Page 7 of Consequences of Their Wedding Charade
He would be even more bewildered at the fact that she had turned down the chanceto ski.She adored skiing and was so good that she could instruct.
While she struggled to come up with a plausible explanation, his face cleared and he looked at her knowingly.
‘I get it,’ he murmured.
‘You do?’ Jess queried, alarmed.
‘I do. We’ve known each other a long time, Jess. I can read you like a book.’
Alarm blossomed into panic. He was shrewd when it came to reading undercurrents. Show him a signal barely visible to the naked eye, and he could ferret out what it meant in a matter of seconds. Had all her dodging and evasion pointed him in the very direction she had been so desperate to conceal? Had he gleaned, somehow, that she wasattractedto him? That their so-called platonic friendship, which he treasured, was something she longed to take several steps further.
Had he guessed how she truly felt about him?
She blanched. Honestly, she could think of nothing worse. It wasn’t just the mortification, it wasn’t just the thought of him laughing his head off at the thought of her actually imagining that she might be competition for the glamorous blondes he was fond of dating...No, it would be the loss of friendship that went with that because he would run a mile in the opposite direction.
‘You can?’ she asked weakly and he nodded.
‘You’ve hit the dating scene big time,’ he expanded. ‘The fact that you’re so secretive about it, secretive about your hot date last night, is telling me something.’
‘What is it telling you?’
‘It’s serious.’
He waited. She failed to embellish so he continued, a little jerkily. ‘Frankly, I’m a little hurt that you don’t feel you can confide in me.’ Surprisingly, hedidfeel hurt and...what else? A feeling of edginess that nestled on the periphery of what seemed acceptable to him. He dismissed the uneasy feeling quickly.
‘Why should I confide in you about my private life?’ Jess asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.
‘You know all about mine!’
‘Curtis, so does half the country.’ She burst out laughing, expecting him to follow suit, but he stared at her with such a disgruntled expression that she carried on laughing, couldn’t help herself. ‘You’re in the tabloids more often than the daily weather reports,’ she said wryly. ‘You don’t actually need to tell me who you’re seeing because all I have to do is grab a newspaper from the corner shop.’
Her stomach tightened but she kept smiling. Yes, she saw all those cute, tiny blondes he went out with. None seemed to last longer than ten minutes.
He said that he was an open book. Was he though? When she thought about it, there were huge gaps in her knowledge about him. He’d never spoken about his childhood, aside from to tell her in passing that he could not have hoped for a better father figure than William. He was adept at deflecting questions he didn’t want to answer and questions that were too probing were adroitly side-stepped.
He was approaching thirty and, yes, young enough to be wary of being tied down, but when he talked about women and relationships there had always been an edge of cynicism in his voice, a flat determination that marriage was an institution he had no time for.
And yet he had been engaged. He hadn’t been the one to break it off. Had a broken heart accounted for his aversion to commitment? Jess could swear that he had never wanted to be tied down, that he had always been wary of commitment...or was that just her imagination playing tricks on her?
‘You never really told me what happened between you and Caitlin,’ Jess said, treading on ground previously untrodden. She’d tentatively asked at the time but hadn’t pursued the matter when he’d failed to explain. Yet weren’t they supposed to be greatfriends?
Well, this friendship wasn’t exactly on a par when he felt hurt because she had chosen not to blurt out everything about her private life butshewas handed precious little real information abouthis.
Suddenly, she felt the stirrings of an anger she had never felt towards him before. Her anger ratcheted up a notch or two when he stilled because clearly he wanted that untrodden ground to remain untrodden.
‘That business with Caitlin is ancient history,’ he dismissed in a guarded tone.
The question had come at him from left field and Curtis shifted uncomfortably. For a few seconds he seemed to look down into deep, dark water that swirled lazily beneath him, so full of things unspoken and buried sadness.
‘I must say, Curtis,’ Jess mused sweetly, ‘that it’s a bit rich for you to feel hurt because I happen to want to keep my private life to myself, when you have no qualms about keepingyourprivate life to yourself. The whole world knows what women you date because you don’t mind them knowing, but you’re very good at keeping yourself to yourself when it comes to making sure no one oversteps the mark...’
‘Okay. Spit it out. What’s going on, Jess?’
‘Nothing. I’m just pointing out the obvious.’
‘So you don’t want to tell me who you’re seeing?’ He shrugged with exaggerated indifference. ‘So be it. It’s not the end of the world.’
That stung. She hated the feeling. It had been bearable keeping her distance, thinking about him but building up her immunity, but now that he was sitting across from her shemissedtheir easy familiarity.
