She was pregnant, not invalid!
Therefore, she was going to drive herself and her mother home and no one was going to stop her.
Even though she was annoyed that everyone was treating her like she was a fragile piece of glass, it had been a good day.
The first really good day in a very long time.
She had woken in Jack’s arms. Then she took a shower in Jack’s bathroom (with Jack). She’d put on her makeup at his bathroom mirror while she listened to him talk on his phone in the bedroom. He’d even zipped the zipper at the side of her dress (which was, she saw, getting tight).
And they’d walked down to breakfast together holding hands.
Belle Abbot holding hands with James Bennett while they walked through his huge, imposing castle on their way to breakfast like it was the most natural thing in the world.
She thought she might have a major panic attack at the very thought of settling into life by Jack’s side. She thought she’d spend all her time questioning his attraction to her and also questioning her trust in him. She thought she would make excuses to run away, to protect herself, it was too soon, there were too many ifs, she wasn’t good enough for him, she couldn’t feel safe with him.
She thought her mind, as it always had done, would work against her.
But none of that happened.
It was, for some reason, easy.
It seemed to come naturally.
And this, Belle was certain, was all because of Jack.
He was good with her and her crazy behaviour. He was also good with her crazy mother and grandmother. Further, he was good with his own crazy mother. And lastly, he was good with the equally crazy Yasmin.
He’d been overrun by women, crazy women, and he didn’t seem to care.
Not even a little bit.
What he seemed, and what Belle was taking a risk to believe, was a man who had a lot of patience, a bizarre (to Belle’s way of thinking) but ever present sense of humour, more than a little bit of tenderness and what appeared to be a lot of love.
Belle was betting everything important in her life (her sanity, her faith in her fellow man, things like that) that she was right.
That morning after breakfast, Jack had driven her to work while Olive went straight to the airport where he was going to fly them both to London. The gods were definitely smiling on them because the day before, after Jack had publicly spent the night in Belle’s cottage, the media were in a frenzy.
That morning, however, something else must have been happening in the world. There were half as many photographers and they hung back, none of them shouting questions.
Apparently, Jack and Belle were still news, just old news.
There were, she guessed, only so many pictures worth taking of Jack walking Belle to her store.
And for that, as she had done a half a dozen times that morning, she thanked her lucky stars.
Jack had left her at the store. After, of course, on the stairs, he’d given her a long, sweet, thorough kiss and told her to have a good day.
Belle’s mother had come later in the morning to be Belle’s newest shop assistant. Dirk had taken Mom under his wing and, even though the media seemed to be losing interest, the customers definitely weren’t. It was high season in St. Ives and Belle’s store was a crush. This happened during high season but, because of her recent spate of popularity in the papers, it had shot straight to ridiculous.
Belle was happy to leave Dirk and Mom in the shop while she, Nola and Carol saw to their business upstairs with Nola or Carol wandering down when things got too mad which wasn’t often. Dirk was Super Shop Assistant. He was the only man Belle knew who could multitask and do it while charming every customer into buying that one, do-I-really-need-that? item which he did by giving them a blinding grin. That was it. He said nothing, just grinned at them.
It made for a brilliant day.
It also helped knowing she’d be going home to the criminally handsome Jack Bennett, the father of her child and, apparently, the real-life, walking, talking, breathing, kissing, making love, showering together and holding hands man of her dreams.
She only had two moments that caused blips in her day and they came back to back.
The first was when she was alone in the workroom, Nola off to get sandwiches, Carol downstairs to help with the crush.