Anything but Vanilla... (12 page)

‘How about you? How do you survive in the jungle?’ she asked.

Did that mean that she didn’t want to take the easy option, either, but, like him, wanted to stay here? Just the two of them. Eat, talk, let this go wherever it would.

He took another long drink, felt the iced water slide down inside him. It didn’t help.

‘I don’t starve,’ he admitted. ‘What have I got to work with?’

‘Let’s see.’

She stepped over a terrier, too old and arthritic to reach his hand. He leaned forward and stroked his head.

‘Uh-oh.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve said that. I’m suspecting the worst.’

‘Geli has been in London all week, Gran and Basil have been at KG all day. No one has been shopping.’ She looked round the fridge door at him. ‘Clearly it wasn’t just Gran’s tiredness that prompted an adjournment to the pub. What we have is a chunk of cheese, a carton of milk, a couple of cans of beer and some water.’

She turned to look up at him. Her skirt was brushing against his thigh, her lips were just inches away and for a moment neither of them moved. Then Midge nudged him, demanding his attention.

Sorrel looked away.

He caught his breath. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this. A swift adjournment to the pub was the sensible move.

‘The options are limited, but if your repertoire includes an omelette,’ she said, holding up the cheese, ‘I can handle the salad.’

‘Great idea...’ sensible clearly wasn’t on the menu ‘...but we appear to be missing two of the vital ingredients. Eggs and salad.’

‘Not a problem. Come with me.’ She closed the door, picked up an old basket and headed down the garden, followed by the dogs. Once they were beyond the lilac, a daisy-strewn lawn opened up surrounded by perennial borders coming to life. Beyond it there was a well-maintained vegetable garden.

The walls were smothered with roses beginning to put out buds, suggesting that it had once had a very different purpose, but what had once been flower beds were now filled with vegetables. One had a fine crop of early potatoes, onions and shallots were coming along apace and sticks were supporting newly planted peas and beans. On the other side of the wide, herb-lined grass path, rows of early salad leaves, spring onions, radishes and young carrots basked in a weed-free environment.

‘Salad,’ Sorrel said and, with a casual wave in the direction of a large chicken run sheltered beneath a blossom-smothered apple tree at the far end of the garden, ‘Eggs.’

‘You’re into self-sufficiency?’ he asked as half a dozen sleek brown hens and a cockerel paused in their endless scratching for worms to regard him with deep suspicion from the safety of a spacious enclosure.

‘Not by design. There was a time when growing our own wasn’t a lifestyle choice, it was a necessity. I hated it.’ He caught a glimpse beneath the façade of the bright, confident woman who knew exactly what she wanted and took no prisoners to get it and saw a girl who’d had to dig potatoes if she wanted to eat. ‘Fortunately, Gran has green fingers.’

‘Not Basil?’

‘Basil is the skeleton in our family cupboard. We didn’t know he existed until five years ago when he and Rosie turned up on our doorstep.’

‘That would be the long story?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it would.’ She was smiling, so he guessed that part of it at least was a good one, but she didn’t elaborate. ‘When I was little this was a mass of flowers. The kind of magical country garden that you see in lifestyle magazines. It was even featured in the
County Chronicle
. Gran had help in those days and she held garden open days to raise money for charity.’

‘What happened?’

‘What always happens to this family, Alexander. A man happened.’

‘I feel as if I should apologise, but I don’t know what for.’

Sorrel shook her head and a curl escaped the neat twisted knot that lay against her neck. ‘Gran’s always been a bit fragile, emotionally. That’s what a bad marriage can do to you. And then my mother died, leaving her with three girls to raise on her own. She was easy meat for the kind of man who preys on lonely widows who have been left well provided for. She needed someone to lean on...’ She sighed. ‘It wasn’t just her. We all needed someone and he made the sun shine for us at a very dark time. He took us out for treats, bought us silly presents, made us laugh again. We all thought he was wonderful.’

‘If your mother had just died, you were all vulnerable,’ he said, wondering where her father had been while all this was happening. ‘And likeability is the stock in trade of the con man.’

‘I know...’ She shook her head. ‘He romanced us all, entranced us, but it was all a lie. He took everything we had and a lot more besides.’

‘Did the police ever catch up with him?’

‘We never reported it. What was the point? Gran had signed all the documents and I don’t suppose for a moment he used his real name.’

‘Even so.’

