Single Dads Collection. Lynne Marshall
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voluntary work, but that’s not what I want. I’ve got a career, and the longer I stay away from it the more difficult it will be to go back to it. I’ve worked hard to get to this stage,’ she told him. ‘I can’t just chuck it all in now on the basis of a few happy weeks.’
‘At least you admit you have been happy,’ said Will with an unmistakable thread of bitterness. ‘Are you going to be happy in London? No, don’t answer that,’ he said as Alice hesitated. ‘You’ve always put your career before your happiness, haven’t you?’
‘At least I can rely on my career to give me satisfaction and security,’ she retorted. ‘You can’t rely on being happy.’
‘But if you don’t take the risk you’ll never know how happy you could be.’
Alice sighed and pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘We’ve been through all this before, Will,’ she reminded him. ‘You’ve got your career, I’ve got mine, and they don’t fit together. We still want different things from life.’
‘So you won’t stay?’ he asked heavily. ‘Not even for a while?’
She swallowed. ‘No.’ And then, when he said nothing, ‘Surely you can see that the longer I stay, the harder it’s going to be to say goodbye? It’s going to come to goodbye sometime, and I think it would be easier for both of us to do it sooner rather than later.’
‘All right,’ said Will after a moment, his voice empty of expression now. ‘I’ll email the agency tomorrow and get them to send Helen out as soon as possible.’
Alice didn’t reply. She sat unmoving in her chair, paralysed by the weight of the decision she had made. It was the right one, she knew, but that didn’t stop her feeling leaden inside, and her throat was so tight she couldn’t have spoken if she’d tried.
Beside her, Will looked out at the darkness, his jaw clenched with disappointment and a kind of rage for allowing himself to even hope that she would say yes when he must have known that she would say no.
The insects shrilled into the silence, and for a while there was nothing else but the sound of the ocean beyond the reef and the sadness of knowing that the love and the joy they had shared wasn’t going to be enough.
At last, Will drew a long breath and got to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said, holding a hand down to her. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
He stopped as he saw her expression rinsed with surprise, and the hand which he had reached out so instinctively fell to his side. ‘Would you rather not?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ said Alice, faltering. ‘It’s just…I didn’t think you would want to.’
‘We’ve still got a week left,’ he said. ‘You were the one who said that we should make the most of the time we had.’
‘Yes.’ Alice got up almost stiffly, overwhelmed by the relief that had rushed through her when she’d realised that Will wasn’t going to reject her. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had, but the thought that she would never again lie in his arms had been a bitter one. Reaching out, she took his hand deliberately. ‘Yes, I did.’
They didn’t say a word to each other, but there was a desperation and a poignancy to their love-making that wrenched Alice’s heart. There was no need to speak when every kiss, every touch, said more than words ever could how much they were going to miss each other.
By tacit agreement, they both threw themselves into the preparations for the open day. Anything was better than thinking about how they were going to say goodbye.
On Friday morning, Will sat impatiently in the car, waiting for Alice and Lily to appear. He had done his best to talk himself into believing that Alice’s departure was for the best. She had worked really hard on the open day, but she didn’t really fit in here, he reminded himself constantly. She had been right. There would be nothing for her to do on St Bonaventure, and she would soon get bored and restless. Look how little time it had taken for her to get fed up with staying with Beth. Far better for her to go now than to hang around until her frustration soured everything.
He should never have asked her to stay, Will told himself, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and glancing at his watch for the umpteenth time. Alice had a pattern of running away at the first suggestion of commitment. She had always done it, and she always would. For someone with such forceful opinions, she was pathetic when it came to taking risks.
Will was conscious of the growing resentment inside him, which he fed deliberately because it was easier to be angry with Alice than to contemplate life when she was gone. Why had she had to come and upset everything? She could have stayed with Roger and Beth. They could have met a couple of times for some polite conversation and everything would have been fine. But no! She’d had to come and live with them. She had turned his world upside down all over again. She had made him fall in love with her all over again, and, now that she had made sure that she was right at the centre of his life and Lily’s, she was going to leave them both feeling desolate.
Now the tension between them was worse than ever. They hardly talked about anything except the open day. The only way they could communicate was in bed, where they made love with a fierceness and an intensity that left them both shattered. Will didn’t know whether it making things better or worse. He just knew that his stomach felt as if a heavy stone were lodged inside it.
If nothing else, the delay allowed an outlet for his feelings. He leant on the horn. ‘If you’re not ready in two minutes, you can get a taxi,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘We’re coming!’
Alice and Lily came hurrying down the steps from the front door. Alice was holding Lily’s hand and had a straw hat in the other. Will didn’t know whether it was deliberate or not, but she was wearing the green dress she had worn at the party when he had first seen her again. She even had the same silly shoes on. It was almost as if she was making an effort to revert to the brittle, superficial person she had seemed then.
His daughter looked charming in a floppy hat, pink shoes, and a straight pink shift that Will didn’t recall seeing before.
‘New dress?’ he asked, cocking an eye over his shoulder as she clambered into the back seat and Alice helped her fix her seat belt.
‘Alice bought it for me.’
‘A goodbye present,’ Alice explained, getting in beside Will and settling herself with much smoothing and twitching of her skirt. ‘I thought it was time to get her used to the idea of me going,’ she added in an undertone as Will let out the clutch.
Big of her, thought Will sourly, resenting the way she seemed to treat the matter so practically.
‘I don’t want her to go,’ said Lily, whose hearing was better than Alice had imagined.
Now look at the mess Alice had left him in. It was all very well for Alice, swanning back to her oh-so-important career in London, but he was going to be left trying to find a way to comfort a desolate daughter, and he had know idea how he was going to do it.
‘Alice has to go home,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll like Helen. She sounds nice.’
Lily’s bottom lip stuck out. ‘I don’t want Helen. I want Alice.’
‘I’m not going yet,’ Alice interrupted, determinedly bright. ‘So let’s all enjoy today.’
She might be able to enjoy it, Will thought darkly, but he couldn’t. The only advantage was that he was too busy to think much. The open day proved to be a surprisingly popular event and, once the government minister’s tour was out of the way, a steady stream of curious visitors came in to look around and find out what the project was all about and how it would affect them. Fishermen mixed with the expatriate crowd Alice had persuaded to come with a view to drumming up some financial support, and between them all ran what seemed like hordes of children who had got a whiff of the prizes. Alice’s competition was a huge success, and even some of the adults