Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ when he looked at her to try and indicate his gratitude somehow, he saw that she wasn’t even aware of Lily any more. Instead she was leaning against Roger, her arm tucked through his and her head on his shoulder. It was a very intimate pose.

      Too intimate for a man whose wife was only a few feet away.

      Will glanced at Beth, who was smiling at Lily as she adjusted her hat. She seemed unaware of Roger and Alice over by the window, but Will had noticed a fleeting expression of sadness in her face more than once now, and he wondered how much Beth knew, or guessed, about her husband’s feelings for Alice.

      It was a long time since he and Roger had shared that drunken evening, but Will had never forgotten the look in Roger’s eyes as he confessed the truth. He couldn’t remember where Alice had been, but Roger had just split up with yet another girlfriend, and Will had been deputed to help him drown his sorrows and provide a shoulder to cry on.

      ‘I don’t want him to be alone,’ Alice had said. She’d always been very protective of Roger, which was ironic in its own way, Will reflected.

      It had been very late and very dark when Will had helped a reeling Roger home at last. He had never known if Roger had meant to tell him that all the other girls were just an attempt to disguise how he felt about Alice, or if the next day he had even remembered the truth he had blurted out. Neither of them had ever mentioned it again, but Will couldn’t shake the memory of the bleakness in Roger’s face.

      ‘I’m just her friend,’ he had said, slurring his words. ‘I’ll only ever be her friend.’

      Had Roger decided to settle for second best with Beth? Will hoped not. He liked Roger’s wife. She deserved better than that.

      What was Alice doing, snuggled up to Roger like that? Will scowled. Did she know how Roger felt about her? Had she guessed?

      ‘I’m looking for Mr Right,’ she had told him with that bright, brittle smile he hated. Easy to see how Roger might fill that role for her. He was kind, loyal, funny, the rock Alice had fallen back on more than once. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the scales falling from her eyes as friendship turned to love…

      But Alice wouldn’t do that to Beth, would she? Will’s frown deepened. The old Alice would never do anything to hurt her friends, but what did he know of her now? The old Alice wouldn’t have stood that close to Roger, either.

      She would have been standing close to him, leaning against him, touching him.

      Will pushed the thought aside and got abruptly to his feet. ‘It think it’s time we went,’ he said.

      ‘What did you think of Dee?’ Beth asked Alice when Will had chivvied a disappointed Lily and Dee out to the car.

      ‘Not much,’ said Alice, unimpressed. She felt oddly disgruntled. It wasn’t that she had wanted to see Will, but he could have stayed a bit longer instead of rushing them off like that. It wasn’t very fair on Lily. ‘She tries too hard. You can tell she’s desperate to impress Will.’

      Beth looked at her strangely. ‘You can?’

      ‘Well, it’s a classic, isn’t it?’ Alice sniffed. ‘Child, nanny, single father…alone together on a tropical island…Of course she’s going to fall for him!’

      ‘It’s interesting you should say that,’ said Beth. ‘I wouldn’t have said that she was the slightest bit interested in Will. He’s too old for her.’

      ‘Old?’ repeated Alice, outraged. ‘He’s not old! He’s only thirty-five!’

      ‘I expect that seems old to Dee,’ said Beth, choosing not to comment on how well Alice remembered Will’s age. ‘She can’t be much more than twenty. I’d say she was much more impressed by that hunk who taught her how to snorkel yesterday. Didn’t you hear her going on about him?’

      ‘No.’ Alice frowned. She wasn’t as openly friendly as Beth, and had frankly tuned out most of Dee’s prattling. She wasn’t quite ready to believe that Dee had no interest in Will, either. He might be a bit older, but Dee could hardly have failed to notice that he was an attractive man—any more than Will would have missed the fact that she was young and very pretty. One could accuse Will of being lots of things, but unobservant wasn’t one of them.

      ‘I don’t know how Will could possibly have thought she would make a suitable nanny,’ she said crossly.

      Beth laughed. ‘Nannies aren’t buxom old ladies in mob caps any more, you know! Dee is young and friendly and enthusiastic. I expect Will thought she would be fun for Lily to have around.’

      ‘Or fun for him to have around?’ suggested Alice, her voice laced with vinegar. ‘You’re not going to tell me he didn’t clock those long legs and that body when he interviewed her?’

      ‘She’s certainly a very pretty girl,’ Beth agreed equably. ‘But it wasn’t Dee he was watching today, and it wasn’t Dee he couldn’t take his eyes off yesterday.’

      Alice, who had prowling restlessly around the room, stopped and stared at Beth, who smiled blandly back.

      ‘I don’t think you need to worry about Dee,’ she said.

      ‘I’m not worried about Dee,’ snapped Alice, severely ruffled. ‘Will can do what he likes. I don’t care. We don’t even like each other any more.’

      ‘Ah.’ Beth nodded understandingly. ‘Right. That’ll be why you both spent the entire time watching each other when you thought the other one wasn’t looking.’ She paused. ‘I think there’s still a real connection between you.’

      Alice flushed. ‘There’s no connection,’ she insisted. ‘Not any more.’

      And there wasn’t, she reminded herself repeatedly over the next few days. Will had hardly spoken to her at the tea, and she certainly hadn’t been aware of him watching her. Whenever she’d happened to glance at him—and it wasn’t that often, no matter what Beth had said—he’d seemed intent on talking to Roger or Beth, or watching Lily and Dee. If he’d even noticed that she was in the room, he’d hidden it extremely well, she thought grouchily.

      There certainly hadn’t been any opportunity for her to tell him that she was sorry for her tactless comments at the party.

      Not that Will would care whether she apologised or not. He had made it very clear how he felt about her now. Beth’s idea of a connection between them was ludicrous, Alice thought more than once over the next week, refusing each time to consider why the realisation should make her feel so bleak. Any sense of connectedness that had once existed between her and Will had been broken long ago, and there was no hope of repairing it now.

      And she wouldn’t want to, even if it had been possible, Alice reminded herself firmly. She hadn’t been lying when she had told Will that this time in St Bonaventure was her chance to think about what she really wanted out of life. Redundancy and Tony’s rejection had brought her to a crossroads, and, if the last miserable few months had taught her anything, it was that she needed to look forward, not back.

      There was no point in hankering after the past or what had been. Of all the options that lay open to her now, the one route she wouldn’t take was the one she had already travelled. She had to make her own future, and that certainly didn’t include resurrecting old relationships СКАЧАТЬ