Winter Wishes (26 page)

The chink of sky between Jules’s curtains was still inky with darkness. It was the middle of the night as far as her body clock was concerned. All she really wanted to do was burrow under the covers and go back to sleep, but Caspar sounded desperate and she was quite fond of him in a rather frustrated kind of way.

And besides, she really wanted to read the next Cassandra Duval book…

Wondering how life had led her to this crazy episode, Jules promised Caspar that she’d be straight over. Then she hauled herself out of bed, dragged a brush through her tangled hair and threw on her jeans, sweater and boots. She didn’t bother with make-up; after all, there were only the seagulls to see her just-got-out-of-bed look.

It was still dark when she left the house. The lights of the fishing boats glowed as they steamed out of the harbour, and the moon still floated lazily above Ashley’s house. The village was empty; nobody was up and about to stop Jules with requests or complaints, and so she was at Tide’s End Cottage in minutes. She didn’t even need to knock on the door, but instead found Caspar waiting on the doorstep.

The writer looked even wilder than usual. His hair was dishevelled, he was wearing only jogging bottoms and he had even bigger bags under his eyes than Jules, which was saying something.

“You look dreadful,” she said.

“I’ve been up all night trying to sort this,” Caspar said sadly as she followed him into his small sitting room, where the laptop glowed on the table. “I swear next time I’m writing it all by hand.”

“Then you’d have called me over to Sellotape all the ripped-up pieces back together,” Jules pointed out. “After fishing them out of the harbour, of course. The laptop isn’t the issue here.”

Caspar sank into a chair, his head in his hands. “You’re right. Oh, what a curse to feel things as deeply as I do.”

What a curse to be such a drama queen
, Jules thought wryly.

Aloud, she said, “Put the kettle on and make me a coffee, for a start. Then you can think about some toast. I can’t function on an empty stomach.”

“Do you think you can help?” Caspar was at hand-wringing stage now. The advance he would have to pay back must be huge.

“If teenagers can hack into the Pentagon and bring telecom giants to their knees, then I’m sure we can find a deleted file,” Jules said firmly. “How hard can it be?”

Two hours later she was starting to regret these confident words. Her eyes were gritty from lack of sleep and staring at the screen, her fingers ached and her brains were scrambled. She was awash with tea and stuffed full of toast, and her ears ached from Caspar’s constant pleading, but she was no closer to finding the latest Cassandra Duval novel. By eight o’clock she was ready to tear out her hair and throttle the anxious writer. Using the excuse of having a sermon to prepare, Jules shut the laptop firmly.

“We’ll try again later,” she promised. “I’ll give Richard Penwarren a call. He knows a lot about IT. We’ll get it back somehow.”

With his head drooping like a thirsty tulip, Caspar escorted Jules to the front door.

“Thanks for trying,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “I do appreciate it.”

“We’ll think of something,” Jules reassured him. She patted his cheek soothingly. “Now go and get some sleep.”

Leaving him standing in his jogging bottoms in the doorway, she stepped out into a crisp sunny morning and straight into Danny. The sun had turned his hair to gold and his breath smoked in the cold air. On seeing her, he inhaled sharply. He was holding Morgan’s gloved hand and carrying a brightly coloured packed lunchbox on a shoulder strap. It was obvious from the look of shock on his face that she was the last person he’d expected to see leaving Caspar’s house. Jules was suddenly all too aware of her tangled hair, hastily thrown-on clothes and lack of make-up. Danny glanced from her to the bare-chested Caspar, and a fleeting expression of hurt flickered across his features, like cloud shadows passing over the valley. Then he nodded politely.

Oh Lord. He thought that she’d spent the night with Caspar!

“Morning, Jules, Caspar,” Danny said with icy civility. Tugging Morgan behind him at a military pace, he marched past them and up the slipway.

Jules was mortified. Leaving Caspar on the doorstep, with his shout that they must “try to do it again later” echoing after her, she scurried up the slope and into the narrow street.

“Danny! Wait for me!” she called.

“Slow down, Dad!” Morgan was saying. “Jules can’t catch up.”

“Exactly,” she heard Danny mutter.

Jules increased her pace, something she would never have managed a few months ago. Still panting a little, she drew up beside him.

