That was good advice. Maybe she should use what time she had and take things a little slower. But maybe not with Jon.
He parked the car in the street outside her house and she got out, stretching her cramped limbs. Home. The last few hours had seemed as if she’d taken a holiday, and it felt as if there should be shoulder-high weeds growing in the front garden, but it was just the way she’d left it.
‘I should go on my own. It’s good of you to offer, but you have things to do here.’ She followed him up the path, searching for her keys in her bag.
‘Nothing that won’t wait. I’m pretty sure that my house will still be there when I get back.’
‘That’s my point. It’ll still be there, and still need to be done when you get back.’ She walked through to the kitchen, putting her keys on the table. ‘You don’t have a magic kitchen that transforms itself when you’re not there, like I do.’
He chuckled quietly. ‘You still like it?’
‘No. I still love it.’ She turned to face him in the shadows. ‘This is the dramatic pause before I put the light on and see it all over again.’
Actually, the dramatic pause wasn’t so bad in itself. She could get lost in that and forget all about the kitchen, staring up at that easygoing smile, which seemed tempered by steel in the shadows.
‘Why don’t you trust me?’ Suddenly he seemed a little more steel than smiles. ‘You trust this.’
He gently pulled the gold chain around her neck, freeing the citrine from under her sweater. Chloe realised that her hand had automatically gone to her chest to feel its shape.
‘This was given to me by a friend when I was first ill. It was on a silver chain and it broke, but I loved the colour of the citrine and I put it on another chain. The chain was my mother’s.’
‘So you kept it by you?’
‘Yes. When I was alone it...helped me cope.’
‘So these crystals do have magical properties.’ The look on Jon’s face said that he didn’t believe that for a second.
‘I’m a scientist, like you. I believe in what I can quantify. Would you say that the human mind has no bearing on the body?’
He chuckled. ‘I’ve worked in A and E for far too long to think that.’
‘Or that holding onto good memories can’t get you through the bad times?’ She curled her fingers around the citrine.
‘No, I wouldn’t say that either.’ The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘But it’s not easy to take second place to a piece of crystal, hung around your neck.’
‘You’re never second best.’ Her answer came a little too quickly, too fluently to be anything other than the absolute truth. ‘I just don’t want to take advantage of you.’
‘So you push me away?’ He looped his arms loosely around her. ‘Don’t do it, Chloe. I know you’ve been let down before but I’m not going to repeat history.’
‘How would you know that?’ She suddenly wanted so badly for him to be different, but couldn’t dare to believe he was.
‘Because I’ve made up my mind.’
She felt her fingers curl, bunching his shirt in her hand. ‘We all make our minds up about a lot of things.’
‘Okay. So someone promised they’d be there and then wasn’t. Your parents?’
‘No. I know they would have been there if they could. Hannah was the one who felt deserted when they died, not me and James.’ She moved away from him, and he let her go. Chloe almost wished he’d put up more of a fight and crush her against him, the way he had before. But that had got them nowhere and had only threatened their friendship.
‘I had a boyfriend.’
‘Ah. A nice boyfriend?’ There was a touch of the competitiveness she’d heard in his voice when he’d been talking about the crystal. Jon really didn’t like to be second best.
‘Fair to middling. We’d been going out for a couple of years and I really liked him at the time. When I was sick he held my hand...not that I could feel it, mind you, because my right hand was paralysed, but I suppose the thought was the main thing.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Anyway, he promised me that he was going to be there for me, through thick and thin, whatever happened. That we were going to do this together. I was so grateful to him, and I loved him more than anyone at that moment.’ Chloe could feel tears pricking behind her eyelids, and blinked them away.