The traffic was bad, though, as P.J. had pointed out. Maybe John was stuck somewhere. She had better give him a chance to turn up, anyway.

Choosing a seat where she could be seen from the door, Nell ordered herself a glass of wine and carefully put the Swahili phrase book in full view on the table in front of her. She would give John half an hour, and then she would go.

Normally Nell would have felt very conspicuous at being so obviously waiting for a blind date, but right then she didn’t care about anything other than the fact that she had just said goodbye to P.J. again. How was she going to bear it?

For something to do, she picked up the phrase book and studied it dully, but it was too full of the memories that P.J. had brought back so vividly. She thought about the good times they had had, the dreams they had dreamed together, and just for a moment she let herself imagine what it would have been like if she hadn’t chosen Simon.

But she had, and she had to take responsibility for that. Nobody had made her choose him, she had done that herself. She had made a mistake, and she had to live with it. In so many ways she was lucky, Nell reminded herself. Clara was healthy and happy. She had loving family and friends, a place to live, and a good job.

She just didn’t have P.J.

Well, she had managed without him before and she would manage without him again…but, oh, it was going to be so much harder now. In spite of her determination to keep up a good face, a tear trickled down Nell’s nose and she brushed it angrily away just as a Swahili dictionary was laid quietly on the table in front of her.

CHAPTER TEN

‘I’M SORRY I’m late.’

Nell stared at the hand on the dictionary, riveted by the whiteness of the cuff against brown skin, by the gleam of gold cufflinks and the fine dark hairs at the broad male wrist. Very, very slowly, her stunned grey gaze travelled up the sleeve of the dinner jacket, along the shoulder and up at last to the face that went with the voice.

P.J.

Still in thrall to utter disbelief, she dropped her eyes down to the dictionary as if to confirm it was what she thought it was, and then lifted them back to his face.

‘You?’ she whispered.

‘Peter John,’ P.J. reminded her. He pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. ‘Janey and Thea decided you wouldn’t come if you knew it was me, so they used my second name instead.’

Nell sat mouse-still, staring at him like an owl, hardly daring to believe what was happening, and too stunned to understand anything beyond the fact that suddenly, miraculously, he was there. She felt almost frightened, as if she had conjured him up by the power of her longing and he weren’t quite real.

‘I thought I was coming to meet someone called Helen,’ P.J. went on, more unnerved by her silence than he wanted to admit. ‘Why didn’t I know that about you? I didn’t realise Nell was an abbreviation of Helen, although I know that’s not why you’re called Nell…’

He could hear himself burbling nervously and made himself stop. ‘I’m talking too much,’ he acknowledged, and looked straight into Nell’s beautiful grey eyes. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked simply.

‘Mind?’ echoed Nell, although the word came out as barely more than a croak.

‘That it’s me, instead of another John?’

The uncertainty in his expression broke the spell that held Nell motionless. This wasn’t a dream. This was a real man, unsure of himself after all, and she gave something between a laugh and a sob, and shook her head.

‘No,’ she said, smiling through the tears that brimmed her eyes, ‘I don’t mind.’

P.J. reached out and took her hands in his, holding them tightly across the table in a warm, firm grasp. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘Part of me was afraid that you would be angry.’

‘I should be,’ said Nell, but fingers were twining round his. ‘But not with you. I presume this is Thea and Janey’s doing?’

‘They set it up between them, apparently. After they got in touch on that internet site, Janey couldn’t wait to tell Thea her favourite theory about me.’

‘What theory is that?’

‘The one that says that I’d never got over you,’ said P.J. with a rueful smile. ‘Ever since I came back to London, and she discovered from Thea that you were divorced, Janey’s been going on and on at me to get in touch with you, but I was afraid of raking up the past. I thought it would be better to leave things as they were…and then I saw you this morning, and I realised that Janey had been right all along, which of course she’s absolutely delighted about!’

Nell couldn’t help laughing at his expression. ‘Thea will be unbearable, too. She’s been doing the same thing. Why didn’t I contact you? Why didn’t I give you a ring and just say hello? You can imagine! And the more she talked about you, the more I refused to see you.’

‘Were you anxious about the past, too?’ asked P.J., and she thought about it a while.

