Under the Boss's Mistletoe (16 page)

‘You looked pretty compatible to me last night.’

Cassie’s eyes filled with tears again and she swiped angrily at them with the back of her hand. ‘We want different things, Tina. Jake thinks he can order a relationship like everything else, and I’m holding out for something he thinks doesn’t exist. I want someone to love me, someone who needs me as much as I need him. Jake thinks that’s a fairy tale.’

‘I’m sure he does love you, Cassie,’ said Tina, putting an arm around her shoulders. ‘He may not realise it yet, that’s all. I bet you anything he’ll send Natasha away with a flea in her ear, and come roaring back down here with that ring as soon as he hears what you’ve done.’

But Jake didn’t come. On Wednesday, Cassie sent him a brief, businesslike email saying that she was staying in Portrevick for a while to oversee work on the Hall. She didn’t mention Natasha, and nor did Jake when he replied.

Thanks for update,
was all he said.
Keep me posted. Regards, Jake.

Regards?
Regards?
Was that all he could say after he had rolled her beneath him and smiled against her throat? After his hands had unlocked her, made her gasp and arch? After he had loved her slowly, thoroughly, gloriously, and held her, still shaking, as they spiralled back to reality together?

How dared he? Furious, Cassie stabbed at the delete button. How dared he send her
regards
after he had made her love him?

Sheer anger kept her going all afternoon, but when it leaked away it left her more miserable than ever.

‘Tell him how you feel,’ said Tina, exasperated. ‘Put yourself in Jake’s shoes. He’s got no idea that you care for him at all. You have a great weekend together, and the next thing he knows you’ve tossed him back his ring and told Natasha he’s all hers. What’s the poor bloke supposed to think?’

‘What am
I
supposed to think?’ Cassie protested tearfully. ‘He didn’t even suggest meeting up in London.’

‘He’s probably terrified you’ll think he’s getting too heavy.
If you ask me, you’re both being big babies,’ said Tina. ‘At least Natasha had the guts to go and tell him how she felt.’

The mention of Natasha was enough to plunge Cassie back into the depths. ‘How can I go? He’ll be back with Natasha by now.’ She tortured herself by imagining the two of them together. How could Jake have resisted those green eyes shimmering with love and the promise of calm? When Cassie looked at herself in the mirror she saw eyes puffy with tears, awful skin and limp hair. There was no way Jake would want her now, even if he wasn’t dazzled anew by Natasha’s beauty.

At least work on the Hall was going well, she tried to console herself. Joss was pleased with the way the project was going, and as November was never a busy time for weddings she was happy for Cassie to stay in Cornwall for the time being. It was bittersweet, being up at the Hall every day, but Cassie threw herself into the job. It was all she had left.

Three long, wretched weeks dragged past. The days got shorter, darker and damper, and Cassie got more miserable. It was time to go back to London and pick up her old life, she decided grimly. She had been perfectly happy before, and she would be again. It wasn’t as if she was likely to bump into Jake. London was a big city and their lives would never cross, unless he was tactless enough to ask her to plan his wedding to Natasha. Cassie couldn’t see that happening. No, she would go back, stick to the job she could do and stop trying to be someone she wasn’t.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she told Joss, and went for a last walk on the beach. The sea was wild, the sky as grey as her mood. It was very cold, and the spray from the crashing waves stung her cheeks.

Head bent, Cassie trudged along the sand. There were no surfers today, no lifeguards, and she had the beach to herself. Except, she realised, for a figure in black leathers that was heading towards her from the dunes. Some biker who must
have left his motorbike in the car park, and, not content with roaring through the villages disturbing everyone’s peace, was now spoiling her solitude.

Cassie scowled. There were plenty of other empty beaches in Cornwall at this time of year. Why did he have to come here? She wanted to be miserable on her own, thank you very much.

And he was coming straight for her! Cassie glared at him, and was just about to turn pointedly on her heel when she stopped. Hang on, wasn’t there something familiar about that walk? About that self-contained stride? She looked harder. The set of those shoulders, the darkness of the hair…. It couldn’t be, could it?

All at once a great hand seemed to close tight around her, inside her, gripping her heart, her lungs and her entrails so that she couldn’t breathe. She could just stand and stare, brown eyes huge with disbelief and desperate hope, as he came closer and closer until he was standing right in front of her.

