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. ‘
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 his skin, for God’s sake! Will was wearing a long-sleeved shirt rolled back at the wrist, but there was only a thin barrier of cotton between his skin and hers, and she was sure that she could feel his warmth and strength through the fine material anyway.
Horribly conscious of the way her body was thrumming in response, she made herself pull her hand away. She couldn’t have been touching him for more than a few seconds, but her heart was beating so hard she was afraid Will would be able to hear it above the crescendo of the night insects.
In this light it was impossible to tell whether he had even registered her touch, and his voice sounded perfectly normal as he credited her with the small progress he had made with Lily.
‘Thanks to you,’ he said. ‘The books were your idea.’
‘But you were the one who read to her.’ Sure that her cheeks were still burning with awareness, Alice was very grateful for the darkness that she hoped hid her expression as effectively as it did Will’s.
‘You’re good with children,’ he said abruptly. ‘Somehow I never imagined that you would be.’
‘I’m not really,’ she confessed, glad that her voice seemed steadier now. ‘I’m not usually that interested in them. But I like Lily.’
‘You’ve never wanted children of your own?’
Alice thought about the years she had spent trying to find a man she could settle down and be happy with, a man she could build a family with, a man who would make her forget Will and all that she had walked away from. She had thought she had found him at last in Tony. They had talked about having children, when they were married, when the time was right. But sometimes the time was never right, and, even if it was, it wasn’t always that easy. Look at Roger and Beth.
‘You can’t always have what you want,’ she said in a low voice, and Will turned to her, wondering if she was thinking about Tony who she had loved so much, and thinking about how much he had wanted her for so long.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Sometimes you can’t.’
‘It’ll rain soon.’ Will handed Alice a glass of fresh lime juice chinking with ice, and sat down next to her with a cold beer.
‘I hope so.’ Alice took the glass with a murmur of thanks and held it against her cheek, letting the condensation cool her skin. ‘Mmm…that feels nice,’ she told Will, who had to make himself look away from the sight of her, her eyes closed in pleasure as the condensation on the glass trickled down her throat and into her cleavage. It was dark on the verandah, but sometimes not dark enough.
‘It’s been so hot today,’ she went on, languid with heat. ‘I took Lily over to see Beth today so we could sit in the air-conditioning for a while.’
With her free hand, Alice lifted a few damp strands of hair that had fallen from their clip onto the back of her neck. ‘The heat doesn’t usually bother me, but for the last couple of days it’s been suffocating. It’s like trying to breathe through a scarf.’
‘It’s the pressure.’ Will was dismayed at how hoarse his voice sounded. ‘A good storm will clear the air.’
‘I can’t wait,’ she sighed. ‘There’s no sign of any rain clouds, though. I’ve been looking at the horizon all day.’
‘They’ll be boiling up now,’ said Will. ‘Didn’t you notice them at sunset? That’s always a sign. It has to break soon.’
He wished that he was just talking meteorologically. A different kind of pressure had been building inexorably over the ten days since Alice had arrived, and Will was finding it harder and harder to ignore.
He had done his best to try and think of her simply as Lily’s nanny, but it wasn’t any good. She was resolutely Alice, impossible to ignore. It didn’t matter if she was just sitting quietly next to him in the dark, or playing cards with Lily or laying the table. It was there in every turn of her head, every gesture of her hands, every sweep of her