“Dan, it’s not what you think!”

Danny shrugged. “It’s none of my business, Jules. You can see who you like.”

“I’m not seeing Caspar! For heaven’s sake, Danny! You’ve got it all wrong.”

He snorted and looked as though he was about to say something in reply but had thought better of it.

“Morgan, run ahead to the shop, will you, and ask Mrs Jago for Grand Gran’s paper? And an apple for your lunch. I just need a word with the vicar.”

“You don’t want the paper. And I don’t like apples. You just want to talk without me listening,” Morgan said. “Fact.”

“Yes, fact.” Danny opened his wallet and with the same hand deftly removed a five-pound note from it. “Now go and get the paper.”

“Can I have some sweets? Some Skittles?”

His father grimaced. “Mum will kill me but, OK then, one packet of Skittles. Now scram!”

As Morgan raced up the road to the general store, his dinosaur rucksack bouncing on his back, Danny turned to Jules. All the humour of seconds before had vanished.

“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Jules.” His voice was cold now. “I might only have one eye but I know what I saw just then. Do you really think I’m stupid?”

“Yes, if you don’t listen to what I’m saying!” Jules caught his sleeve. “Slow down, Danny, and listen to me! I’m not seeing Caspar!”

But Danny just shrugged. “See who you like, Jules. It’s none of my business, is it? You’ve made it pretty clear that you’re not interested in me, so you’re a free agent.”

“Yes,
I
am but
you’re
not!” Jules cried. “Which we’ve been through a million times. And you always trot out the same old argument that there’s something I can’t know that would explain it all, if only you could trust me enough to tell me.”

Her voice was raised and joltingly loud in the early morning. Net curtains twitched in cottage windows.
Great
, thought Jules. It would be round the village in seconds that the vicar and Danny Tremaine were having a row.

She took a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.”

He stared at her. “I probably deserved it. Anyway, I do trust you, but trust’s a two-way street – and when I say that I can’t tell you something, you need to know that I’m telling the truth.”

“Just like I am now about Caspar,” she retorted. “Dan, let me explain…”

“Explain? I’m not stupid. It’s barely eight in the morning and you’re leaving his house, looking like neither of you have slept. I don’t think there’s much to explain,” spat Danny. “He’s artistic, handsome in his own way, and you like his company. You don’t owe me any explanations.”

The hurt that lay beneath the anger in his voice was enough to flood her eyes with tears.

“Danny, I know you’re upset but it really isn’t what you think.”

“So how about you tell me what it really is?” His voice had an edge of steel in it now and Jules’s heart sank. “What were you really doing at his house?”

It was checkmate.

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

Danny laughed, a bleak laugh. “A secret. I see.”

“Danny, please! This isn’t my secret,” Jules said desperately. “Caspar needed help.”

“In the small hours? Yeah, right.” He shook his head. “It’s all right, Jules. You don’t have to spare my feelings. I thought there was something between us. Christ, I actually thought I was falling in love with you, but it wasn’t real, was it? It was totally one-sided.”

Jules couldn’t keep quiet a second longer. All the months of eating her heart out for him – of crying quietly at night, of praying and praying for the strength to do the right thing – all those long lonely months finally took their toll.

“If you really think that of me then you’re right!” she shot back. “It isn’t real if you can judge me so quickly and write me off. Of course I’m not seeing Caspar. How can I when you know I love you? If you want the truth then here it is: Caspar’s a bestselling romantic novelist, one of my favourites as it happens, and he’s deleted the file containing his latest book. He called me in a panic because he needs to find it. That’s why I was in his cottage, and if neither of us look like we’ve slept then it’s because we haven’t!”

Her chest burned and she was shaking. Danny just stared at her.

“Say that again? How you feel about me?”

Jules could have ripped her tongue out. Her face was on fire. “I… err…”

“Jules,” Danny said softly. “Look at me.”

Reluctantly she dragged her eyes from the pavement to meet his gaze. Her heart flipped over and over.

“Do you love me?” Danny asked. “Did I hear that right? I only have one fully working ear, remember?”

Jules was trapped. In the heat of the moment she’d told the truth.

“I love all my parishioners,” she said quickly. “It’s the greatest commandment.”

