Page 41 of All Summer Long

Alice bolted the bathroom door and after a moment’s thought turned on the bath taps instead of jumping in the shower.

Whatever was going to happen downstairs was going to happen anyway, and she wasn’t in any hurry to meet Robinson’s wife or get caught up in the crossfire with Marsh.

Sliding into the bubbles, she closed her eyes and tried to work out what on earth was going to happen next, how she could play it and come out with both her heart and her home intact.

For a few weeks back there life really had been quite magical, long luxurious days of sunshine and exciting plans, and even longer, hotter nights in the Airstream with Robinson.

It had only ever been an interlude, a decadent escape from reality for both of them.

Looking back, Marsh’s arrival had marked the beginning of the end, and Brad turning up out of nowhere had further hastened the end of their idyll.

And now there was Lena to contend with, not to mention the entire British press involved in the spectacle again too.

She’d recognised a few of them when she’d peeped quickly out of an upstairs window just now, guys who had spent so much time on her driveway last year for her to know them by first name, faces she’d hoped never to need to see again.

Every now and then she heard raised voices from the kitchen, snippets and tones that made her want to stay in the bathroom forever.

Marsh paced the kitchen floor, his jacket discarded and his steel grey hair all over the place from pushing his hands through it.

He was in an absolute rage about the press involvement; he ruled the PR side of his client’s business with an iron rod and this situation had potential disaster written all over it.

He needed a cast-iron damage-limitation strategy, one that definitely didn’t include Robinson and Lena having an all out slanging match within ear shot of England’s most influential hacks.

‘Will you two pipe the hell down?’ he shouted over them, waving his arms in the manner of a man landing a plane. Lena shook her glossy dark waves and flashed her eyes at him.

‘I’ll pipe down when I’ve said what I hauled my ass halfway across the world to say, Marshall,’ she shot back. ‘Or what you hauled my ass halfway across the world to say.’

‘I am not listening to her, Marsh,’ Robinson said. ‘I want her out of the house, out of this village and out of this country before nightfall, do you understand me? She has no place here.’ He sighed, infuriated and exasperated. ‘What did you think was going to happen?’

Marsh glowered at him. ‘I’m gonna ask you a question here, Robinson, and I suggest you think damn carefully before you open your mouth to answer it.’

Robinson stared back hotly. This shouldn’t be happening here. It shouldn’t be happening at all, but it certainly shouldn’t be happening in Alice’s house. Marsh pulled out a chair and attempted to look calm.

‘Robinson. Am I, or am I not, your business manager?’

Robinson sighed hard and looked out of the window. ‘Make your point.’

‘My point? My point? You pay me to manage your career, and I’m sure you don’t need me to point out the goddamn obvious about how this is gonna look in the press if the truth comes out, which it cata-fuckin’-gorically is not gonna, regardless of that pack of hounds out there.

’ He jerked his thumb violently towards the front of the house.

‘Tell me this, son. Are you, or are you not, planning on turning up in Nashville for your sold-out home-coming concert in three weeks’ time?’

Robinson sat down at the table. ‘You know damn well I’ll be there.’

‘And you expect to still have a career after it?’

Robinson swallowed hard. Truth was that he’d deliberately pushed away all thoughts of beyond the commitment he’d made to the concert. He plain old didn’t know which direction he wanted his life to go in, but Marsh would have a meltdown at that kind of indecision.

‘Here’s the deal, Robinson. You want us to stay in business together, then this is how we’re gonna play it.’ He paused, then said, ‘You’re a sex addict.’

‘The hell I am!’ Robinson said, genuinely startled, and even Lena let out a strangulated laugh from her stance over by the Aga.

‘Yes, you are. You’re a sex addict, and you came here to check in to therapy in London but ended up being seduced on the way there by some star-fucking blonde in Toy Town and everything spiralled out of your control.

’ Marsh drummed his fingers quickly on the table.

‘I can make this stick. Have you seen your damn neighbours? A washed-up porn star and some pagan nutso, not to mention Alice in fuckin’ Wonderland herself.

It’s one step away from a cult and you’ve been sucked right in.

Enter Lena, your beautiful, caring and well-known wife who has selflessly flown over here to step in and rescue you.

