Читать книгу Single Dads Collection - Lynne Marshall - Страница 24

‘ALICE.’ Will’s throat was so constricted that her name was all he could manage.

Roger looked from one to the other, and took the easy way out. ‘I’d better make sure everyone has a drink,’ he said, although neither of them gave any sign that they had even heard him. ‘I’ll leave you two to catch up.’

Will stared at Alice, hardly able to believe that she was actually standing in front of him. His first stunned thought was that she hadn’t changed at all. There were the same high cheekbones, the same golden eyes and slanting brows, the same wide mouth. The silky brown hair was even pulled carelessly away from her face just the way she had used to wear it as a student. She was the same!

But when he looked more closely, the illusion faded. She must be thirty-two now, ten years older than the way he remembered her, and it showed in the faint lines and the drawn look around her eyes. Her hairstyle might not have changed, but the quirky collection of dangly, ethnic earrings had been replaced by discreet pearl studs, and the comfortable boots by high heels and glamour.

Alice had never been beautiful. Her hair was too straight, her features too irregular, but she had possessed an innate stylishness and charm that had clearly matured into elegance and sophistication. She had become a poised, attractive woman.

But she wasn’t the Alice he had loved. That Alice had been a vivid, astringent presence, prickly and insecure at times—but who wasn’t, when they were young? When she’d talked, her whole body had become animated, and she would lean forward and gesticulate, her small hands swooping and darting in the air to emphasise her point, making the bangles she wore chink and jingle, or shaking her head so that her earrings swung wildly and caught the light.

Will had loved just to watch the way the expressions had chased themselves across her transparent face. It had always been easy to tell what Alice had been feeling. No one could look crosser than Alice when she was angry; no one else’s face lit like hers when she was happy. And when she was amused, she would throw back her head and laugh that uninhibited, unexpectedly dirty laugh, the mere memory of which was enough to make his groin tighten.

Ironically, the very things that Will had treasured about her had been the things Alice was desperate to change. She hadn’t wanted to be unconventional. She hadn’t wanted to be different. She’d wanted to be like everyone else.

And now it looked as if she had got her wish. All that fire, all that quirkiness, all that personality…all gone. Firmly suppressed and locked away until she was as bland as the rest of the world.

It made Will very sad to realise that the Alice who had haunted him all these years didn’t exist any more. In her place was just a smart, rather tense woman with unusual-coloured eyes and inappropriate shoes.

‘How are you, Alice?’ he managed after a moment.

Alice’s feet were killing her, and her heart was thumping and thudding so painfully in her chest that it was making her feel quite sick, but she produced a brilliant smile.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘Great, in fact. And you?’

‘I’m OK,’ said Will, who was, in fact, feeling very strange. He had been pitched from shock to joy to bitter disappointment in the space of little more than a minute, and he was finding it hard to keep up with the rapid change of emotions.

‘Quite a surprise bumping into you here,’ Alice persevered in the same brittle style, and he eyed her with dismay. When had the fiery, intent Alice learnt to do meaningless chit-chat? She was treating him as if he were some slight acquaintance, not a man she had lived with and laughed with and loved with.

‘Yes,’ he agreed slowly, thinking that ‘surprise’ wasn’t quite the word for it. ‘Beth didn’t tell me that you were here.’

‘I don’t think she made any connection between us,’ said Alice carelessly. ‘It wouldn’t have occurred to Beth to mention me to you. She didn’t know that we’d been…’

‘Lovers?’ suggested Will with a sardonic look when she trailed off.

A slight flush rose in Alice’s cheeks. ‘I didn’t put it quite like that,’ she said repressively. ‘I just said that we had been close when we were students together.’

‘It’s not like you to be coy, Alice.’

She looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You and Roger were close,’ said Will. ‘You and I were in love.’

Alice’s eyes slid away from his. She didn’t want to be reminded of how much she had loved him. She certainly didn’t want a discussion of how in love they had been. No way could she cope with that right now.

‘Whatever,’ she said as carelessly as she could. ‘Beth got the point, anyway.’

