Page 42 of All Summer Long

They sat out on the deck and dangled their bare toes over the water, skimming stones and murmuring about the accidentally amazing summer they’d shared.

Alice dipped her toes into the water and watched the ripples. ‘What will you do when you go home?’

Robinson sighed, his arms braced straight at his sides, his palms flat on the deck. ‘Concert’s in three weeks. There’s rehearsals, and Marsh will already have a schedule of PR junkets and radio interviews lined up. It’ll be a crazy time.’

She hadn’t really been asking him about work. ‘And Lena?’

Robinson thought for a while, his eyes on the water.

‘You know, Alice, when I arrived here I brought so much more baggage than just my suitcase and my guitar. I brought my bitterness, and my anger, and what was left of my love for Lena. I couldn’t work, couldn’t think straight.

Spending the summer here in Borne with you changed all of that.

’ He shook his head, looking pained as he found the words.

‘Before Lena … before she did what she did, I thought I had life all pretty much all worked out. Right career, right woman, right life.’ He shrugged.

‘I was wrong about at least one of those things.’

Much as Alice wanted to ask him which one, she didn’t. ‘It’s turned out to be a more life-changing summer than I’d bargained on, too.’

‘Then I guess you could say we’re even,’ he said softly. ‘You fixed me, and I fixed you.’ He hi-fived her. ‘Good job, partner.’

‘Who knew sex therapy could be so successful,’ she laughed, tearful.

‘Especially with me being a sex addict, an’ all,’ he said, rolling his eyes and muttering an obscenity about Marsh.

‘Our holiday romance would never survive out there in the real world, would it?’ she said after a while, missing him already.

He shook his head, wistfully. ‘You belong here, and I belong back in Nashville. You have this screwball, wonderful life here that suits you perfectly. You’re part of the fabric of this place. You need to be in Borne.’

Alice loved that he understood her so innately, and she also knew that what he was going to say next was going to be harder to hear.

‘My life isn’t here, Alice. Back home it’s high octane, full throttle a lot of the time, endless rounds of publicity and all the stuff you’d hate. I can’t change that. As people, we fit, but we still don’t belong together. Our lives are just too different.’

She leaned against him and put her head on his shoulder.

‘It was pretty magical while it lasted, though, wasn’t it?’

‘Best ever.’ He wrapped his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘And we still have tonight.’

‘I want to remember it for ever,’ she said, finding it hard to see the lake through her tears.

‘No pressure, then.’

She shook her head. ‘None. I’ll remember it as the best night of my life even if we just sit in silence and stare at each other.’

He slanted a sidelong glance at her, breaking her heart with his lopsided grin. ‘Can we be naked while we do it?’

Alice bumped her shoulder into his. ‘Manor or Airstream?’

‘Absolutely the Airstream.’ He stood up and held his hand out to help her up. ‘Come on. Let’s end this thing in style, Goldilocks.’

At The Siren, Brad sat at the bar nursing a swollen nose and his third tequila when an outlandishly glamorous woman stormed in and hurled herself onto the only other barstool. She glanced briefly across at Brad and looked away, and then looked at him again, only longer.

‘You’re him,’ she drawled. It was one of his absolute favourite things, to be recognised in public, but even with just two words Brad knew she must be connected to the other two Americans in Borne, one of whom had set him up and the other one had smacked him live on breakfast television that morning.

Despite her lithe body and attractive face, he didn’t warm to his new drinking buddy at all.

‘And you’re who?’ He didn’t even attempt to sound interested.

She flicked her long glossy hair over one shoulder.

‘Lena Duff. I do believe that my husband is sleeping with your wife.’ Her accent and delivery made the line sound straight out of an episode of Dallas .

Even Brad was impressed, and he signalled to Dessy for a second shot glass.

Dessy slid it down the bar along with the bottle and then left them to it with an inhospitable growl of ‘I’ll put it on your bill. ’

‘He always did have a good left hook,’ she said, eyeing his nose.

‘Lucky punch,’ Brad tried to feign nonchalance. It hurt like buggery. ‘Brad McBride.’

She downed her first shot of tequila in one and he refilled her glass, sensing a fellow pro drinker.

‘Good news is we’re going home tomorrow morning. You can have Pollyanna back.’

Brad processed the information as she downed her second drink as if it were water. The tequila had hit his system already and he could feel the effects numbing the pain in his face and loosening ill-advised words from his mouth.