‘I know. He probably went on and did the same thing to other women, but Elle was terrified that if the authorities knew how bad things were Geli and I would be taken into care.’

He looked around the garden. Hard times maybe, but what he was seeing here was survival. A glimpse of what had made Sorrel strong enough to stand her ground when he’d tried to drive her away. Strong enough to win business from hard-headed businessmen whose first reaction must have been much the same as his.

What he didn’t understand was why she would need the approval of someone like Graeme Laing. The man had spoken to her as if she were a wilful child rather than an intelligent adult.

‘You managed to keep the house,’ he said. ‘That’s something.’

‘He’d have taken that, too, leaving us out on the street without a backward look if he could have got hold of the deeds. He must have been digging for information when Elle helpfully explained that Grandad had left the house in a trust for his grandchildren. That it can’t be sold until the youngest reaches the age of twenty-one.’

‘Your grandfather didn’t trust your grandmother?’ He thought of Lally’s distress when he’d mentioned her smile.

‘They didn’t have a good marriage and he spent most of his time working abroad, but I think it was my mother he was really worried about. She was a serial single mother; three babies by three different men, each of whom was just passing through. Elle believes that it was deliberate. She wanted children, a family, but she’d seen enough of her parents’ marriage not to want a husband.’

‘Are you saying that you don’t know your father?’

‘None of us do.’ She lifted her shoulders in a careless shrug, as if it didn’t matter. ‘Probably a good thing.’

‘Child support might have helped.’

‘She didn’t need it. Grandad looked after us, but I imagine he saw a time when some totally unsuitable man would realise the potential and, instead of planting his seed and moving on without a backward glance, would decide to stick around and make himself comfortable.’

‘How on earth did you manage?’ he asked. Trying to imagine how an old woman and three young girls had coped with a huge house they couldn’t sell and no money.

‘Elle held everything together. Held us all together, as a family. She sold anything of value to pay off the debts, the credit-card companies and, instead of going to college to study catering, she took a job as a waitress to pay the bills and make sure we didn’t go hungry. She deserves every bit of happiness.’

And not just her sister... ‘How old were you when your mother died, Sorrel?’

‘Thirteen. Cancer, caught too late,’ she said, matter-of-factly, but he saw a shadow cross her face like a passing cloud, and gone as quickly. ‘It was just the four of us until Great-uncle Basil turned up.’

‘He’s your grandfather’s brother?’

She nodded. ‘He’s been so good for Gran. She’s a changed woman since he arrived.’ And with that she summoned up a smile, putting the bad memories behind her. ‘He does most of the hard work in the garden these days. The rescue chickens are a recent addition. Geli volunteers at the animal shelter and tends to bring home the overflow.’

‘Rescue chickens? You’re kidding.’

‘They had scarcely a feather to bless themselves with when they arrived,’ she said, opening the rear door and feeling inside the nest boxes for eggs.

‘They don’t seem very grateful,’ he said, taking the basket, with its single egg.

‘No.’ She grinned. ‘How do you feel about chicken soup?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, right, I can see that happening,’ he said, putting his arm around her and heading back towards the house. ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to be very generous and agree to eat in the pub.’

‘Good decision. Just give me five minutes to change.’

‘Not so fast,’ he said, putting down the basket and keeping a firm hold on her waist, turning her so that she was facing him. ‘There’s one condition.’

‘Oh?’ She made a move to tuck the stray curl—the one with a mind of its own—behind her ear but he beat her to it, holding it there for a moment, feeling the flutter of her pulse as his thumb caressed her throat. ‘What’s that?’

‘I get to choose the pub.’

Sorrel stopped breathing.

For a moment there she had remembered the mission. Security. Safety. To be in control of her destiny. To be the partner of a man who would be there always. Not like her grandfather who’d spent most of his life working abroad to avoid the woman he’d married. Not like her father, just passing through. Not like the man who’d reduced them to penury. But Alexander’s hand was at her waist, his voice soft as lamb’s fleece, wrapping her in a kind of warmth that she had never known.

His fingers were barely touching her cheek yet, from those tiny points of contact, energy flowed into her, firing a need, sensitising her skin so that she wanted to stretch like a cat, purr, rub against him, wrap herself around him.

