Belle - Lesley Pearse [243]
He swept her into his arms and kissed her until she felt she was going to faint with wanting him.
‘Home now,’ he said, taking her hand and leading her to the door. ‘I think you need time on your own to think this through.’
Belle tossed and turned that night, unable to think of anything but Jimmy’s kisses and how they had made her feel. She’d kissed only five men in her life – Etienne, Serge, Faldo, Clovis and Jimmy. Serge didn’t count at all, for blissful as his lovemaking had been, she had never been under any illusion that it was anything other than sex. Faldo didn’t count either for she’d felt nothing but a vague affection for him. Clovis was someone she regretted deeply. As for Etienne, she was still just a child when he kissed her, and after all she’d been through just before she met him it was likely she became infatuated because he was so kind to her.
She’d written back to him just before she and Mog moved to Blackheath, and told him about her life back in England, about Lisette and Noah, and how Mog and Garth were getting married. She’d said she hoped he’d find true happiness on his little farm, but said nothing of her feelings for him.
She realized now that her letter had finalized it for her. She’d met him at a desperate time in her life, and his kindness and wisdom had helped her through it. Looking back, it was hardly surprising that she’d put him on a pedestal. On top of that he was the one who rescued her from Pascal. What woman wouldn’t love him for that? Yet in the past three months of being secure and happy she’d rarely thought about him, and when she did it wasn’t with sadness for what might have been, only gratitude he’d been there when she needed someone.
Yet if Jimmy was to go out of her life she knew she wouldn’t forget him in a hurry. He was part of her past, of the present, and she wanted him there in her future. Did she love him?
If someone was your best friend, someone you never wanted to lose, and you desired them, if that wasn’t love, what was it?
She tried to think about her shop, to imagine how she would decorate and arrange it, and display her hats in the window. But her mind kept slipping back to Jimmy.
Everyone she knew would be delighted if they married. Even her mother had said that he was a diamond.
What was she waiting for? Did she expect a thunderbolt from the heavens to make her see it was meant to be?
She got out of bed, and as she so often did when she couldn’t sleep, she picked up her sketchpad and a pencil.
But instead of drawing a hat, she found herself drawing a veil, and that led to a wedding dress.
It was barely light when she began, and she became so engrossed in the detail, her own face beneath the veil, the beading on the dress, a train sweeping out behind, even a frothy bouquet of roses and orange blossom in her hands, that she lost all sense of time.
As she finished it she glanced at the clock and was surprised to find it was nine o’clock.
She looked down at the finished sketch and smiled. ‘That’s the closest you’re going to get to a thunderbolt,’ she murmured. ‘So I think you should go and tell him.’
Read on for a taste of Belle’s further adventures in Belle’s War, to be published by Michael Joseph in spring 2012.
Chapter One
July 1914
The name ‘Belle’ in gold italic writing above a shop window made Etienne Carrera stop in his tracks and his heart beat a little faster. It was raining hard so he sheltered under a haberdasher’s shop awning to look across the street at the little bow-windowed hat shop. It had to be her shop, it surely couldn’t be mere coincidence when he had come out to Blackheath for the sole purpose of finding out how she was.
Etienne could see two ladies silhouetted inside the shop; their hand and head movements suggested they were excited by the hats on display. If the shop belonged to his Belle then he knew he should be satisfied that she’d achieved her ambition to become a milliner, and could go back into London happy that life was treating her well. But just the thought that she might be less than twenty yards from him