‘Good idea,’ she managed to choke out. Why did he have to stand so close beside her?
‘I’ll give you a hand to slide the painting out. It’s too heavy for one person.’
She had to acknowledge the truth in that. It would seem churlish not to. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
She stood at one end of the painting and he at the other and they lifted it free of its wrappings. As the image emerged, she could not help a gasp. The artist had perfectly captured in acrylic, on the underside of a breaking aquamarine wave, a pod of dolphins joyfully surfing towards the beach. ‘It’s wonderful. No. More than wonderful. Breathtaking.’
Jesse would have been justified in an I-told-you-so smirk. Instead he nodded. ‘I thought so too,’ he said.
Lizzie reached out a hand to touch the painting then drew it back. ‘This artist is so talented. It looks like Big Ray beach, is it?’ Big Ray was the local surf beach. It had a different name on the maps. The locals called it Big Ray because of the two enormous dark manta rays that periodically glided their way from one headland to the other. As a kid, visiting Dolphin Bay, she had been both fascinated by and frightened of them.
‘Yep. One of the smaller paintings is of the rays.’
‘Let’s open that one next.’ She couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice.
‘So the big one passes muster?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It gets a triple A. You were absolutely right. It’s perfect.’ She indicated a central spot on the wall. ‘It would look fabulous right there.’
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘The artist will be delighted. She was really hoping you’d choose one of her paintings.’
‘She?’ The word slipped out of her mouth.
Jesse’s eyes darkened to the colour of the sea on a stormy day. ‘Yes. She. Is that a problem?’
‘Of course not. It’s just—’
‘It’s just that you’ve jumped to the immediate wrong conclusion. The artist is a friend of my mother. A retired art teacher. I know her because she taught me at high school. Not because she’s one of the infamous “Jesse’s girls”.’
‘I...I didn’t think that for one moment. Of course I didn’t.’ Of course she had.
At the wedding, she had wanted to be with Jesse so much, she had refused to acknowledge his reputation. Until he himself had shown her the truth of it.
She took a step away from him. His physical presence was so powerful she was uncomfortably aware of him. His muscular arms, tan against the white of his T-shirt. The strength of his chest. His flawless face. Stand too close and she could sense his body heat, breathe the spice of his scent that immediately evoked memories she was desperately trying to suppress.
She thought quickly. ‘I...I just thought the artist might have been a man because of the sheer size and scale of the painting.’
‘Fair enough,’ he conceded, though to her eye he didn’t look convinced. In fact she had the impression he was struggling to contain a retort. ‘If you’re sure you want this painting as the hero, let’s get it up first so we can then balance the others around it.’
‘That could work,’ she said. He was right, of course he was right. And she could not let her memories of how he had hurt her hinder her from giving him the courtesy she owed him for his help.
He stood in front of the wall and narrowed his eyes. After a long pause he pointed. ‘If we centre it there, I reckon we’ll be able to achieve a balanced display.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
It wasn’t a good idea to stand behind him. His rear view was even more appealing than she had remembered. Those broad shoulders, the butt that could sell a million pairs of jeans. She stepped forward so she was beside him. Darn, her shoulders were practically nudging his. Stand in front of him and she’d remember too well how he’d slid his arms around her and nuzzled her neck out on that balcony. How she’d ached for so much more. She settled for taking a few steps sidewards, so quickly she nearly tripped.
As it happened, she needn’t have bothered with evasive tactics. He headed for a toolbox she hadn’t noticed tucked away behind the counter and took out an electric drill, a hammer, a spirit level, a handful of plastic wall plugs and a jar of nails. ‘It’s a double brick wall with no electrics in the way so we can hang the picture exactly where we want it.’
‘I can’t wait to see it up,’ she said.
She found his continual use of the word ‘we’ disconcerting. No way did she want to be thought as part of a team with Jesse Morgan. But, she had to admit, she was totally lacking in drilling skills. Sandy knew that. And why pay a handyman when Jesse was volunteering his time?
He pulled a pencil from out of his pocket, marked a spot on the wall and proceeded to drill. It seemed an awkward angle for someone with a shoulder injury but who was she to question him? But he easily drilled a neat hole, with only the finest spray of masonry dust to mar the freshly painted wall. ‘Done,’ he said in a satisfied tone.
He put down the drill, picked up the hammer and the wall plug. He positioned the wall plug with his left hand and took aim with the hammer in his right. His sudden curse curdled the air and the hammer thudded to the floor.
‘Jesse! Are you okay?’
‘Just my shoulder,’ he groaned, gripping it and doubling over. ‘Not a good angle for it.’
‘How can I help?’ She felt useless in the face of his pain. Disconcerted by her immediate urge to touch him, to comfort him.
He straightened up, wincing. ‘You hold the nail and I’ll wield the hammer using both hands, it’ll take the strain off the shoulder.’
