Barefoot Bride

by Jessica Hart

  ‘I’ve never felt anything like it before,’ he said. ‘It was such a strong feeling, it was like a tight band around my chest, and I could hardly breathe with it. It was too painful to be happiness, and there was terror in there too, but it was a wonderful feeling too…I don’t know what it was.’

  Surprised at how moved she was, Alice managed a smile. ‘It sounds like love,’ she said, lightly enough, and Will turned his head to look at her for a long, intense moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘I suppose that’s what it was. But not love the way-’

  He had so nearly said the way I loved you. Will caught himself up just in time.

  ‘It’s not the same as the love between a man and a woman,’ he finished smoothly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Alice. ‘But it’s still love. I’ve never had a child, but I recognized the feeling you described straight away.’

  She remembered lying in bed next to Will and feeling just that mixture of terror and wonder, a feeling so intense that it was almost pain. Its power had seemed dangerous, overwhelming, uncontrollable, and in the end she had run away from it. She had been a coward, Alice knew, but at the time it had seemed the sensible thing to do.

  And now…Well, there was no point in looking back. No point in wondering what it would have been like if she had given in to that feeling instead of fighting it, if she had chosen love rather than security. She and Will might have had a child together. She would have discovered for herself how it felt to hold a child in her arms.

  She wouldn’t have been able to run away from that feeling.

  Aware that she was drifting perilously close to regret, Alice gave herself a mental shake. She had made her own choices, and she would have to live with the consequences.

  ‘I don’t think Lily knows that you love her that much,’ she said, breaking the silence.

  ‘How could she?’ said Will. ‘I’ve hardly seen her since she was a baby. Nikki had already started the divorce process before Lily was born.’

  ‘You’d think the baby would have brought you together,’ Alice commented.

  ‘I would have been prepared to give it another go for Lily’s sake, but I suspect Nikki was right when she said that we both knew it wasn’t going to work, so we’d better accept reality sooner rather than later.’

  Will shifted shoulders restlessly, as if trying to dislodge the memory pressing onto them. Of course, that was what Alice had said too. It’ll never work. Let’s call it a day while we’re still friends. It’s not worth even trying. At least Nikki had taken the risk of marrying him. Alice hadn’t even had the guts to give it a go.

  ‘So you didn’t contest the divorce?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Our marriage was a mistake. Nikki was right about that. We should never have got married in the first place.’

  ‘Why did you, then?’ asked Alice, who had no patience with people who didn’t think through the consequences of their actions. Of course, sometimes you could think about things too much, and you ended up missing opportunities, but Will was an intelligent man, and marriage was a serious business. It wasn’t the kind of thing you fell into by mistake.

  The sharpness in her voice made Will glance at her, but he didn’t answer immediately. How could he tell Alice how hard he had tried to find someone else after she had given him that final ‘no’ at Roger’s wedding? How every woman he’d met had seemed either twee or colourless in comparison to her? Nikki had been the first woman he’d met with a strength of personality to match hers. Seduced by the notion of wiping Alice from his memory once and for all, Will had convinced himself that he was falling in love with Nikki’s forcefulness and vivacity, and he had been too eager to find out what she was really like until it was too late.

  ‘I think I fell in love with the idea of Nikki, rather than with the person she really was,’ he said at last. ‘And I think she did the same.’

  Alice opened her mouth to tell him it had been madness to even think about marrying an idea, but then closed it abruptly. Hadn’t she done the same with Tony, after all? Tony had represented something that she had always yearned for, but she hadn’t really known him. If she had, she might not have been so unprepared when he’d met Sandi.

  ‘It was a holiday romance that got out of hand,’ Will went on. ‘She came out to the Red Sea to learn how to dive, and when we met she was incredibly enthusiastic about diving and the reef. I saw that she was fun, pretty, vivacious…and I think she saw me as someone very different from her friends and business associates in London.’

