Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
JESS
Jess was sitting next to Declan, and their legs brushed once or twice, giving her those butterflies once more. She was sure he must have felt it too, and the way she caught him glancing at her told her that it maybe was not just in her imagination.
All the same, she wasn’t sure about letting another man into her life.
Could she go through the heartache again if things didn’t work out?
It had taken all of her strength to get her life together, juggling work and being a parent to Maisie after she split with Maisie’s dad.
It would have to be someone very special if she was to open her heart again.
At least her mum looked happy and a little like her old self again, thought Jess, as she observed her and Mark laughing at something together.
It struck her that she had not really looked like that in quite a while and realised that it was important for her to be around good people who shared her sense of humour.
The pain from her dad’s betrayal seemed, thankfully, a little easier for her mum to bear these days, and maybe Pete had been a distraction when she needed it.
There was no doubting it now, though: her mum had made a mistake moving in with Pete. However pretty the Lake District was, with its stone houses and river running through the village, she had told Jess it just didn’t feel like home.
By all accounts the problem had been Pete himself, who had presented himself as fun and adventurous in the early stages of the relationship.
Despite his good looks, it hadn’t taken long for him to reveal his serious, and at times, dull nature.
Ironically, when Jess was young, her mother had warned her about the exceptionally handsome guys, believing they didn’t try as hard, and relied on their looks.
Maybe there was a grain of truth in that.
The problem was that Carol had sold her old house that was snapped up in five minutes, such was the popularity of the area. She had bought a decent car to get her to and from the Lake District and settled a credit card debt.
She had revealed to Jess that she would never be able to afford to return here with the money she had left in the bank with the current house prices and would probably be forced to rent.
Jess was delighted that her mum was having such a good evening and hopefully not thinking about such matters.
She was proud to have a mother who always found the solution to things in life, something Jess herself had inherited.
It was comforting to know that if life knocked them down, they would always be there to lift each other up.