footsteps came towards them. ‘Are you all right?’ a male voice asked, sharp with concern. ‘I didn’t hit you, did I?’
Clara pulled herself away from her mother and turned on him furiously, venting her fright in shrill anger. ‘You should be more careful! You could have knocked her over!’
Nell braced herself for a mouthful of abuse. A lot of drivers would react aggressively in a near accident, and it had been her fault, after all. Fortunately, this man seemed to take in Clara’s distress and was calm enough not to take out his own fright on a little girl.
‘Yes, I could,’ he said to Clara, sounding almost as shaken as Nell felt. ‘I’m really sorry. I wasn’t expecting your mother to step out into the road like that, but that’s no excuse, I know.’ He turned to Nell, who was rubbing her arm. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No, I … I …’ She trailed off in disbelief.
He looked just like P.J.
Older, tougher, more solid, but yes, exactly like P.J. He looked like him, he even sounded like him, but clearly he couldn’t be P.J. That would be too weird. Coincidences like that just didn’t happen. It was just that she’d been thinking about him.
Nell shook her head slightly to clear it. Perhaps she had been knocked over after all and was having some bizarre out-of-body experience? But he was staring back at her and the blue eyes that were uncannily like P.J.’s widened with incredulous recognition.
‘Nell?’ he asked in a tentative voice.
‘Hello, P.J.,’ she said weakly.
CHAPTER TWO
P.J. STARED at her, trying to take in the fact that it was actually Nell. Janey had been doing her best to drop her name into every conversation they had had since he had come back to London, and he had been disturbed by how vividly he could remember her.
Nell was divorced now, Janey had said pointedly. Why didn’t he give her a ring?
P.J. had been hesitant. It wasn’t as if he had been pining for Nell all these years, but the memory of the look in her eyes as she gave him back his ring still had a surprising power to hurt. The raw pain had faded to the merest twinge now, of course, but he didn’t want to go through that again.
Still, the idea of seeing her again had both intrigued and unnerved him, and he had been thinking about it more than he should have done. That was probably why he hadn’t been concentrating as well as he should, until she had stumbled out into the road in front of him.
And now here she was, his first love, his lost love, standing in a busy London street, while the passersby, hopeful at first of some gory incident, had quickly lost interest and were now surging impersonally past them once more, oblivious to the fact that his world had just turned upside down.
Nell.
She was older, of course, and thinner, he thought, and she had lost the golden bloom that had so entranced him as an adolescent. There was a wariness and a weariness in the lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before, but it was unmistakably Nell. She had the same wide grey gaze, the same sweetness in her expression, the same air of deceptive fragility.
‘Nell …’ He ran his hands through his hair a little helplessly. ‘This is bizarre … I always hoped I’d bump into you again one day, but not literally! Are you sure I didn’t hurt you?’
Nell looked down at herself as if to check, becoming aware for the first time of a dull throb in her ankle. She must have wrenched her bad foot as she’d tried to right herself.
‘I think my arm just caught your wing mirror,’ she said, feeling more shaken by coming face to face with P.J. than by the accident.
It was disconcerting to find him so familiar, and yet so changed. She had been right in thinking that he would grow into his looks, but she hadn’t expected him to turn into quite such an attractive man. Where the young P.J.’s face had been thin and beaky, now it was strong and angular. His neck and shoulders had broadened as he had thickened out with age, and he had acquired a solidity and a presence that was almost unnerving, but the crooked smile and the blue dancing eyes were just the same.
‘Let me see.’ Unaware of the train of her thoughts, P.J. took her arm and felt it gently. ‘It doesn’t seem to be broken, anyway.’
Nell was unaccountably flustered by the feel of his hands, and miserably conscious of her bare face, and scruffy clothes. If fate had wanted her to meet P.J. again against all the odds, it could at least have waited until she was looking more presentable.
‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ she said almost sharply, and pulled out of his grasp, only to wince as she stepped back onto her twisted ankle.
‘You’re limping,’ said Clara protectively. ‘It’s your bad foot, too.’ She cast P.J. an accusing glance. ‘She broke it last year.’
‘And now I’ve made it worse. I’m sorry …’ P.J. looked enquiring, and Nell had no choice but to make the introduction.
‘This is my daughter, Clara,’ she said. ‘Clara, this is—’
‘P.J.,’ supplied Clara before she could finish. She looked assessingly at P.J. as she held out her hand, and quite suddenly she smiled, as if he had passed some rigorous test. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello, Clara.’ P.J. shook her hand gravely, but his eyes twinkled. ‘It’s nice to meet you, but I’m really sorry I had to nearly knock your mother over to do it. We’re old friends.’
‘I know,’ said Clara. ‘Mum was just telling me about you. She said you were nice.’
P.J. glanced at Nell, his eyes warm with amusement, and to her chagrin Nell could feel herself blushing.
‘We were just talking old boyfriends and how I met you at school,’ she said as casually as she could. She didn’t want him thinking that she spent her days boring on about him. ‘Clara doesn’t believe that I was ever that young, of course!’
‘Oh, she was,’ P.J. told Clara with a grin. ‘She was the prettiest girl in the school. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was, I can tell you!’
Clara beamed approvingly at him, and Nell’s heart sank. Her daughter was an incurable matchmaker, especially since she had taken such a successful hand in her aunt Thea’s affairs the previous year, and now she had evidently decided that it was time that her mother had some romance in her life, too. It was clear that she was eyeing P.J. up as prospective candidate.
Heaven only knew what she would say if she discovered that P.J. was not only eligible but rich enough to solve all her mother’s financial problems without even noticing a blip in his bank account! She had to nip her plans in the bud right now, Nell decided.
‘Clara, we’re going to be really late,’ she said quickly. ‘We’d better get on.’ She turned to P.J. ‘Nice to see you again, P.J.,’ she said with a bright smile and what she hoped was an air of finality.
If P.J. heard it, he ignored it. ‘Let me give you a lift,’ he said.
‘There’s no need,’ Nell said firmly, and pointed to the school gates. ‘We’re just going along here.’
‘What about your ankle, Mum?’ Clara put in. ‘You won’t be able to walk on it. How are you going to get to work?’
‘I’ll be fine when I get to the tube.’
‘Where do you work?’ asked P.J.
‘In the city,’ said Clara, disregarding Nell’s attempt at a quelling look. ‘It takes ages to get there,’ she added, blatantly fishing.
P.J. didn’t disappoint her. ‘Oh, well, that’s easy, then,’ he said. ‘I’m going that way myself. I just have to drop off the kids first.’
Kids?
Jolted