Page 25 of All Summer Long

‘I like this dress on you,’ Robinson said, running his finger beneath the slender strap as they curled up together on the loveseat she’d placed on the balcony for prospective residents to stargaze.

She smiled and kissed his fingers, resting her head back on his outstretched arm.

‘Stars are out,’ she said, her eyes picking out the great bear and the little bear nestled beside it. She’d spent countless nights as a child studying the skies flat on her back beside her dad, some of the most precious memories she had.

He followed suit and tipped his head back too. ‘Same stars, even on the flipside of the world.’

‘There are some things you just can’t outrun,’ she said, turning her head towards him.

Robinson sighed. ‘Out with it, Goldilocks. There’s something on your mind. Tell me what it is.’

Alice sat up with her feet tucked beneath her, her body angled towards his. She nodded slowly, unsure how even to say the things in her mind, and unwilling to break the easy comfort of the time they shared together.

‘It’s this place,’ she looked around the wood. ‘And us,’ she added, ‘and you.’

‘That’s three pretty big things,’ he said. ‘Start at the beginning. This place. You mean the manor?’

Alice nodded. ‘I love Borne, Robinson. I love the village, the people, and the manor. When Brad left he left me with very few alternatives to packing up and leaving too. I couldn’t keep up payments on a place like this, so I made the choice to rent it out rather than lose it.

Everything is only just making it, I cross my fingers before I open bills and hope the bank manager doesn’t send for me.

I feel like I’m trying to hang on to the stars, running in high heels; I go to sleep scared tomorrow will be the day I realise I’m going to lose it all. ’

Robinson rubbed her shoulder absently. ‘I know how it feels to lose almost everything you love, Alice. I envy you for still loving the place you call home. It’s good that you still have that, even if you’re having to share it temporarily with a reclusive cowboy.’

She laughed softly. ‘I’m glad you’re here. When I advertised for someone to rent the manor, I never imagined that someone like you would come.’

‘Someone like me?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know how much better you’ve made things for me,’ she said, her fingers rubbing back and forth over the collar of his shirt.

‘I’m not lonely any more, and I don’t spend my time obsessing over what or who I’ve lost. You’re kind of curing me of loving Brad McBride, and for that I’ll be forever grateful to the cowboy who came to stay. ’

His green eyes glittered in the reflected lights wound over their heads.

‘Backatcha, pretty face. I didn’t count on you, either.’

‘It’s all make-believe, though, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘At the end of the summer you’ll go home, and I’ll still be here, and I have to find a way to stay here afterwards.’

‘I guess I hadn’t thought so far ahead for you,’ he said. ‘Will you rent the manor out again?’

Alice sipped her wine and shook her head. ‘Pretty as it is, I can’t stay in that caravan for ever, Robinson.’

‘I see that.’

‘So no, I don’t think I’ll look for someone else to rent the manor after you …’ It suddenly felt hard to say ‘after you leave’, so she let the sentence hang in the air. ‘That’s why I’ve renovated the tree house.’

He frowned, not seeing the picture, and Alice haltingly told him about her plans for the glampsite.

She gathered confidence as she described how the boathouse looked in her dreams, and the stunning location she’d decided on for the yurt down by the stream, and the sheltered glade at the far end of the woods that she planned to turn into a book nook complete with a gauzy day bed and a little library of books she’d been amassing from charity stores and table sales.

Five or six different places people could come and stay in the beauty of Borne woods, more eventually.

Hopefully. If the stars aligned and she could string things out financially for long enough to get everything in place by the time he left.

She was well aware that her plan had its holes, that it was pulled together from hope and stardust and desperation.

‘For a girl with such slender shoulders, you sure have a lot resting on them,’ he said, when she finally finished speaking and looked at him for his reaction.

She didn’t know why she’d kept her plans from him.

Or she did, but she didn’t know how to put her feelings into words.

The thing she had with Robinson was … it was other, separate, just for them.

Letting reality into it was a risk. They worked because of the strict rules they’d applied to their relationship upfront, namely that it wasn’t a relationship, or even a friendship, really.

It wasn’t set up for them to share worries, or plans, or find pathways into each other’s heart.

They were each other’s holding bay, each other’s ‘get your breath back’ safety net.

It wasn’t supposed to be touched by reality, and by sharing her hopes, dreams and fears she’d blurred all of those lines.

And then he went and said things like that.

Simple insights that said I see you, I see who you really are, and in moments like those he stole her breath.

‘I’m stronger than I look,’ she said, and he just nodded and put his head back again.

‘There’s something else,’ she said, unburdening herself even more than she’d planned on. ‘Brad wants the manor back. It’s only the fact that it’s rented out that’s holding him off.’

Slowly, Robinson raised his head again and looked her in the eyes.

‘Sounds like it might be easier all round if I just went and shot him,’ he said, and Alice loved the way he managed to make light of it whilst also offering his protection should she ever need it. She knew that she had it without question for as long as Robinson was in Borne.

‘I think I need to be the one who fires the shots,’ she said.

His eyes told her that he understood. ‘At least let me load the gun and teach you how to handle it,’ he said, his hand warm and reassuring on the curve of her neck. ‘By the time I leave here you’ll be a sure shot.’

‘He won’t know what has hit him.’

Robinson smiled, kissing her shoulder. ‘Atta girl.’ He turned her jaw to his with his fingertips, kissing her lips slow and searching.

‘Don’t worry about biting off more than you can chew, Alice,’ he said, as he pulled her on top of him and held her hair back from her face. ‘Your mouth is probably a whole lot bigger than you think.’

She smiled against his lips. ‘Cowboy wisdom, eh?’ she said, really quite distracted by his hand sliding up her thigh.

‘There’s a whole lot more where that came from.’

There was a whole lot more that Alice needed to say too, but he blew all of those thoughts from her mind like confetti with his hot kisses and cowboy moves. It’d keep for a while. She really ought to test out that bed anyway.

In the early hours of the morning Alice awoke and looked at Robinson sleeping, all tanned skin against white cotton sheets, so very unexpected in her life. It was as if he’d been sent to her just at the time she needed him most, and she hoped she offered him that same sense of shelter in return.

Moonlight bathed the whole tree house in a pale silvery wash, picking out the outlines of the furniture, the gleam of their used glasses, their hastily discarded clothes on the sofa.

His guitar still stood where he’d left it when he came in earlier, untouched and unreferenced over the course of the evening.

Beside it on the low side table sat her camera.

Not her father’s beloved Nikon, but her own top-of-the-range kit that she’d left at the manor, until recently, ignored.

Brad had seemed oblivious at the time that he’d chosen her a gift she neither wanted, appreciated, nor used.

He’d just given her the camera as it was something she didn’t already own and because it made for a substantial, showy gift.

Getting to grips with it in recent weeks had, however, been a guilty pleasure for Alice.

She intended on cataloguing the glampsite as it developed in order to commission a website when she was a bit closer to being ready, and already she’d bagged some beautiful images of the various stages of the tree house renovation.

It was another integral piece of her gossamer-thin spider-web plan to keep hold of the things she loved.

Looking at Robinson’s guitar for a few long minutes, she pulled her courage together and touched his shoulder to wake him.