Life's a Beach and Then... (The Liberty Sands Trilogy Book 1)

by Roberts, Julia

  Rosemary pulled the car into a free space in the hotel car park and said, with a hint of irony, ‘Come on, old boy, let’s get you back to our room.’

  The irony was completely lost on Robert.

  Chapter 29

  Philippe was usually confident around women but he felt ridiculously nervous at being left alone with Holly in his own home. It had been different going on the island tour with her in the company of Sachin. Even when the driver had left them alone to have a stroll on the beach there had been plenty of other people around, but here it was just the two of them. He had been surprised when Holly had agreed to Rosemary’s suggestion to stay a little longer. He had purposely not said anything to encourage her to stay, frightened that she would feel he was trying to pressure her, so it was all the more pleasurable that she had opted for a later night than his other two friends. He was also surprised that she had accepted his offer of a second glass of wine.

  He carried the two replenished wine glasses out towards the verandah where Holly was leaning on the rail looking out to sea. The big silver moon was lighting the night sky and from the angle he was looking as he approached her it looked like a halo around her head.

  Holly could hear his footsteps as he crossed the room but only just over the hammering of her heart. She was already wondering if she had made the right decision to stay. What would they talk about? What if Philippe assumes that by agreeing to stay a while longer I’m agreeing to have sex with him? she thought. And is that why I’ve stayed? she wondered. Feeling confused and vulnerable she deliberately kept her back to him and looked out to the ocean.

  ‘Your wine madam,’ Philippe said as he handed her the glass, bowing slightly.

  ‘Merci,’ she said, responding to his French accent.

  ‘Do you speak French, Holly?’

  ‘Probably about a dozen words and that’s if you include yes, no and what time is it,’ she laughed. ‘I always admire people from other countries who speak English so fluently. I suppose it came quite naturally to you,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘One of the benefits of having parents from different nationalities. Did you learn both from the time you could talk?’

  ‘I speak a lot less French than you might imagine, even though I grew up in France. My father was adamant that I should learn about English history and geography so I had a tutor from the age of six. I only really mixed with the village children when I went out to play and that wasn’t that often as my mother didn’t like me to get dirty.’

  ‘Oh, I just assumed you would be bi-lingual.’

  ‘I always swear in French if that helps?’

  ‘You swear?’ she said, a look of mock horror on her face. ‘I’m shocked!’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone? Although I usually only swear when I’m writing,’ he said, anxious to dispel any opinion she may be forming about him being foul-mouthed. ‘And only when the words won’t flow.’

  Holly seized the opportunity to change the subject.

  ‘How is your book coming along?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a work in progress,’ he said, not adding that progress had been very slow.

  Philippe was anticipating her next question and was wondering how to refuse allowing Holly to read his manuscript without offending her. If he hadn’t lied about it being a travelogue he wouldn’t have minded her reading a chapter or two.

  The question never came. Before Holly could speak there was a whooshing followed by an explosion of sound and multi-coloured sparkles.

  ‘Fireworks,’ she cried. ‘I love fireworks.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Philippe. ‘I wasn’t sure if you did when I organised the display.’

  Holly turned to look at him and caught the twinkle in his eye.

  ‘I hope you’re not lying to me, Philippe?’ she said accusingly, digging him playfully in the ribs.

  ‘What a suggestion,’ he countered, draping his arm around her shoulder as the fireworks exploded in the night sky and in Holly’s heart.

  The display lasted for fifteen minutes and concluded with a spectacular arch created by the exploding fireworks in the colours of the rainbow.

  ‘That was beautiful. I love rainbows, they have a special meaning for me,’ Holly said, turning to Philippe as the final light extinguished.

  ‘Not as beautiful as you,’ Philippe said, leaning down and kissing her softly on her full inviting lips.

  For a moment Holly allowed herself to be kissed and then she pulled away.

  ‘Perhaps I should be going,’ she said, turning away from Philippe so that she didn’t see the look of disappointment flash across his face.

  The acrid smoke from the firework display was starting to drift towards them in a coloured cloud. Philippe realised he had been too forward but he hadn’t been able to resist her upturned face.

  ‘We should both go inside before we’re engulfed in the smoke,’ he said, steering her gently into the living room and closing the door to the verandah. ‘I don’t want you to go yet, Holly, but I will call you a cab if you’ve had enough of me for one night.’

  Philippe could see that Holly was wavering. He wanted her more than any woman he had ever met but only if she wanted him too.

  ‘I promise I won’t lay a finger on you if you don’t want me to,’ said Philippe.

  ‘How do I know I can trust you?’ she asked.

  ‘I promised Rosemary I would do nothing to hurt you,’ he answered. ‘I would never lie to Rosemary, she is like a mother to me.’

  ‘You and Rosemary have been discussing me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say discussing you,’ he replied quickly, ‘but I did tell her I thought you were beautiful and that I fancied you like mad and she was very protective towards you.’

  Holly relaxed a little. ‘She feels like a mother to me too, more so than my own mum in a lot of ways,’ admitted Holly, sinking down onto the comfy sofa.