He had changed, she thought, unaccountably disconsolate. Of course, she had known in her head that he wasn’t going to be the same. Ten years, marriage and children were bound to have had an effect on him.

But in her heart she had imagined him still the Will she had known. The Will she had loved.

This Will seemed taller than she remembered, taller and tougher. His neck had thickened slightly and his chest had filled out, and the air of calm competence she had always associated with him had solidified. He still had those big, capable hands, but there was none of the amusement she remembered in his face, no familiar ironic gleam in the grey eyes. Instead, there were lines around his eyes and deeper grooves carved on either side of his mouth, which was set in a new, hard line.

It was strange, talking to someone at once so familiar and so much a stranger. Meeting Will like that was even worse than Alice had expected. She had planned to be friendly to him, charming to his wife and engaging to his child, so that they would all go away convinced that she had no regrets and without the slightest idea that her life wasn’t quite the glittering success she had so confidently expected it to be.

She might as well have spared herself the effort, Alice thought ruefully. In spite of all her careful preparations, her confidence had evaporated the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and she was as shaken and jittery as if Will had turned up without a moment’s warning. She knew that she was coming over as brittle, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

‘Beth said that you were working out here,’ she said, opting to stick with her social manner, no matter how uncomfortable it felt. It was easier than looking into his eyes and asking him if he had missed her at all, if he had wondered, as she had done, whether life would have been different if she had said yes instead of no that day.

Will nodded, apparently willing to follow her lead and stick to polite superficialities. ‘I’m coordinating a major project on sustainable tourism,’ he said, and Alice raised her brows.

‘You’re not a marine ecologist any more?’ she asked, surprised. Will had always been so passionate about the ocean, she couldn’t imagine him giving up diving in favour of paperwork.

‘I am, of course,’ he corrected her. ‘But I don’t do straight research anymore. A lot of our work is assessing the environmental impact of major development projects on the sea.’

Alice frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with tourism?’

‘Tourism has a huge effect on the environment,’ said Will. ‘The economy here desperately needs the income tourists can bring, but tourists won’t come unless there’s an international airport, roads, hotels, restaurants and leisure facilities…all of which use up precious natural resources and add to the weight of pollution, which in turn affects the delicate balance of the environment.’

Will gestured around him. ‘St Bonaventure is a paradise in lots of ways. It’s everyone’s idea of a tropical island, and it’s still unspoilt. Its reef is one of the great undiscovered diving spots in the world. That makes it the kind of place tourists want to visit, but they won’t come all this way if the development ends up destroying the very things that makes this place so special.

‘The government here needs to balance their need to get the money to improve the living standards of the people here with the risk to the reef,’ he went on. ‘If the reef is damaged, it will not only destroy the potential revenue from tourism, it’ll also leave the island itself at risk. The reef is the most effective protection St Bonaventure has against the power of the ocean.’

Will stopped, hearing himself in lecture mode. The old Alice might have been interested, but this one certainly wasn’t. Instead of leaning forward intently and asking awkward questions, the way she would have done before, she wore an expression of interest that was little more than polite.

‘Anyway, the project I’m coordinating is about balancing the needs of the reef with the needs of the economy before tourism is developed to any great extent,’ he finished lamely.

‘Sounds important,’ Alice commented.

He glanced at her, as if suspecting mockery. ‘It is,’ he said.

Alice had deliberately kept her voice light to disguise the pang inside. For a moment there he had been the Will she remembered, his face alight with enthusiasm, his eyes warm with commitment.

What would it be like to work on something you believed in, something that really mattered, not just to you but to other people as well? Alice wondered. When it boiled down to it, her own career in market research was just about making money. It hadn’t changed any lives other than her own.

That had never bothered her before, but she had had to question a lot of things about her life in the last year. What did her much-vaunted career amount to now, after all? Nothing, thought Alice bleakly.

Will had built his career on his expertise and his passion. He had done what he wanted the way he’d wanted to do it. He had found someone to share his life and had fathered a child. His life since Roger’s wedding had been successful by any measure, while hers…Well, better not go there, Alice decided with an inward sigh.

‘What about you?’ Will asked, breaking into her thoughts and making her start.

