clean had seemed to kick in, but she had just been way too fastidious. He was coping, he’d told Adam. Privately, though, he didn’t actually feel he was. His personal life was a disaster and he had no idea what to do about any of it, other than what his conscience told him.
Would she come? Nervous as well as agitated, he wiped the condensation from his windscreen and squinted through it for any sign of her. He almost had minor heart failure as his headlights caught something or someone shrinking back into the woodland beside the lane. A fox, probably. He was getting jumpy, imagining he was being followed. It was no wonder, he supposed, when he was sneaking about like a thief in the night, meeting up with her in the middle of nowhere.
Concerned for her safety, nevertheless, he decided to walk down the lane to meet her. It wasn’t far from her new house, so she’d said she would be coming on foot. The area was dark and remote, the nearest properties the Plough and Dog pub and then nothing but a deserted farm. Whatever was happening between them, he didn’t like to think of her walking around here on her own. He couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure it was a fox slinking about in the woods.
He’d only gone a few yards when he saw her hurrying around the bend towards him. She hesitated when she spotted him, hugged her coat tight around her, then glanced over her shoulder and walked on, not over-enthusiastically.
‘That keen to see me then?’ he joked when she reached him. It was met with a scathing glance.
‘What are you doing, Josh?’ Jemma demanded, her violet eyes peering out through her tangle of blonde hair like those of a hostile animal. Josh guessed that pretty much indicated how she felt about him. Whatever happened to the open-faced girl who was beautiful without seeming to know it? he wondered. She was still beautiful, undeniably, but now she seemed hard-edged and cynical. Had that always been there and he’d just been too blind to see it?
‘You weren’t on your way to my house, were you?’ she asked. ‘Because if you were—’
‘No!’ Josh failed to curtail his anger. ‘I got the message, Jemma. Loud and clear.’ He looked her over, guessing there wasn’t much affection in his own eyes. Right now, he was close to hating her, yet at the same time, he’d never stopped loving her, ever since he’d fallen for her in their first year of college. Even when she’d dumped him, going out with Ryan instead, because he was working and renting his own place, he’d kept on loving her. Why? ‘I was looking out for you, that’s all.’ He shrugged disconsolately. ‘It’s an isolated area and…’ He stopped. Why was he bothering to offer explanations? ‘I won’t come to your house, Jemma. I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t.’
She looked him over suspiciously, and then nodded.
He’d done some small thing right in her eyes at last. He didn’t want to keep arguing. He just wanted to find a way forward that didn’t include him disappearing off the face of the earth, which was what she appeared to want him to do. ‘Do you want to talk in the car?’ he asked, nodding towards it.
She shook her head hard, and Josh sighed heavily. She didn’t want to be reminded of the time they’d made love in it, he supposed. At least that was what he’d thought they were doing.
‘So?’ He looked at her curiously, wondering what she’d come to say. Something, presumably, since she’d finally agreed to meet with him.
Still gauging him warily, she didn’t answer for a second. Then, ‘What do you want, Josh?’ she asked.
Josh stared at her, incredulous. ‘What do I want?’ he repeated, his anger almost off the scale despite his best efforts to stay calm. ‘You really did think I was going to just walk away, didn’t you? Why did you tell me?’ he went on, before she could answer. ‘What was it you wanted, Jemma? Because I’m buggered if I know.’
‘I…’ Jemma looked away. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. And then—’
‘Right,’ Josh cut in abruptly. ‘So when you’d made up your mind, presumably having first decided to keep your options open, you told me to piss off. Does that sound right to you, Jemma? In any sense of the word, does it sound fair?’