The Girl He'd Overlooked by Cathy Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

inch was the limit of her concessions, ‘I
did
think that it might be awkward if we met up. I
may
have avoided you at first but then, honestly, life just became so busy… I barely had time to think! I guess I could have come back to England more frequently than I did, but Dad’s never travelled and it was fun being able to bring him over, take him places. It was the first time I’ve ever been able to actually afford to take him on holiday…’ The egg she had been scrambling had gone cold. She relit the stove and busied herself resuscitating it, keeping her back to him so that she couldguard her expression from those clever, perceptive deep blue eyes, which had always been able to delve into the depths of her. She couldn’t avoid this conversation, she argued to herself, but she wasn’t going to let him know how much he still affected her.
    She was smilingly bland when she placed a plate of toast and eggs in front of him.
    ‘I think what I’m trying to say, James, is that I’ve grown up. I’m not that innocent young girl who used to hang onto your every word.’
    ‘And I’m not expecting you to be!’ But that, he realised, was exactly what he had been expecting. After four years of absence, he had still imagined her to be the girl next door who listened with eagerness to everything he had to say. The smiling stranger he had been faced with had come as a shock, and even more surprising was the fact that his usual cool when dealing with any unexpected situation had apparently deserted him.
    ‘Which brings me to this: I don’t want for there to be any bad feeling between us, but I also don’t want you thinking that because we happen to be temporarily stranded here, that you have a right to come and go as you please. You’ve seen to the little flooding problem in the cottage and I’m very grateful for that but it doesn’t mean that you now have a passport to my home.’
    ‘Point taken.’
    ‘And now I expect you’re angry with me.’ She hadn’t wanted to say that but it just slipped out and she could have kicked herself because, as the new woman she claimed to be, would she still care what he thought of her? Why couldn’t she be indifferent? She hadn’t seen him for
four years
! It seemed so unfair that after all this time her heart still skipped a beat when he was around and it was evenmore unfair that she inwardly quailed at the thought of antagonising him.
    ‘I’m glad you said what was on your mind. Honesty being the best policy and all that.’ He dug into his breakfast with relish. ‘Did your father tell you that he’s thinking of doing a cookery course? This, incidentally, is my way of trying to normalise the situation between us. Because you’ve changed doesn’t mean that we’ve lost the ability to communicate.’
    Jennifer hesitated, apprehensive of familiarity, but then decided that, whether she liked it or not, there were too many strands of their lives that were interwoven for her to pretend otherwise.
    ‘He told me,’ she said, relaxing, with a smile. ‘In fact, the last time he came over, just before Christmas, he brought all his prospectuses so that I could give him some advice. Not that I would be any good at all when it comes to that sort of thing.’
    ‘You mean being in Paris, surrounded by all that French cuisine, wasn’t enough to stimulate an interest in cooking?’
    ‘The opposite,’ Jennifer admitted ruefully. ‘When there’s so much brilliant food everywhere you go, what’s the point trying to compete at home?’
    ‘You must have picked something up.’ James saluted her with a mouthful of egg on his fork. ‘This scrambled egg tastes pretty perfect.’
    ‘That’s the extent of it, I’m afraid. I can throw a few things together to make something passable for an evening meal but no one I’ve ever entertained has really expected me to produce anything cordon bleu. In fact, on a couple of occasions, friends in Paris actually showed up with some store-bought