Maids Under The Mistletoe Collection. Christy McKellen

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       CHAPTER EIGHT

      TO HER DISAPPOINTMENT, Emma didn’t see much of Jack over the next ten days. For the first couple of them his work took him into his office in the City at a totally unreasonable hour in the morning and kept him there until well after Emma had dragged herself to bed in the evenings. Though to be fair, she was crashing out early after long, intense days of researching and planning the new design scheme for the downstairs of the house.

      On the odd occasion when she did see him their conversations were stilted and tended to focus on the practicalities of living together, with him excusing himself before she had chance to ask him anything of a personal nature.

      Seeing the place in total disarray on Friday night when he returned from work, Jack had then suddenly announced he was flying off to Italy for a few days to meet with a business acquaintance, though she suspected he was deliberately making himself scarce—partly to avoid having to live in what felt very much like a building site, but mostly to avoid having to be around her all weekend.

      This thought made her stomach twist with a mixture of sadness and dejection. She’d really hoped that her confession in the pub garden would bring them closer, but instead it seemed to have driven even more of a wedge between them, crushing any hope she’d once had of a reconciliation.

      So it was actually a relief in a way to have this huge project to take her mind off things.

      With the contacts that she and her friends from the agency had managed to scrape together between them, she’d hired a talented, hard-working team and less than two weeks on she barely recognised the place. Luckily it had only needed cosmetic changes—though old, the house had been kept in good condition—and they’d been achieved with the minimum of fuss.

      She’d not had so much fun at work in a very long time.

      The new furniture was sourced from a couple of funky little independent shops on Columbia Road, which suited the brighter, more contemporary palette of colours she’d chosen for the walls and flooring. While it wasn’t up to Daphne’s standards of wow factor, she was delighted with the end result.

      It was a much more relaxing, comfortable place to hang out in now.

      When Jack returned a couple of days before they were due to do the interview with Perdita she stood nervously in the living room with him, crossing her fingers as he stared around him with an expression of pure amazement on his face.

      ‘Well, Em, I think you’ve found your calling. This is fantastic!’ he said finally, turning to give her a wide, genuine smile.

      Her heart lurched at the sight of his pleasure, the tension in her shoulders fading away.

      ‘Not a woodchip to be seen,’ she joked, feeling her tummy flip when he grinned back at her.

      ‘You’ve done an amazing job, thank you,’ he said, walking over to where she stood.

      Seeing him here again, with his hair dishevelled and dark smudges under his eyes, had sent her senses into overdrive and she was having a hard time keeping her nerves under wraps.

      ‘I’m glad you like it. I had a real blast working on it,’ she said, having to force herself to maintain eye contact so he wouldn’t see how jittery she was feeling in his charismatic presence.

      ‘I can tell. It shows,’ he said, looking at her with a strange expression now. Was that pride she could see in his eyes?

      Prickly heat rushed over her skin as they both stared at each other for a long, tension-filled moment.

      Jack broke the atmosphere by clearing his throat. ‘Well, I’m going to go and check in with the US office then head off to bed,’ he said, running a hand over his tousled hair. He looked so exhausted she had a mad urge to spring into full-on wife mode and start fussing around him, telling him not to bother with work, but to go straight to bed and get some rest.

      She didn’t though.

      Because she knew that it wasn’t her place to do that. She was only his wife in name after all.

      Sadness swamped her as she accepted the painful reality that she’d forfeited the right to have a say in how he lived his life six years ago.

      He wasn’t hers to care for any more.

      * * *

      The next morning, just one day before Perdita and her crew were due to sweep in and dissect their lives for the entertainment of the general public like some kind of twisted anthropology project, she was surprised to see Jack striding into the kitchen at nine o’clock in the morning.

      She was in the process of stuffing her mouth with a croissant she’d rewarded herself with for all her hard work over the last few days, so it took her a moment to comment on his remarkable appearance.

      ‘What are you doing here?’ she muttered through a mouthful of buttery pastry, her heart racing at the sight of him looking all fresh and clean from the shower and, oh, so strikingly handsome in a dark grey, sharply tailored Italian suit.

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