‘Those kinds of ideas aren’t for the likes of us. Jem needs to get a job to help out at home,’ her mother had told the teacher who’d tried to persuade the older woman that her daughter should stay on at school to study for her A-level exams.
‘You’re like your mother—dumb as a rock and just about as useful!’ her father had condemned often enough for that label to have troubled Jemima for many year afterwards.
With lunch eaten, she walked Alfie down to his session at the playgroup in the village hall, wincing when her son bounded boisterously through the door calling his friends’ names at the top of his voice. Alfie, named for his great-grandfather on Jemima’s mother’s side of the family, was very sociable and full of energy after spending the morning cooped up at the shop with his mother. Although Jemima had created a play corner in the backstore room for her child, there really wasn’t enough space to house a lively little boy for long. With the help of a childminder, she had often contrived to keep Alfie with her during working hours, but now that he was of an age to join the playgroup in the afternoons and she no longer attended floristry classes she needed a lot less childcare. Considering that her close friend and former childminder, Flora, was now often too busy with her bed-and-breakfast operation to help out as much, Jemima was grateful for that fact.
It was a pleasant surprise therefore when Flora came into the shop an hour later and asked Jemima if she had time for a coffee. Brewing up in the small kitchen, Jemima eyed her red-headed friend and read the other woman’s uneasiness with a frown. ‘What’s up?’
‘It’s probably nothing. I meant to come over and tell you at the weekend, but a whole family booked in with me on Saturday and I was run off my feet,’ Flora groaned. ‘Apparently some guy in a hire car was hanging around the village last Thursday and someone saw him taking a picture of your shop. He was asking questions about you in the post office as well.’
Jemima stilled, dark blue eyes widening while her heart-shaped face paled below her cloud of wildly curling strawberry-blonde hair and the stance of her tiny slender figure screamed tension. Just an inch over five feet in height, she had reminded the more solidly built Flora of a delicate blown-glass angel ornament when they’d first met, but she had later appreciated that nobody as down-to-earth and quirky as Jemima could be seen for long in that improbable light. However, her friend was unquestionably beautiful in an ethereal way and if men could be equated to starving dogs, Jemima was the equivalent of a very juicy bone, for the male sex seemed to find her irresistible. Locals joked that the church choir had been on the brink of folding before Jemima had joined and a swell of young men had soon followed in her wake, not that any of them had since got anywhere with her, Flora reflected wryly. Badly burned by her failed marriage, Jemima preferred men as friends and concentrated her energies on her son and her business.
‘What sort of questions?’ Jemima prompted sickly, the cold chill of apprehension hollowing out her stomach.
‘Whether or not you lived around here, and what age Alfie was. The guy asking the questions was young and good-looking. Maurice in the post office thought he was playing cupid…’
‘Was the man Spanish?’
Flora shook her head and took over from her anxious friend at the kettle to speed up the arrival of the coffee. ‘No, a Londoner according to Maurice. He probably just fancied trying his chances with you—’
‘I don’t remember any young good-looking men coming in here last week,’ Jemima pointed out, her concern patent.
‘Maybe he lost interest once he realised you were a mother.’ Flora shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have told you about him if I had known you would get wound up about it. Why don’t you just get on the phone and tell…er…what’s his name, your husband?’
‘Alejandro,’ Jemima supplied tautly. ‘Tell him what?’
‘That you want a clean break and a divorce.’
‘Nobody gets away with telling Alejandro what to do. He’s the one who does the telling. It wouldn’t be that simple once he found out about Alfie.’
‘So you go to a solicitor and say what a lousy husband he was.’
‘He didn’t drink or beat me up.’
Flora grimaced. ‘Why should such extremes be your only yardstick? There are other grounds for divorce, like mental abuse and neglect—and what about the way he left you at the mercy of his horrible family?’
‘It was his mother who was horrible, not his brother or his sister,’ Jemima pointed out, wanting as always to be fair. ‘And I don’t think it’s right to say I was mentally abused.’
Flora, whose temper was as hot as her hair, regarded the younger woman with unimpressed eyes. ‘Alejandro criticised everything you did, left you alone all the time and got you pregnant before you were ready to have a kid.’
Jemima reddened to the roots of her light-coloured hair and marvelled that she could have been so frank with Flora in the early weeks of their friendship, sharing secrets that she sometimes wished she had kept to herself, although not, mercifully, the worst secrets of all. Of course, back then, she had been as steamed up as a pressure cooker of emotions and in dire need of someone to talk to. ‘I just wasn’t good enough for him…’ She spoke the truth as she saw it, as lightly as she could.
Growing up, Jemima had never been good enough for either of her parents and the ability to search out and focus on her own flaws was second nature to her. Her mother had entered her in juvenile beauty contests as a young child but Jemima, too shy to smile for the photos and too quiet to chatter when interviewed, had not shone. Bored out of her mind as she was as a daydreaming teenager, she had done equally poorly at the office-skills course her mother had sent her on, shattering her mother’s second dream of her becoming a high-powered personal assistant to some millionaire who would some day fall madly in love with her daughter. Her mother had pretty much lived in a fantasy world, which, along with the alcohol, had provided her with her only escape from the drudgery and abuse of a bad marriage.
Jemima’s father, whose only dreams related to making pots of money without ever getting up off the sofa, had wanted Jemima to become a model, but she failed to grow tall enough for fashion work and lacked the bountiful curves necessary for the other kind. After her mother’s death, her father had urged her to become a dancer at a club run by his mate and had hit her and thrown her out of the family home when she’d refused to dress up in a skimpy outfit and attend an audition. It was years before she saw her father again and then in circumstances she preferred to forget. Yes, Jemima had learned at an early age that people always expected more from her than she ever seemed able to deliver and, sadly, her marriage had proved no different. It was for that reason that making her own way in life to set up and run her business had added greatly to her confidence; for once she had surpassed her own expectations.
Yet when she had first met Alejandro and he had swept her off her feet, he had seemed to be her every dream come true, which in retrospect seemed laughable to her. But love had snatched her up like a tornado and made her believe in the impossible before it flung her down again. Somehow, and she had no idea how, she had truly believed that she could marry a rich, educated foreigner with a pedigree as long as her arm and make a go of it. But in practice the challenges and the disparities had proved insurmountable. Her background had come back to seriously haunt her, but her biggest single mistake had been getting too friendly with her brother-in-law, Marco. Although, she reasoned defensively, had Alejandro been around more and made more effort to help her come to terms with her new life in Spain she wouldn’t have been so lonely and wouldn’t have jumped at the offer of Marco’s company. And she had adored Marco, she acknowledged abstractedly, recalling how wounded she had felt when even after her marriage broke down he had made no attempt to get in touch with her again.
‘You were too good for that husband of yours,’ Flora told Jemima with strong emphasis. ‘But you really should tell Alejandro about Alfie instead of staying in hiding as if you have something to be ashamed of.’
Jemima turned her head