Page 80 of Christmas at Sturcombe Bay
There were fairy lights and a couple of bunches of mistletoe in the conservatory, and the dining room sparkled with gold and silver and pretty table centre-pieces of holly and tall slim scarlet candles.
And outside beside the steps was the biggest tree of all, sixteen feet tall and glowing with multi-coloured lights.
“Phew!” Jess sighed as she climbed down the stepladder for the last time. “That’s it. All done.”
“You deserve dinner for that.”
“Oh?” She eyed him warily.
“At mine. I’ll cook for you.”
“You can cook?”
“Of course. I live alone. If I want to eat, I have to cook. Or pop down to my mum’s,” he added with a mischievous grin.
She rolled her eyes. “Which is just three doors down. Convenient.”
“You were paying attention.”
“Of course. I was taught to have good manners.”
“So what do you say? Are you going to let me show off my culinary skills?”
She hesitated. She really ought to say no. Wasn’t she supposed to be off men? Especially men like Paul Channing. But somehow the message from the sensible part of her brain hadn’t reached the part that formed speech, and she heard herself say, “Okay.”
“Great. See you at seven. Number twenty-two, Cliff Road.”
And before the sensible part of her brain could catch up he had strolled away to chat to Alex Crocombe.
* * *
Dammit, she must have been mad to agree to this. Had she learned nothing from experience? Another good-looking, arrogant man — just like Glenn.
Although . . . maybe not really like Glenn. It wasn’t quite fair to call him arrogant. He was certainly confident, self-assured, but then he had good cause to be. He had reached very close to the top as a professional footballer, and had gone on to forge a second successful career in the equally competitive world of finance.
Whereas Glenn . . . His arrogance had been that of a big fish in a small pond. Why had she put up with him for so long? Five years . . . She’d been pretty down at the time when they had first got together, having been in a nasty accident on her motorbike and fracturing her wrist.
He’d been fun and charming and very, very sexy, and he’d given her a real boost when she’d needed it most. It had been easy to fall in love with him in those early days — and much harder to fall out of it as she had gradually come to see the other side of him.
She shook her head. Tomorrow was the eighteenth of November. The day she had been supposed to marry him.She couldn’t even imagine that now — it seemed like another lifetime.
But like an idiot, here she was again. Fun, charming and very, very sexy — far too easy to fall in love with.
Lisa had warned her, Cassie had warned her, Julia had warned her. None of his . . . liaisons — you couldn’t really call them relationships — had lasted more than a couple of months. Then it was ‘goodbye and thank you, don’t leave your toothbrush on the shelf when you go’.
When everyone was pointing and shouting ‘shark’, it was probably a good idea to stay out of the water.
Instead, she was walking up Cliff Road, past the row of elegant Victorian townhouses. Each had stone steps leading up to their front doors, with bay windows on each side. They were the sort of houses that would have been converted into holiday flats, but she knew that number nineteen was where Lisa’s parents lived.
And three doors up was Paul’s, with his gleaming Aston Martin on the hard standing at the front.
The front door was painted a traditional glossy dark blue, with a smart brass knocker, but tradition gave way to twenty-first-century technology with the neat security camera on the wall.
She rapped on the knocker, struggling to keep her heartbeat steady as footsteps approached. The door opened. And breathe . . .
He was wearing a charcoal-grey cashmere sweater, smooth across his wide shoulders, the V-neck revealing a smattering of dark hair at the base of his throat, the sleeves pushed up over strong forearms.
“Good evening.” Oh, that smile . . . “Come on in.”
