Barefoot Bride

by Jessica Hart

  ‘I don’t think so, thanks,’ she said, ultra-casual. She could hardly change her mind just because Roger had mentioned Will. What a giveaway that would be! ‘I’ll just stay here and finish my book.’

  But, when Roger and Beth had gone, Alice sat with her book unopened on her lap and wished perversely that she had let herself be persuaded. After all, Will could hardly suspect her of chasing him if she just happened to bump into him at party, could he? She would have been able to see how he-how Lily, Alice corrected herself quickly-was getting on.

  Then, of course, Dee might be at the party too. What could be more natural for Will to take her along since they were all living together? Did she really want to see that they were all getting along absolutely fine?

  No, Alice acknowledged to herself, she couldn’t honestly say that she did. Much better not to know. She was better off here.

  Determinedly, she opened her book, but it was impossible to concentrate when all the time she was wondering if Roger and Beth had bumped into Will at the party, and, if they had, whether he would notice that she wasn’t there. Would he ask where she was? Would he miss her?

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Alice slammed her book shut, furious with herself. Will didn’t even like her now. Remember that little fact, Alice? Why on earth would he miss her?

  And why was she wasting her time even thinking about him?

  When the doorbell went, she was so glad of the interruption that she leapt to her feet. It was Chantelle’s day off, and she hurried to the door, not caring who it was as long as they distracted her from her muddled thoughts for a while.

  Flinging open the door, she smiled a welcome, only to find the smile wiped from her face in shock as she saw who was standing there.

  It was Will, with Lily a small silent figure beside him. The last people she had expected to see. The sight of them punched the breath from Alice’s lungs, and, winded, she hung onto the door.

  ‘Oh,’ she said weakly. ‘It’s you.’ She struggled to get some oxygen into her lungs but her voice still sounded thin and reedy. ‘Hi…hello, Lily.’

  ‘’Lo,’ Lily muttered in response.

  Will cleared his throat. He looked as startled to see Alice as she was to see him, which was a bit odd given that he knew perfectly well that she was living there. ‘Is Beth around?’

  ‘No, she and Roger have gone to a party.’ Alice had herself under better control now. It had just been the surprise. ‘At the Normans, I think.’

  ‘Damn, I’d forgotten about that…’

  Will raked a hand through his hair and tried to concentrate on the matter in hand and not on how Alice had looked, opening the door, her face alight with a smile. Her hair swept back into its usual messy but stylish clip, and she was wearing loose trousers and a cool, sleeveless top. Her feet were thrust into spangled flip flops, and she looked much more relaxed than she had done at the party.

  Much more herself.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

  He hesitated only for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said baldly. Alice might be the last person he wanted to ask for help, especially under these circumstances, but he didn’t have a lot of choice here. Too bad if she gave him a hard time about neglecting Lily. He had survived worse.

  ‘There’s been an accident on the project,’ he said, his voice swift and decisive now that his mind was made up. ‘I don’t have many details yet, and I don’t know how bad it is, but I need to go and see what’s happened and if anyone’s hurt. I can’t take Lily with me until I know it’s safe.’

  ‘Where’s Dee?’ asked Alice, going straight to the heart of the problem as was her wont.

  ‘She left yesterday.’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘She met some guy at the diving school last weekend.’ Will wondered if he looked as frazzled as he felt. Probably, judging by Alice’s expression. ‘She’s known him less than a week, but when he told her he was going back to Australia she decided to go with him.’ he tried to keep his voice neutral, because he was afraid that if he let his anger and frustration show he wouldn’t be able to control it.

  Alice opened her mouth to ask how on earth that had happened, and then closed it again abruptly. Will was worried about Lily, worried about the accident. He didn’t need her exclaiming and asking questions.

  ‘Perhaps Lily could stay with me,’ she said instead. ‘You wouldn’t mind keeping me company this afternoon, would you, Lily?’