They were standing so close that all she could see were his eyes. Everything else had faded away: the mad twittering of the sparrows in the hedge, the mingled scents of lilac and crushed grass, the agitated muttering of the hens. Her world had retracted to the ocean deep blue. She was sinking, going under... Sinking into a kiss that stole her breath, stole her mind, stole her body as his long fingers brushed against her shoulder and the pressure of his thumb against her nape sent ripples of pleasure down her spine.

He drew her closer so that she was pressed against him, breast to hip, sensuously plundering her mouth until her whole body was melting with a rush of intimacy, a need that stormed through her body, turning her legs to jelly. And then, when he was the only thing stopping her from melting into a little heap on the grass, he eased back to look down at her.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Sorrel felt the world tilt. All the certainties she’d lived by fall away. She knew it was crazy, that next week, next month, he would be on the other side of the world, but some moments were to be seized.

Her mother had known that. Ria and Nancy knew it.

‘No...’ The word was thick on her tongue and even as she said it a dozen problems tumbled out of the woodwork, a hundred reasons why this had to be the worst idea in the world. Because he was asking for much more than her approval of his pub choice. ‘Yes...’

Alexander had turned her world upside down, changing her from a woman in control of her life, her emotions, into someone who could forget everything when he touched her. He wouldn’t take money, but he would steal her peace of mind, undermine the foundation on which she had built her future. Steal her heart. And then he’d leave...

With a supreme effort of will, she pulled away from him, putting air between them so that she could breathe, think. Sinking down onto the battered old bench by the back door before her legs gave way.

She took in big gulps of air, practically flinching as the noise rushed back in. Who knew that sparrows could be loud?

‘I don’t do this,’ she said, her voice catching in her throat, and every cell in her body was screaming out to touch him. For him to touch her. ‘I’m not like my mother,’ she said, and it sounded like a betrayal.

‘Aren’t you? She knew what she wanted and went for it. Isn’t that what you do?’

TWELVE

All I really need is love, but a little ice cream would do to be going on with.

—Rosie’s ‘Little Book of Ice Cream’

Sorrel looked up at Alexander, her eyes huge. ‘You don’t understand.’

Actually, he did. She didn’t do this, and neither did he. This was his cue to get up and walk away. He’d planned to drive to Wales this afternoon and find Ria, but he didn’t even have to do that. She’d be back in her own good time and what happened next was Sorrel’s decision, not his. Graeme Laing would be there to stop her doing anything foolish.

He could be on a flight back to Pantabalik tonight. It should be easy.

It had always been easy in the past. Even when he’d been engaged to Julia he couldn’t wait to get back.

But he’d tried walking away from Sorrel and, as if he’d been held on a piece of bungee, he’d bounced straight back.

He didn’t do this, but he took her hand and said, ‘Ria had a baby.’

Her eyes widened. ‘But she hasn’t...’ Then, ‘She wouldn’t...’

‘No. My father gave her the money to dispose of his indiscretion but you’re right, she didn’t.’

‘But...’

‘She was very young and she was sure that once he saw the baby he’d want it. Ria is borderline bi-polar, high highs, low lows. She took her newborn son and presented him to his father on a dizzy high. You can imagine his reaction.’

‘Poor Ria.’

‘She collapsed with post-partum psychosis. Delusions, self-harm... The baby was taken from her, she was sectioned and by the time she had recovered her mother and my father had arranged for the baby to be adopted. She’s been trying to find her son, my brother, ever since.’

‘That’s how you met?’

‘I found letters from Ria, from her mother, amongst his papers after his death. He’d paid her mother...’ He broke off.

‘You contacted Ria? Hoping to find your brother?’

‘Yes. If they’d gone through the proper channels I could have registered with them in case he ever decided to search for his mother. But it was a private arrangement and he was taken abroad.’

‘Alexander...’ Her hand tightened around his fingers. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish she’d trusted me enough to tell me.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not you, Sorrel. She never talks about it. She still feels terrible guilt.’

‘She shouldn’t.’

‘No.’

‘I’m glad she had you to support her.’

‘I’ve done what I can. Tried to make amends. I hoped that the ice-cream parlour would give her a focus.’

‘I can see why she loves you.’

‘I love her, too. But not like this,’ he said. ‘Not like this.’

Like this?

Sorrel heard the words and Alexander was looking at her so intently that for a moment she thought he meant something more than the sexual frisson that had been burning up to the air between them from the moment they’d set eyes on each other.

Which was ridiculous. He hardly knew her.