‘So this is where you are,’ said Jake.

‘Jake.’ It came out as little more than a squeak.

Cassie was completely thrown, ricocheting around between astonishment, sheer joy and confusion at how different he looked. Standing there in black leather, he seemed younger, wilder, and the guarded look she had become used to had been replaced by a reckless glint. The wind ruffled his hair, and with the angry sea behind him he looked so like the old Jake that she could hardly speak.

‘What…what are you doing here?’ she stammered at last.

‘Looking for you,’ said Jake.

He sounded the same. He just looked so…Cassie couldn’t think of a word to describe how he looked, but it was making her heart boom so loudly that it drowned out the crashing waves and the wind that was whistling past her ears.

She swallowed hard. This, remember, was still the Jake who had gone back to London without a word about the future, who had sent her his
regards.

‘What for?’ she asked almost rudely.

‘I bought a motorbike,’ he said. ‘I wanted to show you. Everyone thinks I’m having a midlife crisis, but I thought you would understand.’

‘I would?’

‘You were the one who said that riding a bike wouldn’t change me, that I could let go just a little and I wouldn’t lose everything I’d fought to be.’

Cassie eyed the leathers. They made him look lean, hard and very tough. Of course, he looked like that in a suit too, but now he was even more unsettling. ‘I’m not sure I was right about that,’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve changed to me.’

‘But I haven’t,’ said Jake. ‘I’m still Chief Executive of Primordia. I still have my MBA, my experience, my career. My world hasn’t fallen apart because I bought a bike. I really thought that it would,’ he said. ‘I was afraid that I might lose myself, but I’ve found myself instead. I’ve realised that I can’t change the past. I have to accept that my family, my past, that difficult boy I was, all of them are part of who I am now.’ A smile lurked in his eyes as he looked at Cassie. ‘You were right about that too.’

Cassie moistened her lips. ‘I don’t think I’ve been right so often before,’ she tried to joke, not knowing what else to do, not knowing what was happening, knowing only that all her certainties were being shaken around like flakes in a snow globe.

‘You weren’t right about Natasha,’ said Jake. ‘You sent her to me because you thought she was what I wanted, didn’t you?’

‘She is what you want.’ It was cold in the wind, and Cassie hugged her jacket about her. By unspoken consent, they turned their backs to the wind and started walking back along the beach, the sand damp and firm beneath their feet.

Cassie dug her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders defensively. ‘You told me she was,’ she reminded him. ‘You told me she was perfect.’

‘I thought she was,’ he admitted. ‘I thought I needed
someone cool and careful, like I was trying so hard to be. I thought I needed someone who would help me fit in, who would help me forget what I’d been and where I’d come from.’

‘Someone like Natasha,’ said Cassie bitterly.

‘Yes. I thought Natasha was exactly what I needed, but I was wrong,’ said Jake. ‘It took meeting you again to realise that what I really needed was someone who would make me laugh, who would give me the strength to let go of everything I thought I needed.’ He slowed, and Cassie slowed with him, until they had stopped and were facing each other alone on the beach.

‘Someone who would make me remember, not forget,’ he said, his voice very deep and low. ‘Someone who would force me to stop running away from the life I had here and accept it as part of who I am.’

He looked down at Cassie, whose hands were still thrust into the pockets of her jacket, and he could see the realisation of what he had come to say dawning in the brown eyes.

‘Someone like you,’ he said.

‘But—but, Jake, you can’t need me,’ she said in disbelief, even as Jake was reaching for her wrists and tugging her hands gently from her pockets. ‘I’m the last person you can want. I’m not sensible or clever or beautiful or—or
anything,’
she said, but her fingers were twining of their own accord around Jake’s. ‘I’m useless.’

‘Useless?’ he said. ‘You’ve transformed the Hall, organised a ball, set up a wonderful marketing opportunity with a magazine, charmed the socks off everyone who met you in London. You’re not useless at all,’ he said sternly.

‘My family wouldn’t agree with you,’ she sighed. ‘I haven’t achieved anything, not like the rest of you, with your degrees and your fantastically successful careers.’