’ Marsh stopped to breathe and slapped his hand down.

‘This thing right here is a good old American intervention.’ He gestured between Lena and himself, hitting his stride and shouting like an evangelical preacher.

‘What you’re looking at is your bona-fide rescue party, and if you’re wise, son, you’ll shut the hell up and let yourself be goddamn rescued! ’

Marsh stopped talking and stared at him, wide eyed.

Robinson stared back, incredulous. ‘Have you lost your mind?’

Marsh’s eyes bulged. ‘I’m trying to help you here, son. Work with me.’ He made son sound more like a curse than a term of affection.

Robinson turned to look at his estranged wife. ‘Why are you really here, Lena? Last I heard we were filin’ for divorce.’

Lena shrugged one slender shoulder prettily and crossed to sit beside him. ‘I still care ’bout you, baby. I thought we could … talk.’

‘Which I’m guessing roughly translates as you’ve realised that good old Buck doesn’t have enough money to bankroll your expensive tastes.

’ Lena had always been the one who revelled in his income, her closet stuffed full of the latest designer clothes and her calendar stuffed full of dinner dates at the most exclusive restaurants.

She was high maintenance in every sense, a big spender with a hot temper.

It had made for a tempestuous married life, and Robinson hadn’t missed the drama one bit.

Lena laid a hand on his arm and twirled her hair around her finger.

‘Sex addiction’s a serious thing, Robinson,’ she said with wide-eyed fake sincerity.

‘I just wanna help you.’ She leaned forward to give him a bird’s-eye view down her low-cut white dress and whispered close against his ear.

‘You know I can help you with that addiction of yours. Remember how hot it was between us?’ She slid her red nails up his thigh. ‘Buck just didn’t measure up, honey.’

Robinson closed his eyes and summoned up the image of Buck and Lena over his kitchen work surface to combat the lies being poured like warm wax into his ears.

Had it really only been little more than a year since he and Lena had been together?

It seemed like a lifetime. Her perfume was new and stuck in his throat, and her over-long dark lashes were as fake as the new boobs she’d insisted on two Christmases ago.

She was a beautiful fraud, both in body and in her heart.

Pushing back his chair, he got to his feet.

‘Marsh, if I ever hear the words sex addict come out of your mouth about me again, you are no longer my manager. If I hear you say another bad word about Alice or anyone else in Borne, you are no longer my manager. Am I making myself entirely clear?’

Marsh watched him in silence.

‘Now, take Lena to The Siren and wait for me,’ he said, looking at Marsh. ‘Give me until morning. You say nothing to the press, understand? Give me tonight, and you can book the flights.’ He looked up as Alice appeared in the doorway. ‘Give me one more night, and then I’ll go home.’

Lena looked Alice up and down, her hands on her hips. ‘Really?’ She looked across at Robinson skeptically. ‘Oh, please. She’s practically a Girl Guide.’

Even after her bath, Alice felt woefully under armed in the face of Lena’s perfectly groomed glamour. Converse shoes, yesterday’s cut-off shorts and her pink vest proved no match for the other woman’s white linen dress and heels, and the no make-up look didn’t help the situation.

‘What are you, nineteen?’ Lena looked her over again.

Alice met her eyes head on, uncowed. You don’t scare me, lady. Not these days. ‘I think Robinson asked you to leave.’

Attractive as Lena undoubtedly was, the sneer that twisted her lips at the sound of Alice’s soft English accent was ugly by any definition.

‘And I don’t think that’s any of your business, darlin’.’

Alice didn’t flinch. ‘It is while you’re in my house.’

Robinson crossed to the back door and looked at Marsh.

‘Go this way and round the side. You can walk across the woods at the back and follow the path, or go down the drive through that lot. You choose, but Marsh, I swear to God, if you say even one word about sex addiction or cults I will not be on that plane.’

Tension radiated from every bone of Robinson’s body as he stared at his manager.

Marsh looked at Lena, and then down at her shoes pointedly.

‘You’re gonna have to take those things off. We’re goin’ hikin’.’

Lena looked at him as if she was Jerry Hall and he’d had a frontal lobotomy. ‘I don’t hike.’

