Page 14 of Christmas at Sturcombe Bay (Sturcombe Bay Romances #3)

“Goodnight, Grandpa. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Goodnight, son. Mind how you go.”

Alex laughed. “I’m only going about two hundred yards up the road, Grandpa.”

“Ah, you can never be too careful. You never know who’s about these days.”

Alex laughed again, shaking his head. “Okay, Grandpa, I’ll be careful.”

It was a pleasant evening for a stroll. The sun was sinking slowly beneath the horizon, the sky tinted with watercolour shades of gold and magenta, darkening to indigo in the east as a few stars began to glimmer.

But it was still quite warm. Instead of going straight back to his empty flat and cooking himself some dinner (something straight from the freezer to the microwave), he was tempted to take a walk on the beach.

The waves were rolling in lazily and uncurling with ribbons of white foam sliding in over the red-gold sand. Alex paused at the bottom of the ramp down to the beach and drew in a long, deep breath of the salt-tanged air.

He’d only been here for a couple of weeks, but already he was falling in love with the place . . .

Someone was sitting on the rocks beneath the hotel — someone he recognised instantly. Her shoulders were hunched, and her whole posture signalled dejection. He hesitated, then walked over.

“Hi.”

She glanced up, startled, and he knew at once that she’d been crying. She brushed a hand across her eyes and turned her head away from him.

“Mind if I join you?”

She didn’t answer, so he climbed up and sat on a rock just below hers, careful not to startle her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked gently.

“Nothing.”

“There clearly is. Is it something to do with that sleazebag who attacked you?”

“No.” Her voice was ragged. How long had she been crying? There was a long pause, then she said, “They’re closing the hotel.”

Astonished, he glanced up at the building above them. “Closing it? But why?”

“It’s been taken over by some greedy investment fund who just want to make money, and we’re not making enough, apparently.

” Now it was bitterness in her voice. “So, they’re putting it up for auction next month, and if it doesn’t sell .

. . Which it probably won’t. I mean, who wants a great big white elephant like that these days?

Nobody wants to come to the seaside for their holidays any more when they can go to Greece or Spain and be sure of getting the sun.

So they’ll just close it, and leave it derelict until it falls down. ”

“That’s ridiculous! It’s a great place. All it needs is a little bit of polishing up, a bit of advertising in the right places . . .”

“Who’s going to pay to polish it up?” She turned to him, her eyes red-rimmed. “It doesn’t make enough profit for it to be worth putting money into it.”

“You have to invest to make money.”

“Yeah, well, all we need is a millionaire with more money than sense.”

He paused for a moment, the figures his accountant had sent him a few days ago flickering through his mind. “Most millionaires have more money than sense.”

“They’d have more sense than to throw money at this place.”

The tears were streaming down her cheeks. Carefully, Alex eased up closer to her. “How long have you worked here?”

“Three years. But it’s not just a job. It’s my home. I’ve never had a proper home before.”

The ache in her voice tore into his heart. “Never?”

“Oh, I’ve had a lot of homes, but they weren’t really mine. Just foster homes. I was even adopted once, but they gave me back.”

“They what?”

She laughed bitterly. “I wasn’t the good little girl they wanted.”

Her words shocked right through him as he remembered his own close, loving family. “That’s appalling.”

“So I got moved on.” She shrugged her slender shoulders in a gesture of casual dismissal which he recognised as just a front for a world of hurt.

“To another foster home, and then another. I can’t even remember most of them.

By the time I was fifteen, I couldn’t be bothered with them anymore, so I ran away from the last one. ”

“What did you do?”

“Survived.” The acid in her voice could have etched steel.

He took a moment to choose his words — it would be very easy to say the wrong thing. “That must have been tough.”

“Oh, it was a laugh a minute. A bit of begging, a bit of shoplifting. Living in squats which were filthy and had no water or electricity. I lived with a couple of prostitutes for a while, kept house for them. I never sold sex myself.” Her eyes were sharp. “Except for a couple of hand jobs.”

He knew she was expecting him to recoil, but all he felt was a profound compassion that she had been forced to such extremes. But he sensed that she would reject sympathy, at least at the moment.

“So how did you end up down here?”

Another casual shrug. “I’d been sleeping rough round behind Oxford Street for a couple of weeks, and this charity that looks out for homeless young people offered me a room in their hostel.

I stayed there for a while, then they found me this job.

” At last a smile. “It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. ”

The tears started again, and he reached out tentatively to take her hand. She didn’t withdraw it. They just sat in silence for a while as the waves rolled in, splashing against the rocks beneath them.

“Are you hungry?”

A wary look.

“Fish and chips?”

She smiled, that tiny dimple popping into her cheek. “That would be nice.”

“Come on then.” He drew her to her feet and they walked along the beach, the cool evening breeze from the sea stirring their hair, the stars appearing one by one as if lit by an invisible hand.