‘Me?’

‘What are you doing on St Bonaventure?’

Alice wished she could say that she was here for some interesting or meaningful reason. ‘I’m on holiday,’ she confessed, immediately feeling guilty about it.

‘So you’ll just be here a couple of weeks?’

She was sure she detected relief in his voice. He was probably delighted at the idea that she wouldn’t be around for long so that he could get on with his happy, successful, married life without her.

The thought stiffened Alice’s resolve not to let Will so much as guess that all her careful plans had come to nothing. It wasn’t that she begrudged him his happiness, but a girl had her pride. She needed to convince him that she had never had a moment’s regret. She wouldn’t lie—that would be pathetic, obviously—but there was no reason why she shouldn’t put a positive slant on things, was there?

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m here for six weeks.’

He lifted one brow in a way that Alice had often longed to be able to do. ‘Long holiday,’ he commented.

‘I’m lucky, aren’t I?’ she agreed with a cool smile. ‘Roger and Beth have been telling me I should come and visit ever since they were posted here last year, but I just haven’t had the opportunity until now.’

Redundancy could be seen as an opportunity, couldn’t it?

‘You must have done well for yourself,’ said Will. ‘Not many people get the opportunity for a six-week holiday.’

‘It’s not strictly a holiday,’ Alice conceded. ‘As it happens, I’m between jobs at the moment,’ she explained, tilting her chin slightly.

That wasn’t a lie, either. She might not have another job lined up just yet, but when she went home she was determined that she was not only going to get her career back on track, but that she would be moving onto to bigger and better things. With her experience, there was no reason why she shouldn’t aim for a more prestigious company, a promotion and a pay raise.

‘I see,’ said Will, his expression so non-committal that Alice was afraid that he saw only too well. He had no doubt interpreted being ‘between jobs’ as unemployed, which of course was another way of looking at it, but not one Alice was prepared to dwell on.

‘I was in a very pressurised work environment,’ she told him loftily. ‘And I thought it was time to take a break and reassess where my career was going.’

Strictly speaking, of course, it had been the company who had taken over PLMR who had decided that Alice could have all the time she wanted to think about things, but Will didn’t need to know that. It wasn’t as if it had been her fault. Almost all her colleagues had been made redundant at the same time, she reminded herself. It could happen to anyone these days.

‘Market research—it is market research, isn’t it?—obviously pays well if you can afford six weeks somewhere like this when you’re between jobs,’ said Will, with just a hint of snideness. ‘But then, you always wanted to make money, didn’t you?’

‘I wanted to be secure,’ said Alice, hating the faintly defensive note in her voice. ‘And I am.’ What was wrong with wanting security? ‘I wanted to be successful, and I am,’ she added for good measure.

Well, she had been until last year, but, when your company was the subject of a hostile takeover, there wasn’t much you could do about it, no matter how good you were at your job.

It hadn’t been a good year. Her only lucky break had been winning nearly two thousand pounds in the lottery, and that had been a fluke. Normally, Alice wouldn’t even have thought about buying a ticket, but she had been in a mood when she was prepared to try anything to change the dreary trend of her life.

It wasn’t as if she had won millions. Two thousand pounds wasn’t enough to change her life, but it was just enough for a ticket to an out-of-the-way place like St Bonaventure, and Alice had taken it as a sign. At any other time, she would have been sensible. She would have bought herself a pair of shoes and put the rest of the money towards some much-needed repairs on her flat—the unexpected windfall would have covered the cost of a new boiler, for instance—but that hadn’t been any other time. That had been the day she heard that Tony and Sandi were getting married.

Alice had gone straight out and bought a plane ticket. And some shoes.

Still, there was no harm in letting Will think that she had earned so much money that she didn’t know what to do with it all. Not that it would impress him. He was more likely to disapprove of what he thought of as her materialistic lifestyle, but Alice was desperate for him to believe that she had made it.

‘We all make choices,’ she reminded him. ‘I made mine, and I don’t have any regrets,’

‘I’m glad you got what you wanted, then,’ said Will flatly.

