With a final glance at him, she said, amiably and calmly, ‘Skiing tomorrow?’ She paused. ‘It’s been really great, Curtis. I’ll remember it for ever. I’ll see you in the morning.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANUNEASYTRUCE. A sticking plaster over something that threatened to ooze out.
That was what it felt like to Jess.
Yes, she had left his bed, had got right back into that red dress and had scuttled back to her bedroom. And, yes, they had skied in the morning and chatted, but she was conscious of whole conversations lying unspoken beneath the surface of their banter and chat and laughter.
Was it just her who had felt the strain of trying to pretend that everything was as it had beenbefore?
She’d laughed but made sure to keep her distance physically.She’d teased him while steering clear of all references to anything that could be a reminder of the fact that they’d slept together. She’d watched him and now her eyes were no longer innocent, no longer speculating.She knew what his body looked like and felt like and tasted like, and it had been hell keeping things natural while that imagery was playing in her head.
It had been a relief to hit British soil once again. As if mentally back behind his desk even before they arrived back at the airport, he had disconnected on the flight over, burying himself in whatever work he had missed during his time out in Courchevel.
She assumed that once his proposition had failed he had shrugged off her rejection with good humour and relegated the whole episode to the back of his mind. Easy come, easy go.
Whilefor herthat had been impossible.
A breather, she had decided. Once back, she would no longer have to be in his presence and so that spine-tingling, toe-curling, dark, forbidden excitement that had suffocated her would be gone.
They had parted company at the airport and she had firmly refused his offer of a driver to return her to Ely.
‘Jess,’ he had said, turning his fabulous green eyes on her for the first time since they had left the hotel, ‘it’s ridiculous for you to trudge all the way back to your house on public transport in this weather. If you don’t want a driver, then I will get a taxi to take you back and if you don’t want that, then I will have to insist on driving you back myself.’
She had taken the taxi. She had returned to her house and had spent the past two and a half weeks nursing all sorts of memories that had no place in her life. She had half-heartedly checked out a couple of guys on her dating app and rejected both. She had told herself that she just had a very bad case of break-up blues,which was something everyone went through but usually years earlier. She was a late bloomer but that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t recover, that she would remain trapped in a half-life of yearning for what she couldn’t have while desperately trying to embrace what she didn’t want.
She had immersed herself in work and repeatedly told herself that in six months’ time she would chuckle at the torment she was currently feeling.
Except in six months’ time...
Jess stared at the small stick with the pair of blue lines on it and felt a wave of nausea rise up inside her all over again.
Books to be marked sat untouched on her kitchen table. Although she had recognised two days ago that her normally perfectly reliable menstrual cycle had had a glitch, it had not seriously occurred to her that she might be pregnant. Not even when, two hours previously, she had gone to the local chemist to buy some toiletries and bought herself a pregnancy testing kit on the spur of the moment...just in case.
Now she was numb as she stared at the evidence of the price that could be paid for a few hours of stolen pleasure.
How?How?He had used protection, but then she thought back to his shock when he had found out that she was a virgin, the way he had fumbled, totally thrown by something that hadn’t come close to registering as a possibility on his radar. Had he known that there had been a chance the contraception had failed? She vaguely remembered him muttering something before the moment was lost in the heady passion that had consumed both of them.
Experienced as he was with the opposite sex, he had clearly never been in the novel situation of ending up in bed with a virgin and, in that once-in-a-lifetime moment of utter awkwardness, fate had seen fit to intervene.
And what happened now? she wondered miserably. Outside, steady freezing rain seemed to mirror her panic-fuelled confusion and mind-numbing fear.
Of course she would have to tell Curtis. What choice did she have? On moral grounds it would have been indefensible to keep that sort of information to herself, and on practical grounds it would have been impossible anyway because she saw a great deal of his godfather. Hiding a pregnancy and a baby didn’t begin to be an option unless she turned her back on her strongly held principles and fled the area under cover of darkness. Like a thief in the night.
Facing a very long evening with nothing to do but think, Jess picked up her cell phone, stared at it for a few minutes, her heart pounding like a jackhammer inside her, and dialled his number.Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today...
It was a little after five in the evening which, for Curtis, still left at least two, if not three, hours ahead of him. Two or three work-fuelled hours before his driver returned him to his bigger-than-strictly-necessary house in one of the most expensive postcodes in London.
Life could have been better as far as he was concerned.
Work-wise? Great. More money being added to the coffers. Two enormous deals that would guarantee him as a major player in the cut-throat world of web development and complex data analysis.
But on a personal level...?
Two dates with two small hot blondes had failed to ignite his interest or, for that matter, put to rest way too many fantasies about a certain five-ten woman he had slept withoncebut who still managed to occupy his every waking moment.
For a ‘moving on’ type of guy, as he was, that did not sit well. Understatement. That sat very, very badly, especially when the blunt truth was that she had been the one to turf him out. Metaphorically.