  Alice could imagine it all very clearly. To Nikki, bored with men in suits and ties, escaping from a cold, grey London, Will must have seemed hard to resist with his wind-tanned skin and the glitter of sunlit sea in his eyes. He would have been a step up, too, from the surfers and beach bums. Will’s shorts and T-shirts might have been as faded from the sun as theirs, but he had an air of competence and assurance that gave him the kind of authority other men had to put on suits to acquire.

  ‘So you were both carried away by the sea and the stars?’ she suggested, with just a squeeze of acid in her voice.

  ‘You could say that,’ Will agreed dryly. ‘And of course, once reality set in, the sea and the stars weren’t enough. Nikki was full of how she wanted to start a new life with me, but it didn’t take long before she was bored, and then she started to resent me for “making” her give up her career in London.’

  His mouth twisted. ‘It wasn’t a good time. We tried to patch things up-hence Lily-but in the end it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. Nikki wanted to pick up her career where she’d left off, and the truth was that by then I wanted out of the marriage too. I just didn’t count on how Lily’s birth would change things.’

  ‘It must have made everything more complicated,’ said Alice, and he gave a mirthless laugh.

  ‘You could say that. Nikki insisted on having full custody of Lily, and I was prepared to accept that. What I wasn’t prepared to accept was not having any access to my daughter at all.’

  ‘No access? But that’s completely unreasonable!’ Alice protested, shocked. ‘And unfair!’

  Will shrugged. ‘Unreasonable…unfair…You can shout all you like, but, when you’re up against the kind of hot-shot lawyers Nikki hired, saying that it’s unfair doesn’t get you very far. For two years she refused to communicate with me except through the intimidating letters her lawyers would send me.’

  ‘But why would she be like that? You’d have thought she’d have wanted her child to grow up knowing its father!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Will rubbed a weary hand over his face. ‘The only thing I can think was that she was afraid I’d somehow take Lily away, but I wouldn’t have done that, and she had no grounds for suspecting that I would.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice, appalled at what Will had been through. ‘It must have been very hard for you.’

  ‘I didn’t react quickly enough.’ Will’s face was set in grim lines as he remembered that bleak period. ‘I’m a scientist. I understand about ocean currents, and protogyny among coral-reef fish, and sampling by random quadrats, but I wasn’t well equipped to deal with divorce lawyers. It took me too long to get my own hot-shot lawyers and take the fight back…and by the time I did Nikki had changed tactics.’

  Alice frowned. She didn’t like the image of Will, bruised from the wreckage of his marriage, frustrated by lawyers and manipulated by Nikki. No wonder there were harsh lines on his face now. ‘In what way?’

  ‘She opted for emotional blackmail next,’ he said, and, although he was clearly trying to keep his voice neutral, it was impossible to miss the underlying thread of bitterness. ‘And very effective it was, too. Lily was already a toddler by then, and Nikki claimed it would be too unsettling for her to see me regularly. I wouldn’t understand her needs the way Nikki did. It would distress Lily to go and stay somewhere strange. She didn’t know who I was. I wouldn’t know how to look after her properly. She needed to be
in a familiar environment. It would be too disruptive for her to spend longer than a couple of hours with me. And so on and so on.’

  ‘With the result that you became even more of a stranger to Lily?’

  ‘Exactly. The few times I did manage to see Lily I was only able to take her out for a few hours, and frankly they weren’t successful visits. I think Nikki was so paranoid about the possibility of me taking her away altogether that she’d transferred all her tension and suspicion to Lily. It’s not surprising that she was nervous of me. As far as she was concerned, I was a stranger her mother didn’t trust.’

  He rubbed his face again, pushing his fingers back through his hair with a tired sigh. ‘It wasn’t just Nikki’s fault. I didn’t know how to reach Lily either. I wanted to tell Lily how much she meant to me, but I didn’t know how, and I still don’t. I’ve got no experience of being a father, and, now that I’ve got Lily all the time, I just feel inadequate. I either try too hard, or I get it completely wrong.’

