The Broken Hearts Book Club (11 page)

His unusual interest in my efforts caught my attention. ‘Oh? What do you have in mind?’

He thoughtfully stroked the brown stubble on his chin and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Well for a start, leave the piñatas and foam baseball bats out of the equation. Find out a bit more about each member and what makes them tick; that’ll do far more good than trying to steamroller them with stress busting exercises. People who are as broken-hearted as they are need gentle guidance and coaxing to make changes, not to whack a purple donkey full of sweets.’

I did a playful salute and smiled. ‘And there was me thinking you were just the moody pub landlord. You know, with that kind of insight, I could really do with you being in the club.’

He sighed and I could feel some of his spikiness returning. ‘Sorry but the answer’s still no I’m afraid. You wouldn’t want me at your meetings anyway; I’d spend four hours just talking about stuff that’s bothering me! It’d become the Jake Hartley Show in no time. Nah, I’m better staying away.’

He got up and put his arms round me to lift me up. His grip was strong and firm and as I leaned into him for support, I breathed in his fresh, clean aroma. The smell of sandalwood shower gel clung to his skin and his clothes gave off the faintest hint of lavender.

‘The offer’s still open,’ I replied, gathering myself. ‘You can join whenever you like. And I haven’t forgotten about helping you save The Purple Partridge either.’

‘What about world domination, is that on your list too?’ He grinned but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. I’d touched a nerve by mentioning the pub. ‘Out of curiosity, what
were
your ideas for saving it?’

We negotiated the concrete step we’d been sitting on and continued back down the cobbled hill towards my mum and dad’s house. As Jake walked beside me, I could feel my senses slowly start to wake up. The sandalwood and lavender ensnared and intrigued me. I listened to the steady rhythm of his footsteps and couldn’t fail to notice how gorgeous he was. His wavy brown hair lay in thick unkempt tufts like it hadn’t seen a comb for days, stubble was dotted around his chin and his slate-grey eyes were guarded.

‘There’s loads you could do: quiz nights, theme nights, cocktail evenings like the karaoke night. It’s all about pulling as many punters in as possible whilst spending as little as you can. How did you find the karaoke night worked, by the way? Do you think it helped?’

‘There were a few more people than usual, I suppose, but the place was hardly packed. To be honest, I don’t even think inviting Cara Delevingne to work behind the bar would fill The Purple Partridge!’

I laughed and shook my head. ‘I think she’s a bit busy just now anyway! What about a cocktail night? It’s simple but effective: cocktails are always really popular and they’ll attract loads of people to the pub.’

He scoffed. ‘This is Luna Bay, not London. Cocktails won’t do well around here; this is a beer and pork scratchings crowd.’

I threw him my best and sweetest smile. ‘That attitude, my friend, is why your pub is losing money.’

We came to a halt outside my parents’ house and I disentangled myself from him, leaning against the outside wall for support instead.

‘OK, OK, say I
did
want to try some of those events out. Where would I start?’

My sweet smile widened into a bright grin. ‘By hiring a kick-ass events planner! Don’t happen to know any, do you?’

‘Only one, but she’s a bit of a clown: bursts into song all the time and has a habit of falling over in funny ways.’

I hit him on the arm and nearly toppled over. ‘We’ll start with a cocktail night and take it from there, how does that sound?’

He puffed his cheeks out and rolled his eyes. ‘Like I must be going mad! But at this rate, I’ll try anything. Why don’t you come over to the pub tomorrow and we can talk about it?’

We said goodbye and I hobbled inside. My first meeting as the Broken Hearts Book Club chairwoman might’ve been an unmitigated disaster, but Jake agreeing to my events ideas had perked things up a bit.

Life was throwing me some interesting curveballs lately.

Chapter Ten

Carefree laughter turns into a blood-curdling scream. Nothing will ever be the same again. The world as I know it has changed forever and it’s all my fault. I begin to scream ‘Vicky’ at the top of my lungs…

I woke up from the nightmare in a cold sweat, ragged breaths struggling to escape from my chest. My eyes worked quickly to take in their surroundings, which were barely visible in dim half-light. The dawn was just on the outer reaches of the sky, its long tapered fingers ready to blast through the darkness and herald a new day.

