‘I should be,’ said Nell, but fingers were twining round his. ‘But not with you. I presume this is Thea and Janey’s doing?’
‘They set it up between them, apparently. After they got in touch on that internet site, Janey couldn’t wait to tell Thea her favourite theory about me.’
‘What theory is that?’
‘The one that says that I’d never got over you,’ said P.J. with a rueful smile. ‘Ever since I came back to London, and she discovered from Thea that you were divorced, Janey’s been going on and on at me to get in touch with you, but I was afraid of raking up the past. I thought it would be better to leave things as they were…and then I saw you this morning, and I realised that Janey had been right all along, which of course she’s absolutely delighted about!’
Nell couldn’t help laughing at his expression. ‘Thea will be unbearable, too. She’s been doing the same thing. Why didn’t I contact you? Why didn’t I give you a ring and just say hello? You can imagine! And the more she talked about you, the more I refused to see you.’
‘Were you anxious about the past, too?’ asked P.J., and she thought about it a while.
‘That was part of it, of course, but mainly I was really intimidated because I’d heard that you were so rich and successful. It just seemed like we had different lives now and that it would be better to keep them that way.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s as if we’ve been on separate paths, that have gone off in different directions, and twisted and turned, but still somehow been meant to bring us back together today. We’ll let our sisters think it was down to them, but, really, I think we’d have met anyway. I think that was the way it was meant to be.’
‘I wonder,’ said Nell, thinking about what he had said. ‘Certainly the first two meetings today had nothing to do with Thea or Janey, did they?’
‘No, and the third time was me deciding to take a hand in my own affairs,’ said P.J. with a grin. ‘I thought fate had done enough and it was up to me to get you back-although, as it turned out, I could have left it to my sister!’
Nell smiled, and he released her hands at last. She took a sip of her wine, conscious of the tension slowly trickling away from her spine and her shoulders. ‘When did you know that it was me you were meeting tonight?’
‘Not until you dropped your bag. All Janey would tell me about the blind date she’d set me up on was that I was to meet a divorced friend of hers called-she said-Helen, who was very nice and I’d know her because she’d have a Swahili phrase book with her. When I saw that it had fallen out of your bag, I felt…’
P.J. trailed off, trying to find the right words to explain how everything had suddenly fallen into place, and the world had lifted from his shoulders. ‘I can’t describe how I felt.’ He gave up at last. ‘When I dropped you at Trafalgar Square, I rang Janey and asked her straight out if it was you I was supposed to be meeting, and she confessed.’
‘Why on earth didn’t they just tell us?’ grumbled Nell.
‘I think they thought that we would bottle out if we knew what they were planning.’
‘I probably would have done,’ she conceded reluctantly, ‘but at least it might have saved me making a colossal fool of myself! I’m going to kill Thea when I see her! You must have thought I was an idiot, pretending that I’d found the perfect man in John!’
‘I’m just relieved that he’s turned out to be me, to be honest,’ said P.J. with a crooked smile. ‘The thought of him gave me some bad moments! I was pretty jealous of him.’
Nell put down her glass in surprise. ‘Surely you guessed that he wasn’t real?’
‘Only after I saw the phrase book. He sounded so perfect, so exactly what you wanted. I had no reason to believe that he wasn’t real.’
She flushed, remembering the fibs she had told. ‘I don’t know why I made up all that about him,’ she said, twisting the stem of the glass between her fingers. ‘I suppose I didn’t want you to think that I was just a sad divorcee.’
It was P.J.’s turn to look surprised. ‘There was no chance of that, Nell! Why on earth would I think that? There you were, with a lovely daughter, a good job and-it seemed-a great man. It looked to me as if you had your life under perfect control.’
‘Whereas in fact I’m chaotic and clumsy, with daughter who bosses me around and an imaginary lover,’ said Nell, amused at the very idea of her having her life under control. If only!
‘I know better now,’ P.J. agreed solemnly. ‘I’ll admit it was a relief to discover that you weren’t quite as perfect as you seemed at first.’ Smiling, he lifted his hand to trace the line of her cheek with infinite tenderness. ‘Although you’ll always be pretty perfect to me,’ he said softly.
‘Oh, P.J…’ Sudden tears trembled on Nell’s lashes. ‘How can you say that when I hurt you so much? I was so stupid about Simon,’ she told him. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I hurt you, too,’ he pointed out gently. ‘I should have paid you more attention when you needed it. I was too busy thinking about the future when I should have been listening to you and what you wanted in the present.’
Reaching for her hand, he closed his fingers around hers firmly. ‘That’s the thing about relationships. It takes two to make it, two to break it. It wasn’t just you, Nell. At least you were honest with me. You told me as soon as you realised that you were attracted to Simon, and that must have taken guts. It didn’t help that I went off the deep end. If I’d been older, I might have stuck it out, and given you some space to think about things instead of ending it all there and then.’
‘I was such a fool. I had no idea how lucky I was.’ A single tear wobbled over Nell’s lashes and trickled down the side of her nose until P.J. wiped it away tenderly with his thumb.
‘Nell, it was a long time ago.’
‘I just wish I could do it all again better.’
‘But then you wouldn’t have Clara, and I wouldn’t have my company. The last sixteen years haven’t been all bad, have they?’
‘No,’ Nell had to agree, thinking of her daughter.
‘I have missed you, though,’ P.J. confessed.
‘For sixteen years?’ She smiled, still a little tearfully. ‘I don’t believe you’ve been pining all that time!’
‘I wouldn’t say I’d been pining exactly,’ he admitted. ‘I haven’t been unhappy, and there have been women, yes. But none of them were you, Nell. Another of Janey’s theories is that all my girlfriends looked like you, and that I spent my time trying to find a substitute for you. She thinks that’s why my relationships never came to anything. I wanted them to, but subconsciously maybe I was comparing them to you.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘The crazy thing is that if you’d told me yesterday that that was what I felt-as Janey always did-I would have insisted that it wasn’t true, but all I had to do was look at you this morning, in your old jogging suit and trainers, and I knew that I had loved you all along.
‘I went straight into work and rang Janey and tried to get out of the date she’d set me up on tonight, but she wouldn’t let me. I should have guessed what she was up to, but I didn’t. I thought I was going to have to spend the evening making polite small talk with a divorcee when all I wanted was to be with you.
‘Janey was right.’ Still holding her hand, P.J. looked deep into Nell’s grey eyes. ‘It’s only ever been you, Nell. You’re my one and only, just like they used to say. Being near you again was like coming home for me. I was so desperate to see you again, and it was a real blow when you said you didn’t want to see me.’
Nell tightened her fingers around his. ‘I was afraid,’ she said honestly, and his brows drew together slightly.
‘Of me?’
‘Of the way you made me feel,’ she said. ‘I’m like you. I’ve spent sixteen years telling myself I’d forgotten you, and then a couple of weeks ago Thea mentioned your name… Since then I’ve been remembering, and regretting, and just wanting something I knew couldn’t have.’ Her smile twisted. ‘I’m not sure what it was. I think probably I just wanted to be that confident and certain again. I wanted to be loved the way you used to love me.’