‘Or you could let me use the hammer.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’
Was it masculine pride? Or did he honestly think she couldn’t use a hammer? Whatever, she had no intention of getting into an argument over it. ‘Okay,’ she said.
He handed her the nail and, using her left hand, she positioned it against the wall plug. She was tall, but Jesse was taller. To reach the nail he had to manoeuvre himself around her. Her shoulders were pressed against the solid wall of his chest. He was too close. Her heart started to thud so fast she felt giddy; her knees went wobbly. She dropped the nail, twisted to get away from him and found herself staring directly up into his face. For a long, long moment their eyes connected.
‘I...I can’t do this, Jesse,’ she finally stuttered as she pushed away from him.
Three of his large strides took him well away from her before he turned to face her again. He cleared his throat. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We can’t just continue to ignore what happened between us at the wedding. Or why you ran away the next day without saying goodbye.’
CHAPTER THREE
THE LIZZIE JESSE had known six months ago hadn’t been short of a quick retort or a comment that bordered on the acerbic. Now she struggled to make a response. But he didn’t prompt her. He’d waited six months for her excuse. He could wait minutes more.
Instead he tilted back on the heels of his boots, stuck his thumbs into the belt of his jeans and watched her, schooling his face to be free of expression.
She opened her mouth to speak then shut it again. She twisted a flyaway piece of her pale blonde hair that had worked itself free from the plait that fell between her shoulder blades.
‘Not ignore. Forget,’ she said at last.
‘Forget us getting together ever happened?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was a lapse of judgement on my part.’
He snorted. ‘I’ve been insulted before but to be called a “lapse of judgement” is a first.’
She clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out quite like that.’
‘I’m tough; I can take it,’ he said. He went to shrug his shoulders but it hurt. In spite of his bravado, so had her words.
‘But I meant it,’ she said. ‘It should never have happened. The...the episode on the balcony was a mistake.’ She had a soft, sweet mouth but her words twisted it into something bordering on bitter.
‘I remember it as being a whole lot of fun,’ he said slowly.
She tilted her chin in a movement that was surprisingly combative. ‘Seems like our memories of that night are very different.’
‘I remember lots of laughter and a warm, beautiful woman by my side,’ he said.
By now she had braced herself against the back of the counter as if she wanted to push herself away from him as far as she possibly could. ‘You mean you’ve forgotten the way a rowdy group of your friends came out and...and caught us—’
‘Caught us kissing. Yeah. I remember. I’ve known those people all my life. They were teasing. You didn’t seem to be bothered by it at the time.’
‘It was embarrassing.’
‘You were laughing.’
That piece of hair was getting a workout now between her slender fingers. ‘To hide how I really felt.’
He paused. ‘Do you often do that?’
She stilled. ‘Laugh, you mean?’
He searched her face. ‘Hide how you really feel.’
She met his gaze full on with a challenging tilt to her head. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘You laughed it off. Said you had to go check on Amy.’
Her gaze slid away so it didn’t meet his. ‘Yes.’
‘You never came back.’
‘I did but...but you were otherwise engaged.’
‘Huh? I don’t get it. I was waiting for you.’ He’d checked his watch time and time again, but she still hadn’t shown up. Finally he’d asked someone if they’d seen Lizzie. They’d pointed her out on the other side of the room in conversation with a group of the most gossipy girls in Dolphin Bay. She hadn’t come near him again.
Now she met his eyes again, hers direct and shadowed with accusation. ‘You were dancing with another woman. When you’d told me all dances for the evening were reserved for me.’
He remembered the running joke they had shared—Jesse with a ‘Reserved for Lizzie’ sign on his back, Lizzie with a ‘Reserved for Jesse’ sign. The possessiveness had been in jest but he had meant it.
He frowned. ‘After the duty dances for the wedding—including with your delightful little daughter—the only woman I danced with that evening was you. Refresh my memory about the other one?’
She turned her head to the side. Her body language told him loud and clear she’d rather be anywhere else than here with him. In spite of the café and Sandy and family obligations.
‘It was nothing,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘You had every right to dance with another woman.’
He reached out and cupped her chin to pull her back to face him. ‘Let’s get this straight. I only wanted to dance with you that night.’
For a long moment he looked deep into her eyes until she tried to wiggle away from him and he released her. ‘So describe this mystery woman to me,’ he said.
‘Black hair, tall, beautiful, wearing a red dress.’ It sounded as if the words were being dragged out of her.
He frowned.
‘You seemed very happy to be with her,’ she prompted.
Realisation dawned. ‘Red dress? It was my cousin. I was with my cousin Marie. She’d just told me she was pregnant. She and her husband had been trying for years to start a family. I was talking with her while I waited for you to come back.’
‘Oh,’ Lizzie said in a very small voice, her head bowed.
‘I wasn’t dancing with her. More like whirling her around in a dance of joy. A baby is everything she’s always wanted.’
‘I...I’m glad for her,’ Lizzie said in an even more diminished voice.
