The Baby Verdict by Cathy Williams Page B

and I had to take over.’
    â€˜No!’ Ronnie cried in amazement, and Jessica grinned at her.
    â€˜You’re right. No. My trips abroad have all been spectacularly uneventful, I’m afraid.’ At which point, with lunch out of the way, the party broke up, going in different directions, mostly indoors to recover from the effects of the morning sun.
    Jessica retired to a bench under a tree to finish eating, and gave a little sigh of resignation as Bruno approached her and then proceeded to sit down next to her.
    â€˜This will start the rumour mill going,’ he said with amusement. ‘If this house had net curtains, then I’m sure a few of them would be twitching.’
    â€˜Ha, ha, I’m glad you find the thought of that funny.’ She stabbed a piece of tomato and stuck it in her mouth.
    â€˜Did you have a nice swim this morning?’ he asked, and she threw him a sidelong glance.
    â€˜Very nice, thank you.’
    â€˜I must say, I was impressed by your exciting anecdote about avoiding death by barracuda in the Indian Ocean. Well, until you said that you’d fabricated the whole thing.’
    â€˜Which you had known from the start anyway,’ she said, sticking her empty plate on the bench next to her and wondering whether it was her imagination or whether he was flirting with her. It was hard to tell with a man like Bruno because he was intrinsically charming. He had the ability to invite the illusion that you were somehow special, simply because when he conversed he had the knack of making you feel as though every pore in his body were focused on whatever you might be saying.
    You’d be a fool, of course, to be taken in by any such illusion.
    â€˜True,’ he said lazily, stretching one arm along the back of the bench, and tilting his face up to the sun, which speckled through the leaves of the tree.
    â€˜Because,’ Jessica said coolly, ‘hard-working career girls like me who have no time for anything exciting in their lives couldn’t possibly have exciting adventures, could we?’
    Once the words were out of her mouth, she couldn’t quite believe that she had said them. What had possessed her? She sounded like a teenager suffering a fit of pique, instead of a mature adult who had her life totally under control.
    It was just...that he made her feel, somehow, as though she had missed the boat somewhere along the line. As though there was a huge, exciting life out there, happening to other people, while she remained locked indoors, too scared to venture out. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way, but she knew that she never had until he had come along. He was just so damned charismatic . She had watched all the faces at lunchtime, focused on him, alight with enthusiasm.
    â€˜That remark,’ he told her, not bothering to look at her when he spoke, ‘has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said, and everything to do with how you feel about yourself.’
    â€˜That’s utter nonsense and you know it,’ Jessica muttered uncomfortably. Rather than risk going down this route of personal confrontation, from which, she knew, she would emerge the loser, she decided to change the topic of conversation altogether. She even managed to inject a note of cheeriness in her voice when she asked him about the island and the house.
    â€˜Who maintains it when you’re not around?’ she asked. Aside from the house, there were extensive grounds, and they were well tended. She suspected that, in the tropics, foliage grew at a rate of knots. He would need a full-time gardener just to stop the place from becoming a jungle.
    â€˜I employ three gardeners, who work all year rotund.’ He yawned, which made her feel like yawning as well. It was the heat. ‘And when I’m not here, Vicky and Sandy, the housekeepers who are here at the moment, come across twice a week by boat to make sure that everything’s ticking over nicely