‘Well…’ Jenna could hardly deny it. This woman might have shaken her by being nothing like she’d expected, but that didn’t alter the fact that she’d stolen Jenna’s husband from her and taken the twins’ father away. ‘Areyou sorry?’ she asked at last.
‘Yes,’ the woman said flatly. ‘More than you can possibly imagine.’
‘I suppose that’s something,’ Jenna said cautiously.
‘Do you still love him?’ Annette asked, lifting her cup of tea to her lips.
Jenna hesitated. ‘He’s my husband. The father of my children.’
‘That’s not what I asked, though, is it?’
‘What does it matter?’ Jenna asked. ‘He’s with you now. I thought, I really believed, that he’d be home by the end of the summer holidays. He’s done this before, you see, and I suppose I had it fixed in my mind that eight weeks was his limit. I don’t know why. Stupid of me.’
‘I know he’s done it before,’ Annette admitted. ‘He told me, during one of our many rows. He wanted me to be absolutely clear that I was nothing special, you see.’
Jenna stared at her. Whatever she’d expected to hear from Annette, it wasn’t that.
Annette smiled and shrugged. ‘The bugger’s not easy to live with, is he?’
‘No,’ Jenna agreed stonily. ‘I suppose he isn’t.’
So this woman had enticed Joel away from his wife and family, and now she was complaining about his behaviour? That was rich!
‘Are you pregnant?’ she blurted out without thinking.
Annette put her cup back on the saucer, her eyes wide with shock. ‘Bloody hell, I hope not! What makes you say that?’
Jenna shrank back in her chair, feeling stupid. ‘You wanted to meet me. Said you had something to tell me. I thought…’
‘That I’d been stupid enough to get pregnant by him? No bloody fear. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ Jenna said, through gritted teeth.
‘If you really want to know why I’m here, I’ll tell you. Thing is, I’m done with him. You can have him back.’
Jenna couldn’t think of a single retort to that remark. It was so utterly out of the blue that she could only stare.
‘He wasn’t a bit like I thought he’d be,’ Annette continued blithely. ‘He really knows how to charm the birds off the trees, that one, doesn’t he? I fell for it hook, line and sinker.’
Jenna remembered the song Joel had played repeatedly before he’d left. ‘August’. How he’d smirked as he’d sung the lyrics, which were from the viewpoint of a woman who’d lost someone who never belonged to her in the first place.
‘At least you got him to like a Taylor Swift song,’ she said, watching the woman’s reaction closely. ‘I never managed that.’
Annette had the grace to blush, confirming Jenna’s suspicions. ‘Oh, bloody hell! I can’t believe I ever felt that way about him. Honestly, I thought I’d die if he didn’t leave you and move in with me. I was such an idiot to tell him about the song. I think he got off on it, actually.’
Remembering Joel’s glee as he sang along to the song, Jenna thought Annette was probably correct.
‘And Gillan’s Burger Bar. You got him to like that, too.’
Annette’s eyes widened. ‘You must be joking! I hate that place. It was him! He told me I’d made him feel ten years younger, and he wanted to experience all the things he’d missed out on being shackled to you all those years. It beggars belief that I fell for it really,’ she mused. ‘I don’t usually fall for that old flannel, but there was something about him. He has a way of making you feel so special at first.’
Jenna couldn’t deny it and, seeing the wistful look in the woman’s eyes, she suddenly realised that she no longer saw Annette as her enemy. Yes, she’d behaved badly, there was no doubt about it. But she would never have been able to ‘steal’ Joel from Jenna. It had been Joel’s choice.Hisbetrayal.
‘When did it start?’ she asked hesitantly, cursing the part of her that desperately needed to know.
Annette looked sheepish. ‘About six weeks before he moved in with me,’ she admitted.
Six weeks. He’d been seeing her for six weeks! He’d left his home, his wife, his children, put them through all this misery and upheaval for a woman he’d only been seeing for six weeks. That was how little he valued them.
