And in that moment she loved him so much she felt her heart would burst. 'Oh, Jay! Can't you just imagine William playing on that beautiful sand?'
He nodded and drew a deep breath, knowing that he couldn't put this off any longer. 'There's something else, Keri.'
Some unrecognisable quality in his voice made her look at him very hard.
'You see, my name isn't Jay Linur at all.'
EPILOGUE
KERI gave the ribbon around the ceramic pot holding a bay tree a last tweak, and stood back for an overall view of the newly painted shop-front. The opening of Linur Lifestyles was due to take place in a couple of hours' time. There were bottles of champagne chilling, and soon caterers would be arriving with bite-sized hamburgers and mini fish and chips housed in tiny little cornets of newspaper. 'A celebration of the best of both English and American cuisine,' Keri had announced, and Jay had laughed.
'What do you think?' she asked now, anxiously.
He looked down at her. 'Honestly?'
'Honestly.'
He smiled. 'I think it looks absolutely incredible. And so, incidentally, do you. But then, you always do.'
She smiled back as she touched his face, remembering the bombshell he had dropped just before their wedding. About his father, heir to one of America's biggest fortunes, which Jay had inherited. 'Just too much money,' he had said bitterly. 'And that kind of wealth taints things.' He had wanted good to come of it, not corruption, and had set up a charitable foundation to help children who were underprivileged in all senses of the word. And he had adopted his mother's surname to distance himself from all of the expectation which his father's carried.
Had she been shocked by the revelation? Not really, no. Nothing Jay did could surprise her-only delight her. She had thought right at the beginning that learning to know him was like peeling away all the layers of an onion, and in that she had been uncannily right.
Oh, he could still be autocratic, and stubborn, and high-handed, but these days she found that a bit of a turn-on. Well, more than a bit.
He lifted her hand from where it was still tweaking unnecessarily at the ribbon and lifted it to his lips. It was a sweet and romantic gesture, but then he captured her gaze as he slowly licked his way along one of the fingers and Keri coloured with pleasure. Gone was the man who had only shown affection in bed-but then, so much had changed.
With Jay. With her. With them both. Love was a liberating thing, she decided-it made you free to say what was really in your heart, instead of worrying whether or not it was the right thing to say. And the astonishing thing was that their wants and their needs seemed to coincide perfectly.
It had all started with a remark he had made while they were waiting for the papers to come through for their Caribbean wedding. They had been strolling along a moon-washed beach, with the stars as bright as diamonds in the sky above them.
'The stars are so clear here,' Jay had said, almost wistfully, and she'd remembered him saying something similar before-that city lights meant you couldn't really see the stars properly.
And so she had hatched a plan. They would move to the country and he could work from an office there, leaving Andy in charge of the London office.
'I really think he's ready for promotion,' she had said seriously. 'Ready to move out from underneath your wing. And I think it's time you stopped doing such dangerous missions.'
'Oh, do you?' He laughed, thinking that once he would have been outraged if anyone had suggested that. But now he was ready. More than ready.
'Yes. And I can quit modelling-I want to, Jay-and I can start up the design business. I can afford to.'
'We can afford to,' he said possessively.
Keri nodded, growing warm with pleasure because it all seemed to make such perfect sense.
'And I can give my apartment to Erin, and I'm not going to take no for an answer. She can live there or she can sell it, if that's what she wants.'
Erin had agreed to accept the gift, bowing under the gentle pressure from both Keri and Jay. In the end she had opted to sell, and to move to the country not far from them.
'There's not a lot of point me being in London if you're not there, Keri,' she'd said. 'That's if you don't mind, Jay?'
He'd shaken his head. 'I don't mind a bit.'
Jay had grown to understand the intense bond between the twins, to cherish it and not to be threatened by it, as some men might have been. And he liked Erin-she was a lot like his wife, but she was different. As he'd said-no two people were the same, even though a lot of people seemed to have difficulty telling them apart. But he would have known Keri in the dark from a hundred paces, and that was just instinct.
No, maybe not just instinct. It was something else-something much stronger than instinct.
He smiled down at his wife.
It was love.