“Jack,” she called, her voice definitely moving toward annoyed rather than confused. “You can’t call Olive. It’s Sunday.”
“I can. She’s available twenty-four seven.”
Belle’s hand tugged his with a force he couldn’t ignore. He stopped and looked down at her.
“She’s available twenty-four seven?” Belle asked with obvious disbelief and possible accusation as if he was a slave driver cracking a nasty whip.
“Of course,” Jack replied with casual patience.
“Who is Olive, anyway?” she queried, not quite recovered from her shock.
“My PA,” Jack answered.
“And she’s available at all times?” Belle went on, still, for some reason, not processing this information.
Jack lost his casual patience and slid into amused impatience.
Therefore his lips were twitching when he said. “Yes, Belle, and she gets paid well into six figures to be available at all times. She’s not an indentured servant. She’s a highly experienced, intensely skilled, extremely loyal, very valued employee who can find a way, on a Sunday afternoon, to hire the best shop assistant in the UK and have her in your store by tomorrow, end of business.”
She stared at him a moment and then breathed, “Oh.”
And while Jack was watching her parted lips at the same time fighting a nearly overwhelming urge to put his own against her mouth, slide his tongue inside and taste her, Belle continued on a whisper.
“Wow.”
Jack won his battle, lifted a hand to her jaw and smiled down at her as he leaned closer. “Wait until you meet her, poppet. Olive is definitely an ‘oh wow’.”
At his words, for some reason, something in Belle’s face shifted, it softened and a fetching radiance came into her eyes.
He understood he scored a point. He just didn’t understand how.
Then she said softly, “I’ll look forward to that.”
She turned and started walking again but he knew, somehow, her mood had lifted considerably, lightening in a way he’d never experienced from her before.
It was as charming as it was surprising.
Therefore ten minutes later (when he made his third mistake), it should not have taken him off-guard when she threw a carefree smile over her shoulder at him and announced, “I’ll show you my new favourite place.”
However, this did take Jack off-guard.
Completely.
He had an excuse for not controlling his reaction.
A smile from Belle was infrequent and it was enchanting. A carefree one, though, was something he’d never seen and that was enthralling.
When she started to scramble onto a dangerous outcropping of rock at a cliff face, Baron and Gretl protectively close to her but also alighting the outcrop with practiced ease as if they’d done it every day of their lives, Jack overreacted.
Strike that, it was when Belle, the woman he considered his woman and the woman who was carrying his child, a woman who was scared of practically everything but that dangerous outcropping of rock, started to scramble onto it that he overreacted.
He followed her quickly, caught her with an arm around her midriff and lifted her off her feet. Her back to his front, he carried her off the outcrop to the far safer cliff path and set her on her feet.
When she whirled around to face him, he demanded curtly, “What did you think you were doing?”
She’d stared at him a second then asked what he thought was bizarrely, “Oh no, you’re not going back to the jerky one, are you?”
Jack decided to ignore her question, focussing instead on his far more important, and sensible one.