Page 18 of All Summer Long

For his part, Robinson truly considered saying thanks but no thanks.

Every last one of his instincts told him that spending time alone with her was unfair on both of them, and yet he went ahead and did it anyway.

Alice McBride was turning out to be a woman who pressed the override switch in his head and put his body in charge, and that made her a very dangerous woman indeed.

‘Coffee would be good,’ he said. ‘Bourbon would be even better.’

Alice glanced over her shoulder at him as she led him in to the Airstream.

‘One, I don’t have any bourbon, and two, it’s barely eight o’ clock and I haven’t eaten. One drink and I’d be legless within the hour.’

‘Legless?’ he grinned. ‘You mean drunk, right?’

She nodded. ‘Legless as in I wouldn’t be able to stand up.’

‘And that’s a bad thing because …?’

‘A very bad thing, because I’d have a headache and probably a gut full of regret in the morning, Robinson,’ she said, turning the gas on beneath the kettle like a pro now. ‘Sit down.’

He settled on the banquette and watched her busy herself in the small space. She made sandwiches with a practised hand, sliding the filled plate onto the table along with their coffee, and then as an afterthought she pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and added a couple of glasses.

‘It’s as good as dessert is going to get around here,’ she said, placing the bottle on the table.

‘Works for me,’ he said. He was a man. Alcohol trumped chocolate in just about every situation he could think of. Alice slid in opposite him and pushed the plate his way.

‘Chicken salad. Bit plain, sorry.’

He shook his head, perfectly happy with the fare.

‘It’s fine. I’m living on pizza and microwave dinners up at the house thanks to that oven from the History Channel. This is a definite step up.’

‘No more weird casseroles from Hazel lately, then?’ Alice picked up a sandwich as she spoke and pulled her coffee towards her.

The conversation batted easily back and forth between them as they ate, mostly about their nearest neighbours in the cottages.

Robinson learned that Stewie had turned his spare bedroom into a dedicated wig boudoir and spent a disturbing amount of time and money on eBay buying ‘Girl’s World’ heads to display them all on.

He also learned that Hazel claimed to have once cast a love spell that turned the whole village into nymphomaniacs for twenty-four hours, and that one of Niamh’s nudes had appeared in the National Gallery.

‘And what about you, Alice?’ he said, opening the wine as she cleared the table and sat back down. ‘What’s your unexpected secret?’

She played with the stem of her glass, and he found himself watching her slender, ringless fingers.

‘What you see is what you get,’ she shrugged. ‘I wish I could make me sound more interesting, but this is me.’

‘You live in an Airstream in your own backyard, that’s pretty interesting,’ he said. ‘What gives?’

Her pretty blue eyes clouded. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you didn’t want to live in the house any longer without your husband.’

The look on her face told him that he couldn’t be more wrong.

‘I love Borne Manor,’ she said. ‘It’s my home, and leaving it broke my heart. I leased it so I could cover the costs of keeping it.’

‘You mean you moved out so you didn’t have to sell it?’

She sighed, puffing out her cheeks.

‘And now my crappy husband and his vile bitch of a girlfriend have decided that they want it.’

Alice looked so delicate, ethereal, and Robinson’s only instinct at that time was to protect her from all the crap that life was flinging at her.

‘We come from very different worlds, Alice, but in some ways you and I are in very similar situations,’ he said, swallowing a mouthful of cold sauvignon and wishing it was warm bourbon.

‘We’ve both found our lives turned upside down by other people and been left trying to find our place in the world again. ’

Alice nodded. ‘Except you moved thousands of miles to do it and I only moved as far as my own back garden.’

‘Maybe that makes you lucky,’ he offered. ‘You know where you want to be, even if you’re not with the person you want to be with.’

‘Where as you’ve ended up in a strange land with bizarre people who have wig boudoirs and cast love spells,’ she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

‘Exactly, Goldilocks.’ He laughed softly. ‘You got off pretty darn light.’

Alice topped up their dwindling glasses.

‘I’m here, you know,’ she said. ‘If you ever need to get anything off your chest, you can talk to me.’

At that precise moment, he thought about how much he’d like to get his shirt off his chest and press Alice back against the cushions.

‘I mean it,’ she spoke again when he didn’t reply. ‘If anyone is going to understand what you’re going through, with your marriage at least, it’s me.’

