Читать книгу One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December - Kat French, Kat French - Страница 12

Alice tapped the back door of the manor later that afternoon, slightly nervous that Robinson might not be talking to her after the inaugural meeting of the Robinson ‘Robster’ Duff fan club.

‘It’s open,’ his voice carried through the open window, and Alice pushed the door, taking a moment to appreciate the way the familiar old handle felt in her hand. Every little last thing about Borne Manor was beloved, from the smoothness of the worn oak banister to the creak of the floorboards on the third step of the attic stairs. As she’d closed her eyes to sleep in the caravan last night she’d walked slowly through the rooms in her head, savouring, remembering, and making herself believe that one day she’d live there again. She just needed some time, and for her glamping plan to work.

‘It’s only me,’ she called out, kicking off her boots by the door and walking through the kitchen into the hallway in time to find Robinson jogging down the staircase barefoot in just his jeans. Unsure whether to be flustered or cool, Alice opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again, because the only words in her head were oh my god I’ve never seen a six-pack in real life before. His tousled hair was darkened by dampness, and the towel in his hand confirmed his just out of the shower status.

‘I know. I saw you coming from upstairs,’ he said, absolutely unfazed by the fact that he was half dressed. Alice was finding it difficult to be so laissez faire, given the fact that his skin was the kind of deep burnished gold that only a lifetime spent in the sunshine can give a man and the light covering of hair that trailed down his torso disappeared into his low-slung jeans like a fishing line that made you want to see what was at the end of it. God, she needed to pull herself together. What was happening to her? Her emotions were all over the place since the move into the Airstream, all of the upheaval seemed to have given her libido a scandalised kick up the backside as far as Borne’s newest resident was concerned. It felt strange and confusing to be heartbroken over one man and lustful over another at the same time, all topsy-turvy and wrong.

‘I wanted to apologise about earlier,’ she said, following him back into the kitchen, biting her lip at the sight of his naked shoulders. She couldn’t help it. She was a broad-shoulders girl, and Robinson’s were world class. They did things, odd things to her insides. Maybe it was her inner cavewoman, but seeing a good pair of shoulders made her want to be thrown over them and carried up the stairs.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ he said, opening the fridge and pulling out a couple of beers. ‘Beer?’

Did she want to drink beer with the half naked and totally gorgeous superstar hiding out in her manor? Oh, go on then.

If only Brad could see her now, he’d rue the day he decided to screw her over with Felicity bloody Shaw. Robinson knocked the lids from the bottles and handed her one, then reached casually for the T-shirt he’d draped over the radiator and slid it over his head. Bye then, shoulders. Bye then, abs. Alice bid them a silent farewell as they disappeared beneath the dark cotton. Did he have his clothes made for him, she wondered, noticing the way the material seemed to cling to every slope and angle of him.

‘I didn’t run around the village announcing your arrival,’ she said, leaning against the Aga as she always had. ‘I only told Niamh, and that was sort of by accident really because I looked you up on her laptop.’ Too late, she realised that she’d made herself sound like a stalker. ‘It was just that your name rang a bell and I wasn’t sure why,’ she added in an attempt to make it better, only of course she’d probably insulted him by saying she’d never heard of him. God, this was difficult! One of the benefits of being separated from Brad was that she no longer had to deal with the fragile egos of the famous, and here she was again. Closing her eyes, she tipped her head back and drank deeply from the bottle, and when she opened them he’d pulled out a stool at the breakfast bar and perched on it.

‘Niamh who paints naked men, right?’

Alice grinned. ‘Amongst other things. She’s brilliant, actually, my best friend in the village.’

Robinson drank from his bottle, tipping his head back, drawing Alice’s eyes to the way his throat moved as he swallowed. Slapping down the Mills and Boon heroine in her head, she looked away until he spoke again. She was in a spot of trouble here. Maybe one of the classic symptoms of heartbreak was inappropriate lust for the first good-looking stranger to come your way.

‘What’s Stewie’s story?’

Alice started to laugh. ‘I haven’t seen his Elvis wig before, it must be new.’

‘He has more than one wig?’

‘God, yes. He’s got loads,’ Alice said. ‘He used to be quite a prolific actor.’

‘No way,’ Robinson said, looking interested. ‘Anything I’d know him from?’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Alice said, wondering how best to sum up Stewie’s colourful career. ‘If I tell you that he was professionally known as Stewie “The Snake” Heaven, you might get an idea of the kind of movies he starred in.’