‘That was part of it, of course, but mainly I was really intimidated because I’d heard that you were so rich and successful. It just seemed like we had different lives now and that it would be better to keep them that way.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s as if we’ve been on separate paths, that have gone off in different directions, and twisted and turned, but still somehow been meant to bring us back together today. We’ll let our sisters think it was down to them, but, really, I think we’d have met anyway. I think that was the way it was meant to be.’

‘I wonder,’ said Nell, thinking about what he had said. ‘Certainly the first two meetings today had nothing to do with Thea or Janey, did they?’

‘No, and the third time was me deciding to take a hand in my own affairs,’ said P.J. with a grin. ‘I thought fate had done enough and it was up to me to get you back-although, as it turned out, I could have left it to my sister!’

Nell smiled, and he released her hands at last. She took a sip of her wine, conscious of the tension slowly trickling away from her spine and her shoulders. ‘When did you know that it was me you were meeting tonight?’

‘Not until you dropped your bag. All Janey would tell me about the blind date she’d set me up on was that I was to meet a divorced friend of hers called-she said-Helen, who was very nice and I’d know her because she’d have a Swahili phrase book with her. When I saw that it had fallen out of your bag, I felt…’

P.J. trailed off, trying to find the right words to explain how everything had suddenly fallen into place, and the world had lifted from his shoulders. ‘I can’t describe how I felt.’ He gave up at last. ‘When I dropped you at Trafalgar Square, I rang Janey and asked her straight out if it was you I was supposed to be meeting, and she confessed.’

‘Why on earth didn’t they just tell us?’ grumbled Nell.

‘I think they thought that we would bottle out if we knew what they were planning.’

‘I probably would have done,’ she conceded reluctantly, ‘but at least it might have saved me making a colossal fool of myself! I’m going to kill Thea when I see her! You must have thought I was an idiot, pretending that I’d found the perfect man in John!’

‘I’m just relieved that he’s turned out to be me, to be honest,’ said P.J. with a crooked smile. ‘The thought of him gave me some bad moments! I was pretty jealous of him.’

Nell put down her glass in surprise. ‘Surely you guessed that he wasn’t real?’

‘Only after I saw the phrase book. He sounded so perfect, so exactly what you wanted. I had no reason to believe that he wasn’t real.’

She flushed, remembering the fibs she had told. ‘I don’t know why I made up all that about him,’ she said, twisting the stem of the glass between her fingers. ‘I suppose I didn’t want you to think that I was just a sad divorcee.’

It was P.J.’s turn to look surprised. ‘There was no chance of that, Nell! Why on earth would I think that? There you were, with a lovely daughter, a good job and-it seemed-a great man. It looked to me as if you had your life under perfect control.’

‘Whereas in fact I’m chaotic and clumsy, with daughter who bosses me around and an imaginary lover,’ said Nell, amused at the very idea of her having her life under control. If only!

‘I know better now,’ P.J. agreed solemnly. ‘I’ll admit it was a relief to discover that you weren’t quite as perfect as you seemed at first.’ Smiling, he lifted his hand to trace the line of her cheek with infinite tenderness. ‘Although you’ll always be pretty perfect to me,’ he said softly.

‘Oh, P.J…’ Sudden tears trembled on Nell’s lashes. ‘How can you say that when I hurt you so much? I was so stupid about Simon,’ she told him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I hurt you, too,’ he pointed out gently. ‘I should have paid you more attention when you needed it. I was too busy thinking about the future when I should have been listening to you and what you wanted in the present.’

Reaching for her hand, he closed his fingers around hers firmly. ‘That’s the thing about relationships. It takes two to make it, two to break it. It wasn’t just you, Nell. At least you were honest with me. You told me as soon as you realised that you were attracted to Simon, and that must have taken guts. It didn’t help that I went off the deep end. If I’d been older, I might have stuck it out, and given you some space to think about things instead of ending it all there and then.’

‘I was such a fool. I had no idea how lucky I was.’ A single tear wobbled over Nell’s lashes and trickled down the side of her nose until P.J. wiped it away tenderly with his thumb.

‘Nell, it was a long time ago.’

‘I just wish I could do it all again better.’

‘But then you wouldn’t have Clara, and I wouldn’t have my company. The last sixteen years haven’t been all bad, have they?’