Barefoot Bride

place, and now acute relief at finding her safe sharpened his voice.

‘What do you think you’re-’

He stopped abruptly as he reached the edge of the verandah and saw who was sitting at the bottom of the steps next to his daughter, both of them staring up at him with identically startled expressions.

‘Alice!’

Will glared accusingly at her. If Alice hadn’t annoyed him so much, he wouldn’t have left the poolside, and he would have kept a closer eye on Lily. This was all her fault.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked rudely. It was bad enough when he had imagined her out front, making a spectacle of herself with all those fawning men, but it was somehow worse to find her here with Lily, a witness to his inadequacies as a father.

Why did it have to be her? He wouldn’t have minded finding anyone else with Lily, would even have been glad that his daughter had found a friend, but not Alice. She had been free enough with her opinion of him as a father earlier. There would be no stopping her now that she had met Lily. Alice would have taken one look at his quiet, withdrawn daughter and decided just how he was failing her, Will thought bleakly.

CHAPTER FOUR

ALICE took her time getting to her feet. Slowly brushing down the back of her dress, she wondered how best to deal with him. She didn’t want to argue in front of Lily-how stupid of her not to have guessed who she was, but she didn’t look anything like Will-but it was obvious that Will was still angry with her.

Obvious too that he hadn’t liked finding her with his daughter. She just hoped he wouldn’t think that she had done it deliberately.

‘We were just talking about shoes,’ she said carefully at last. ‘We hadn’t got round to introducing ourselves, had we?’ she said to Lily, who had turned away from her father and was sitting hunched up, her fine hair swinging down to hide her face.

Lily shook her head mutely. With the appearance of her father, she had lost all her animation.

‘I’m Alice,’ said Alice, persevering. ‘And you’re…Lily? Is that right?’

Lily managed a nod, but she peeped a glance under her hair at Alice, who smiled encouragingly.

‘Nice to meet you, Lily. Shall we shake hands? That’s what people do when they meet each other for the first time.’

It felt like a huge victory when Lily held out her hand, and Alice shook it with determined cheerfulness. She wished she could tell Will to stop looming over his daughter. He looked so forbidding, no wonder Lily was subdued.

‘What are you doing out here, Lily?’ Will asked stiffly. ‘Don’t you want to play with the other children in the pool?’

Lily’s face was closed. ‘I like talking to Alice,’ she said, without turning to look at him.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Alice looked from Will to his daughter and back again. He had told her that he was practically a stranger to his own child, but she hadn’t appreciated until now just what that meant for the two of them. Will was awkward and uncertain, and Lily a solitary child still trying to come to terms with the loss of her mother. Neither knew how to make the connection they both needed so badly.

It wasn’t her business. Will wanted her to leave him alone with his daughter, that much was clear. She should just walk away and let them sort it out themselves.

But when Alice looked at Lily’s hunched shoulders, and remembered how she had laughed at the butterfly, she couldn’t do it. Will didn’t have to accept her help, but his little girl needed a friend.

‘I liked talking to you, too,’ she said to Lily. ‘Maybe we can meet again?’ She glanced at Will, trusting that he wouldn’t jump on the offer before Lily had a chance to say what she wanted. ‘Do you think your dad would let you come round to tea one day?’

‘Can I see your shoes?’ asked Lily, glancing up from under her hair.

‘You can see some of them,’ said Alice. ‘I’m only here on holiday, so I didn’t bring them all with me, but I’ve got some fun ones. The others are at home in London.’

Lily thought for a moment and then looked over her shoulder at her father. ‘Can I?’

Most other little girls would have been jumping up and down, swinging on their daddy’s hand and cajoling him with smiles and dimples, supremely confident of their power to wrap their fathers round their perfect little fingers, but not Lily. She would ask his permission, but she wouldn’t give him smiles and affection. Not yet, anyway.

A muscle worked in Will’s jaw. He wished that he knew how to reach her. He knew how sad she was, how lost and lonely she must feel. If only he could find some way to break down the barrier she had erected around herself.

Torn, he watched her stiff back helplessly. He wanted to give Lily whatever she wanted, but Alice and her shoes and her talk about London would only remind her of her mother and her life in England, and she would be unsettled all over again. Surely that was the last thing she needed right now?

He was still hesitating when Beth burst through the screen door with her customary exuberance. ‘Will?’ she called. ‘Are you out here? Did you-’ She stopped as she caught sight of the three of them. ‘Oh, good, you’ve found her-and Alice too!’

Belatedly sensing a certain tension in the air, she looked from one to the other. ‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’

‘Of course not.’ Alice forced a smile. ‘I was just inviting Lily round for tea one day.’

‘What a lovely idea!’ Beth clapped her hands together and beamed at Will. ‘Come tomorrow!’

Will could feel himself being swept along by the force of her enthusiasm and tried to dig in his heels before it all got out of hand. ‘I’m sure you’ll have had enough visitors by then,’ he temporised while he thought up a better excuse.

‘Nonsense,’ said Beth briskly. ‘I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to anyone today. You know what it’s like at a party. You’re always saying hello or goodbye or making sure everyone’s got a drink. It would be lovely to see you and Lily tomorrow. Otherwise it’ll all feel like an awful anticlimax, and we’ll get scratchy with each other. At least, if you come, Roger and Alice will have to behave.’ She laughed merrily. ‘It’s not as if you’ll be working on a Sunday, is it?’

‘No,’ Will had to admit.

‘And Lily needs to make friends for when you’re not there,’ Beth reminded him.

‘I’ve brought a nanny out from England,’ said Will, irritated by the implication that he hadn’t given any thought to child-care arrangements. What did they think? That he was planning to go off to work and leave Lily alone in the house every day?

‘Oh, you should have brought her along today.’ Beth was blithely unaware of his exasperation, but Alice was keeping a carefully neutral expression, Will noticed. She would know exactly how he was feeling.

‘It’s her day off,’ he said, forcing a more pleasant note into his voice. It wasn’t Beth’s fault that Alice was able to unsettle him just by standing there and saying nothing. ‘She wanted to go snorkelling.’

‘Well, bring her tomorrow,’ Beth instructed. ‘Then she’ll know where we are, and she and Lily can come again when you’re at work.’

Will glanced back at Lily. She had lifted her head and was watching the adults talking. Her face was brighter than he had seen it, he thought, and his heart twisted.

I like talking to Alice, she had said. He couldn’t refuse her just because he remembered talking to Alice himself. And what would be the harm, after all? He didn’t have to have anything to do with Alice. He could just have tea and then let Dee take over the social side of things.

‘All right,’ he succumbed, and was rewarded by a flash of something close to gratitude in Lily’s eyes. ‘Thank you, we’d like to come.’

Alice disliked Dee, Lily’s nanny, on sight. What had Will been thinking of, hiring someone quite so young and silly to look after his daughter? Or had he been thinking more about what a pretty girl she was? How long her legs were, how sparkling her blue eyes, how soft the blonde hair she tossed back from her face as she giggled?