‘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 was 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.
As far as Lizzie went, he just wanted to clear up a misunderstanding that had left her resentful of him and him disappointed in her. They’d missed their chance to be any kind of couple, even the most casual. Once the misunderstanding was sorted, they could work together without awkwardness. After all, she was part of the family now and would always be around. They had to come to some sort of mutual good terms.
‘Weddings have a lot to answer for,’ she said. ‘All that romance and emotion floating around makes people do things they really shouldn’t. Fool around when they shouldn’t. Behave in ways they later regret.’
‘Just for the record, I wasn’t just fooling around with you at the wedding,’ he said.
She flushed redder. ‘Maybe I was just fooling around with you.’
‘Maybe you were.’
‘Maybe I’m the player,’ she said. There was a return of that teasing spirit he’d liked so much, a spark that warmed her cool grey eyes. He found himself wanting her to smile.
Jesse only vaguely remembered Lizzie from her first visit to Dolphin Bay. She’d been sixteen, beanpole-thin and flat-chested. He’d been sixteen, too. But testosterone had well and truly kicked in and he’d considered himself a man.
He wasn’t ashamed to admit he hadn’t found her attractive then. He’d been a typical teenage boy who’d looked to the more obvious.
That summer, his brother Ben had been busy falling in love with Sandy. Jesse had been busy trying to decide between three curvaceous older girls who’d made their interest in him more than clear. He hadn’t chosen any of them. Even then he hadn’t valued what came to him too easily.
When he’d met Lizzie again, more than twelve years later, he’d been knocked over at the woman she’d become. Elegant; sensual without being blatantly sexy; classy. Now she wore simple narrow-legged jeans and a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair was tied back off her face in a plait. She looked sensational without even trying.
‘Are you a player?’ he asked. ‘I somehow doubt that.’
Her eyes dimmed and it was as if that hint of party-girl Lizzie had been extinguished again. ‘No. I’m a divorced single mum with a social life on hold indefinitely. I’m here to work hard at making this café a success and to devote myself to Amy.’
‘I get that,’ he said. ‘Being a lone parent must be one of the toughest gigs around.’
‘Tougher than I could have imagined,’ she said. ‘But it’s worth