The Girl He'd Overlooked

James hesitated and raked his fingers through his hair.

‘Thanks for dinner, James… and I’ll see you…’

She remained frozen to the spot as he brushed past her, pausing fleetingly, as though hesitant to leave.

What did he think she was going to do? Jennifer wondered. Fling herself out of her bedroom window because he had rejected her? Was she so pathetic in his eyes that he doubted her ability to get over the slight?

The soft click of the front door closing signalled his departure and it was only once she was certain that he had left the cottage that Jennifer slumped.

She closed her eyes and thought of the excited girl who had bought a new outfit especially for her big date. She remembered her anticipation at having him all to herself over dinner. She had dreamt of seduction and of finally having this crazy crush of hers fulfilled. It suddenly felt like a million years ago and, although a year wasn’t long, it was long enough to say goodbye to that person.

CHAPTER ONE

EXCEPT one year became two, which became three, which became four. And in all those four years, Jennifer had not once set eyes on James. Each Christmas, she had contrived to bring her father over to Paris for the holidays, which he had loved. What had begun as a one-year placement, during which she could consolidate her French, had seen her rise through the company, and as she had risen so too had her pay cheque. She found that she could afford to holiday with her father abroad, and on those occasions when she had returned to England she had been careful with her visits, always making sure that they were brief and that James was nowhere in the vicinity.

He had walked out of the cottage four years previously and she had fled to Paris, her wounds still raw. She couldn’t imagine ever facing him again, and not facing him had developed into a habit. He had emailed her, and she had been happy enough to email back, but on the occasions when he had been in Paris she had excused herself from meeting him on grounds of being too busy, prior engagements, not well, anything because the memory of him gently letting her down remained, that open wound quietly hurting somewhere in the background of her shiny new life.

Except now…

She had nodded off on the train and woke with a start as it pulled into the station.

When she looked through the window it was to see that the flurries of snow that she had left behind in London were a steady fall here in Kent. The weather was always so much harsher out here. She had forgotten.

At six-thirty in the evening the train was packed with commuters and fetching her bags was chaotic, with people jostling her on all sides, but eventually she was out of the train and braving the freezing temperatures and snow on the platform.

She wasn’t planning on staying long. Just long enough to sort out the problems in the cottage, problems she had learnt about via an email from James who had been checking his house in his mother’s absence and had happened to walk down to the cottage to take a look only to find water seeping out from under the front door. Her father was away on his annual post-Christmas three-week holiday to visit his brother in Scotland. The email had read:

You can pass this on to your father, but I gather you’re in the country so you might want to check it out yourself instead of ruining your father’s fishing trip. This, of course, presupposes that you can interrupt your busy schedule.

The tone of the email was the final nail in the coffin of their enduring friendship. She had run away and, never looked back, and over time, the chasm between them had become so vast that it was now unbreachable terrain. His emails, which had been warm and concerned at the beginning of her stint in Paris, had gradually become cooler and more formal, in direct proportion to her avoidance tactics. It occurred to her that she actually hadn’t heard from him at all for at least six months.

In Paris, she could tell herself that she didn’t mind, that this was just the way things had turned out in the end, that their friendship had always been destined to run its course because it had been an unrealistic union of the inaccessible boy in the manor house and the childishly doting girl next door.

But now here, back in Kent, his email was a vaguely sexy reminder of how things used to be.

She wheeled her suitcase out to where a bank of taxis was only just managing to keep the snow on their cars from settling by virtue of having their engines running. Everywhere, the snow was forming a layer of white.

The water had been cleared, James had informed her, but there was a lot of collateral damage, which she would have to assess for the insurance company. He had managed to get the heating started. So at least when she arrived at the cottage, she wouldn’t freeze to death. She hoped he might have left her some fresh provisions before he cleared off, on his way to Singapore for a series of meetings, he had politely informed her in his email, but she wasn’t banking on it.

That was how far their friendship had devolved. When Jennifer thought about it for too long, she could feel a lump of sadness in her throat and she had to remind herself of that terrible night when she had made such a fool of herself. Someone better and stronger might have been able to survive that and laughingly put it behind them so that a friendship could be maintained, but she couldn’t.

For her, it had been a devastating learning curve and she had learnt from it.

She gazed out of the window of the taxi but could barely see anything because of the snow. Deep in the heart of the Kent countryside, the trip, in conditions like this, would take over an hour. She settled in for the long haul and let her thoughts drift without restraint.

It had been a while since she had returned to the cottage for any length of time. She and her father had spent summer in Majorca, two weeks of sun and sea, and every six weeks she brought him over for a weekend. She loved the fact that she could afford to do that now. She knew that there was a part of her that was reluctant to return to the place that held so many memories of James, but that was fine because her father was more than happy to travel out to see her and she always, always made sure that she met Daisy, James’s mother, for lunch in London when she was over on business. She had politely asked about James and given evasive non-answers whenever Daisy showed any curiosity as to why they no longer seemed to meet. Eventually his name had been quietly dropped from conversations.