  Philippe nodded sadly as he sat down beside her. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  Holly told a watered-down version of her early life and how she had always felt that she was a burden to her mother despite her best efforts at being a model child. The harder she tried and the better behaved she was, the more her mother seemed to dislike her. It was easy to talk to Philippe. He just listened quietly. At one point she lifted her head from his shoulder, where she had been resting, to make sure he was still awake. His eyes were wide open but he was looking out towards the full moon.

  ‘Why did you stop?’ he asked looking into her deep green eyes.

  ‘I thought I had bored you so much that you had fallen asleep,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘I’m a good listener.’

  Holly continued her story but stopped at the point where she left home to go to university.

  ‘What did you study?’ he asked.

  ‘English,’ she replied and then quickly continued before he could ask her anything about her time at university. ‘So come on it’s your turn to tell me about you.’

  She snuggled into his chest with her legs curled up on the sofa and his arm resting around her protectively. The last thing she remembered thinking, before falling asleep, was that the story about his mother sounded vaguely familiar.

  Chapter 30

  Sleep had eluded Philippe. Once he realised that Holly was no longer listening to his story he carefully removed his body from under her head and replaced it with a cushion. He fetched the white waffle blanket from the spare room and covered her with it but he didn’t pull the curtains closed as he didn’t want to disturb her. He had retired to his bedroom but couldn’t sleep knowing that the object of his desire was just metres away. He wanted to be close to her when she woke up in strange surroundings and guessed she might wake early when the first light of the new day filtered in through the unguarded windows, so he had lain staring at his ceiling wondering why he had such depth of feeling for someone he barely knew.

  Philippe was in unfamiliar territory. T
o him women were objects of beauty to be enjoyed without allowing them to get too close. He had no problem attracting the opposite sex, particularly when he was working as a journalist, but he didn’t have lasting relationships. Seducing a woman with his practised small-talk and laconic sense of humour was easy but it was only ever to achieve one end result: a night of sex.

  Many woman, from work colleagues to nubile young glamour models, had succumbed to his charm but none had ever heard their adoring words in the heat of passion reciprocated. Philippe never misled any of them, always telling them that he wasn’t looking for anything permanent, however most of his conquests believed they would be the one to change his mind. None of them had.

  He hadn’t uttered those three little words, that every woman longs to hear, since he was thirteen years old. His parents were separating and Philippe had asked his mother why they couldn’t live together.

  Her reply had been truthful but not explanatory.

  ‘Your father doesn’t love me any more,’ she had said.

  ‘But I love you, Maman,’ he had pleaded.

  ‘You don’t know what love is, Philippe,’ she had said dismissively. ‘Maybe one day you will.’

  Philippe wondered whether finally that day had arrived.

  As dawn approached he quietly crept back into the living room and knelt down beside the sleeping Holly. The lust he had felt when he had first seen her in the hotel restaurant was still there but it was tempered by a desire to nurture and care for this emotionally fragile woman. The long dark lashes that framed her beautiful eyes were flickering and he knew that in a few moments she would wake. He whispered her name.

  Holly had been dreaming about the holiday she and Harry went on eight months earlier that had changed her life so dramatically but she couldn’t understand why he was calling her by her name.

  ‘Mum,’ she mumbled incoherently, as she started to wake from sleep. ‘Call me mum.’

  Philippe rested his fingers lightly on Holly’s lips assuming that she had been dreaming about her mother as that was the last thing she had been talking about before falling asleep. He wondered if Holly and her mum were still in contact after the unhappy childhood she had endured. Maybe in the depths of sleep she was asking her mum to call her, but it hadn’t sounded like a plea, more of an instruction.

  Philippe was acutely aware that he hadn’t spoken to his own mother since he had sent her a copy of his book which she had read without recognising the woman he had written about. She was upset and angry in equal measure when he had patiently explained in a telephone conversation that the title character was his perception of her through adolescent eyes.

  ‘You should have spoken to me before you started writing and I could have told you the truth about your father and me,’ she had said in an aggrieved tone of voice.

  ‘But the book was a novel, so the character was based on you and how I saw you from my point of view, not actually who you really are, although I’m not sure I have ever known the real you.’

  ‘The real me would have made a much better story,’ she said defiantly before she abruptly ended the call.

  That was over a year ago and she hadn’t answered any of his calls since.

  Holly was looking up at him now her green eyes wide with questioning but not alarm. He realised he still had his fingers resting on her lips and moved them away as if they had been scalded.

  ‘Did you need me to keep quiet?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Am I not supposed to be here? Is your girlfriend at the door?’

  ‘None of the above,’ Philippe replied. ‘I just wanted to be close to you when you awoke. I didn’t know if you would remember straightaway where you fell asleep.’

  ‘I’m so sorry Philippe,’ she said apologetically, the colour starting to rise in her cheeks I can’t believe I fell asleep when you were in mid flow. Do you want to carry on where you left off?’ she rambled.

  ‘Maybe later,’ he said, his sexy French voice loaded with innuendo. ‘But now I need you to get up. There is something I have to do that I think you will enjoy.’