‘But you can do the things your clever, successful family can’t.’

‘Oh yes? Like what?’

‘Like make the sun seem brighter when you smile,’ said
Jake. ‘Like making me laugh. Like making me happy.’ He drew her closer. ‘Like making me safe,’ he said softly. ‘Cassie, tell me I can do that for you too.’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘You can,’ she whispered. ‘You do.’

They didn’t kiss, not at first. They just held each other, very, very tightly. Cassie’s face was pressed into his throat, and she could smell the leather of his jacket, just as she had done ten years ago. But this time the shock and anger had gone and in their place was a ballooning sense of joy and relief, as if she had finally found her way home.

Safe—that was what Jake had said he felt. Cassie knew exactly what he meant.

‘Tell me you love me, Cassie,’ he murmured against her hair, and she tipped back her head to smile at him, her eyes still shimmering with tears.

‘I love you,’ she said. And then they did kiss, a long, intoxicatingly sweet kiss that dissolved the hurt and the uncertainty and left them heady and breathless with happiness.

‘I love you,’ said Jake shakily at last. Somehow they had made it to the shelter of the dunes, and sank down onto the soft sand as they kissed and kissed again. ‘I love you, I love you,’ he said again between kisses. ‘I can’t tell you how much.’

Cassie drew a shivery sigh of sheer contentment and rested her head on his shoulder, her arms wound tightly around him as if she would never let him go. ‘What about the formula?’

‘Ah, the formula,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I clung to that formula like a life raft! It seemed to make sense,’ he tried to explain. ‘It worked, or at least it did until I met you again. You don’t know what you did to me, Cassie. You turned my world upside down. I had constructed such a careful life, and suddenly everything was out of control.

‘You made me
feel
again, and I was torn. I wanted you, but I didn’t want you. You were part of the past I’d been running away from for so long. I thought if I could just hold onto my sensible, practical formula I’d be all right, but I can see now
that it was just as much a fantasy as the fairy tale that you believe in.’

‘Yes, I’ve learnt that too,’ said Cassie, snuggling closer as they lay in the sand. ‘I held on to the fairy tale, just like you held on to the formula. I suppose I was always such a dreamer that it was natural for me to fantasise about the perfect relationship, the perfect wedding, the perfect everything.’

She ran her hand over his abdomen. Even through the leather, she could feel the muscled strength of him. ‘I don’t think you’re perfect, though.’

‘Oh?’ Jake pretended to sound hurt, and she softened the blow by leaning up on her elbow and smiling down at him as she dropped a kiss on his lips.

‘No, you’re not perfect. You’re impatient and practical and oh-so-sensible—or you were until you went out and bought yourself a motorbike just to make a point! When I dreamed of the man I would love, I never imagined someone like you, but it
is
you. I’ve learnt to love what’s in front of me, not a dream. Now I know that you love me back, well…’ She smiled, kissing him again. ‘I think this just might be the fairy tale after all!’

She settled back into the curve of his arm with a sigh of happiness. ‘I’ve been so wretched for the last three weeks,’ she told him. ‘Why did it take you so long to come?’

‘Because I thought you’d changed your mind after I’d gone,’ said Jake. ‘I thought you’d just been amusing yourself that weekend, and that you didn’t want to get any more involved. I thought you couldn’t even be bothered to tell me yourself. You just sent Natasha instead.’

Cassie wriggled uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t
send
her. I thought you would be happy to see her.’

‘Happy? Hah!’ Jake snorted. ‘There was one moment that day when I was wildly happy. The door bell rang and I convinced myself that it was you, that you’d told the contractors they could go to hell so that you could come up to London early and be with me.’

‘Well, I don’t know why you would think I would do that.’ Cassie pretended to grumble. ‘You never said a word. How was I to know you wanted to see me?’

‘I know, I was a fool. I should have begged you to come with me.’ Jake wound his fingers in the curls that were hopelessly tangled by wind and sand. ‘But, Cassie, I was terrified,’ he said. ‘I’d fallen wildly in love with you. That weekend, when we made love, it all happened so fast. I felt as if I was losing control when I was with you, nothing else mattered. I could feel myself slipping back, becoming the reckless boy I’d been before, not caring about anything except the moment.