‘She’s not all sugar and spice, our Alice,’ he said, pitching the conversation poorly, as if Lena were one of the lads rather than an attractive and pissed-off woman.

‘She can be quite the little wild cat, on the quiet.’ He made a claws motion in the air and threw in a halfhearted ‘raarrgh’ for good measure.

Lena looked at him speculatively. ‘Then she sure will have had a good time with Robinson.’ She draped her hand over Brad’s forearm and leaned in.

‘That man is such a tiger in the bedroom.’ She nodded knowingly and tipped him a subtle wink as she spoke.

‘More roar than raargh, if you catch my drift.’

Perturbed and suitably goaded, Brad swallowed another measure of tequila and poured them both another round.

Caught up in their bizarre game of my ex is better than yours, he said, ‘Alice likes to take control.’

‘Maybe,’ Lena shrugged one shoulder. ‘Or maybe she just hadn’t been with a guy who knew how to control her.’ She drew her shot glass towards her. ‘Until now. I wonder if he brought his handcuffs with him …’

The idea of Alice in handcuffs had him reaching for his shot glass again.

‘She has her own,’ he said, even though she didn’t, not as far as he knew anyway.

‘Among other things. I bet he was surprised to see her toy collection.’ In reality, the only toy Alice actually owned was a threadbare teddy she’d kept since she was five years old.

‘And sometimes she doesn’t wear any knickers on a Sunday. ’

‘Go Pollyanna,’ Lena scoffed openly. ‘They call Robinson captain commando for a reason, honey.’ She downed her latest shot of tequila and waved the empty glass at him. ‘Anyhow. They don’t do jockey shorts in his size.’

Brad was having trouble bringing Lena’s face into focus. ‘Yet you shagged his best mate,’ he slurred. He’d googled. He knew the gist of it.

‘And you still screwed your leading lady,’ she said, cattily. She’d googled too, as soon as Marsh had called her to fill her in and tell her he’d booked her on the next flight. Funny how he’d ignored all of her emails trying to get to Robinson until he deemed her useful.

‘And right now they’re probably boffing each other’s brains out in my house,’ he said, wondering if he could stand up.

‘While we drink tequila in an empty hellhole of a … pub?’ she said the word as if it were another language, and one she had no interest in learning.

A thought occurred to Brad.

‘I have a room upstairs. I don’t suppose you fancy …’ He attempted a seductive look that actually looked more like someone in the advanced stages of a stroke.

Lena squinted at him, and then laughed so hard that tears streaked her mascara. ‘You’re joking, right?’

Brad scowled, and she laughed even harder and refilled their glasses.

‘Honey, there ain’t enough tequila in this whole wide world to convince me to go upstairs with you.

For one, I can’t feel my legs, for three, you and your big split nose are definitely not my type, and for …

’ she paused, confused. ‘For two, and this is the important one so listen the hell up,’ she said, jabbing him hard in the chest with her finger.

‘For two, I’m taking my husband back home tomorrow and I’m gonna make life so sweet for him that he forgets all about this damn place and every last person in it, Pollyanna included. ’

She lost her moral high ground when she attempted to slither haughtily off her stool and crumpled into a heap on the floor at his feet.

Offended, Brad rubbed his chest where her nail had gouged into him. Bloody ungrateful woman couldn’t even count. Did she not know who he was?

‘Is it too late to run away?’

Alice curled into Robinson’s chest in the sanctuary of the Airstream, or as she would forever more refer to the caravan in the soon-to-be-put-together glampsite brochure, the love bubble.

They were in bed, as they had so often been, and she was somewhere between euphoric and catastrophic because she’d just had the best sex ever with a man who was soon going to leave her forever.

‘I’ve tried running,’ he said, pressing his lips against her forehead. ‘Life has a way of following you and setting up camp on your doorstep until you go home again.’

She nodded and sighed. Knowing he was right didn’t make it any easier to stomach.

‘How will you get out of the manor without being seen?’

He shrugged his shoulder beneath her head.

‘I could borrow one of Stewie’s wigs?’

Alice considered the various options and couldn’t see Robinson as a convincing Elvis, Rod Stewart or one of the Bay City Rollers.

‘Be serious,’ she chided, stroking his chest, committing him to memory.

‘Not today. I’ll be serious tomorrow, but right now I’m still on holiday and I’m going to make the most of every last precious second. Listen …’ He smoothed her hair behind her ear. ‘I can still hear the sea.’