Everything You Want: Everything For You Trilogy 2 (39 page)

I turn back to the water quickly before he sees the flush of awkwardness that heats my cheeks.

He doesn’t know the half of it.

Chapter Seventeen

Jack checks his instruments. He holds the boat stationary on the far side of Tower Bridge amongst moving vessels and a running tide on the throttles alone, so I can watch the bridge go all the way back down. Dozens of boats are queuing on the far side of the river to enter St Katherine’s Dock.

“An hour and a quarter so far. We’ve made good time. Another hour and a half should take us down to the Thames Flood Barrier for a look, then we’ll moor up and go off for lunch in Greenwich. Sound good?”

“Sounds wonderful.” I finger the eternal knot pendant hanging between my collar bones and know this day will always be significant to me. It’s as if it took the impetuous, yet insistent flow of a river to return us to the place the universe wants us to exist in together.

“There’s orange juice in the fridge back there. Pour me a glass too.”

I’ve obviously found my sea legs although the river isn’t too choppy today. I manage to pour two glasses and return with their contents mostly intact. The sun has risen even higher in the blue sky and I enjoy the plaintive cries of gulls and the deep murmur of the engines beneath my feet. We sip sweet juice and enjoy this little floating paradise we’re marooned on together. Part of the world yet nothing of it.

I wonder why Jack doesn’t remind me it’s his birthday. If it had been me and I thought everyone had forgotten I’d probably be sulking like a toddler. Jack’s maturity is a natural foil to my youthful inexperience. We complement each other. It seems so natural to me that we should be together. Would I help that come to pass by telling him I love him? Or drive some irremovable wedge in our tentative friendship?

It’s such a momentous decision after everything that has happened, I don’t know if I have the courage. Jack tells me I’m brave but I feel sick with apprehension about how he might receive such a startling revelation.

I think back to the last time I shared such a personal part of me, when I asked him to be the one to take my virginity. He left me. I never saw him again for four years and only then, because he thought I had some alcoholic death wish and he felt a sense of responsibility for Harry’s sake.

Would telling Jack I love him, that I’ve always loved him, that I will never love anyone but him for the rest of my life, have him running permanently for the hills? I might as well throw myself overboard now. There’s no way I could survive such complete and utter rejection again.

But what if I never tell him?

What if I never find out how he feels about it; about me? Wouldn’t that be even worse? Never knowing. Always wondering. Will I go to my lonely grave wishing I had been the brave woman he says I am?

“Penny for your thoughts?”

My heart jumps as he breaks my reverie. It’s as if the moving river itself is bringing things to a head between us. One way or another. “I’m still thinking them through.”

“Deep.”

“Very.” Our words skirt around the truth. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of them.”

“Can I help you to do that?”

Yes. No. Just tell me you love me first. But how will he ever know what he has to consider if I don’t find the courage to speak out?

“I have something to tell you.” My voice is barely a whisper. My eyes sting.

“I thought you might.” His voice is gentle. Encouraging. Patient. Perhaps even a little apprehensive.

My heart batters against my ribs. My lungs constrict enough for breathing to become erratic. Short. Feeble. Yet I must find the strength somehow.

“Hey.” He takes me in his arms, turns me to him and looks down. “Breathe. Steady. In. And out.” He gives me all the time I need to settle and stops things spiralling out of control.

Am I mistaken to think I might be more important to him now than Amanda? His own breathing slows so I can mirror it. I feel so protected in his arms. It’s where I belong.

Am I really going to tell him? There will be no going back. It will change everything. A tear rolls down my cheek.

Please God, don’t let him reject me. Not after the eternal knot and stopping the traffic on the bridge. Not on his birthday.

His birthday.

I remember the stupid plan I have to carry out for his party. I can’t tell him something as momentous as this and then abandon him, can I?

But I can tell him later. My path becomes clear. This will be my gift to him. The most personal, most private and most sensitive giving of my complete self to Jack to do with what he may. I can do it for this man because I love him with all my soul.

Because I love him.

“I have something to tell you,” I repeat, blinking back the tears.

“Yes. I believe you do.” His face is serious. I feel the almost imperceptible tension in his muscles as he holds me in his arms.

Does he suspect – dread – what I’m about to say? Because he doesn’t want to hear it; deal with it? I’ve never been as scared of anything in my life. I’m not brave. Not one bit. I’m a complete coward. If I was brave I would have told him long ago and I would have kept on telling him at every opportunity since. No matter what.

I would have told him at the Buddhist temple. I would have told him when the flag unfurled and when the bridge opened and the traffic stopped. I would have shouted it to the entire world. Yet I can’t even whisper those three little words to Jack. That is the hardest telling of all.

But it’s his birthday and he’s my love. He has the right to know how I feel. My love for him is his as well as my own. Then the choice about what he does with my gift will be his to make. I will tell him…

… Later.

“Tonight. Can you wait for me to tell you tonight?” After your party when we’ve left Claridge’s hotel and we’re back at Belvedere together. Lying in your bed. Lying in each other’s arms. Making real love.

“Yes.” He doesn’t push and I love him even more for that. He knows that whatever I have to say to him is difficult for me. He gives me that space. “For you, Tabitha, I can wait as long as you need me to.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

We both turn our superficial attention back to the river with all its running tides, blind curves, loops, twists and turns. But I expect we’re both thinking more about those of life and the forces that have brought us to this exact place in it.

* * *

The Thames Flood Barrier is a truly impressive sight.

