Under the Boss's Mistletoe by Jessica Hart Page A

place to live when there’s never any money, and the moment there’s trouble the police are at your door wanting you to account for where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.’
    Jake could hear the bitterness seeping into his voice in spite of every effort to keep it neutral. Cassie had no idea. She had grown up in a solid, cosy house in a solid, cosy, middle-class family. They might have lived in the same place, but they had inhabited different worlds.
    Miss it? He had spent ten years trying to put Portrevick behind him.
    ‘You must have family still there, though, mustn’t you?’ said Cassie. There had always been lots of Trevelyans in Portrevick, all of them reputedly skirting around the edges of the law.
    ‘Not in Portrevick,’ said Jake. ‘There’s no work in a village like that any more.’ And there were richer pickings in places like Newquay or Penzance, he thought dryly. ‘They’ve all moved away, so there’s no one to go back for. If it wasn’t for Sir Ian and the trust, I’d be happy never to see Portrevick again. And once I’ve sorted out something for the Hall I’ll be leaving and I won’t ever be going back.’
    Cassie was having trouble keeping the filling in her sandwich. The egg kept oozing out of the baguette and dropping everywhere. Why hadn’t she chosen a nice, neat sandwich like Jake’s ham and cheese? He was managing to eat his without any mess at all.
    She eyed him under her lashes as she licked her finger and gathered up some of the crumbs that were scattered on her side of the table. Jake had always been such a cool figure in her memories of Portrevick that it had never occurred to her to wonder how happy he had been.
    He hadn’t seemed unhappy. In Cassie’s mind, he had always flirted with danger, roaring around on his motorbike or surfing in the roughest seas. She could still see him, sleekand dark as a seal in his wetsuit, riding the surf, his body leaning and bending in tune with the rolling wave.
    It was hard to believe it was the same man as the one who sat across the table from her now, contained and controlled, eating his sandwich methodically. What had happened to that fierce, reckless boy?
    Abandoning her sandwich for a moment, Cassie took a sip of coffee. ‘If you feel like that about Portrevick, why did you agree to be Sir Ian’s trustee?’
    ‘Because I owed him.’
    Jake had finished his own sandwich and brushed the crumbs from his fingers. ‘It was Sir Ian that got me out of Portrevick,’ he told her. ‘He was always good to my mother, and after she died he let me earn some money by doing odd jobs for him. He was from a different world, but I liked him. He was the only person in the village who’d talk to you as if he was really interested in what you had to say. I was just a difficult kid from a problem family, but I never once had the feeling that Sir Ian was looking down on me.’
    Unlike his nephew, Jake added to himself. Rupert got up every morning, looked in the mirror and found himself perfect. From the dizzying heights of his pedestal, how could he do anything but look down on lesser mortals? A boy from a dubious family and without the benefit of private schooling…Well, clearly Jake ought to be grateful that Rupert had ever noticed him at all.
    ‘Sir Ian was lovely,’ Cassie was agreeing. ‘I know he was a bit eccentric, but he always made you feel that you were the one person he really wanted to see.’
    Jake nodded. He had felt that, too. ‘I saw him the day after that fight with Rupert,’ he went on. ‘Rupert was all set to press assault charges against me, but Sir Ian said he would persuade him to drop them. In return, he told me I should leave Portrevick. He said that if I stayed I would never shake off my family’s reputation. There would be other fights, otherbrushes with the police. I’d drift over the line the way my father had done and end up in prison.’
    Turning the beaker between his hands, Jake looked broodingly down