Joy smiled back.
Chapter Ten
Belle and Jack and the Sea
Belle
Belle sat on a thick, woollen rug on the rocks outside The Point watching and listening to the waves smashing against the cliffs.
She was silently asking the sea for peace.
Unusually, the sea wasn’t giving it to her.
That was because her life had again turned on its head.
And it was all Jack’s fault.
After breakfast two days before, he had, as he told her he would do, driven her to her shop in St. Ives.
She didn’t understand why he needed to drive her to her shop. She was temporarily pregnant, not temporarily blind.
However, she did not ask him this.
The drive had been silent which made Belle intensely uncomfortable. What made her more uncomfortable was that it appeared not to make Jack uncomfortable in the slightest.
He’d pulled his sleek, maroon Jaguar around the cobbled street that lined the sea and without her giving him the first direction, stopped at the winding path that led to her shop in town.
She’d turned to him to offer her gratitude for the ride and saw he was already turned toward her.
Before she could speak, he did. “I’m going to London now, poppet. I’ll be home late. Rachel’s picking you up.”
Belle nodded, a little surprised he was driving to London and back in a day (it was over five hours away) but she wasn’t going to comment.
She was about to twist away to exit the car when his hand came up, his fingers curled around her neck and he pulled her close as he leaned in.
He touched his mouth to hers and when his head moved back a half inch, he murmured, “Have a good day.”
She nodded again and replied, “You too,” but her reply came out all breathy like she’d just run the two hundred yard dash in record time.
This made him grin which made a trill slide up her spine which made her shiver which she knew he felt because his grin deepened to a smile.
Then he slanted his head and kissed her again.
This kiss was not a touch of the lips but harder and longer. If not an open-mouthed, make out fest, it still worked on her. By the time he lifted his head, she wasn’t breathing.
“Go to work,” he muttered, she nodded and with all due haste exited the car.
She knew, as she walked around the hood of the Jag, along the sidewalk and up the winding, cobbled alley that he watched her. She knew this because, the entire time, her scalp was tingling.
Her day was uneventful except for Yasmin, who came and spent an unbelievable amount of money on clothes and jewellery. Then she spent an even more unbelievable amount of time hanging out with Belle and chatting like they’d known each other for years. She eventually left because, she told Belle, she had a meeting with her divorce attorney. Belle had learned, during the chatting, that marriage number two was even worse than marriage number one and marriage number one had been nothing to write home about.
By the time Belle went to bed that night, Jack hadn’t returned.
By the time Belle woke up the next morning, she knew he had.
She knew this because the front of his body was pressed into the back of hers, his arm was around her waist, his hand resting on the bump of her belly.
She might have been idiotically slow on numerous occasions with Jack which led to life altering circumstances but she was learning.