  Lily shook her head and, when Alice held out her hand, she took it after only a momentary hesitation.

  ‘You go on,’ Alice said to Will. ‘I’ll look after her until you get back.’

  Astonished and relieved at her lack of fuss, Will could only thank her. He turned to go, but as he did he saw Alice nod imperceptibly down at his daughter. God, he’d almost forgotten to say goodbye! What kind of father did that make him?

  ‘Goodbye, Lily,’ he said awkwardly. If only he could be sure that if he crouched down and hugged her she would hug him back. ‘Be good.’ She was always good, though. That was the problem. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  Alice had to be one of the few people who knew less about parenting than he did, he thought bitterly as he reversed the car out of the drive and headed towards the project headquarters as fast as he could, but she was still able to make him realise how badly he was getting it wrong.

  Alice, still able to wrong-foot him after all these years. Will shook his head. He had been waiting for her to take him to task for putting the project before his own child. He couldn’t have blamed her if she’d pointed out that it was his fault for employing a silly girl like Dee who would run off and leave him in the lurch after barely more than a week as a nanny. She could have criticised him for not even thinking to say goodbye to Lily.

  But she had done none of those things. She had recognized the problem and done exactly what he needed her to do. He would have to try and tell her later how much he appreciated it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘LILY’S asleep,’ said Alice, opening the door to him nearly four hours later and motioning Will inside.

  ‘Asleep?’ He was instantly anxious. ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Of course. She’s just tired, and she dropped off a few minutes ago. It seems a shame to wake her just yet. Why don’t you sit down and have a drink?’ Her polite façade vanished as she watched Will drop into a chair. ‘You look tired,’ she added impulsively.

  Will rubbed a hand over his face in a gesture so familiar that Alice felt a sharp pang of remembrance. ‘I’m OK,’ he said gruffly, but he was glad to sit down, he had to admit. The room was cool and quiet after the chaos at the hospital. ‘Thanks,’ he said as Alice came back with one of Roger’s beers, and he drank thirstily.

  ‘Was it a bad accident?’ Alice asked. She sat on the end of the sofa, far enough away to be in no danger of touching him by accident, but not so far that it looked as if she was nervous about being alone with him.

  ‘Bad enough.’ Will lowered the bottle with a sigh. ‘A couple of our younger members of staff had taken one of the project jeeps to the beach. It’s their day off, and they had a few beers…you know what it’s like. They’re not supposed to take any of the vehicles unless they’re on project business, but they’re just lads.’

  He grimaced, remembering the calls he had had to make to the boys’ parents after he’d contacted the insurance company. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well they took one of our jeeps. It had our logo on the side, so when someone saw it had gone off the road they raised the alarm with the office, and the phone there gets switched through to me at weekends.’

  ‘Are the boys OK?’

  ‘They’ll survive. They’ve both recovered consciousness, and the doctors say they’re stable. The insurance company is making arrangements to fly them back to the UK, and the sooner that happens the better. The hospital here isn’t equipped to deal with serious accidents.’ He shook his head. Hospitals were grim enough places at the best of times.

  ‘I
’m glad I didn’t have to take Lily there,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for looking after her, Alice.’

  Alice avoided his eyes. ‘It was no trouble,’ she said with a careless shrug. ‘Lily’s good company.’

  ‘Is she?’ Will took another pull of his beer, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘I can’t get her to talk to me.’

  ‘You need to give her time, Will. Everything’s very new to her at the moment, and she’s just lost her mother. You can’t expect her to bounce back immediately.’

  ‘I know, it’s just…I don’t know how to help her,’ he admitted, the words wrenched out of him.

  ‘You can help her best by being yourself. You’re her father, and she knows that. Don’t try too hard,’ Alice told him. ‘Let her get to know you.’

  ‘Who made you such an expert on child care?’ Will demanded roughly.

