Page 11 of Consequences of Their Wedding Charade
Still brooding over an atmosphere he couldn’t quite put his finger on, he watched as she spun round and began walking carefully towards him, coffee in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She should have just got waiter service but that wouldn’t have occurred to her, which made him smile.
Just like that, she looked across to him and their eyes met and tangled and for a few seconds his breath caught sharply in his throat. But then he smiled more broadly as she neared, easing back into the low chair, ready to tease her about helping herself to coffee when there were eager attendants waiting to do it for their privileged customers, ready to share a wry joke about the quality of the delicacies on offer being as good as in any restaurant, ready to ask her why she hadn’t helped herself to any of the sweet morsels. He knew from old that she loved nothing more than a slice of cake or a chocolate bar.
But then she leant forward to deposit the water and the coffee on the table and in one smooth movement, straightened to remove the bulky sweater.
And he stared.
It was rare for him to be disconcerted to the extent that he was rendered speechless, but in this instance he was because the figure on display underneath that shapeless blue sweater was...definitely not what he’d expected.
He had a moment of pure confusion at the dichotomy between the reality of what he was seeing and his memory of her hiding behind her thick specs and untidy hair and shapeless garments. Wasn’t she just the tiniest bit overweight? She had been...hadn’t she?
The specs had gone and the hair was gloriously shiny, falling in dark waves to her shoulders, and her body...
He was shocked by the dramatic response of his body. Since when was he in the habit of losing control? He made a futile attempt to drag his eyes away but for a few seconds all he could take in, as she leant to shove the jumper into the holdall, was the sway of her full breasts, the rounded curve of her hips and legs that were incredibly long and surprisingly slender. She brushed her hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She wasn’t looking at him and he concluded that that was a relief because she would have been startled to see how compulsively he was staring, but he just couldn’t seem to help himself.
When hadthathappened? When had she turned into a sex siren? Why hadn’t she given him any prior warning as to what to expect? He really hadn’t seen much of her at all over the past few months and it dawned on him that this body transformation was in line with her sudden exploration of the dating scene. It was a sobering thought. She wasn’t one of these hard-edged women who knew how the world turned when it came to guys! She was...well, she wasJess! Sweetly innocent and endearingly straightforward.
He thought about her with some sex-crazed guy on the lookout for a one-night stand and congratulated himself on the surge of protectiveness that smothered him just for a few destabilising seconds.
‘Is there something on my face?’
‘Come again?’
‘You’re staring.’
He flushed darkly, shifted, scowled.
‘Mind was a million miles away.’ His voice was more abrupt than he’d intended and he saw her face tighten with hurt but, caught out as he had been, the last thing on his mind was an apology. ‘Work,’ he offered, staring at his laptop while his mind tried to compute a shift inside himself that he didn’t care for.
‘Okay.’
He heard her laugh and was aware of her sitting down again and reaching for the coffee. All he could see in his mind was the abundance of luscious breasts straining against the stretchy black fabric of her skin-tight T-shirt.
It could not have been a more modest garment, with a high, round neck and long enough to ensure not even a sliver of stomach was revealed, however much she twisted, turned and stretched. And the jeans encasing those long, long legs? Blue denim without a designer label in sight, and high-waisted enough to pretty much classify as unfashionable in most of the circles he mixed in, and yet she could not have looked sexier.
‘I should go sit at one of those desks.’ He nodded to the bank of desks by the wall, with all the accoutrements for hooking up to the Internet. He tried to kill the uncomfortable flush of discomfort and the zinging awareness of her looking at him with those surprisingly beautiful almond-shaped navy eyes. ‘Charging banks,’ he muttered. ‘Useful.’
‘Sure.’
The smile was frozen on her face as he stalked off without a backward glance.
Could he have made it any clearer that he couldn’t be bothered with her company?
Was this a terrible mistake? Was their friendship only workable when they met in passing? They weren’t kids any more, sitting on the sofa and watching movies with a bag of popcorn between them. Life had separated them. Life and experiences. Was she jeopardising what they had by being here? Some things that thrived in a certain environment wilted and died in another.
They were so close, she mused, pointedly not looking in his direction but fishing into her bag for her laptop, and yet there was a gulf between them that had become glaringly apparent in the wake of his relationship and engagement to Caitlin.
First-hand, she had seen how the important stuff had never been shared. She knew precious little about his past and nothing at all about how he really felt about...love and marriage and parenthood or anything else that really mattered.
He was the least likely guy she should ever have had a crush on, never mind nurturing deeper feelings that would never be returned.
Maybe he was regretting inviting her along for four days of together time.
Maybe she should tell him that he should feel free to ditch her if he wanted. It wasn’t as though she would lose sleep if she missed a wedding where she knew no one!
She would wait and see how things played out but already she longed for the safety of her little terraced house and the peace of not having her feelings challenged.
CHAPTER THREE
