Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall
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Her polite façade vanished as she watched Will drop into a chair. ‘You look tired,’ she added impulsively.
Will rubbed a hand over his face in a gesture so familiar that Alice felt a sharp pang of remembrance. ‘I’m OK,’ he said gruffly, but he was glad to sit down, he had to admit. The room was cool and quiet after the chaos at the hospital. ‘Thanks,’ he said as Alice came back with one of Roger’s beers, and he drank thirstily.
‘Was it a bad accident?’ Alice asked. She sat on the end of the sofa, far enough away to be in no danger of touching him by accident, but not so far that it looked as if she was nervous about being alone with him.
‘Bad enough.’ Will lowered the bottle with a sigh. ‘A couple of our younger members of staff had taken one of the project jeeps to the beach. It’s their day off, and they had a few beers…you know what it’s like. They’re not supposed to take any of the vehicles unless they’re on project business, but they’re just lads.’
He grimaced, remembering the calls he had had to make to the boys’ parents after he’d contacted the insurance company. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well they took one of our jeeps. It had our logo on the side, so when someone saw it had gone off the road they raised the alarm with the office, and the phone there gets switched through to me at weekends.’
‘Are the boys OK?’
‘They’ll survive. They’ve both recovered consciousness, and the doctors say they’re stable. The insurance company is making arrangements to fly them back to the UK, and the sooner that happens the better. The hospital here isn’t equipped to deal with serious accidents.’ He shook his head. Hospitals were grim enough places at the best of times.
‘I’m glad I didn’t have to take Lily there,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for looking after her, Alice.’
Alice avoided his eyes. ‘It was no trouble,’ she said with a careless shrug. ‘Lily’s good company.’
‘Is she?’ Will took another pull of his beer, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘I can’t get her to talk to me.’
‘You need to give her time, Will. Everything’s very new to her at the moment, and she’s just lost her mother. You can’t expect her to bounce back immediately.’
‘I know, it’s just…I don’t know how to help her,’ he admitted, the words wrenched out of him.
‘You can help her best by being yourself. You’re her father, and she knows that. Don’t try too hard,’ Alice told him. ‘Let her get to know you.’
‘Who made you such an expert on child care?’ Will demanded roughly.
There was a tiny pause, and then, hearing the harshness of his voice still echoing, he put down the beer and leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees and raking both hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a moment. ‘That was uncalled for. Sorry.’
‘You’ve got a lot on your mind at the moment,’ said Alice after a moment.
‘Still.’ He straightened, and the grey eyes fixed on hers seemed to reach deep inside her and elicit a disturbing thrum. ‘It’s no excuse for rudeness.’
With an effort, Alice pulled her gaze away and reached for her lime juice with a hand that was not nearly as steady as she would have liked it to be.
‘You’re right, I don’t know much about children,’ she said. ‘But Lily reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. I was shy, the way she is, and I know what it’s like—oh, not to lose my mother—but that feeling of not really knowing where you are or what you’re doing there…’ The golden eyes clouded briefly. ‘Yes, I remember all that.’
‘Is that why you were so angry with me at the party?’
Alice flushed. ‘Partly. I shouldn’t have said what I did, Will. I’m sorry, I was out of order. It wasn’t any of my business.’
‘No, you were right. I overreacted, mainly because you’d put your finger on all the things I felt most guilty and unsure about.’ He smiled briefly. ‘So it looks as if neither of us behaved quite as well as we might have done.’
He paused, his eyes on Alice, who had tucked her feet up beneath her and was curled into the corner of the sofa.
‘What was the other reason?’ he asked.
‘Reason?’ she said blankly.
‘You said that was “partly” the reason you were angry,’ he reminded her.
‘Oh…’ The colour deepened in Alice’s cheeks, and she fiddled with the piping on the arm of the sofa. ‘It’s stupid, but I suppose it was meeting you again after all this time. I was nervous,’ she confessed.
‘Me too,’ said Will, and her eyes flew to his in disbelief.
‘Really?’
He lifted his shoulders in acknowledgement. ‘You were the last person I expected to see,’ he told her with a rueful smile. ‘I was completely thrown.’
‘Oh,’ said Alice with an embarrassed little laugh. ‘Well…I’m glad it wasn’t just me.’
‘No.’
An awkward silence fell, and stretched at last into something that threatened to become even more difficult. Will drank his beer. Alice traced an invisible pattern on the arm of the sofa and kept her eyes lowered, but beneath her lashes her eyes kept sliding towards the fingers curled casually around that brown bottle.
Those fingers had once curved around her breast. They had drifted over her skin, stroking and smoothing and seeking. They had explored every inch of her, and late at night, when they had been intertwined with her own, she had felt safe in a way she never had before or since.
Alice’s throat was dry, and that little thrum inside her was growing stronger and warmer, spreading treacherously along her veins and trembling at the base of her spine.
She reached forward for her glass with something like desperation. She shouldn’t be remembering Will touching her, kissing her, loving her. They weren’t the same people they had been then. Will was a father, and had more on his mind right now than remembering how the mere touch of his hands had been enough to melt her bones and reduce her to gasping, arching delight.
Sipping her lime juice, she sought frantically for something to say, but in the end it was Will who broke the silence.
‘Roger and Beth still out?’
The question sounded too hearty to be natural, but Alice fell on it like a lifeline.
‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘You know what party animals they are.’
‘Why didn’t you go?’ Will asked her.
‘I didn’t feel like it.’
She didn’t quite meet his eyes as she adjusted her hair clip. Telling him how she had dithered over the possibility of meeting him again wouldn’t help. The atmosphere was taut enough as it was, even though they were both labouring to keep the conversation innocuous.
‘I’ve spent all week going to coffee mornings and lunches, and we’ve been out to supper twice, and every time you meet the same people,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I had a much better time with Lily this afternoon.’
Will had finished his beer, and he looked around for a mat to put the bottle down on. ‘What did you do with her?’
‘Oh, you know…we just pottered around.’
‘No, I really want to know,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to spend more time with Lily, and it would help if I knew what she liked doing.’
‘Well, she’s very observant,’ said Alice, glad to have moved the conversation into less fraught channels. ‘And she’s interested in