Barefoot Bride

strength.

Her eyes slid sideways under her lashes to rest on the austere profile. She couldn’t see them in the darkness but she knew there were new lines creasing his eyes, a tougher set to his jaw, a sterner line to his mouth.

That capacity for stillness was the same, though. She had often watched him sitting like that, his body relaxed but alert, and envied his ability to withdraw from the chaos and just be calm. She had loved his competence, his intelligence, the ironic gleam in the humorous grey eyes. Even as a young man, he had had an assurance that was understated, like everything else about Will, but quite unmistakeable.

There was something insensibly reassuring about his quiet presence. Whatever happened, you felt that Will could deal with it and everything would be all right. Even now, after everything that had happened, he made her feel safe.

If only that was all he had made her feel! The initial attraction she had felt for the ordinary-looking student had deepened into a dangerous passion that made Alice uneasy. She didn’t like feeling out of control, and the strength of her emotions scared her.

Will had started out a good friend, a good companion, and he had become a good lover, but soon it went beyond even that. Alice was out of her depth. She didn’t like the feeling of needing him, of not feeling quite complete without him. All her experience had taught her to rely on herself, and she had forced herself to resist the lure of binding herself to him for ever.

Because she had been so in love she hadn’t seen that they wanted very different things out of life. The future Will enthused about hadn’t been the one Alice had dreamed of. She had yearned all her life for security, and that had been the one thing Will couldn’t offer. He’d wanted to continue his research, to work wherever he could find a coral reef, to do what he could to protect them. She’d wanted a wardrobe, somewhere she could hang up her clothes and never have to unpack them. She’d wanted a place she could call her own. She’d been sick of scrimping and saving to put herself through university. She’d been sick of window shopping. If she saw a pair of wonderful shoes in a window, she wanted to be able to go in and buy them.

There were no shoe shops on coral reefs. If she’d married Will, as he had asked her to, she’d have had to give up all her dreams to live his. Alice had decided that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that.

She had made the right decision, she told herself, but there was no denying that the physical attraction was still there. It was very hard to explain. There was nothing special about the way Will looked. He had a lean, intelligent face that could under no circumstances be called handsome, but the contrast between the severe mouth and the humorous grey eyes made him seem more attractive than he actually was.

The first time Alice had seen Will, she hadn’t been conscious of any instant physical attraction. Later, that seemed strange. She’d thought he was nice, but it was only as she’d got to know him that she’d begun to notice those things that made him uniquely Will: the firmness of his chin, the texture of his skin, the angle of his jaw. The way the edges of his eyes creased when he smiled.

Once she had start noticing, of course, it had been impossible to stop. It hadn’t been long before Alice had found her body utterly in thrall to his, and she’d only had to look at his mouth for her breath to shorten and for her entrails to be flooded with a warmth that spread through her until it lodged, tingling and quivering with excitement, just beneath her skin.

The way it was doing now.

Alice tucked her feet beneath her once more and drew herself in, willing the jangling awareness to fade. ‘It’s not enough,’ she had told Will at Roger’s wedding, and she knew that she had been right. If she let herself be sucked back into those dark, swirling depths of sexual attraction, she would lose control of her life and her self completely, and the last ten years would have been for nothing.

She swallowed, hard. ‘So, what about you?’ she asked to break the lengthening silence. ‘Do you know what you want?’

For years Will would have been able to say instantly that he wanted her. And then he would have said that he wanted to forget her. Now…

‘Not really,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve learnt not to want anything too specific. I don’t want a Porsche or a knighthood or to win a million pounds. But I want other things, I suppose,’ he went on, thinking about it.

‘I want to keep Lily safe. I want her to grow up with a sense of joy and wonder at the world around her. I don’t want her to be afraid of it.’ he turned his head to look at Alice. ‘I don’t want her to end up frightened of love or too proud to admit that she needs other people.’

‘Oh, so you don’t want her to end up like me?’ Alice asked flippantly, but there was no answering smile on Will’s face as he met her gaze steadily.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I want her to be happy.’

Was that really how he saw her-unhappy and afraid? Alice lay in bed that night, scowling into the darkness, hating the memory of the pity she had seen in Will’s face. She didn’t need him to be sorry for her. She was fine. She could look after herself. She didn’t need anybody.

She had thought that she needed Tony, and look where that had got her. She had placed him at the centre of her life and told herself that she was safe at last. Tony hadn’t made her head whirl with excitement, it was true, but it wasn’t passion that Alice was looking for. She had had that with Will, and the power of those unmanageable emotions had left her uneasy and out of control. With Tony, she had felt settled and as if her future was safe at last. It had been a wonderful feeling.

Until Sandi had come along, and her carefully constructed world had fallen apart.

All those years she had dreamed of feeling secure, and with one meeting it had been shattered. Was it the loss of that dream that hurt more than losing Tony himself? Alice wondered for the first time. And did that mean that she had never really loved Tony at all?

For some reason, it was that thought that made Alice cry in a way she hadn’t been able to cry since Tony had left. Trapped in a straitjacket of hurt and humiliation, she had taken refuge in a stony pride, but all at once she could feel the careful barriers she had erected around herself crumbling, and she lay under the mosquito net and wept and wept until at last she fell asleep.

Her eyes were still puffy when she woke the next morning, but she felt curiously released at the same time. Having spent her childhood trying not to let her parents guess how unhappy she was, Alice felt uncomfortable with crying. Until now, it had just seemed another way of admitting that everything was out of control, and she’d been afraid that, once she started, she might never be able to stop.

But this morning it felt as if a heavy hand had been lifted from her heart.

Perhaps she should try tears more often, Alice thought wryly.

Will had gone by the time she got up. She found Lily in the kitchen with the cook, a severe-looking woman called Sara. Alice was quite intimidated by her, but Lily seemed to accept her and was already picking up some words of the local language, a form of French Creole.

Alice was relieved not to have to face Will just yet. She might feel better for a good cry, but she had told him more than she wanted about herself last night, and now she felt exposed. At least she hadn’t cried in front of him- that was something-but he had still been sorry for her, and that wasn’t a feeling Alice liked at all.

She spent the morning exploring the garden with Lily, and together they crossed the track to the beach. In the daylight, the lagoon was a translucent, minty green, its surface ruffled occasionally by a cat’s paw of breeze from the deep blue ocean that swelled and broke against the protecting reef. The leaning coconut palms splashed the white sand with shade, but it was still very hot and Alice was glad to keep on the shoes she had put on to pick her way through the coarse husks and roots that littered the ground beneath the trees.

She had bought the sandals on impulse at a market the previous summer, and Lily was frankly envious. They were cheap but fun, their garish plastic flowers achingly bright in the dazzling sunshine.

‘I wish I could have some shoes like that,’ said Lily wistfully.

‘Let’s see if we can find you some in town,’ Alice said without thinking, and Lily’s face lit up.

‘Could we?’ She sounded dazzled by the prospect.

‘We’ll go this afternoon,’ said Alice.

‘Look what I’ve got,’ Lily said to Will when he got home that evening, and she lifted one foot so that he could admire her new shoes.

There hadn’t been a great deal of choice in town-St Bonaventure would have to give some thought to