Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ that it was here, she hadn’t even thought about it.

      Perhaps she ought to be grateful to Will for distracting her?

      Will drained the last of his beer and turned aside to put the empty bottle on the decking rail. ‘Still avoiding commitment, I see,’ he commented with a sardonic glance over his shoulder at Alice, who flushed at the injustice of it.

      She wasn’t the one who had called off the wedding. If it had been down to her, she would be happily married to Tony right now, but she bit back the words. She had just convinced him that ending her engagement to Tony had been a mutual decision, so she could hardly tell him the truth now.

      Which was worse? That he thought she was afraid of commitment, or that he felt sorry for her?

      No question.

      ‘Still determined not to get married until I’m absolutely sure it’s perfect,’ she corrected Will. ‘So…I’m fancy free, and on the lookout for Mr Right. I’m not going to get married until I’ve found him, and, until then I’m just having fun!’

      Will was unimpressed by her bravado. ‘You seem very tense for someone who’s having fun,’ he said.

      Alice gritted her teeth. ‘I am not tense,’ she snapped. Tensely, in fact. ‘I’m a bit jet-lagged, that’s all. I only got here a couple of days ago.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Will, not bothering to hide the fact that he was totally unconvinced by her explanation. Which just made Alice even crosser, but she sucked in her breath and resisted the temptation to retort in kind. She didn’t want Will to think that he was getting to her, or that she cared in the slightest what he thought of her.

      Friendly but unobtainable, wasn’t that how she wanted him to think of her? Pleasant but cool. His long-lost love who had turned into a mysterious stranger. Anything but sad and tense and a failure.

      She fixed a smile to her face. ‘I gather you weren’t as hesitant about taking the plunge,’ she said.

      ‘The plunge?’

      ‘Marriage,’ she reminded him sweetly, and a strange expression flitted over his face.

      ‘Ah. Yes. I did get married,’ he agreed. ‘Why? Did you think I would never get over you?’

      ‘Of course not,’ said Alice with dignity. ‘If I thought about you at all—which I can’t say was that often—’ she added crushingly, ‘it was only to hope that you were happy.’

      Will raised his brows in disbelief. ‘Really?’

      ‘Yes, really.’ Alice had been nursing a glass of Roger’s lethal tropical punch, but it didn’t seem to be having a very good effect on her. She set it on the rail next to Will’s empty bottle.

      ‘Have you been happy?’ she asked him, the words out of her mouth before she had thought about them properly.

      Will didn’t answer immediately. He thought about Lily, about how it had felt when he had held his daughter in his arms for the first time. About drifting along the reef, fish flitting past him in flashes of iridescent colour and looking up to see the sunlight filtering down through the water to the deep blue silence. About sitting on a boat and watching dolphins curving and cresting in the foamy wake, while the water glittered and the sea breeze lifted his hair.

      He had been happy then. It hadn’t been the same feeling as the happiness he had felt lying next to Alice after they had made love, holding her into the curve of his body, smoothing his hand over her soft skin, breathing in her fragrance, marvelling that this quirky, contrary, vibrant woman was really his, but, still, he had been happy since.

      In a different way, but, yes, he’d been happy.

      ‘I’ve had times of great happiness,’ he said eventually, very conscious of Alice’s great golden eyes on his face. ‘But not in my marriage,’ he found himself admitting. ‘We weren’t as sensible as you. We didn’t realise what a mistake we were making until it was too late.’

      It had been his fault, really. He had vowed to move on after Roger’s wedding, had been determined to put Alice from his mind once and for all. The trouble was that every woman he’d met had seemed dull and somehow colourless after Alice. They might have been prettier and nicer, and certainly sweeter, but, when he’d closed his eyes, it had always been Alice’s blazing golden eyes that he saw, always Alice’s voice that he heard, always Alice’s skin that he tasted.

      Nikki had been the first woman with the strength of personality to match Alice’s, and Will had persuaded himself that she was capable of banishing Alice’s ghost once and for all. They had married after a whirlwind holiday romance in the Red Sea where he had been researching at the time.

      It had been madness to take such a step when they’d barely known each other. Will should have known that it would end in disaster. Because Nikki hadn’t been Alice. She had been forceful rather than colourful, efficient rather than intense. The only thing the two women had shared, as far as Will could see, was a determination to make a success of themselves.

      Nikki, it had turned out too late, had had no intention of wasting her life in the kind of countries where Will felt most at home. ‘My career’s at home,’ she had told him. ‘There’s nothing for me to do here, nothing works, and, if you think I’m having the baby in that hospital, you’ve got another think coming!’

      Lily was the result of a failed attempt to make the marriage work. She’d been born in London, just as Nikki had planned, but by then Nikki had already sued for divorce. ‘It’s never going to work, Will,’ she’d told him when he came to see his new daughter. ‘Let’s just accept it now rather than waste any more time.’

      ‘We were married less than two years,’ he told Alice.

      ‘So you’re divorced?’ she said, horrified at the instinctive lightening of her heart, and ashamed of herself for feeling even a smidgeon of relief that his life hadn’t turned out quite as perfectly as it had seemed at first.

      And that she wouldn’t have to face his wife after all. Although she wished now that she hadn’t said that about ‘looking for Mr Right’. She didn’t want Will thinking that she would try and pick up where they had left off the moment she realised that he was single.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, when he nodded curtly. ‘I didn’t realise. Beth said that you had your family with you, so we just assumed that you were married.’

      ‘No, it’s just me and Lily,’ he said. ‘My daughter,’ he added in explanation. ‘She’s six.’

      ‘Is she spending the holiday with you?’ Alice didn’t have much to do with children, and was a bit vague about school terms, but she supposed mid-March might conceivably mean the Easter holidays. It seemed a bit early, though. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much for six-year-olds?

      ‘No, she lives with me,’ said Will, almost reluctantly.

      ‘Oh? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Alice looked surprised. ‘Doesn’t the mother usually have custody?’

      ‘Nikki did,’ he said. ‘She died recently, so now Lily only has me.’

      ‘God, how awful!’ Alice was shocked out of her cool pose, and Will was absurdly pleased СКАЧАТЬ