Page 57 of The Cocktail Bar

“You! I trusted you… all your sworn secrecy with your chitchat about the stars and their confidentiality. What a crock of shit that was!”

Alice pressed her palms down on the wall now, sandwich discarded to a cranny of its stonework; she was a gymnast about to vault over the horse, an angry gymnast at that. Alice’s friend headed back to the farmhouse alone, looking back over her shoulder uncertainly.

Don’t you dare have any grand plans to call any rifle-toting farmers down! With any luck, River would get Alice to come to her senses in minutes, even if that came to some serious financial bargaining with the landowner.

“You gave yourself away, me number was on the taxi receipt, sweetheart. What man wasn’t going to call it to try and find you?”

Hayley popped her head out the window to add her pearls of wisdom. Magically, this seemed to soften things.

“I actually wished you’d come sooner… it sucks here, Riv.”

Alice put her head in her strawberry-stained hands, slunk down against the jagged wall and began to cry. Huge fat tears. River was all a dither.

“Are you happy to wait here a bit?” he shouted back to Hayley.

“All in a day’s work, I’ve got myJelly Babies… might have to call into that fudge factory’s shop on the way home, mind… that’ll keep me energised ‘til supper.”

He leapt over the wall. “Christ, she’s a case, that one… bet you enjoyed the journey to the station.”

They both laughed then and Alice spurted out the entire backstory. From start to finish, not a middle bit of Georgina’s declaration left out.

“Why that twisted little... just you wait until I see her.”

“River, no: you’re not like that, you’ve never been like that, and you’re not going to start being like that now.”

He looked to Alice, only to see it wasn’t her who had uttered those words.