  He sounded so dispirited that Alice found herself reaching out to lay a comforting hand on his arm.

  ‘You got it right tonight,’ she told him.

  She was burningly aware of his hard muscles beneath her fingers, and wished that she hadn’t touched him. She had reached out instinctively, but now that her hand was on his arm it seemed suddenly a big deal, and she felt jolted, as if she had done something incredibly daring.

  Which was ridiculous. It was only a matter of a hand on his forearm, after all. No reason to feel as if she had done the equivalent of clambering onto his lap, unbuttoning his shirt, pressing hot kisses up his throat…

  Alice swallowed. She wasn’t even touching his skin, for God’s sake! Will was wearing a long-sleeved shirt rolled back at the wrist, but there was only a thin barrier of cotton between his skin and hers, and she was sure that she could feel his warmth and strength through the fine material anyway.

  Horribly conscious of the way her body was thrumming in response, she made herself pull her hand away. She couldn’t have been touching him for more than a few seconds, but her heart was beating so hard she was afraid Will would be able to hear it above the crescendo of the night insects.

  In this light it was impossible to tell whether he had even registered her touch, and his voice sounded perfectly normal as he credited her with the small progress he had made with Lily.

  ‘Thanks to you,’ he said. ‘The books were your idea.’

  ‘But you were the one who read to her.’ Sure that her cheeks were still burning with awareness, Alice was very grateful for the darkness that she hoped hid her expression as effectively as it did Will’s.

  ‘You’re good with children,’ he said abruptly. ‘Somehow I never imagined that you would be.’

  ‘I’m not really,’ she confessed, glad that her voice seemed steadier now. ‘I’m not usually that interested in them. But I like Lily.’

  ‘You’ve never wanted children of your own?’

  Alice thought about the years she had spent trying to find a man she could settle down and be happy with, a man she could build a family with, a man who would make her forget Will and all that she had walked away from. She had thought she had found him at last in Tony. They had talked about having children, when they were married, when the time was right. But sometimes the time was never right, and, even if it was, it wasn’t always that easy. Look at Roger and Beth.

  ‘You can’t always have what you want,’ she said in a low voice, and Will turned to her, wondering if she was thinking about Tony who she had loved so much, and thinking about how much he had wanted her for so long.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Sometimes you can’t.’

  ‘It’ll rain soon.’ Will handed Alice a glass of fresh lime juice chinking with ice, and sat down next to her with a cold beer.

  ‘I hope so.’ Alice took the glass with a murmur of thanks and held it against her cheek, letting the condensation cool her skin. ‘Mmm…that feels nice,’ she told Will, who had to make himself look away from the sight of her, her eyes closed in pleasure as the condensation on the glass trickled down her throat and into her cleavage. It was dark on the verandah, but sometimes not dark enough.

  ‘It’s been so hot today,’ she went on, languid with heat. ‘I took Lily over to see Beth today so we could sit in the air-conditioning for a while.’

  With her free hand, Alice lifted a few damp strands of hair that had fallen from their clip onto the back of her neck. ‘The heat doesn’t usually bother me, but for the last couple of days it’s been suffocating. It’s like trying to breathe through a scarf.’

  ‘It’s the pressure.’ Will was dismayed at how hoarse his voice sounded. ‘A good storm will clear the air.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she sighed. ‘There’s no sign of any rain clouds, though. I’ve been looking at the horizon all day.’

  ‘They’ll be boiling up now,’ said Will. ‘Didn’t you notice them at sunset? That’s always a sign. It has to break soon.’

  He wished that he was just talking meteorologically. A different kind of pressure had been building inexorably over the ten days since Alice had arrived, and Will was finding it harder and harder to ignore.

  He had done his best to try and think of her simply as Lily’s nanny, but it wasn’t any good. She was resolutely Alice, impossible to ignore. It didn’t matter if she was just sitting quietly next to him in the dark, or playing cards with Lily or laying the table. It was there in every turn of her head, every gesture of her hands, every sweep of her lashes.