  Holly was intrigued. She freshened up in the bathroom by splashing water on her face and then using some of Philippe’s sun protection lotion as a moisturiser. Some men had a whole host of beauty products, thought Holly, but Philippe was very old school with just his shaving foam, after shave balm and deodorant in the bathroom cabinet. She squeezed a line of toothpaste onto her finger and rubbed it over her teeth to banish her morning breath. Her tousled curls looked like she had been dragged through a hedge backwards, she thought, using her dad’s favourite phrase, so she raked her fingers through her hair and then retrieved a stretchy band from the pocket of her shorts and tied it back in a pony tail. The only other things in her pocket were a stick of lip salve, which she gratefully applied to her lips, and her hotel room key.

  ‘Come on, Holly,’ Philippe urged through the closed bathroom door. ‘I don’t like being late for this.’

  This must be very special, she thought, unlocking the bathroom door, because he doesn’t mind being late for almost everything else.

  He grabbed her hand as soon as she was through the door and pulled her towards the verandah and down the wooden steps onto the beach. The sun was starting its ascent but there were still traces of red and orange in the early morning sky. They ran along the soft sand for about fifty metres and then Philippe turned away from the sea towards a small field sandwiched between two houses. In the furthest corner was a ramshackle stable and nodding his head in greeting was the magnificent black horse that Holly had seen Philippe riding on the beach a few days before.

  As they approached Philippe reached his hand into the bin of feed and held it out to the appreciative animal.

  ‘Is he yours?’ Holly asked.

  Philippe shook his head. ‘He belongs to my fisherman friend, Billy,’ he said, ‘although I like to think it is the other way round. Billy won him in a poker game and had no idea how to look after him so I volunteered to help him out by exercising him three mornings a week. I could ride almost before I could walk which is funny as the Greek meaning of my name is “lover of horses”. Do you ride Holly?’

  ‘There wasn’t much available cash for riding lessons when I was growing up.’

  ‘Well you don’t need money to ride this horse,’ said Philippe, placing the bit in the horse’s mouth, buckling the bridle and looping the reins over its head.

  Holly felt uncertain about getting on this magnificent animal.

  ‘What’s his name?’ she asked.

  ‘His name is Helios, the Greek sun god. Maybe that’s why he loves to go for a gallop as the sun is starting a new day.’

  Holly looked at the impressive beast towering above her and then at Philippe’s animated face.

  ‘Aren’t you missing a saddle?’ she enquired, fearful of the answer.

  ‘Helios and I don’t like saddles,’ he replied. ‘We like to feel the heat and motion of each other’s bodies,’ he said, looking Holly straight in the eye. ‘Are you going to let me teach you?’

  Holly could barely breathe. She understood the power of horses, particularly one as large as this, but she felt sure Philippe wouldn’t let her come to any harm. That was not why she was hesitating. It was the thought of sitting astride a horse with Philippe’s arms around her and his torso pressed into her back.

  ‘I know he’s big,’ said Philippe, his eyes twinkling in a mocking manner, ‘but he’s very well behaved. You know you want to.’

  Holly knew she was being teased but she didn’t care. It was time to throw caution to the wind and live a bit. Besides she had always wanted to ride a horse bareback. It was on her ‘things to do before I die’ list, that Harry made such fun of.

  She lifted her chin defiantly. ‘How do I get up there?’

  In one deft movement Philippe spun her round to face Helios, lifted her by the waist while instructing her to throw her right leg over the horse’s back and then pushed her bottom upwards until she was sat astride its wide
back. Moments later he too had mounted the horse and reached around Holly for the reins which he rested gently in her hands, his own hands covering hers.

  It was dizzyingly high but Holly focused her eyes on Helios’s dramatic black mane.

  ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Philippe asked.

  ‘Yes I’m sure,’ she said, leaning back against his firm chest, feeling the rippling of muscles in his arms and legs as he urged Helios forward at a gentle walking pace.

  Chapter 31

  There was a thundering in Robert’s head almost like a horse’s hooves pounding incessantly on his temples. He opened one eye very gingerly and peered through the dim light towards the motionless form of his wife lying next to him in the bed. She must have sensed the slight movement as she turned her head towards him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Pretty rough if I’m honest,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got a thumping headache.’

  ‘I’ll get you some paracetemol,’ she offered, rising from the bed and making her way towards the bathroom before her husband could argue.

  She returned moments later with the pills and a glass of water. Robert eased himself into a semi-sitting position to enable him to swallow the tablets and the water without choking and then rested back onto his pillow.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  Rosemary glanced across at the travel clock on her bedside table. ‘It’s not quite six,’ she replied, gently stroking his head. ‘You should try and get back to sleep for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Don’t be nice to me,’ Robert said. ‘I’ve brought this on myself. I don’t know what I was thinking trying to keep up with a man twenty years my junior.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it, Robert,’ Rosemary said soothingly. ‘You needed to unwind and enjoy yourself after the eighteen months we’ve had. You just didn’t realise the potency of the local brew and combined with the strong sunshine it’s no wonder you’ve got a sore head.’