  There was a tiny pause, and then, hearing the harshness of his voice still echoing, he put down the beer and leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees and raking both hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a moment. ‘That was uncalled for. Sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot on your mind at the moment,’ said Alice after a moment.

  ‘Still.’ He straightened, and the grey eyes fixed on hers seemed to reach deep inside her and elicit a disturbing thrum. ‘It’s no excuse for rudeness.’

  With an effort, Alice pulled her gaze away and reached for her lime juice with a hand that was not nearly as steady as she would have liked it to be.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t know much about children,’ she said. ‘But Lily reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. I was shy, the way she is, and I know what it’s like-oh, not to lose my mother-but that feeling of not really knowing where you are or what you’re doing there…’ The golden eyes clouded briefly. ‘Yes, I remember all that.’

  ‘Is that why you were so angry with me at the party?’

  Alice flushed. ‘Partly. I shouldn’t have said what I did, Will. I’m sorry, I was out of order. It wasn’t any of my business.’

  ‘No, you were right. I overreacted, mainly because you’d put your finger on all the things I felt most guilty and unsure about.’ He smiled briefly. ‘So it looks as if neither of us behaved quite as well as we might have done.’

  He paused, his eyes on Alice, who had tucked her feet up beneath her and was curled into the corner of the sofa.

  ‘What was the other reason?’ he asked.

  ‘Reason?’ she said blankly.

  ‘You said that was “partly” the reason you were angry,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Oh…’ The colour deepened in Alice’s cheeks, and she fiddled with the piping on the arm of the sofa. ‘It’s stupid, but I suppose it was meeting you again after all this time. I was nervous,’ she confessed.

  ‘Me too,’ said Will, and her eyes flew to his in disbelief.

  ‘Really?’

  He lifted his shoulders in acknowledgement. ‘You were the last person I expected to see,’ he told her with a rueful smile. ‘I was completely thrown.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alice with an embarrassed little laugh. ‘Well…I’m glad it wasn’t just me.’

  ‘No.’

  An awkward silence fell, and stretched at last into something that threatened to become even more difficult. Will drank his beer. Alice traced an invisible pattern on the arm of the sofa and kept her eyes lowered, but beneath her lashes her eyes kept sliding towards the fingers curled casually around that brown bottle.

  Those fingers had once curved around her breast. They had drifted over her skin, stroking and smoothing and seeking. They had explored every inch of her, and late at night, when they had been intertwined with her own, she had felt safe in a way she never had before or since.

  Alice’s throat was dry, and that little thrum inside her was growing stronger and warmer, spreading treacherously along her veins and trembling at the base of her spine.

  She reached forward for her glass with something like desperation. She shouldn’t be remembering Will touching her, kissing her, loving her. They weren’t the same people they had been then. Will was a father, and had more on his mind right now than remembering how the mere touch of his hands had been enough to melt her bones and reduce her to gasping, arching delight.

  Sipping her lime juice, she sought frantically for something to say, but in the end it was Will who broke the silence.

  ‘Roger and Beth still out?’

  The question sounded too hearty to be natural, but Alice fell on it like a lifeline.

  ‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘You know what party animals they are.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go?’ Will asked her.

  ‘I didn’t feel like it.’

  She didn’t quite meet his eyes as she adjusted her hair clip. Telling him how she had dithered over the possibility of meeting him again wouldn’t help. The atmosphere was taut enough as it was, even though they were both labouring to keep the conversation innocuous.

  ‘I’ve spent all week going to coffee mornings and lunches, and we’ve been out to supper twice, and every time you meet the same people,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I had a much better time with Lily this afternoon.’

  Will had finished his beer, and he looked around for a mat to put the bottle down on. ‘What did you do with her?’

  ‘Oh, you know…we just pottered around.’

  ‘No, I really want to know,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to spend more time with Lily, and it would help if I knew what she liked doing.’