‘You too,’ said Alice, and for a jarring moment their eyes met. It was as if the polite mask they both wore dropped for an instant, and they saw each other properly for the first time. The sense of recognition was like a blow to Alice’s stomach, pushing the air from her lungs and leaving her breathless and giddy and almost nauseous.

But then Will jerked his head away, the guarded expression clanging back into place with such finality that Alice wondered if she had imagined that look.

‘You didn’t marry Clive, then?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Clive?’ Alice was thrown by the sudden change of subject.

‘The Clive you were so in love with at Roger and Beth’s wedding,’ Will reminded her with an edge of savagery. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten him!’

‘I didn’t—’ Alice opened her mouth to strenuously deny ever loving Clive and then shut it again. If she hadn’t loved Clive, why had she let Will believe that she did? Why hadn’t she been able to tell him the truth that day?

‘No, I didn’t marry Clive,’ she said quietly. ‘We split up soon after…after Roger’s wedding,’ she finished after a tiny moment of hesitation.

She had so nearly said ‘after you kissed me’, and she might as well have done. The memory of that dark night in the hotel gardens jangled in the air between them. Those desperate kisses, the spiralling excitement, the sense of utter rightness at being back in each other’s arms.

The tightness around her heart as she’d watched him walk away.

Alice could feel them all as vividly as if they had kissed the night before.

Will had to be remembering those kisses too. She wanted to be able to talk about it, laugh about it even, pretend that it didn’t matter and it was all in the past, but she couldn’t. Not yet.

So she drew a steadying breath and summoned another of her bright smiles. ‘Then I met Tony, and we were together for four years. We talked about getting married, but…well, we decided it wouldn’t have worked.’

Tony had decided that, anyway.

‘We stopped ourselves making a terrible mistake just in time,’ Alice finished.

OK, it might not be the whole story, but why should she tell Will all her sad secrets? Anyway, it might not be the whole truth, but it was the truth. It would have been a mistake if she and Tony had gone ahead with the wedding. Nothing but unhappiness would have come from their marriage when Tony was in love with someone else. Alice’s world might have fallen apart the day Tony had sat her down to tell her about Sandi, but she’d accepted even then that he had done the right thing.

Today was Tony and Sandi’s wedding day, Alice was startled to remember. She had spent so long dreading this day, imagining how hard it would be for her to think about another woman taking what should have been her place, and, now that it was here, she hadn’t even thought about it.

Perhaps she ought to be grateful to Will for distracting her?

Will drained the last of his beer and turned aside to put the empty bottle on the decking rail. ‘Still avoiding commitment, I see,’ he commented with a sardonic glance over his shoulder at Alice, who flushed at the injustice of it.

She wasn’t the one who had called off the wedding. If it had been down to her, she would be happily married to Tony right now, but she bit back the words. She had just convinced him that ending her engagement to Tony had been a mutual decision, so she could hardly tell him the truth now.

Which was worse? That he thought she was afraid of commitment, or that he felt sorry for her?

No question.

‘Still determined not to get married until I’m absolutely sure it’s perfect,’ she corrected Will. ‘So…I’m fancy free, and on the lookout for Mr Right. I’m not going to get married until I’ve found him, and, until then I’m just having fun!’

Will was unimpressed by her bravado. ‘You seem very tense for someone who’s having fun,’ he said.

Alice gritted her teeth. ‘I am not tense,’ she snapped. Tensely, in fact. ‘I’m a bit jet-lagged, that’s all. I only got here a couple of days ago.’

‘Ah,’ said Will, not bothering to hide the fact that he was totally unconvinced by her explanation. Which just made Alice even crosser, but she sucked in her breath and resisted the temptation to retort in kind. She didn’t want Will to think that he was getting to her, or that she cared in the slightest what he thought of her.

Friendly but unobtainable, wasn’t that how she wanted him to think of her? Pleasant but cool. His long-lost love who had turned into a mysterious stranger. Anything but sad and tense and a failure.

She fixed a smile to her face. ‘I gather you weren’t as hesitant about taking the plunge,’ she said.

‘The plunge?’

‘Marriage,’ she reminded him sweetly, and a strange expression flitted over his face.