I lay back on my pillow and stared at the ceiling, my eyes going funny from the swirly patterns. Once upon a time, there had been beautiful exposed beams on the ceiling, but Dad being the enthusiastic DIYer he was had decided covering them up with Artex would look much better. I immersed myself in the finer details of each swirl, willing my mind to banish the nightmare that was still clinging onto the periphery of my thoughts.

I’d expected it to come. After Diane had made such a big show of mentioning Vicky, it was pretty much inevitable. The events always happened in the same order and although I knew what was coming, it still terrified me. The feeling of helplessness and that the world had changed irreparably because of me… haunted me more than I cared to admit.

I rolled onto my other side and checked the time: just after four in the morning. Plenty of time to try to get some decent sleep. I let my heavy eyes close, snuggled down in my covers and prayed that the nightmare wouldn’t come back.

Jake was waiting for me when I went over to The Purple Partridge just after lunchtime. Elle and George had insisted on coming with me, given that last time I saw him in the pub I did a Tom Jones impression.

‘You need our expert guidance I think,’ Elle had said. ‘We’ll stage some sort of intervention if it even looks like you’re going to sing.’ And George had been more than happy to spend time with Elle. She’d managed to take his mind off the missed part in
The Lion King
and he was now settling into Luna Bay nicely. Jake hadn’t been able to give him any shifts at The Purple Partridge, but he’d managed to pick up some in a pub a few miles away. It was lovely to see George making a life for himself in Luna Bay. Switching from a busy life in the city to a slower, more sedate one on the Yorkshire coast was having a great effect on him. His trademark Cheshire-cat grin was back and it was clear to see how much he loved being in the village.

When I got to the pub, Jake came out from behind the bar and we went over to a little table while my two best friends chose one nearby. I was a bit disappointed to see his beautiful arm muscles were hidden under a cream jumper.

‘How’s the ankle?’ he asked without a hint of awkwardness.

I blushed as I thought of him caressing my sore ankle yesterday.

‘Oh it’s fine thanks!’

The memory of his touch made my skin tingle and my heart ache to feel it again.
Stop right there
, my brain said,
before you get in too deep.

‘So,’ he said, offering me a hot mug of tea, ‘how are we going to save this place?’

I reached into my bag and brought out a spiral notebook with cartoon pandas on the front. This prompted a chuckle from Luna Bay’s moodiest barman, so I was quietly chuffed.

‘I’ve made lists of well-known cocktails according to country and ranked them in order of popularity. ’

Jake smiled wolfishly. ‘You’re enjoying every minute of this aren’t you?’

‘No!’ I felt myself blush. ‘OK yeah, I totally am. Do you have cocktail ingredients?’

‘Nope, but I could probably get some pretty easily. Should I hire a mixologist for the evening or something?’

I was touched to see he actually looked quite serious about this, instead of mildly amused like he normally did. To look at him, you’d think he had life completely sussed; after all, how could someone as gorgeous as him possibly have anything to be unhappy about? However, when no one was looking Jake looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

‘Nah, the cocktails themselves are pretty easy to mix usually. If you want someone to juggle the shakers around and do some fancy stuff, then OK but you could probably pull that off yourself.’

He nodded, looking deep in thought as he chewed his thumbnail. ‘Yeah probably not a good idea to spend more than I have to; I just need to keep this place open. I’ve got… Well I’ve got a lot riding on this and if it goes under, I’m screwed.’

He worried a hand across his face and glanced up at me with desperation as he hunched over on his chair. His eyes were heavy and he looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks. He ran his fingers through his hair, scratched his neck and began fiddling with the wooden beaded bracelet on his right wrist.

‘Sorry,’ he said with a self-conscious chuckle, ‘you’ve probably got enough to deal with without hearing about my problems as well!’

He was so vulnerable, so desperately in need of help that I wanted to fling my arms around him and tell him everything would be OK.

‘You really should come to the book club, you know. I know you said it wasn’t your thing but give it a try eh? You look like you could do with some support and that’s what the club’s for.’

Jake straightened himself up and his bravado was instantly put back in place. Instead of giving me an answer about joining the Broken Hearts Book Club, he pored over the notes I’d made about other events to run in the pub.
He must be desperate to avoid the subject
, I thought,
if he’s looking over events he didn’t even want to do.