Robinson started to laugh, that sexy, crooked smile lighting up his whole face as it had the previous night. ‘Holy fuck. Naked painters and porn star neighbours. And there I was thinking this place was going to be dull.’

‘You missed out the fact that Hazel’s a practising witch,’ Alice said, spreading her hands. ‘Welcome to Borne, cowboy.’

He laughed under his breath and drank deeply from his beer. To Alice he looked every inch a guy in a bar kicking back, utterly relaxed. He tipped the neck of his bottle towards her.

‘And then there’s you, Goldilocks.’

Her new nickname had never sounded so sexy. ‘What about me?’

He shrugged. ‘If I was to guess, I’d say you and I have something in common.’

‘You would? What would that be?’ Alice wasn’t entirely sure it was good for her to know.

‘Feel free to tell me to shut up anytime you like, because I know I said I wouldn’t mention this again, but your wedding band is only just as faded as mine.’

He looked at her left hand, and she looked at the telltale band of paler skin on his ring finger. She had no clue what to say next, so kept her eyes on his hands rather than look him in the eyes. He had good hands. The kind of hands your body might feel sexy in, and your heart might feel safe in. But then Brad had nice hands too, and he’d used them to twist her heart so badly that she wasn’t sure it would ever go back to its original shape again.

‘Almost six months,’ she said softly. The time had gone by in a strange mix of lightning fast and torturously slow, and it was only in the last month that she’d finally removed her wedding ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewellery box.

‘Ten for me,’ he said, and she finally looked up and saw her own broken heart reflected there in his eyes.

‘Are you going to tell me it gets easier?’ she said. Just about everyone else did.

‘Only if you want me to lie to you.’

She shook her head and sighed hard. ‘I’ve had enough of lies to last me a lifetime.’

He clinked his bottleneck against hers and huffed in understanding, the way that only someone else who’s been pissed on from a great height by the person they love best can. She wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned so intimate, but she knew that she needed to steer it back towards less shark-infested waters because talking about Brad always left her feeling bitten raw. Robinson seemed to sense it too, because he suddenly slid from the stool.

‘Before I forget,’ he said, disappearing into the lounge and returning with his hands full of the expensive camera Brad had given her a year or two back for her birthday, even though she’d never expressed even the briefest of interest in photography to him. ‘This was on the side. I figured you’d put it out and then forgotten to take it with you.’

Alice looked at the camera, debating whether to be honest and say she’d never even used it and had put it out to give away or to just take it from him and hide beneath his cover story. Seeing it there in Robinson’s hands, Alice had the most peculiar feeling of a plaster being ripped from a wound only to find the wound hadn’t healed at all and it would have been better left out in the open.

‘Do you mind if I grab something from the cellar?’

Robinson laid the camera down on the breakfast bar. ‘Go for your life, as long as you’re not planning to start playing the drums in the garden.’

Alice threw her empty beer bottle in the bin and headed for the cellar door. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just something I should have done a long time ago.’

Robinson listened to the sounds of Alice dragging things around noisily in the cellar beneath him, cursing every now and then and huffing out of breath. He’d checked a second time if he could help and received a polite but firm refusal, and he sensed that whatever it was that she was looking for down there, she wanted to find it on her own. She was a difficult woman to read. On the surface she was fragile, coltish and bambi-like, in a way that brought out his protective instinct. But she was also funny, and in turn feisty, and he’d glimpsed steel in her eyes too when she was pushed. If she was his sister, he’d be ready to punch the man who’d broken her heart. But she wasn’t his sister, and she had a physical effect on him that was anything but brotherly. He’d screwed a couple of women since Lena had left him, both brunettes with hard bodies and hot tempers, both pseudo replacements of the woman he really wanted, the one who now slept in the bed of his best friend. Alice was the polar opposite of Lena. Was that what he found attractive about her, that she held none of his wife’s Latino appeal and therefore posed no threat to his heart? He knew he was doing the woman in the cellar a disservice by thinking such thoughts, but they were the only ones that made any sense of the way his body reacted to hers.

Back in the sanctuary of the Airstream, Alice warmed soup and toasted bread, consciously avoiding looking at the sizeable dark purple leather case on the table. It had taken some effort to lug it back across the garden; she’d shrugged off Robinson’s repeated attempts to help.

She ate standing at the work surface looking out of the window, the case behind her out of sight.