He couldn’t keep the edge of anger from his voice. ‘You thought I’d moved on to someone else? That I’d kissed you out on the balcony—in front of an audience—and then found another woman while you were out of the room for ten minutes?’
She looked up at him. ‘That’s what it seemed like from where I was standing. I’ve never felt so foolish.’
‘So why didn’t you come over and slap me on the face or whack me with your purse or do whatever jealous women do in such circumstances?’
‘I wasn’t jealous. Just...disappointed.’ Her gaze slid away again.
‘I was disappointed when you didn’t come back. When you took off to Sydney the next day without saying goodbye. When you didn’t return my phone calls.’
‘I...I...misunderstood. I’m sorry.’
She turned her back on him and walked around the countertop so it formed a physical barrier between them. When she got to the glass jars she picked one up and put it down. He noticed her hands weren’t quite steady.
Even with the counter between them, it would be easy to lean over and touch her again. Even kiss her. He fought the impulse. She so obviously didn’t want to be touched. And he didn’t want to start anything he had no intention of continuing. He wanted to clear up a misunderstanding that had festered for six months. That was all. He took a step back to further increase the distance between them.
‘I get what happened. You believed my bad publicity,’ he said.
‘Publicity? I don’t know what you mean.’ But the flickering of her eyelashes told him she probably had a fair idea of what he meant.
‘My reputation. Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about me. That I’m a player. A ladies’ man. That you’d be one of “Jesse’s girls” until I tired of you.’
How he’d grown to hate that old song from the nineteen-eighties where the singer wailed over and over that he wanted ‘Jessie’s girl’. Apparently his parents had played it at his christening party and it had followed him ever since; had become his signature song.
She flushed high on her cheeks. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘You should know—reports of my love life are greatly exaggerated.’
He used to get a kick out of his reputation for being a guaranteed girl magnet—what free-wheeling guy in his teens and early twenties wouldn’t?—though he’d never taken it seriously. But now, as thirty loomed, he was well and truly over living up to the Jesse legend. A legend that had always been more urban myth than fact.
But he’d done nothing to dispel it. In fact it had been a convenient shield against ever having to explain why he’d closed his heart off against a committed relationship. Why he dated fun-for-now, unchallenging girls and always stayed in control of where the relationship went.
Camilla’s words haunted him. ‘You won’t miss me for a minute; a guy as good-looking as you can get any woman you want just by snapping your fingers—there’ll always be another one waiting in line.’ It wasn’t true, as she herself had proven. He had wanted her. Badly. And she had gutted and filleted his heart as surely as his father did the fish he caught. He would never expose himself to that kind of pain again.
‘I didn’t need to be warned,’ Lizzie said. ‘I figured it out for myself. You and Kate Parker, Sandy’s other bridesmaid, were the talk of the wedding. How you’d come back from your travels and hooked up with her. How Kate wouldn’t have more luck with getting you to commit than any other of the long line of girlfriends before her.’
As he’d suspected, the Dolphin Bay gossips had struck again. Didn’t the women in this town have anything better to do with their time? Though for all their poking their noses into other people’s business, they’d never come close to ferreting out the reasons why he’d stayed so resolutely single.
Kate had been his childhood friend. There’d been a long-standing joke between their families that if they hadn’t met anyone else by the time they were aged thirty they’d settle down with each other.
‘Not true. We kissed. Once. To see if there wa
s anything more than friendship between us. There wasn’t. We were just friends. Still are friends.’
Lizzie shrugged. ‘I realised that. I soon sussed out she only had eyes for the other groomsman, your friend Sam Lancaster.’
‘True. It seemed like one minute Kate was organising Ben and Sandy’s wedding, the next minute she was planning her own.’
‘I heard they eloped and got married at some fabulous Indian palace hotel.’
‘You heard right. I was Sam’s best man. It turned out great for them,’ he said.
He was really happy for his old friends. But if he was honest with himself, there had been an awkward moment when Kate had made it very clear the kiss had been a disaster for her. Coming on top of what had happened with Camilla it had struck a serious blow to his male pride. By the time of the wedding he’d been in a real funk, questioning things about himself he’d never before had cause to question.
Meeting Lizzie had done a lot to help soothe his bruised ego—until she’d walked away without a word of explanation.
But that had been six months ago. He’d moved on. Now his circumstances were very different. He’d come to a real turning point in his career and the path he chose was crucial to his future. The recent encounter with Camilla had made him realise it could be time to move on from his work with the charity. He’d told his boss there was a good chance he wouldn’t return after his shoulder healed. He would not turn his back on it completely but would remain involved as a volunteer and as a fund-raiser.
A new direction had opened with the offer of a fast-track job with a multinational construction company based in Houston, Texas. It would be a challenging, demanding role in a ruthlessly competitive commercial environment. But living in the United States would mean he’d rarely make it home to Dolphin Bay.
A Diamond in Her Stocking Page 3