‘Ah. Yes. I did get married,’ he agreed. ‘Why? Did you think I would never get over you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Alice with dignity. ‘If I thought about you at all—which I can’t say was that often—’ she added crushingly, ‘it was only to hope that you were happy.’

Will raised his brows in disbelief. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’ Alice had been nursing a glass of Roger’s lethal tropical punch, but it didn’t seem to be having a very good effect on her. She set it on the rail next to Will’s empty bottle.

‘Have you been happy?’ she asked him, the words out of her mouth before she had thought about them properly.

Will didn’t answer immediately. He thought about Lily, about how it had felt when he had held his daughter in his arms for the first time. About drifting along the reef, fish flitting past him in flashes of iridescent colour and looking up to see the sunlight filtering down through the water to the deep blue silence. About sitting on a boat and watching dolphins curving and cresting in the foamy wake, while the water glittered and the sea breeze lifted his hair.

He had been happy then. It hadn’t been the same feeling as the happiness he had felt lying next to Alice after they had made love, holding her into the curve of his body, smoothing his hand over her soft skin, breathing in her fragrance, marvelling that this quirky, contrary, vibrant woman was really his, but, still, he had been happy since.

In a different way, but, yes, he’d been happy.

‘I’ve had times of great happiness,’ he said eventually, very conscious of Alice’s great golden eyes on his face. ‘But not in my marriage,’ he found himself admitting. ‘We weren’t as sensible as you. We didn’t realise what a mistake we were making until it was too late.’

It had been his fault, really. He had vowed to move on after Roger’s wedding, had been determined to put Alice from his mind once and for all. The trouble was that every woman he’d met had seemed dull and somehow colourless after Alice. They might have been prettier and nicer, and certainly sweeter, but, when he’d closed his eyes, it had always been Alice’s blazing golden eyes that he saw, always Alice’s voice that he heard, always Alice’s skin that he tasted.

Nikki had been the first woman with the strength of personality to match Alice’s, and Will had persuaded himself that she was capable of banishing Alice’s ghost once and for all. They had married after a whirlwind holiday romance in the Red Sea where he had been researching at the time.

It had been madness to take such a step when they’d barely known each other. Will should have known that it would end in disaster. Because Nikki hadn’t been Alice. She had been forceful rather than colourful, efficient rather than intense. The only thing the two women had shared, as far as Will could see, was a determination to make a success of themselves.

Nikki, it had turned out too late, had had no intention of wasting her life in the kind of countries where Will felt most at home. ‘My career’s at home,’ she had told him. ‘There’s nothing for me to do here, nothing works, and, if you think I’m having the baby in that hospital, you’ve got another think coming!’

Lily was the result of a failed attempt to make the marriage work. She’d been born in London, just as Nikki had planned, but by then Nikki had already sued for divorce. ‘It’s never going to work, Will,’ she’d told him when he came to see his new daughter. ‘Let’s just accept it now rather than waste any more time.’

‘We were married less than two years,’ he told Alice.

‘So you’re divorced?’ she said, horrified at the instinctive lightening of her heart, and ashamed of herself for feeling even a smidgeon of relief that his life hadn’t turned out quite as perfectly as it had seemed at first.

And that she wouldn’t have to face his wife after all. Although she wished now that she hadn’t said that about ‘looking for Mr Right’. She didn’t want Will thinking that she would try and pick up where they had left off the moment she realised that he was single.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, when he nodded curtly. ‘I didn’t realise. Beth said that you had your family with you, so we just assumed that you were married.’

‘No, it’s just me and Lily,’ he said. ‘My daughter,’ he added in explanation. ‘She’s six.’

‘Is she spending the holiday with you?’ Alice didn’t have much to do with children, and was a bit vague about school terms, but she supposed mid-March might conceivably mean the Easter holidays. It seemed a bit early, though. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much for six-year-olds?

‘No, she lives with me,’ said Will, almost reluctantly.

‘Oh? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Alice looked surprised. ‘Doesn’t the mother usually have custody?’

‘Nikki did,’ he said. ‘She died recently, so now Lily only has me.’