  Will struggled to remember how he had disliked her at Roger and Beth’s party, but that tense, brittle, superficial Alice had somehow been whittled away by the heat, the sunlight and the warm breeze that riffled the lagoon and rustled through the coconut palms. He had to remind himself constantly that she hadn’t really changed that much. She still wore that absurd collection of shoes. She flicked through magazines and talked about clothes, make-up and God knew what else, encouraging Lily to remember her life in London more than Will wanted. She still talked about the great career she was going to resume.

  She was still going home.

  He needed to keep that in mind, Will told himself at least once a day. She would only be there for another few weeks, and then she would be gone. He would have to start thinking about life without her all over again.

  It alarmed him how easily they had slipped into a routine, and he was afraid that he was getting used to it. He left early for work, but for the first time in years found himself looking forward to going home at the end of the day. Alice and Lily were usually on the verandah, playing games or reading together, and he would often stand behind the screen door and watch them, unobserved for a while, disturbed by the intensity of pleasure the peaceful scene gave him. Sometimes he tried to tell himself he would have felt the same no matter who was with Lily, but he knew that he was fooling himself.

  It wasn’t just the fact that Lily was gradually settling down. It was Alice.

  Every night when Lily was asleep, they would sit on the verandah, like now, and they would talk easily until one of them made an unthinking comment that reminded them of the past and all they had meant to each other. And when that happened, the tension a routine kept successfully at bay most of the time would trickle back into the atmosphere, stretching the silence uncomfortably until one or other of them made an excuse and went to bed.

  Will had hoped that the weekend would break that pattern, and things had certainly been different since then. He just wasn’t convinced that it was for the better.

  On the Saturday he had taken the two of them out to the reef in the project’s tin boat. Half-submerged in a life jacket that was really too big for her, Lily had clutched onto the wooden seat. Her face had been shaded by a floppy cotton hat, but, sitting opposite her at the helm, Will could peer under the brim and see that her expression was an odd mixture of excitement and trepidation. She’d looked as if she wanted to be thrilled, but didn’t quite dare to let herself go.<
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  ‘Would you like to drive the boat?’ he asked her, and her eyes widened.

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Will held out his hand, and after a moment, with some encouragement from Alice, she took it and let herself be handed carefully across to stand between his knees. He showed her how to hold the tiller, and kept her steady, guiding the boat unobtrusively from behind. Lily’s small body was tense with concentration, and it was hard to know whether she was terrified or loving it.

  Over her head, he could see Alice, straight-backed as ever on the narrow seat, holding her hat onto her head. Her eyes were hidden by sunglasses, but when she met his gaze she smiled and nodded at Lily. ‘She’s smiling,’ she mouthed, as if she knew what he most wanted to hear, and Will felt his heart swell with happiness.

  The sun glittered on the water, bouncing off every surface and throwing dazzling patterns over Alice’s face as the little boat bounced over the waves. Everything seemed extraordinarily clear, suddenly: the breeze in his hair, the tang of the sea in his lungs, his daughter smiling as she leant into him…And Alice, contrary, prickly, unforgettable Alice. At that moment, Will felt something close to vertigo, a spinning sensation as if he were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and he had to jerk his gaze away before he did something stupid like telling her that he loved her still.

  Bad idea.

  It had been a happy day, though. They pulled the boat onto a tiny coral island, where they could wade into the warm water and watch the fish dart around their ankles, flashing silver in the sunlight. Will taught Lily how to snorkel while Alice sat under a solitary leaning palm and unpacked the picnic they had brought.

  Afterwards, Lily dozed off in the shade, and Will watched Alice wandering along the shore. The set of her head on that straight spine was so familiar it made Will ache. Her loose white-linen trousers were rolled up to her knees, her face shadowed by the brim of her hat, a pair of delicate sandals dangling from her hand.