One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December. Kat French

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Holy fuck. Naked painters and porn star neighbours. And there I was thinking this place was going to be dull.’

      ‘You missed out the fact that Hazel’s a practising witch,’ Alice said, spreading her hands. ‘Welcome to Borne, cowboy.’

      He laughed under his breath and drank deeply from his beer. To Alice he looked every inch a guy in a bar kicking back, utterly relaxed. He tipped the neck of his bottle towards her.

      ‘And then there’s you, Goldilocks.’

      Her new nickname had never sounded so sexy. ‘What about me?’

      He shrugged. ‘If I was to guess, I’d say you and I have something in common.’

      ‘You would? What would that be?’ Alice wasn’t entirely sure it was good for her to know.

      ‘Feel free to tell me to shut up anytime you like, because I know I said I wouldn’t mention this again, but your wedding band is only just as faded as mine.’

      He looked at her left hand, and she looked at the telltale band of paler skin on his ring finger. She had no clue what to say next, so kept her eyes on his hands rather than look him in the eyes. He had good hands. The kind of hands your body might feel sexy in, and your heart might feel safe in. But then Brad had nice hands too, and he’d used them to twist her heart so badly that she wasn’t sure it would ever go back to its original shape again.

      ‘Almost six months,’ she said softly. The time had gone by in a strange mix of lightning fast and torturously slow, and it was only in the last month that she’d finally removed her wedding ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewellery box.

      ‘Ten for me,’ he said, and she finally looked up and saw her own broken heart reflected there in his eyes.

      ‘Are you going to tell me it gets easier?’ she said. Just about everyone else did.

      ‘Only if you want me to lie to you.’

      She shook her head and sighed hard. ‘I’ve had enough of lies to last me a lifetime.’

      He clinked his bottleneck against hers and huffed in understanding, the way that only someone else who’s been pissed on from a great height by the person they love best can. She wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned so intimate, but she knew that she needed to steer it back towards less shark-infested waters because talking about Brad always left her feeling bitten raw. Robinson seemed to sense it too, because he suddenly slid from the stool.

      ‘Before I forget,’ he said, disappearing into the lounge and returning with his hands full of the expensive camera Brad had given her a year or two back for her birthday, even though she’d never expressed even the briefest of interest in photography to him. ‘This was on the side. I figured you’d put it out and then forgotten to take it with you.’

      Alice looked at the camera, debating whether to be honest and say she’d never even used it and had put it out to give away or to just take it from him and hide beneath his cover story. Seeing it there in Robinson’s hands, Alice had the most peculiar feeling of a plaster being ripped from a wound only to find the wound hadn’t healed at all and it would have been better left out in the open.

      ‘Do you mind if I grab something from the cellar?’

      Robinson laid the camera down on the breakfast bar. ‘Go for your life, as long as you’re not planning to start playing the drums in the garden.’

      Alice threw her empty beer bottle in the bin and headed for the cellar door. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just something I should have done a long time ago.’

      Robinson listened to the sounds of Alice dragging things around noisily in the cellar beneath him, cursing every now and then and huffing out of breath. He’d checked a second time if he could help and received a polite but firm refusal, and he sensed that whatever it was that she was looking for down there, she wanted to find it on her own. She was a difficult woman to read. On the surface she was fragile, coltish and bambi-like, in a way that brought out his protective instinct. But she was also funny, and in turn feisty, and he’d glimpsed steel in her eyes too when she was pushed. If she was his sister, he’d be ready to punch the man who’d broken her heart. But she wasn’t his sister, and she had a physical effect on him that was anything but brotherly. He’d screwed a couple of women since Lena had left him, both brunettes with hard bodies and hot tempers, both pseudo replacements of the woman he really wanted, the one who now slept in the bed of his best friend. Alice was the polar opposite of Lena. Was that what he found attractive about her, that she held none of his wife’s Latino appeal and therefore posed no threat to his heart? He knew he was doing the woman in the cellar a disservice by thinking such thoughts, but they were the only ones that made any sense of the way his body reacted to hers.

      Back in the sanctuary of the Airstream, Alice warmed soup and toasted bread, consciously avoiding looking at the sizeable dark purple leather case on the table. It had taken some effort to lug it back across the garden; she’d shrugged off Robinson’s repeated attempts to help.

      She ate standing at the work surface looking out of the window, the case behind her out of sight.

      Washing up stretched things out for another ten minutes, and she swept each rug on the floor individually until the whole place was spick and span. A quick glance at her watch told her it had just turned nine in the evening; she could always just go to bed. She could fill up her water bottles and have a luxuriously early night, read until her eyelids drooped and she nodded off, leave the case unopened until morning. Everything was easier in the morning, right? She got as far as filling the kettle for her bottles before she sighed and placed it down without lighting the gas beneath it. Even if she warmed the bed, there was no way she’d be able to sleep without at least opening the case. It might as well have had a huge red flashing light on the lid or a high-pitched alarm strapped to it for all the rest she’d get with it sitting there like an unexploded bomb.

      Finally, when she could stall no longer, she took out a soft cloth from beneath the sink, slid into the padded banquette and drew the box slowly towards her. Over eight years had passed since she’d last snapped open its silver clasps. She rubbed the cloth over the cracked leather lid, taking the time to run her index finger over the metallic embossed initials inlaid there. B.A.C. Benjamin Alan Collins. Her father. The box had been his long before it had been Alice’s. He’d given it to her on her twenty-first birthday, as it had been given to him by his own father on his twenty-first. A tradition, he’d smiled, knowing just how much the gesture would mean to Alice. She’d been nervous at first about telling her dad she’d decided to follow in his footsteps as a professional photographer. As a multi-award-winning photojournalist known for his specialist work in war zones, Ben Collins was internationally renowned as one of the best in the business until he’d lost his life during an especially dangerous assignment out in Afghanistan. His posthumous award for bravery had been a fitting tribute for a man who knew the dangers of his work but still threw himself in whole-heartedly because he also knew a powerful image could speak a thousand words. He believed he could make a difference, and he had, both to the world and to Alice, his only child, the little girl he’d raised single handedly when her mother left them before Alice could even walk. Because of his unerring love and attention, Alice had never missed the mum she had no memory of. When Ben was away working he made sure she was safe, sharing her care with his parents who adored having such a hands-on role in their granddaughter’s life. It had worked well, right up to the moment Ben Collins took a bullet through his heart, breaking Alice’s at the same time. She’d closed the lid on the leather case two months after her father’s funeral and from that day to this it had remained sealed. Today was as good a day as any to open it again.

      Alice СКАЧАТЬ