  ‘Well, she’s very observant,’ said Alice, glad to have moved the conversation into less fraught channels. ‘And she’s interested in things. We spent some time wandering around the garden, and she was full of questions, most of which I couldn’t answer, like why the butterflies here are so colourful and why don’t bananas grow in England…I think you’ll make a scientist of her yet!’

  Will’s expression relaxed slightly. ‘It’s reassuring to know that she’ll ask questions like that. She’s always so quiet when she’s with me.’

  ‘She’s not a chatterbox,’ Alice agreed. ‘But she’ll talk if she’s got something to say. She got quite animated going through my wardrobe. She loves dressing up.’

  ‘She gets that from her mother.’ Will sounded faintly disapproving. ‘Nikki was a great one for clothes. Her appearance was always very important to her.’

  ‘Appearance is important to a lot of us,’ said Alice, sensing the unspoken criticism in his comment. ‘It doesn’t always mean that you’re superficial,’ she added with a slight barb, remembering how his jibe at the party had stung.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Will, although he didn’t sound convinced, and Alice noticed darkly that he didn’t take the opportunity of apologising for calling her superficial.

  ‘It’s perfectly normal for Lily to like dressing up,’ she said with some tartness. ‘Most little girls do. It doesn’t mean she’s condemned to life as an empty-headed bimbo! Some of us manage to dress well and hold down a demanding job.’

  ‘You sound like Nikki,’ he said, and from the bleak expression that washed across his face Alice gathered that it wasn’t a compliment.

  She longed to ask what Nikki had been like and what had gone wrong with their marriage, but it seemed inappropriate just then. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know just how much she resembled Lily’s mother.

  ‘At least I stick at my jobs,’ she pointed out with a slight edge. ‘Unlike Dee.’

  ‘Quite.’ Will acknowledged the hit with a sigh. ‘I should never have employed her, but she seemed so bright and lively that I thought she would be more fun for Lily to have around than some of the more experienced nannies. We obviously weren’t fun enough for her, though,’ he said, his mouth turning down at the memory of that dire week with Dee. ‘She couldn’t wait to go out as soon as I got home in the evening. I should have guessed she’d take the first chance to leave. I just didn’t realise it w
ould come quite so soon.’

  ‘You couldn’t have anticipated she’d throw up a good job to follow a guy she’d only known for a week,’ said Alice, even as she wondered why she was trying to make him feel better.

  Perhaps that was what superficial people did.

  ‘If I’d been more experienced, I might have read the signs,’ said Will. ‘She was the only nanny the agency had on their books who could leave at such short notice, and now I know why!’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  Will put his arms above his head and tried to stretch out the tension in his shoulders. ‘Get another nanny, I guess.’ He leant back in his chair with a tired sigh. ‘I’ll have to get onto the agency tomorrow. I just haven’t had a chance today.’

  ‘It might take them some time to find someone suitable,’ Alice pointed out. ‘What happens in the meantime?’

  ‘I’ll just have to manage,’ said Will, rubbing his face again. ‘Lily’s due to start school in a few weeks’ time. I might be able to find someone locally who could help out until then, or maybe she could come to the project headquarters some days. It’s not a very suitable place for a child, but I can hardly leave her on her own.’

  ‘I’ll look after her.’

  The words were out of Alice’s mouth before she had thought about them, and she was almost as startled by them as Will was. He sat bolt upright and stared at her.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Why not?’ Some other person seemed to be controlling her speech. Was she really doing this? Arguing to look after Will’s daughter for him? She must be mad! ‘I managed this afternoon.’

  ‘But…’ Will looked totally thrown by her offer. Almost as thrown as Alice felt herself. ‘You’re on holiday,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’m not suggesting I take on the job permanently. I’m just offering to help out until you can find a qualified nanny.’

  ‘It’s extraordinarily kind of you, Alice,’ said Will slowly. ‘But I couldn’t possibly ask you to give up your holiday to look after Lily. You told me yourself that you were here for a complete break.’