‘His, I think. She’s got a face like concrete, so she’s doing something she doesn’t want to do. They don’t really approve of her.’
‘Hey, you’re good at this!’ Cassie laughed and swivelled back to watch the traffic. ‘Now, who have we got here?’ They were passing a hatchback driven by an elderly man who was clutching onto the wheel for dear life. Beside him, a tiny old lady was talking. ‘Grandparents off to visit their daughter,’ she said instantly. ‘Too easy.’
‘Perhaps they’ve been having a wild affair and are running away together,’ said Jake, tongue in cheek.
‘I like the way you’re thinking, but they look way too comfortable together for that. I bet she’s been talking for hours and he hasn’t heard a word.’
‘Can’t imagine what that feels like,’ murmured Jake, and she shot him a look.
‘I wonder what they think about us?’ she mused.
‘I doubt very much that anyone else is thinking about us at all.’
‘We must look like any other couple heading out of town for a long weekend,’ said Cassie, ignoring him.
Perhaps that was why it felt so intimate sitting here beside him. If they were a couple, she could rest her hand on Jake’s thigh. She could unwrap a toffee and pop it in his mouth without thinking. She could put her feet up on the dashboard and choose some music, and they could argue about which was the best route. She could nag him about stopping for something to eat.
But of course she couldn’t do any of that. Especially not laying a hand on his leg.
She turned her attention firmly back to the other cars. ‘Ooh, now…’ she said, spying a single middle-aged man looking harassed at the wheel of his car, and instantly wove a complicated story about the double life he was leading, naming both wives, all five children and even the hamster with barely a pause for breath.
Jake shook his head. He tried to imagine Natasha speculating about the occupants of the other cars, and couldn’t do it. She would think it childish. As it was, thought Jake.
On the other hand, this traffic jam was a lot less tedious than others he had sat in. Cassie’s expression was animated, and he was very aware of her beside him. She had pushed back the seat as far as it would go, and her legs, in vivid blue tights, were stretched out before her. Her mobile face was alight with humour, her hands in constant motion. Jake had a jumbled impression of colour and warmth tugging at the edges of his vision the whole time. It was very distracting.
Now she was pulling faces at a little boy in the back seat of the car beside them. He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue, while Cassie stuck her thumbs in her ears and waggled her fingers in response.
Jake was torn between exasperation and amusement. He didn’t know where Cassie got her idea that she was ordinary. There was absolutely nothing ordinary about her that he could see.
He glanced at the clock as they inched forward. It was a bad sign that they were hitting heavy traffic this early. It wasn’t even midday, and already they seemed to have been travelling for ever.
Cassie had fallen silent at last. Bizarrely, Jake almost missed her ridiculous stories. Suddenly there was a curdled growl that startled him out of his distraction. He glanced at Cassie in surprise and she blushed and folded her arms over her stomach.
‘Sorry, that was me,’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t have time for breakfast.’
How embarrassing! Cassie was mortified. Natasha’s stomach would never even murmur. At least Jake seemed prepared to cope with the problem.
‘We’ll stop and get something to eat when we get out of this,’ he promised, but it was another twenty minutes before the blockage cleared, miraculously and for no apparent reason, and he could put his foot down.
To Cassie’s disappointment they didn’t stop at the first service-station they came to, or even the second. ‘We need to get as far on our way as we can,’ Jake said, but as her stomach became increasingly vocal he eventually relented as they came up to the third.
After a drizzly summer, the sun had finally come out for September. ‘Let’s sit outside,’ Cassie suggested when they had bought coffee and sandwiches. ‘We should make the most of the sun while we’ve got it.’
They found a wooden table in a sunny spot, away from the ceaseless growl of the motorway. Cassie turned sideways so that she could straddle the bench, and turned her face up to the sun.
‘I love September,’ she said. ‘It still feels like the start of a new school year. I want to sharpen my pencils and write my name at the front of a blank exercise-book.’
Perhaps that was why she was so excited about transforming Portrevick Hall into a wedding venue, Cassie thought as she unwrapped her sandwich. It was a whole new project, her chance to draw a line under all her past muddles and mistakes and start afresh. She was determined not to mess up this time.
‘It’s great to get out of London too,’ she went on indistinctly through a mouthful of egg mayonnaise. ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing Portrevick again, too. I haven’t been back since my parents moved away, but the place where you grow up always feels like home, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Jake.
‘Really?’ Cassie was brushing egg from her skirt, but at that she looked up at him in surprise. ‘Don’t you miss it at all?’
‘I miss the sea sometimes,’ he said after a moment. ‘But Portrevick? No. It’s not such a romantic place to live when there’s never any money, and the moment there’s trouble the police are at your door wanting you to account for where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.’
Jake could hear the bitterness seeping into his voice in spite of every effort to keep it neutral. Cassie had no idea. She had grown up in a solid, cosy house in a solid, cosy, middle-class family. They might have lived in the same place, but they had inhabited different worlds.
Miss it? He had spent ten years trying to put Portrevick behind him.
‘You must have family still there, though, mustn’t you?’ said Cassie. There had always been lots of Trevelyans in Portrevick, all of them reputedly skirting around the edges of the law.
‘Not in Portrevick,’ said Jake. ‘There’s no work in a village like that any more.’ And there were richer pickings in places like Newquay or Penzance, he thought dryly. ‘They’ve all moved away, so there’s no one to go back for. If it wasn’t for Sir Ian and the trust, I’d be happy never to see Portrevick again. And once I’ve sorted out something for the Hall I’ll be leaving and I won’t ever be going back.’
Cassie was having trouble keeping the filling in her sandwich. The egg kept oozing out of the baguette and dropping everywhere. Why hadn’t she chosen a nice, neat sandwich like Jake’s ham and cheese? He was managing to eat his without any mess at all.
She eyed him under her lashes as she licked her finger and gathered up some of the crumbs that were scattered on her side of the table. Jake had always been such a cool figure in her memories of Portrevick that it had never occurred to her to wonder how happy he had been.
He hadn’t seemed unhappy. In Cassie’s mind, he had always flirted with danger, roaring around on his motorbike or surfing in the roughest seas. She could still see him, sleek and dark as a seal in his wetsuit, riding the surf, his body leaning and bending in tune with the rolling wave.
It was hard to believe it was the same man as the one who sat across the table from her now, contained and controlled, eating his sandwich methodically. What had happened to that fierce, reckless boy?
Abandoning her sandwich for a moment, Cassie took a sip of coffee. ‘If you feel like that about Portrevick, why did you agree to be Sir Ian’s trustee?’
‘Because I owed him.’
Jake had finished his own sandwich and brushed the crumbs from his fingers. ‘It was Sir Ian that got me out of Portrevick,’ he told her. ‘He was always good to my mother, and after she died he let me earn some money by doing odd jobs for him. He was from a different world, but I liked him. He was the only person in the village who’d talk to you as if he was really interested in what you had to say. I was just a difficult kid from a problem family, but I never once had the feeling that Sir Ian was looking down on me.’
Unlike his nephew, Jake added to himself. Rupert got up every morning, looked in the mirror and found himself perfect. From the dizzying heights of his pedestal, how could he do anything
‘Sir Ian was lovely,’ Cassie was agreeing. ‘I know he was a bit eccentric, but he always made you feel that you were the one person he really wanted to see.’
Jake nodded. He had felt that, too. ‘I saw him the day after that fight with Rupert,’ he went on. ‘Rupert was all set to press assault charges against me, but Sir Ian said he would persuade him to drop them. In return, he told me
