Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