His mouth curved into a smile. The blue of his eye was no longer arctic but a Caribbean hue. “Yeah, nice try, Jules. Let me think: Sheila and the Pollards and Keyhole Kate? You feel the same way about them as you do me?”

“Yes! No!” Wrong-footed, she searched for the right answer. How had she managed to let her guard down and blurted out the truth like that? Luckily at this point, Morgan came scampering up, armed with
The Guardian
and a monster bag of Skittles, and she was spared any further explanation.

“Are you friends again?” Morgan asked her. “Dad thought you wanted to be friends with Caspar Next Door instead – but you don’t, do you?”

“I’m friends with everyone,” Jules said.

“Even Ivy?” Morgan’s brow crinkled. “She’s very mean.”

Ivy was very mean, there was no denying it, and having a stern word with her was still on Jules’s ever-growing list of things to do.

“Even Ivy,” she said firmly.

“But you like my dad the best. Fact.” Morgan tipped a pile of Skittles onto his palm and regarded her beadily. “My mum says so.”

His mum. Tara. Jules felt as though she’d had a bucket of icy water thrown over her head. What was she thinking, telling Danny she was in love with him, when they both knew it was impossible? How could he and Tara possibly mend their marriage with her in the way? She was horrified with herself.

“I like you all,” Jules told him staunchly, but Danny was laughing.

“But you like me best,” he said. “You can’t take that back now, Jules, no matter how much you might want to. Here, have some Skittles and stop looking so worried. Morgan hates the orange ones, so help yourself.”

“I’m tired and I wasn’t thinking straight,” Jules protested. “Blame Caspar for that. Two and a half hours I spent trying to find that deleted folder. My words are coming out all wrong.”

“Fibber,” Danny said fondly. “Your words are coming out just perfectly. Don’t look at me like that either. You and I are going to talk. You can count on that.”

“Did you look in the trash?” Morgan asked, looking up from the important task of selecting orange skittles from the packet. “That’s where all the deleted folders go.”

Jules hadn’t and she stared at him. “What?”

“If you haven’t emptied the trash then that’s where the files go. Fact. It’s very simple,” Morgan explained, with the same pity in his voice that Jules heard in her own whenever she tried to explain to her mother how to use an iPhone.

All those hours of searching the hard drive and the bloody book might still be in the trash? She could have wept.

“Looks like the missing book problem is sorted. You can pop back and tell Polwenna’s answer to Shakespeare that all’s well that ends well,” Danny said. He checked his watch. “Look, I have to get this one to school or Miss Powell will probably put me in detention, but you and I are definitely going to catch up later. This conversation is not over, Jules. Not by a long way.”

“There’s nothing more to say,” Jules said.

“You’re wrong,” Danny told her. “We haven’t even started.”

As he walked away, Jules stared after him. Her stomach was more tangled than the nets heaped on the quay. It was time to face facts. The feelings she had for Danny Tremaine were not going away. If anything, they were getting stronger.

There was only one solution – and no matter how painful it was, she had no choice but to acknowledge it and do the right thing. She could only avoid Danny for so long, and it was getting harder and harder by the day because every fibre of her being yearned for him.

Her heart was shattering into a thousand pieces already, but Jules knew that she had no other option. If she was to stick to her principles and live by what she knew to be right, then she was going to have to leave Polwenna Bay.

Chapter 18

“I don’t understand it. My dear, you’ve been so happy at St Wenn’s and such an asset to the village.” The bishop leaned back in his chair and looked at Jules with a worried frown. “This is a very sudden change of heart. It’s nothing to do with the
unfortunate
events of earlier on this year, I hope?”

It was Wednesday morning and Jules was seated in a big comfy chair in Bishop Bill’s office, doing her best to balance a large cup of tea and a plate of biscuits on the arm. Her hands were trembling so much that she was in danger of spilling the lot. Plucking up the courage to make the appointment to see the bishop had been hard enough. Telling him that she wanted to leave the parish and find another post had been even more difficult.

“After all,” he continued when she merely shook her head in reply, “although it was a little misguided, the calendar did raise a lot of money for St Wenn’s – and I have to say that the accounts are looking very healthy indeed. You should be very proud of all that you’ve achieved.”