rang a few days ago and said she had some time off. So I was all You’ve got to come back to the village! Nate’s away. We’ve got the cricket tournament on. And the fete. And the art show. She was supposed to come tomorrow, but when I rang her from the hospital this morning, to tell her about the pre-eclampsia diagnosis, she dropped everything and came straight away.’
Wow. That got his attention. Jayne didn’t drop anything to leave the hospital. He dipped his head so he could look into her eyes again. See if he’d missed anything.
As his eyes met hers she looked away and said, ‘I have a lot of accrued holiday HR were threatening to give away, so...’ She gave a half-shrug and a smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes.
Something was off here. Had something gone wrong at the hospital? In her private life? Whatever it was, his gut told him she wasn’t here for a bit of R&R. She’d come back to Whitticombe because she needed to.
She’d been back before. There were the annual Christmas trips, and he had seen her at his mum’s funeral in January. Right at the back of the church, flanked by her parents. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d disappeared before the wake, even though he knew as well as she did that his parents had all but considered Jayne part of the family. More so, he was beginning to realise with hindsight, than they ever had Marie.
Anyway... She’d made the gesture. It had been noted.
He forced his thoughts back into their cupboard and slammed the door shut. His complicated past with Jayne wasn’t the priority in this scenario. Maggie was.
Maggie who was now talking and laughing as if years of history wasn’t humming like electricity between her two childhood friends.
‘I just can’t believe you had holiday exactly when I needed you. It’s like kismet!’
She threw a smirk at Sam, as if he’d spent the past half-hour pooh-poohing her choice rather than being blindsided by his own past.
He felt Jane’s eyes on him, met them and held her gaze. Kismet. That had been ‘their’ word.
They’d known each other from school, of course, but they had been busy being kids and, as a twin, Jayne had been pretty inseparable from Jules. The magical ‘click’ had come when their secondary school teacher had decided to throw out the alphabetical seating plan and change things around. They’d shared a table from that day on. Along with a whole lot of other things.
As he dragged himself along memory lane he could hear Maggie saying something about the cricket tournament. He only managed to tune back in when Jayne mock-admonished Maggie.
‘We are doing no such thing, young woman! You’re meant to be resting.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.
They both looked at him as if he’d just missed a large gorilla walking through the room in a tutu.
Jayne put on a gently disapproving face. ‘This minx here thinks we should take the kids to the cricket tournament tonight for their supper. Ridiculous, right?’
‘Uh...not if we want to eat properly,’ Maggie said, as if it were obvious.
She had a point. For all her plus points, Jayne was not a cook.
Sam and Maggie looked at Jayne as one.
Her cheeks pinked up. ‘What?’
‘Well, let’s see... How I can put this gently?’ Maggie teased. ‘I can barely reach the counter and I’m meant to be on bedrest anyway.’ She feigned fanning herself like a French countess. ‘And, as I remember, your cooking skills are about as good as your ability to stick around in Whitticombe.’
‘Ouch, woman! Kick a girl when she’s down!’
Jayne poked Maggie in the arm, then threw a quick look in Sam’s direction. One long enough for him to see the comment had hit its mark. A protectiveness he hadn’t realised he still possessed flared in him. What did that mean? ‘Kick a girl when she’s down’?
Maggie realised she’d gone too far and started apologising, blaming her hormones, blaming Nate for being gone, blaming life for making her pre-eclampsic at her busiest time of year.
Speaking over her apologies, Jayne was trying to accept the blame herself. She was being too sensitive. She knew Maggie was teasing. It had obviously been a joke. She was here. Maggie could rely on her. Please, please, please don’t worry.
‘Maggie’s right, Jayne. About supper,’ Sam intervened, before everyone’s blood pressure went in the wrong direction. ‘The cricket club is putting on a proper barbecue tonight and it would be a shame to miss it. The kids will love it. There’s going to be a minis’ match to kick things off. Sausages. Burgers. I think there are even marshmallows.’
He resisted the temptation to reach out as he would have in the old days and put a reassuring hand on Jayne’s shoulder.
‘You’ve had a long drive, no doubt. And Maggie’s definitely supposed to be taking it easy. Amongst others, my sisters are cooking. I heard one of them mention potato salad at the coffee shop this morning.’
He nudged this comment in Jayne’s direction. His sisters made Jayne’s favourite potato salad. Unless that had changed, too.
‘Sounds good,’ she conceded with a grateful smile. But that playful look in her eyes was missing. And then it hit him. It hadn’t been there since she’d walked into the room.
Sure, there was the whole awkward ‘running into your ex’ thing, but they’d seen each other before since they’d split up, at the pub over Christmas, and had just about hit the casual acquaintance kind of comfort level. A quick Hi, you look well. So do you. Well...happy Christmas, then! and off they’d go and live their lives for another year.
He narrowed his eyes as Jayne fussed about, picking up Maggie’s bag and the paperwork she’d left on Sam’s desk. She looked a bit tired, but that wasn’t it.
The spark in her eyes had only gone once before, and that had been at her darkest ebb.
A thought jammed itself into place and stuck. This spontaneous trip to the country was definitely loaded with something heavier than just getting HR off of her back. She’d managed to dodge the village for the past seven years, so...why now?
Jayne waved the paperwork at him. ‘All right if I pop in another time to talk through these?’
‘Yeah, sure. Absolutely.’
He caught himself smiling. They’d always enjoyed doing that. Going over patients’ notes together had been one of the myriad reasons they’d planned to work together. Live together. Love together.
Well... He supposed he’d see how much things had changed when she came in. Things he would remind himself of when she left again. Because this wouldn’t last. Couldn’t last. Jayne Sinclair had made it more than clear her future was not in Whitticombe. And not with him.
Jayne bundled Maggie towards the corridor and Sam automatically moved forward to put his hand on the small of Jayne’s back. He saw her notice the movement out of the corner of his eye and pulled