‘God, how awful!’ Alice was shocked out of her cool pose, and Will was absurdly pleased to see the genuine compassion in her eyes. He had been wondering if there was anything left of the old Alice at all. ‘What happened? Or maybe you don’t want to talk about it?’ she added contritely.

‘No, it’s OK. People are going to have to know, and obviously it’s difficult to explain in front of Lily.’ Will sighed. ‘That’s why I couldn’t tell Beth when we met her in the supermarket. Lily is finding it hard enough to adjust without hearing the whole story talked over with perfect strangers.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Lily used to go to the after-school club, and Nikki would pick her up after work. But that day there had apparently been some meeting that had run on, so she was going to be very late at the school. They’d warned her before about being late, so she was rushing to get there, and I suppose she wasn’t driving as carefully as she should…’

‘A car accident?’ said Alice when he trailed off with a sigh.

‘She was killed instantly, they said.’ Will nodded, and Alice wondered just how much his ex-wife still meant to him. You could say that the marriage had been a mistake, but they had had a child together. He must have had some feelings still for Lily’s mother.

‘Meanwhile, Lily is still waiting for her mother to come and pick her up?’ she said gently.

Will shot her a curious look, as if surprised by her understanding. ‘I think she must be. She hasn’t talked about it, and she’s such a quiet little girl anyway, it’s hard to know how much she understands.’

He looked so tired suddenly that Alice felt guilty for being so brittle and defensive earlier. ‘It must have been a shock for you, too,’ she said after a moment.

Will shrugged his own feelings aside. ‘I was in Honduras when I heard. It took them some time to track me down, so I missed the immediate aftermath. I wasn’t there for Lily,’ he added, and, from the undercurrent of bitterness in his voice, Alice guessed he flayed himself with that knowledge.

‘You weren’t to know,’ she said in a deliberately practical voice. ‘What happened to Lily?’

‘Nikki’s parents live nearby so the school called them when she didn’t turn up, and they looked after Lily until I got there. My work’s kept me overseas for the last few years, though, and I haven’t had the chance to see her very often, so I’m virtually a stranger to her.’ Will ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of defeat. ‘To be honest, it’s all been a bit…difficult.’

Difficult? Alice thought about his small daughter. Lily was six, he had said. What would it be like to have the centre of your world disappear without warning, and to be handed over instead to a father you hardly knew? Alice’s heart was wrung. Her own parents had been dippy and unreliable in lots of ways, but at least they had always been there.

‘When did all this happen?’ she asked.

‘Seven weeks ago.’

‘Seven weeks? Is that all?’ Alice looked at Will incredulously, her sympathy evaporating. ‘What are you doing out here?’

Will narrowed his eyes at her tone. ‘My job,’ he said in a hard voice. ‘I’ve already delayed the project by over a month.’

‘You shouldn’t be thinking about your job,’ said Alice with a withering look. ‘You should be thinking about your daughter!’

‘I am thinking about her.’ Will set his teeth and told himself he wasn’t going to let Alice rile him. ‘I’m hoping that the change of scene will help her.’

He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to catch Alice on the raw. His casual assumption that a change of scene could only be good for a child reminded her all too painfully of the way her own parents had blithely uprooted her just when she had settled down in a new country and started to feel at home.

‘We’re off to Guyana,’ they had announced gaily. ‘You’ll love it!’

After Guyana, they had spent a year on a croft in the Hebrides. ‘It’ll be good for you,’ her father had decided. Then it had been Sri Lanka—‘Won’t it be exciting?’—followed by Morocco, Indonesia, Exmoor (a disaster) and Goa, although Alice had lost track of the order they had come in.

‘You’re so lucky,’ everyone had told her when she had been growing up. ‘You’ve seen so much of the world and had such wonderful experiences.’

But Alice hadn’t felt lucky. She hadn’t wanted any more new experiences. She had longed to settle down and feel at home, instead of being continually overwhelmed by strange new sights and sounds, smells and people.

And she hadn’t had the loss of a mother to deal with at the same time. Alice’s heart went out to Will’s daughter.

Poor Lily. Poor little girl.