Did he want to talk about Lena? ‘You know, Alice, I don’t think there’s much to say. I found one of my closest friends fucking my wife over our breakfast bar. It all went downhill pretty fast from there to here.’

‘Oh my god, Robinson! That’s bloody awful.

’ Alice’s mouth twisted in disgust and she shook her head slowly, swirling her wine in her glass.

‘It’s bad enough with a stranger, but someone you loved and trusted?

What’s wrong with people? You must have been …

God, I don’t even want to imagine what you must have been. ’

‘Furious enough to smack his head off that same breakfast bar so hard that Lena called him an ambulance,’ he supplied.

Alice didn’t flinch. ‘I don’t blame you.’ She swallowed a huge mouthful of wine. ‘In fact, in some ways I’m bloody jealous.’

Her reaction surprised him.

‘How so?’

‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fantasised about taking the bacon scissors to Felicity Shaw’s stupid rat-tail hair.

’ She all but spat the woman’s name out.

It seemed such an out of character thing to hear her say.

Alice was an unlikely badass, but he knew exactly which part of her heart she spoke from.

‘I think that’s part of the reason I kissed you when your husband came by,’ Robinson confessed. ‘Somewhere in my head it was Lena standing on that step having to watch me kiss a beautiful woman.’

‘I get your need for revenge,’ she said, and he knew from her eyes that she absolutely did.

‘Is it such a bad thing if he thinks you and me are hitting the sheets?’ Robinson’s gaze slid unbidden to the bed that filled the other end of the Airstream.

Alice paused, most of the way down her second glass of wine. She upended the bottle between them.

‘I just didn’t want to play games with him. The moral high ground is just about all I’ve got left, you know?’

She was wrong, and it suddenly felt important to tell her so.

‘You have so much more than just that, Alice,’ he said. ‘You’re gorgeous. You’ve got this sweet, sexy thing going on, you’re blue skies and cotton candy. But then every now and then you’re not, and that just makes you all the more goddamn sexy.’

She stared at him, surprised, all tumbled curls and rosy cheeks, and then her lips parted a little to let out a tiny ‘oh’ that perfectly illustrated his point. He was hard just looking at her.

‘I’m willing to bet that right about now that ex of yours is burning up inside at the thought of us together,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t know we’re not really fucking.’

Jesus. What was in this wine? His words were tumbling out of his mouth like he’d just lost a game of truth or dare. Alice looked taken aback.

‘I guess he doesn’t. Serves him right.’ She stood up. ‘Want some rum?’

And there she was again, the unexpected bad girl. She went from bad to downright sinful when she moved around the table and stretched up on her tiptoes to reach into a cabinet over his head. Her hips were actually asking his hands to hold them, and he couldn’t say no.

She stilled and looked down, her arms still over her head.

His gaze slid up the length of her body to meet her kiss-me eyes.

‘Robinson …’ She breathed his name, and he did the only thing on his mind at that moment.

He swayed her body gently towards him, close enough to be able to press his mouth against the slim strip of skin exposed by the hem of her shirt.

She stared down at him, and he up at her, and then she seemed to forget all about getting the rum and swung her knee over his thighs instead.

He wasn’t certain if she sat down or he pulled her down, but seconds later she was straddled over his lap, her breathing so shallow that he could see her breasts rising up and down beneath her fitted shirt and he was desperate to know how she’d look without it.

‘Alice,’ his voice came out hoarse, and he pushed her hair back and held her face between his hands. ‘We both know that this isn’t going anywhere, right?’ God, he hoped she knew what he meant.

‘Neither of us wants complicated,’ she said, and he gripped the top of her shirt with both hands and pulled the metal snaps open all in one go.

‘Jesus, Mary mother of God,’ he muttered, unable to take his eyes off the fullness of her breasts trying to escape from her black lace bra. ‘Do you always wear stuff like this underneath your work clothes?’

‘Always,’ she said, reaching for the bottom of his t-shirt and dragging it over his head.

‘You know I love someone else,’ he said.

‘And you know I don’t want a relationship,’ she whispered, her eyes all over his body. ‘I’ve never seen a man who looks like this in real life.’

‘You’re even more incredible than I imagined, Alice,’ he murmured, and then pulled her ass right against his crotch with both hands so that her breasts brushed against his chest.

‘You’ve thought about this?’ She lifted one eyebrow, stroking her hands all the way down from his shoulders to his stomach, making his muscles jump and pay attention.