“Fine, why?”
“You just look a little strange, and a little . . .” His eyes wander down my strange apparel.
I sigh. I can’t be bothered to explain. “Gin rummy anyone?”
They grin and Phil reaches into the glove compartment for the pack of cards while Pete pours me a cup of coffee from the Thermos. Two hands later, the radio buzzes to life and Phil takes the call. I sip my coffee and wait for him to finish.
“Holly, we’re going to have to go. Urgent call. You’ll be OK. The RAC won’t be long now.”
I sigh, say my goodbyes and then am thrown out with great expedience on to the hard shoulder. I walk back to Tristan, give the boys a wave and climb in. I am just berating my fate quietly to myself when I notice a red car has pulled up behind me. Oh, terrific timing. The axe murderer has arrived. Bloody marvelous. I look hastily around the car for a weapon and seize upon a rather timid-looking ballpoint pen that is quietly nestling underneath a crisp packet. Someone raps on the passenger door window. I lean over, brandishing my pen at them, and say, “Now look here . . .”
James Sabine’s face stares back at me.
I gape at him and the adrenaline hits my stomach and starts slushing the sparse contents around. Not content with wreaking havoc with my digestion, it then proceeds down to my legs and turns them to jelly. I shift position rather quickly as he pulls open the door and climbs in. “Where the hell have you been? The station said you’ve been trying to get hold of me and we’ve looked everywhere for you.”
I take a quick squint at the car behind. Is Fleur in there, complete with four large suitcases, ready to jet off to the Maldives? “I, er . . .”
“The paper said you were going to Cornwall.”
“I’m allowed to go to Cornwall,” I say a tad defensively, but he’s too busy staring at my rather attractive outfit.
“What on earth are you wearing?”
“Erm, my clothes,” I mumble.
“You actually paid money for these things?”
“James, what do you want?” I ask impatiently, the waiting carving small holes in my heart.
It’s his turn to look a bit sheepish and confused. “Well, in a word, I want you.”
I look at him in astonishment. “Me?” I echo.
thirty-one
“Me?” I ask again.
He nods slowly, his green eyes fixed upon mine. We stare at each other until he hesitantly moves his head forward and kisses me. A brief, warm kiss. He sits back and looks at me again.
“I hate to seem pushy, Miss Colshannon, but could you tell me whether it is at all reciprocated? It’s just that I think Callum”— he gestures with his head to the red car behind—“might be wanting to get back.”
I rush to get the words out. “It’s reciprocated. Very reciprocated. It couldn’t be more so, in fact,” I whisper.
“Good.” He opens the passenger door and leans out, giving Callum the thumbs-up sign. The red car flashes its lights and hoots as it pulls away.
I still stare incredulously at James, not sure whether this is some sort of huge practical joke and Jeremy Beadle is about to leap out from behind a tree. He leans forward again and kisses me. Wave upon wave of beautiful, sweet kisses. His hands move up my arms and reach my face. His thumbs linger around my cheekbones and then plunge into my hair.
“Hmmmm, arhhmmm!” I murmur. Not in careless, gay, abandoned passion but due to the rather unattractive thought that I haven’t washed my hair since the day before yesterday and my teeth since early this morning. He breaks apart in surprise. “What?”
I wrinkle my nose apologetically. “I don’t feel terribly clean, that’s all. Don’t want you going off me within five minutes.”
“No danger of that. Been having impure thoughts about you for weeks.” He grins at me but draws back a little nonetheless at my request and takes both my hands in his.
“Really?” I ask in wonder. I hesitantly lean forward and touch his face, still unsure about the reality of the situation. I double-check to make sure I’m not dreaming.
“The wedding?” I ask simply.
“Didn’t go ahead, needless to say.” Not needless to my ears. I want to hear every single gory detail, and anything with Fleur in it I want to go over twice.
“When? How?”
“Mixture of things, really. We went on my stag in Weston-super-Mare as you know. I spent the whole time in a confab with Callum. The rest of the department had a delightful night getting uproariously drunk while Callum and I debated my future. I didn’t know what to do, Holly. I was so confused. I knew something was definitely up when I found myself getting into the passenger side of the car when you weren’t there just to smell your perfume on the seat belt. I found myself wanting to call you up to talk to you at all hours of the night. You made me feel something I thought was dead, something I thought had died with Rob. But I couldn’t see clearly, I thought it might just be last-minute nerves. You see, when I first started to date Fleur, she was a ray of light after all those months in darkness. She was beautiful and charming and just what I needed then.” He pauses for a second and looks down at our intertwined hands.
