not expecting you to be!’ But that, he realised, was exactly what he had been expecting. After four years of absence, he had still imagined her to be the girl next door who listened with eagerness to everything he had to say. The smiling stranger he had been faced with had come as a shock, and even more surprising was the fact that his usual cool when dealing with any unexpected situation had apparently deserted him.

‘Which brings me to this: I don’t want for there to be any bad feeling between us, but I also don’t want you thinking that because we happen to be temporarily stranded here, that you have a right to come and go as you please. You’ve seen to the little flooding problem in the cottage and I’m very grateful for that but it doesn’t mean that you now have a passport to my home.’

‘Point taken.’

‘And now I expect you’re angry with me.’ She hadn’t wanted to say that but it just slipped out and she could have kicked herself because, as the new woman she claimed to be, would she still care what he thought of her? Why couldn’t she be indifferent? She hadn’t seen him for
four years
! It seemed so unfair that after all this time her heart still skipped a beat when he was around and it was even
more unfair that she inwardly quailed at the thought of antagonising him.

‘I’m glad you said what was on your mind. Honesty being the best policy and all that.’ He dug into his breakfast with relish. ‘Did your father tell you that he’s thinking of doing a cookery course? This, incidentally, is my way of trying to normalise the situation between us. Because you’ve changed doesn’t mean that we’ve lost the ability to communicate.’

Jennifer hesitated, apprehensive of familiarity, but then decided that, whether she liked it or not, there were too many strands of their lives that were interwoven for her to pretend otherwise.

‘He told me,’ she said, relaxing, with a smile. ‘In fact, the last time he came over, just before Christmas, he brought all his prospectuses so that I could give him some advice. Not that I would be any good at all when it comes to that sort of thing.’

‘You mean being in Paris, surrounded by all that French cuisine, wasn’t enough to stimulate an interest in cooking?’

‘The opposite,’ Jennifer admitted ruefully. ‘When there’s so much brilliant food everywhere you go, what’s the point trying to compete at home?’

‘You must have picked something up.’ James saluted her with a mouthful of egg on his fork. ‘This scrambled egg tastes pretty perfect.’

‘That’s the extent of it, I’m afraid. I can throw a few things together to make something passable for an evening meal but no one I’ve ever entertained has really expected me to produce anything cordon bleu. In fact, on a couple of occasions, friends in Paris actually showed up with some store-bought delicacies. They always said that they wanted to make life easier for me but, personally, I
suspected that they weren’t too sure what they might be getting.’ She laughed and their eyes met for a few seconds before she hurriedly looked away.

There was no way that she was going to return to her comfort zone but this felt good, chatting to him, relaxing, dropping her guard for a while.

‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you still avoid that whole domestic thing?’

‘Define
avoid that whole domestic thing.
’

‘You once told me that you always made sure that the women you dated never went near a kitchen just in case they started thinking that they could domesticate you.’

‘I don’t remember saying that.’

‘You did. I was nineteen at the time.’

‘Remind me never to have conversations of a personal nature with any woman who has perfect recall.’ He had forgotten just how much he had told her over the years, superficial stuff and yet stuff he probably would never have told any other woman. ‘Your father has been trying to lure me into cooking. Every time I’ve popped over, he’s shown me one of his new recipe books. A few months ago I came for a few days to oversee some work my mother was having done in the house, and your father asked us both to dinner here. We were treated to an array of exotic meals and I was personally given a lecture on the importance of a man having interests outside work. Have you any idea how difficult it is for a man to defend himself from a dual-pronged attack? Your father preached to me about learning to enjoy my leisure time and my mother made significant noises about the correlation between hard work and high blood pressure.’

Jennifer laughed again, that rich, full-bodied laugh that reminded James of how much he had missed her uncomplicated company over the years. Except now… nothing
was as uncomplicated as it once was. They could skim the surface with small talk and reach a place in which they both felt comfortable, but he realised that he wanted to dig deeper. He didn’t want to just harp back to the good old days. He didn’t want to just keep it light.

‘I thought I’d see if that Patric guy of yours had a presence on the Internet.’ He changed the subject, standing up and waving her to sit back down when she would have helped him clear the table.

Jennifer went still. Why, she wanted to ask, would he do that?

‘Oh?’

‘He’s well reviewed.’

‘Why would you want to check up on him?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Did you think that I was lying? Made him up?’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ He shook his head in frustration as they teetered back to square one after their fragile truce.

‘Then what? Why the curiosity?’