I decided to drop my quest to get him to join – it obviously wasn’t going to work – and leaned in to discuss some of the other ideas I’d had. As my chair scraped forward, it lurched unexpectedly and my hand knocked against his.

‘Oh, sorry!’

A little shy smile sprouted at the corners of Jake’s full mouth and he gave a slow shrug. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

Then, just like that, he turned back to leafing through my notebook. I cursed every one of those cute cartoon pandas.

In the end I made it through the whole ninety minutes with Jake without bursting into song or falling over. Although when our hands brushed, I did have the urge to sing
You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.

‘So we’ll have the cocktail night in a couple of weeks then?’ he said, stepping back into his domain: behind the bar.

‘Yeah, the Saturday night would probably be the best. Unless you fancy doing it on the Friday? I’ve got my second book club meeting on Wednesday, so either day is good for me.’

‘You’re definitely going back then? I’m glad. You could do a lot of good there, provided you leave the piñata at home this time.’

He leaned his arm on one of the beer pumps and wore the laziest yet sexiest smile I’d ever seen. He went to rest his chin on top of his hand but applied too much pressure to the pump and soaked himself with Guinness.

‘Shit!’ he yelled, jumping back to get himself out of the way. It was too late; his lovely cream jumper was already covered with an ugly brown stain. ‘I’ll have to go and change. Nicole, could you look after the bar for a minute?’

A young, mousy-looking girl with unusually large brown eyes came over to him, her heels clicking on the parquet floor. As I looked at her, it became increasingly apparent just how much she resembled a Furby. Her huge brown eyes surveyed me with an air of suspicion and her little bow-like mouth was crafted into a simpering pout. She didn’t look happy to see me and threw a dirty look my way.

‘You called?’ Her voice was exactly how I imagined Barbie or Hello Kitty to sound: high-pitched and sickly sweet. ‘Ooh, look at your jumper! How did that happen?’

‘Faulty beer pump,’ Jake explained. ‘Would you be OK looking after things for five minutes while I go and get changed?’

Her lips curved into a smile and she put a protective hand on his chest. ‘Of course, you take as long as you need.’

Jake gently removed her hand and went through the door that led to the back of the pub. Through the little porthole window, I saw him take his jumper off and discard it carelessly on the floor. I could see every sinew and muscle in his back and shoulders stretch themselves out until he disappeared upstairs and out of sight.

Oh Mama.

Elle and George, being the utterly lovely individuals they were, insisted on giving me a round of applause for getting through a period of social interaction without singing or doing something catastrophic. When I got back to the table, they stood up and gave me a standing ovation.

‘Well done!’ Elle said, patting me on the back. ‘We’ll make a normal human being out of you yet!’

‘I wouldn’t go that far!’ George winked. ‘Still, at least you didn’t sing.’

‘Haha, very bloody funny!’ I pulled up a spare seat. ‘There’s still time for me to belt out a number you know; I could go for Beyoncé or Lady Gaga this time.’

‘On that note,’ my lovely Welsh best friend said, rising from his seat, ‘I’m off to the bar!’

Elle stared after him for just a fraction too long then turned to me, after sensing me looking at her.

‘So now that it’s just us girls, how did it go with Luna Bay’s answer to Ryan Gosling?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but it was strictly business. Anyway, even if I
was
interested in him – which I’m not – he clearly thinks I’m some kind of all-singing, all-dancing lunatic who butchers Tom Jones songs.’

‘Which, to be fair, you are. But you’re awesome too; he’d be mad not to be interested in you.’

‘That’s what I’ve missed most about you these last eight years Elle; you really know how to pay someone a compliment!’

Our happy reverie was cut abruptly short by the pub door swinging open and Maggie Cunningham walking in. She slowly turned her head to look in our direction and had the expression of someone whose nostrils were permanently filled with a bad smell. For the first time in my life, I gulped. A proper old-style gulp like they do in horror movies. As always, when I saw her, my stomach lurched and my palms grew sweaty. Every time I saw her, the Vicky thing was brought right back to the front of my mind. One look at her was enough to dredge it back up from the deep recess I’d tried to bury it in. All the guilt, the pain and the regret came rushing back and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was always there, lurking in the back of my mind just waiting for the perfect moment to strike. But now that I was back in Luna Bay, it seemed to be somewhat heightened.