Washing up stretched things out for another ten minutes, and she swept each rug on the floor individually until the whole place was spick and span. A quick glance at her watch told her it had just turned nine in the evening; she could always just go to bed. She could fill up her water bottles and have a luxuriously early night, read until her eyelids drooped and she nodded off, leave the case unopened until morning. Everything was easier in the morning, right? She got as far as filling the kettle for her bottles before she sighed and placed it down without lighting the gas beneath it. Even if she warmed the bed, there was no way she’d be able to sleep without at least opening the case. It might as well have had a huge red flashing light on the lid or a high-pitched alarm strapped to it for all the rest she’d get with it sitting there like an unexploded bomb.

Finally, when she could stall no longer, she took out a soft cloth from beneath the sink, slid into the padded banquette and drew the box slowly towards her. Over eight years had passed since she’d last snapped open its silver clasps. She rubbed the cloth over the cracked leather lid, taking the time to run her index finger over the metallic embossed initials inlaid there. B.A.C. Benjamin Alan Collins. Her father. The box had been his long before it had been Alice’s. He’d given it to her on her twenty-first birthday, as it had been given to him by his own father on his twenty-first. A tradition, he’d smiled, knowing just how much the gesture would mean to Alice. She’d been nervous at first about telling her dad she’d decided to follow in his footsteps as a professional photographer. As a multi-award-winning photojournalist known for his specialist work in war zones, Ben Collins was internationally renowned as one of the best in the business until he’d lost his life during an especially dangerous assignment out in Afghanistan. His posthumous award for bravery had been a fitting tribute for a man who knew the dangers of his work but still threw himself in whole-heartedly because he also knew a powerful image could speak a thousand words. He believed he could make a difference, and he had, both to the world and to Alice, his only child, the little girl he’d raised single handedly when her mother left them before Alice could even walk. Because of his unerring love and attention, Alice had never missed the mum she had no memory of. When Ben was away working he made sure she was safe, sharing her care with his parents who adored having such a hands-on role in their granddaughter’s life. It had worked well, right up to the moment Ben Collins took a bullet through his heart, breaking Alice’s at the same time. She’d closed the lid on the leather case two months after her father’s funeral and from that day to this it had remained sealed. Today was as good a day as any to open it again.

Alice slid her thumbs over the catches, closing her eyes as she lifted them. They were stiffer than they used to be from lack of use, and the lid didn’t release easily from its resting place. She gripped the top corners and gave it a shake to free it, and finally it unglued itself and came free. Alice paused, pulled in a deep breath, and then opened the lid.

As she’d known it would, a rush of sensation hit her. The smell of her childhood, the reverence of handling her dad’s most prized cameras, photographs, of course, alongside the thick wedge of sympathy cards and the medal in its case. There was a unique scent to the box that time hadn’t diminished, something woody and intangible, a mix of the box itself, the possessions it held, and the man who’d owned and loved it. Alice vividly remembered countless occasions sitting alongside her dad, the box open on the floor in front of them. He’d allowed her to handle his cameras even when her hands were too small and clumsy to take the necessary care, and he’d made her the proudest kid in junior school when he’d given a talk to her class and allowed her to show her friends inside the box too. He’d taught her how to handle a camera, the intricacies of lens selection, how to best work with the light. He’d gifted her his practical knowledge, but far more than that, he’d given her his passion for capturing a moment forever on film, a fleeting expression, an undeniable emotion.

This wasn’t just a box. It was the next best thing to sitting alongside her dad again. Alice reached in and touched her fingers against the leather tan slipcase of her father’s Nikon, and automatically ran her nail around the serrated edge of the lens casing as she had as a little girl.

She’d shut all of her memories inside the purple leather box, and along with it she’d sealed any of her own aspirations to wield a camera for a living. Over the six months after her father’s death she’d spent less and less time at class, until it reached a point where her tutors could only despair at the fact that such a naturally talented student had turned her back on her vocation. She couldn’t separate her love for photography from the loss of her father, one tainted the other, and the only way she found to handle her grief was to reinvent herself. Being someone else had helped, in a way; at least it had allowed Alice to move on. Meeting Brad had inadvertently cemented Alice in her new role, because they needed her wage to support his acting classes and low-paid between-jobs. Somewhere along the way she’d allowed herself to believe her own spin, to forget how much she loved everything about the world she and her father had shared. She’d stopped constantly viewing the world through a thumb and finger viewfinder to find the best angle, so much so that she’d never felt able to tell Brad about her long-cherished dreams of a life in her father’s footsteps. Life was duller, but kind of easier. Well, no more. Having her world tipped upside down and shaken like a snow globe had left her sitting all alone on her backside in the snow without any footsteps beside her. Not her father, nor Brad. For the first time in her memory she was on her own, and the only set of footprints in the snow were her own. It was time to stand on her own two feet.