Marsh sighed and rolled his eyes as he stalked past Robinson. ‘Then you better put your prettiest smile on for the cameras and keep that big mouth of yours well and truly shut, sweetheart.’

Lena glanced at Alice one last time and then followed Marsh across the kitchen. She paused beside Robinson.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, baby,’ she murmured, low and sultry. ‘I’ll make sure he books first-class tickets. They have beds.’

Robinson closed the kitchen door and turned his back against it, and Alice, in the way that only a true Brit can, put the kettle on for tea that she didn’t especially want.

They sat down at the kitchen table, both of them subdued and wary in a way that they’d never been with each other up to now.

‘Reality bites,’ she said after a while as she slid a mug of tea in front of him.

He nodded, sipping it even though it wasn’t a drink he could ever imagine being fond of unless it was Long Island Iced.

‘We always knew it would,’ she added, when he didn’t speak.

‘Not like this,’ he said, raising his eyes to hers.

Up until Marsh’s arrival those striking green-gold eyes had looked untroubled; right now they were dangerous tropical storms. ‘Not with a pack of hyenas on your driveway and your husband and my wife bunked up half a mile up the road. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. ’

Alice couldn’t disagree. They were kind of under house arrest.

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ he said suddenly, standing up. He crossed to the fridge and threw things in a bag and then opened the back door. ‘Come on. Bring your camera.’

Alice followed Robinson out across the back lawns, wishing she couldn’t hear the press out the front still having a frenzy over Marsh and Lena’s departure. They jogged quickly over into the cover of the tree line, and he led her beyond the Airstream and through the woods.

‘Where are we going?’

Marsh slung his arm over her shoulders.

‘On a date.’

They paused to give Banjo a handful of carrots, and then skirted around the meadow towards the lake. The back of the boathouse loomed into sight, the same as always but subtly different, and Robinson tugged her down the side of it and around onto the deck.

‘Oh,’ she said, drawing the tiny word out on a long whisper.

‘Oh, Robinson.’ She pressed her hands to her cheeks.

She hadn’t been down to the boathouse for weeks, not since the day she’d pulled her dad’s camera from the cellar of the manor and sat out there to look at it.

She’d noticed at the time that some of the deck boards were rotten.

Not any more. The deck had been repaired and yacht varnished, and the whole frontage of the boathouse had been restored.

New panes of glass where there had been broken ones in the wide doors, fresh antique green paint on the clapboards, even a window box spilling with wild, trailing flowers. She looked around in wonder.

‘When did you do all of this?’

He smiled his bashful, crooked smile. ‘Here and there. I needed to fill my time.’

It was such an understatement it left her reeling.

‘Can I see inside?’

In answer Robinson pulled a key from his jean pocket and unlocked the door.

‘It’s not completely finished inside,’ he cautioned. ‘I thought I had more time.’

The boards on the floor were all sound now, as were the shuttered windows and the pitched roof, and in one corner a tiny kitchenette had been hand fashioned from reclaimed wood.

‘Did you make this?’ she said, running her hand over the mellow wood surface.

Robinson reached over and clicked on the radio he’d had in there over the last few weeks and looked at his hands, rueful. ‘Once a carpenter, always a carpenter.’

‘I love it,’ Alice said straight away, admiring his craftsmanship, but feeling so much more than that too.

It would have taken him hours and hours, days to do all of the renovation work he’d done here, trained carpenter or not.

It was eighty per cent done, and already she could envisage it furnished and decorated, another perfect romantic retreat for her expanding collection.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said, turning to him in the middle of the room. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re incredibly welcome, Alice,’ he said, drawing her hips into his. ‘You’re so very, incredibly welcome.’

Her hands slid up around his neck as he dipped his head to kiss her, and they stood locked together in the centre of the boathouse, wrapped around each other like wartime lovers on a train platform. Something sentimental played low on the radio, a love song.

‘Dance with me, pretty girl?’ Robinson linked his hand through hers and lifted it against his shoulder, holding her close with his other hand on the small of her back, old-fashioned chivalry that brought a lump to her throat.

This was their first official date, and already their last ever dance.

She laid her cheek against his solid, warm chest and moved with him to the music, his chin resting on the top of her head.

Alice had been on a fair few dates and even to her own wedding, but this was by far the most profoundly romantic moment of her life.