Sailing beneath it makes me think of that scene in
The Lord of the Rings
movie when the fellowship sail past those huge ghostly, silver-grey statues of Aragorn’s ancestors. The hairs on the back of my neck lift as I crane right back to see, when Jack steers us between two of the ten steel flood gates.

His face appears over mine blocking my view. “They’re as high as a five storey building,” he says, laughing at my fascination.

“I’ve never seen them from this angle before,” I counter.

“Did you know it costs twenty thousand pounds each time they’re closed?”

“That’s some amount of money.”

“Not if you compare it to the tens of billions it would cost in damages if central London was to flood.”

“When you put it like that. Are they closed often?”

“Thinking about your taxes?”

“Too right.”

“Don’t even speculate if I’m going to pay the authorities to close them to amuse you.” He smirks at me.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Well I’d only done so for about a second.

“They test them monthly. I think the last time they closed to prevent a flood was at the end of 2012. And two years before that. We’ll turn here and head back upstream to Greenwich. Do you want to turn her?”

“Can I?” I love that he trusts me with his precious cruiser.

“Of course. Keep a steady turn on the wheel as you go. No jerky movements. You’ll be fine.”

I don’t manage my 180-degree turn in two boat lengths like the skipper but I succeed with his occasional helping hand on the wheel, over mine.

“Well done, kitten. You did brilliantly.”

His praise makes me feel so good anyone would think I’d got another first at university not made an assisted turn on a wide and empty stretch of river.

“I expected it to lean more but it doesn’t.”

“I felt you bracing yourself for impact,” he laughs. “Good design and the right materials. Light-weight Kevlar and carbon-fibre in the fly-bridge. The real weight’s deep in the hull.” He pauses and I sense the mockery coming. “The pointy nose helps too.”

I stick my tongue out at him for mocking my accurate but very un-nautical description of his boat. He guides us back through the barrier again. Before long he’s nosing it into a huge marina on the south bank of the river. There must be two hundred boats or moorings for them at least.

He puts in to one, cuts the engines and flashes down to tie her up. It feels strange now the engines are off but even stranger when he holds out a hand to help me onto the pier. To his amusement, I stagger.

“Your body has been compensating for the rolling motion of the water. It takes a minute or two to adjust.”

My body’s been compensating for quite a few feelings actually but I’m not telling him that.

He keeps hold of me until I seem less drunken. “Hungry, kitten?”

“Starving.” It’s gone noon already and we only had coffee for breakfast nearly five hours ago. We stroll in the warmth of the sun as he leads me to his Pagani, parked in the car park. “How did that get here?”

“Allow me to have some secrets of my own,” he tells me, mischievously.

Instantly I feel guiltier about mine. He must have spent quite some time organising today’s trip for us. First the engraving of the pendant, then the bridge opening, the moorings here and now the car. Anyone would think it was
my
birthday and I didn’t even remember it was his until Amanda showed up and reminded me. In my defence, I suppose I’ve spent quite a few years training my mind to forget all things Jack Keogh.

Soon we’re parking again about a mile and a half away in Greenwich. We stroll down to the Victorian tea clipper – the Cutty Sark – moored there.

“Now that would be a sailing experience second to none,” he muses staring up into the rigging.

“I’m not sure I’d let you take me out on any old thing.”

“And here’s me thinking my girl’d follow me anywhere.” His Irish brogue appears out of nowhere.

Jack thinks I’m staring at him because of that. I’m not. It’s because he’s so close to the truth. I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, if he’d let me.

He shrugs. “Something my father used to say to my mother when she got irritated with him.”

I link my arm through his. I like to think of Jack surrounded by a warm loving family. I never really knew one except Harry after my parents died. I have no brothers and sisters.

“Are you close to them?”

“I am. They still live in Dublin where I was born and I like to go home and see them when I can.” He looks at me. “I’ll take you to meet them some day.”

“I’d like to meet the family that raised Jack Keogh.”

“Good.”

It’s given me my strongest hint yet that maybe he might get over Amanda one day and see some distant possible future with me. I’m more convinced than ever that telling him tonight that I love him, is the right thing to do.

The day is warm and I remove my sweatshirt as we walk. I tie the sleeves round my hips. Jack stares down at the slash of naked belly on show between my short neon t-shirt and my hip-huggers.

“I see,” he murmurs mysteriously as if he’s been pondering for a while how he got at my skin so easily. He leans in to me and whispers. “You look very sexy, dressed like that. I feel like taking you straight back to the boat.”

“Can’t you feed me first?” I plead.

“I suppose I could. If I have to.”

“You definitely have to.”

“In that case, let’s not waste any more time. Lunch.”

He knows exactly where he’s going as he meanders with me past the National Maritime museum and the Old Royal Naval College buildings to the Old Brewery. Once inside I feel the sudden chill from being out of the sun but a waitress in a black apron leads us through the main hall where people are already dining beneath huge copper brewing vats and a sea of hanging bottles, to the outside walled courtyard and back into the sunlight. We have a table reserved under a huge parasol.

Jack holds my chair as I sit.

“You’ve been here before.” It isn’t a question.

“A time or two.” He looks thoughtful like he’s sifting through more old memories.

“With Harry?”

He laughs. “A time or two too many.”

“I like that you’re sharing something you did with Harry, with me.”

“Now I’m not saying I’m sharing what Harry and I did here.”

I’m shocked. I sincerely hope he only means getting drunk. Harry certainly had an eye for the ladies but I’m not even going there. “So who led who astray?”