Page 36 of A Cornish Winter’s Kiss

Jude didn’t know what to do with himself.

He’d been so certain that finding his biological mother would finally allow him to fill the void in his life, one he hadn’t fully realised was there until he’d met Emily.

But the void felt even bigger because it could never be filled now.

He’d reached the point where ignorance about his birth story was no longer bliss.

He couldn’t remember feeling true contentment since his adoptive mother’s death.

But even not knowing had been better than this; the absolute knowledge that he would never know how the woman who’d given birth to him felt about handing him over to someone else.

Jude had tried to convince himself that Emily’s theory had been rubbish.

He didn’t want to believe that his inability to write about love was down to his desire to protect himself from the consequences of the truth.

But she’d chipped away at the barrier he’d built around himself, and he’d finally decided he needed to test her theory.

After discovering that Patricia was dead, he realised how right she’d been.

She was the one person he wanted to talk to about what had happened, but he couldn’t.

Emily had got under his skin and made him feel things he hadn’t ever felt before.

If he saw her now, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from opening up to her again, and it was safer to keep some feelings boxed up.

He’d already paid the price for forgetting that.

Jude had pulled out of going to her parents’ house to watch Elf , and he’d fobbed Emily off when she’d texted him about meeting up with the dogs. He just couldn’t face seeing her.

He couldn’t deny that he’d wanted to kiss Emily from the first day he’d met her, and that desire had deepened as he got to know this bright, insightful and beautiful woman who made him look at the world differently, even when he didn’t want to.

It was hard to believe he’d only known her for four weeks.

But as much as Jude had wanted to kiss Emily, and as amazing as it had been, he shouldn’t have done it.

He’d crossed a boundary he’d been determined to maintain, but far worse, he’d allowed her to see him at his most vulnerable, in the wake of the news that his biological mother was dead.

The news had hit him like a sledgehammer, and he’d been shocked at just how devastated he had felt.

He should never have listened to Emily in the first place and allowed her to convince him that finding his mother was the key to connecting with his characters on a deeper level.

Jude should have kept in mind what life had taught him – that people always let you down in the end, one way or another.

Whether that was through deliberate action, like his father, or by dying, like both his mothers.

If Emily managed her usual trick of getting him to talk, it would just rake over pain he couldn’t do anything about, and all he wanted was to bury it along with every other bad thing that had happened to him.

He doubted very much there was anything she could say that would help him sort out the mess his head was in, let alone his book.

The novel was far worse now than before he’d started the revisions; he knew that without having to show Marty the changes.

Jude had felt he was getting somewhere, but now, as he reread it, the story seemed completely unbelievable.

Why would McGuigan risk his career, his life even, for someone who’d just let him down in the end, whether she meant to or not?

And how could McGuigan’s girlfriend love such a flawed and complex man?

Love couldn’t be worth that kind of sacrifice; it took far more than it gave and set you up for so much hurt.

It was illogical, a game you couldn’t win.

Everyone lost in the end, one way or the other.

Except when he thought about Emily, a tiny part of him could acknowledge something stronger than logic.

A pull between them that couldn’t be explained.

If their professional relationship was over, why did it feel like something was missing when he wasn’t with her?

Jude couldn’t give Emily what she deserved, even if she wanted to be with him.

She deserved what her parents had, and Jude was far too broken to be able to offer her anything close to that.

Since his adoptive mother had died, every lesson he’d learned had reinforced the belief that he was unlovable.

His father’s disinterest, Sandra’s blatant hatred, and a string of relationships that had never felt right, as if somehow they weren’t enough.

Mia had been the only one he’d got as far as living with, and it was probably the only relationship that could be called serious, but looking back, even then, he’d been holding a part of himself back.

He’d blamed the ending on Mia and the fact she’d left for someone else, her disloyalty making the relationship fail, but it hadn’t been that.

It had been set up to fail from day one, because of Jude’s inability to allow himself to fully invest in the relationship and put his heart on the line.

It was almost certainly why Mia had been so open to Bexter’s advances.

He might never have realised it if Emily hadn’t made him see that he was the one who wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t some failing on the part of the women he’d become involved with.

He’d been so busy trying to protect himself from getting hurt again that he’d closed a big part of himself off.

Emily had made him open up and admit that he did want to know his biological mother’s story.

What he hadn’t acknowledged was the hope he’d felt; hope that finding her would stop him feeling like that little unwanted boy, whose father, stepmother and birth mother hadn’t loved him.

Any concept of love had died along with his adoptive mother, but Jude had felt the embers of it reigniting since meeting Emily, and now they’d been snuffed out again.

He missed her, just as much as he missed the hope he’d secretly been nurturing since adding his name to the adoption contact register, and he hated how out of control those emotions made him feel.

Jude snatched up his phone when it began to ring, the hope that it would be Emily rising and falling as he looked at the display.

It shouldn’t have been any surprise that she wasn’t calling.

After all, when she’d texted about meeting up to walk the dogs, he told her he was busy with edits and couldn’t make it.

She’d followed it up by wishing him luck with it, and telling him to message her if he wanted to meet up once he had time.

All he’d texted back in response was ‘will do’.

He was an idiot, but he couldn’t risk giving the feelings he had for her any more power; they were already taking over his subconscious.

When he was writing the new scenes, the only way he could buy into the story was to imagine Emily as the person McGuigan was falling in love with.

He’d even changed the description of McGuigan’s girlfriend so that she had the same dimples as Emily.

He could imagine loving her, and that scared the crap out of him, because the one thing he absolutely couldn’t imagine, the same thing that was blocking him from being able to write McGuigan’s relationship in a believable way, was the idea of Emily falling in love with him.

When Jude realised it was Marty calling, he almost let it go to voicemail, as he had when his editor had called the day before, and the evening before that, just a couple of hours after Jude had discovered that his biological mother had died.

He’d ignored several messages and emails from him too.

He couldn’t bear to give Marty another update, letting him know that the novel was still a steaming pile of horse manure, but he couldn’t keep dodging his friend and editor forever either. He might as well face the music.

‘Hi, Marty.’

‘Bloody hell, Jude, I was beginning to think you might have died!’ Marty sounded genuinely relieved. ‘I’ve been ringing you and messaging you. I was about to ask Sophia for Emily’s number. I thought maybe the two of you were together.’

There was a note of hope in Marty’s voice in the final sentence, but Jude was going to have to disappoint him again. ‘I haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday.’

‘In that case, I hope you’re going to tell me that the revisions to the manuscript are almost complete?’

‘I’ve made a lot of changes.’ That part wasn’t a lie.

Jude had made changes, altered them again, and in some instances changed them back to how they’d been in the first round of edits.

Before he’d kissed Emily, he’d wanted her to look at some of the key pages and give him feedback about whether or not they were as big a mess as he feared.

Only now it felt like he’d already revealed far too much of who he was.

He didn’t want Emily to see anything else that exposed the flaws in his character, flaws that were mirrored in the description of the characters in his book.

‘That’s great. So when do I get to see these changes?

’ Marty’s tone was almost always upbeat, even when he was delivering not so great news, probably because he tried to see the upside in every situation and find solutions that worked for the publishing house and for Jude, if things weren’t panning out the way they’d hoped.

He’d always felt like an ally, someone who wanted Jude’s career to flourish every bit as much as he did.

Jude knew how lucky he was in that respect.

He wasn’t just a pound sign to Marty. Only now there was a far more serious, insistent tone to his voice.

‘I need you to deliver on this, Jude, for both our sakes.’