To think of him moving around in the cottage made something in her shiver. Sometimes, a memory of the scent of him, clean and masculine and woody, would surface from nowhere, leaving her shaken. She hoped that scent wouldn’t be lingering in the cottage when she got there. She was tired and it was too cold to run around opening windows to let out an elusive smell.

By the time they reached the cottage, driving was becoming impossible.

‘And they predict at least a week of this,’ the driver said bitterly. ‘Business is bad enough as it is without Mother Nature getting involved.’

‘Oh, this won’t last,’ Jennifer said airily. ‘I’ve got to be back in London by day after tomorrow.’

‘Lots of clothes for an overnight stay.’ The driver struggled up to the door with the case, unable to wheel it in the snow.

‘I’ll be leaving one or two things behind. Clearing out old stuff.’

She paid him, thinking of the task that lay ahead. Aside from sorting out the cottage, she would be bagging up all those frumpy clothes that had once been the mainstay of her wardrobe. None of them would fit any more. In the space of four years, she had been seduced by Parisian chic. She had lost weight, or maybe, thanks to her daily run, the weight had just been reassigned. At any rate, the body she had once avoided looking at in the mirror now attracted wolf whistles and stares from strangers and she was not ashamed to wear clothes that accentuated it. Nothing revealing, that would never be her style, but fashionable and figure hugging. Her untamed hair had been tamed over the years, thanks to the expert scissors of her hairdresser. It was still long, longer even than it used to be, but it was cleverly layered so that the frizz had been replaced with curls.

The cottage was in complete darkness although the door was surprisingly unlocked. She lugged the suitcase through and slammed the door shut behind her, luxuriating for a few seconds in the blissful warmth, eyes closed, lights still off because she just wanted to enjoy the cottage before she could see all the damage that had been caused by the flood.

And then she opened her eyes and there he was. Lounging against the door that led into the kitchen.

The cottage hadn’t been in complete darkness, as she had first thought. No, one of the kitchen lights had been switched on, but the kitchen was at the back of the house and the door leading to it had been shut when she had entered.

She literally froze on the spot.

God, he hadn’t changed. He was still as beautiful as he always had been, still the man who towered over other men. His hair was shorter than it had been four years ago and she could tell from the shadow on his jawline that he hadn’t shaved. In the space of a few seconds, during which time Jennifer felt her breath catch in her throat, she took in everything. The lean, long body in a pair of jeans and an old striped rugby jumper, the sleeves of which were shoved up to the elbows, those amazing deep blue eyes, now focused on her in a way that made her head swim.

Disastrously, she felt herself catapulted back to the young, naive girl she had once been.

‘James. What on earth are you doing here?’ She knew that her hand was trembling when she hit the light switch. ‘You told me that you would be leaving the country!’

‘I should be in the air right now but the weather got in the way of those plans. It’s been a long time, Jennifer…’

The silence stretched and stretched and stretched and she had to fight to maintain her self-control. Four years of independence, of cutting herself free from those infantile ties that had bound her to this man, and she could feel them melting and slipping away. She could have wept. Instead, she let the little ball of remembered bitterness and anger form into a knot inside her stomach and she began to get rid of her coat, which was heavy and damp from the snow.

‘Yes. Yes, it has. How are you?’ She forced a stiff smile but her heart was thumping like a sledgehammer.

‘I thought I’d stay in the cottage until you got here, make sure you arrived safely. I wasn’t sure whether you were going to drive or take the train.’

‘I… I took the train.’ Her car was parked outside her friend’s house in London where she stayed every time she came back to the city. ‘But there was no need for you to hang around here. You know I can take care of myself.’

‘You’ve certainly been doing a very good job of that while you’ve been in Paris. My mother frequently regales me with news of yet more promotions.’

She still hadn’t taken a single step towards him because her feet appeared to be nailed to that one spot in the hallway.

He was the first to break the spell, turning away and heading into the kitchen, leaving her to follow him.

He hadn’t said a word about how much she had changed. How could he have failed to notice? But then, why was it so surprising when he had never really noticed her? The ease she had once felt in his company was nowhere to be found and it was a struggle thinking of polite conversation to make.

‘It’s been a very successful posting for me,’ Jennifer said politely. ‘I never thought that I’d end up staying over there for four years but as I accepted more and more responsibility, the work became more and more challenging and I found myself accepting their offers to stay on.’

‘You look like a visitor, standing there. Sit down. You might as well forget about getting anything done tonight. We can work on detailing what will need to be done to the cottage tomorrow.’

‘We? Like I said, there’s absolutely no need for you to help me with this. I plan on having it all finished by tomorrow afternoon and I’ll be leaving first thing the following morning.’ This was not how two old friends, meeting after years of separation, would act. Jennifer knew that. She could hear the sharp edge to her voice and, while she was dismayed by it, she was also keenly aware that it was necessary as a protective tool, because just looking at him rooting around in the fridge with his back to her threatened to take her down memory lane and that was a journey she wasn’t willing to make.