“Go on,” I urge, anxious to get to the bit where it goes wrong.
“Well, I guess she was a bit pushy and to begin with I didn’t seem to have room to grieve for Rob and love her. I thought the love for her would come in time. To get married seemed the natural progression; my parents were thrilled and I suppose I hoped in some small way it would start to heal them. You know, a wedding, grandchildren in time, things to look forward to.”
“But Fleur didn’t want children,” I interject.
“I know, she mentioned that a few months ago. Though after the marquee had been booked, the caterers vetted and the church reserved, I might add. Maybe that was when the cracks started to appear. I don’t know. At the time I smoothed over it, thinking I could change her mind later on. And then I met you . . .” He smiles slightly and looks into my eyes. I smile back. Ahhhh, now we get to the good bit. I settle down into my seat and await Jackanory.
“. . . and your arsey attitude.” I frown a little to myself; this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. “And I started to look forward to my days at work. I glimpsed something pre-Rob that I vaguely remembered.”
“How did you call it off with Fleur?”
“Well, when your mother found us at the stag do—”
“My mother?” I interject.
“Yes, your mother,” he repeats patiently. “Lizzie was with her too.”
“Lizzie?” So that’s where the two of them got to last night, and I believed them when they said they were stocking up on tights and wedding mags.
“Well, they turned up at about eight-ish. They had been down to the station and caught Dave coming off duty and he’d told them where we were. He even drove them into Weston-super-Mare because he was so anxious for them to get hold of me. Must have second sight that man! Your mother had had lunch with Miles yesterday. He’d told her all about his plans for me in his firm. In the end that’s what finally convinced me.” He looks at me and grins. “It also gave me a very good reason to call the wedding off.”
“I saw my mother last night though; why didn’t she tell me?”
“To be honest, she probably didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t exactly forthcoming about how I felt about you. I just said I was going to sort things out with Fleur. I’ve been up all night with her. Talking,” he adds hastily as he sees my raised eyebrows. “I called your house this morning but you’d already gone.”
“I was trying to find you.”
“I know. I found messages on my mobile from the station. Urgent police business, was it?”
“Very urgent. I saw Fleur last night.”
“She told me all about it.”
He kisses me again and my insides squirm with longing, hunger and God knows what else.
“Was it awful? Calling it all off?”
He winces. “It was quite bad.”
/> “Were your parents upset?”
“Not as much as I thought they were going to be.”
“What about Robin?” I ask suddenly.
He frowns. “What about her?”
“You’re not still seeing her?”
“What you mean ‘seeing her’?”
“Well, you and she were having a thing, weren’t you?”
His face suddenly relaxes and he laughs. “A thing? God, no. It was Callum; Callum and she split up.”
“Callum?”
“You thought I was . . . ?”
“But you had her in your arms when I first saw you together.”
“I was comforting her. Callum, callous sod that he is, had just dumped her. I should have told you at the time but I didn’t trust you because you were a reporter.”
“Was that what you and Callum had a row about?”
James nods and smiles wryly. “He thought I was taking her side too much. She’d had a really rough time—did she tell you how she came down from London and found her boyfriend in bed with someone else?”
I nod faintly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to think.”
“I felt kind of responsible for her. You know, her being new and Callum being my best friend. Well, she’s seeing your doctor now anyway.”
“My doctor?”
“Doctor Kirkpatrick. She met him at the hospital after you were knocked out, remember? They’ve been out once this week already. She was supposed to be bringing him to the wedding.”
I smile suddenly. “How wonderful for her. She might not go back to London now.”
“I’m not interested in Robin,” he murmurs, leaning forward again. “Promise me you won’t go up mountains now? Shadowing some poor bloke from a mountain rescue team who doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for?”
“No, no. Too boring anyway. Sherry-making will be much more interesting. The RAC is turning up in a minute, by the way.”
“What an exceptionally good purchase this car is turning out to be,” he whispers, reaching for me again. We melt into our kisses and wrap our arms around each other. A flash of light jolts us suddenly and we both look up in alarm. Vince, armed and dangerous, is grinning through the window.
“That’s a front page exclusive!” he yells at us and makes a run for it.
About the Author
SARAH MASON is a full-time writer and lives in Cheltenham with her husband and her West Highland Terrier. This is her first novel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Sarah Mason
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004090461
Originally published in Great Britain by Time Warner Paperbacks, London, in 2002
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-41639-1
v3.0
Sarah Mason, Playing James
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