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 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