next. Nothing on her lips apart from a swoosh of gloss. They didn’t need anything else.
Except, perhaps, for him to find out if her gloss still tasted of vanilla and mint.
He smashed the thought into submission.
That type of impulse was meant to have died a long time ago. Right about the moment she’d handed his ring back to him.
Jayne blinked and hitched her nose against an obvious sting of emotion. When she opened her eyes again they held tight with his.
Oh, hell.
What he wouldn’t give to be able to read all the secrets she held in those jewel-like eyes of hers.
They’d used to light up when they were planning their wedding. Dreaming of finally refurbishing the old barn. Talking about Jayne’s plan to specialise in paediatrics. Sam in geriatrics. They’d used to light up when she saw him come round a corner.
Her sister’s death had knocked the light out of her eyes. Even so, he’d refused to believe her when she’d said she didn’t love him any more. She’d been through a trauma. She was bound to be different for a while.
Jayne had loved Jules as he loved his own family. Fiercely. Protectively. There was no fighting with a ghost. He got that. He’d thought he could wait it out. Be there for her. But she’d refused his support, again and again. Months had gone by before he’d finally seen the change of heart she’d said she felt. The change that had seen her handing him back his ring for good.
That was the day her eyes had lit up again. Glazed with tears, sure, but he’d felt the flare of life return to her as acutely as he would have felt a lightning strike. And it hadn’t been him who had put it there. Holding the ring between them, she’d told him she’d changed disciplines. She wanted to be a paediatric cardiologist. She didn’t want to move back to Whitticombe. She’d taken over Jules’s flat in London. She’d told him it was time for him to find someone else to run the surgery with.
That had been the blow that had struck the deepest. She had always known more than anyone how much he valued his family and how important running his grandfather’s surgery was to him. His family was his adoptive family—they’d never made any secret of it—but he’d never felt anything less than family. When he’d finally been old enough to register that his future might have been completely different—alone in an orphanage—he’d vowed to stick with them as loyally and as lovingly as they’d stuck with him as they’d brought him up. With all of his heart.
It was then that he’d known he had no choice but to walk away from Jayne and get on with his own life. It had broken his heart to do it, but doing anything else would have been living a lie.
Their intense eye contact broke as Maggie pulled back from the hug and hooked her arm round Jayne’s waist so that the pair of them were facing Sam.
‘Can you believe it? Jayne rang a few days ago and said she had some time off. So I was all You’ve got to come back to the village! Nate’s away. We’ve got the cricket tournament on. And the fete. And the art show. She was supposed to come tomorrow, but when I rang her from the hospital this morning, to tell her about the pre-eclampsia diagnosis, she dropped everything and came straight away.’
Wow. That got his attention. Jayne didn’t drop anything to leave the hospital. He dipped his head so he could look into her eyes again. See if he’d missed anything.
As his eyes met hers she looked away and said, ‘I have a lot of accrued holiday HR were threatening to give away, so...’ She gave a half-shrug and a smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes.
Something was off here. Had something gone wrong at the hospital? In her private life? Whatever it was, his gut told him she wasn’t here for a bit of R&R. She’d come back to Whitticombe because she needed to.
She’d been back before. There were the annual Christmas trips, and he had seen her at his mum’s funeral in January. Right at the back of the church, flanked by her parents. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d disappeared before the wake, even though he knew as well as she did that his parents had all but considered Jayne part of the family. More so, he was beginning to realise with hindsight, than they ever had Marie.
Anyway... She’d made the gesture. It had been noted.
He forced his thoughts back into their cupboard and slammed the door shut. His complicated past with Jayne wasn’t the priority in this scenario. Maggie was.
Maggie who was now talking and laughing as if years of history wasn’t humming like electricity between her two childhood friends.
‘I just can’t believe you had holiday exactly when I needed you. It’s like kismet!’
She threw a smirk at Sam, as if he’d spent the past half-hour pooh-poohing her choice rather than being blindsided by his own past.
He felt Jane’s eyes on him, met them and held her gaze. Kismet. That had been ‘their’ word.
They’d known each other from school, of course, but they had been busy being kids and, as a twin, Jayne had been pretty inseparable from Jules. The magical ‘click’ had come when their secondary school teacher had decided to throw out the alphabetical seating plan and change things around. They’d shared a table from that day on. Along with a whole lot of other things.
As he dragged himself along memory lane he could hear Maggie saying something about the cricket tournament. He only managed to tune back in when Jayne mock-admonished Maggie.
‘We are doing no such thing, young woman! You’re meant to be resting.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.
They both looked at him as if he’d just missed a large gorilla walking through the room in a tutu.
Jayne put on a gently disapproving face. ‘This minx here thinks we should take the kids to the cricket tournament tonight for their supper. Ridiculous, right?’
‘Uh...not if we want to eat properly,’ Maggie said, as if it were obvious.
She had a point. For all her plus points, Jayne was not a cook.
Sam and Maggie looked at Jayne as one.
Her cheeks pinked up. ‘What?’
‘Well, let’s see... How I can put this gently?’ Maggie teased. ‘I can barely reach the counter and I’m meant to be on bedrest anyway.’ She feigned fanning herself like a French countess. ‘And, as I remember, your cooking skills are about as good as your ability to stick around in Whitticombe.’
‘Ouch, woman! Kick a girl when she’s down!’
Jayne poked Maggie in the arm, then threw a quick look in Sam’s direction. One long enough for him to see the comment had hit its mark. A protectiveness he hadn’t realised he still possessed flared in him. What did that mean? ‘Kick a girl when she’s down’?
Maggie realised she’d gone too far and started apologising, blaming her hormones, blaming Nate for being gone, blaming life for making her pre-eclampsic at her busiest time of year.
Speaking over her apologies, Jayne was trying to accept the blame herself. She was being too sensitive. She knew Maggie was teasing. It had obviously been a joke. She was here. Maggie could rely on her. Please, please, please don’t worry.
‘Maggie’s right, Jayne. About supper,’ Sam intervened, before everyone’s blood pressure went in the wrong direction. ‘The cricket club is putting on a proper barbecue tonight and it would be a shame to miss it. The kids will love it. There’s going to be a minis’ match to kick things off. Sausages. Burgers. I think there are even marshmallows.’
He resisted the temptation to reach out as he would have in the old days and put a reassuring hand on Jayne’s shoulder.
‘You’ve had a long drive, no doubt. And Maggie’s definitely