“I guess you don’t seem like the type who would leave everything you know behind to find a new life,” he said carefully.
“Really?” she said, the deliberately light tone of someone who was hiding something, “This pizza alone is enough to make me toss my old life.”
“Pizza preferences aside, you seem like a picket fences kind of woman. And a solid guy who adores you and whose world revolves around you. Babies. A golden retriever. A summer cottage on the lake. A big Christmas tree, only real will do.”
He was pretty sure, according to the employment standard act, you weren’t allowed to say anything like that to a prospective employee. It was probably sexist as all get-out to offer conjecture about her lifestyle but he was deliberately trying to provoke her.
“Are you reaching these conclusions because I think your oven is ideally suited to the preparation of traditional feasts?” she asked. “Or because I think your house is more like a hotel than a home?”
“Traditional,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. You seem more traditional than career oriented.”
“And yet,” she said calmly, “I’ve enjoyed great success in my career. I assume that’s part of why I was invited here.”
Sitting here on his deck, the sounds of New York calming for the night, the warm summer air embracing them, it felt as if he needed to know more about her than the career synopsis that had been put together for him by an office assistant. Admittedly, he had not even glanced at it until he got to JFK to pick her up.
“Though I did grow up with very traditional values and a lifestyle very close to what you described,” she said, after a moment. “It’s the life my parents had, and the life I always thought I would have, too.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She hesitated. “That solid guy who adored me died.”
“I’m so sorry.” He looked at her face. He hadn’t turned on the patio light, and it was alabaster in the subdued secondary lights from the city and the other apartments. Really, his intent had been a kind of casual job interview, not a prying into her personal life. But suddenly, he had to know. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“The world I grew up in, and that I always wanted—safe, predictable, traditional—was shattered in a second. Devon died in a skiing accident.” Softly she said, “I don’t want to leave myself open to believing in happily-ever-after again.”
But he had the feeling she did, she just didn’t want to believe she did.
“Tell me about the two of you.”
Really?
Good night, Miss Winton, nice to make your acquaintance would have been the wiser choice!
Jamie did not have these kinds of conversations with people. And especially not female people who might be working for him someday soon.
“We grew up together,” Jessica said. “I started preschool the same day Devon did. We had the same friends. Our parents were friends. We lived down the block from each other. We enjoyed all the things that growing up in a place like Timber Falls had to offer—hiking and camping, skiing and snowshoeing.
“We never really fell in love. We were always in love. We always knew, both of us, that we had been together forever and we always would be. But then, we weren’t. He died our senior year in high school.”
“He asked you to marry him in high school?” He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice.
She nodded, and tilted her chin at him, with faint stubbornness that said, Just because we were young doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
Jamie grappled with what he was hearing. He knew from the fact sheet he had been given about her that she was twenty-six years old. That meant high school was seven or eight years behind her. It troubled him that even before high school she had been making huge choices. It sounded awfully young to be mapping out the entire course of your life, and choosing a life partner. It seemed criminal, somehow, that she had missed out on the experience of falling in love.
Not that he was one to talk about that! He’d avoided the complications of falling in love like it was a plague.
So, instead of saying any of that to her—that she had been too young, that she had missed something—he was shocked to hear himself saying, “I was only eighteen when my dad died, so I know how tragedy shapes a person.”
She cocked her head at him. A man could fall toward what he saw in her eyes: someone who knew what it was to have your heart break in so many pieces it could not possibly be put back together again.
It felt imperative he get this back on track—that he not fall toward the respite offered by her eyes—so he carefully rephrased his original question. “So what makes a woman like you leave everything she knows in search of a new start?”
“I do have a really good life in Timber Falls,” Jessica said hastily. “I have my bookstore and my family...” Her voice trailed away.
“But?” he asked her.
“You’re probably absolutely right. I don’t think of myself as the marketing type, but there must be a reason I came to JHA’s attention. I made it clear that I’m not at all sure about this position, but I love bookstores, I love books, I love authors and I love readers. I’ve come up with an equation for putting all those elements together successfully. I can’t take it any further in Timber Falls and sometimes I feel a longing for more, even though I don’t know what that more is.”
She had thrown that love word around pretty casually, but what if that was what she was really longing for? What if that was her more? The one she wasn’t admitting, even to herself.
Jamie could feel a longing, unknown to him before this very second,