She hardly knew him and yet her entire world was in turmoil. She couldn’t think, could hardly breathe. It was as if she had been in suspended animation and had suddenly woken, seventeen again and on the brink of something amazing...

‘Like this?’

Heart pounding, she reached out and touched his face where the lengthening shadows threw into relief the scars that ran in faint lines from his temple to his jaw, followed their path with her lips, trailing soft kisses across his cheek, the stubble of his beard sparking tiny flashes of electricity that buzzed through her. As her fingers reached his mouth she paused, raised her lashes and looked at him.

He would leave, she knew that, but he wouldn’t steal her heart: she was giving it to him. Here, now, this was her day.

‘Forget the pub,’ she said. ‘We can send out for pizza, but right now the only thing I want to eat is you.’

She didn’t wait for his answer, but caught his lower lip between hers, sucking it in, wanting to taste him, devour him, and he responded like a starving man offered a feast.

The kiss consumed them both and she had no idea how they made it up the stairs to the small apartment she’d created for herself beneath the eaves.

She was only conscious of his mouth, of his hands beneath her skirts, on her thighs as, stumbling in their haste, she backed up the stairs, leading the way, pulling his shirt over his head, desperate to see, to touch what had until now been no more than tantalising glimpses of silken skin.

They tumbled through the door to her bedroom, breathless, laughing as he unzipped her dress. It fell in a whoosh of green cotton and white petticoats in a heap around her feet, leaving her standing in a white-and-green polka-dot bra, matching pants and lacy-topped hold-up stockings. And suddenly neither of them was laughing.

‘Pretty...’ His voice was thick as he stroked away the straps and kissed the curve between her neck and shoulder. She leaned towards him, wanting more, and he slipped the hook so that the bra joined her dress. His thumb lightly touched a painfully tight nipple, then his tongue, and she gasped as the shock of it went through her like a lightning rod. ‘Very pretty...’

‘Alex...’ His name was a plea. She wanted to feel him, see him, possess him, and he lifted her, taking her down onto the bed with him.

Nothing she had done with a fumbling teen had prepared Sorrel for this. She wanted to throw herself on him, grab the moment, but the siren instinct, as old as Eve, was clamouring through her veins and, curbing the urgency to know, to be complete, she lowered her lips to a chest spattered with sun-gilded hair.

It tickled her lips as she feathered soft kisses down his throat, along his collarbones and he seized her as she flicked her tongue over his nipples.

‘Wait!’ she commanded. ‘Wait...’ She wanted him to remember this when he was on the other side of the world, up to his neck in jungle or lying on a hammock, or walking along a tropical beach. She wanted to remember this when that was all he was—a memory.

He grinned as he lay back, relaxed, arms stretched above his head, surrendering himself. ‘Help yourself.’

Afterwards, he held her until she came back down, opened her eyes onto a new world.

‘For a woman who’s waited so long,’ Alexander said, ‘you were in an almighty hurry.’

Oh, God... ‘I’m sorry. Did you...?’

‘I most certainly did,’ he said, before looping his arm around her to pull her close, so that her head was on his shoulder and they were lying together, ‘but next time we’ll take it slower. Did you say something about pizza?’

Next time... She absorbed the fact that he wanted to do it again. ‘I’m sorry about dinner.’

‘I’m not. While you owe me dinner, I have a built-in excuse to keep coming back.’

‘You don’t need an excuse,’ she said. ‘You can come any time.’

He grinned. ‘Give me a minute. I’m not a nineteen-year-old.’

‘No, thank goodness.’

He glanced at her, but his call to the pizza parlour was answered at that moment and he concentrated on ordering, checking what she liked. Only when that was done did he turn to her and say, ‘Okay. We have thirty minutes. Do you want to tell me about it?’

She shifted a limb that felt boneless. ‘About what?’

‘How you come to be the last twenty-three-year-old virgin in Maybridge. Possibly in the entire county.’

‘I’m not...’ He raised one of those expressive eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t...’

‘No? I have to tell you that the nineteen-year-old who was there before me didn’t make much of an impression.’

‘No?’ She thought about the very thorough job that Alexander had done and grinned. ‘No.’ Heady on the scent of fresh sweat, so relaxed that she was glued to the bed and aware that she was wearing a grin that would have put the Cheshire cat to shame, she said, ‘Actually he was eighteen. I was seventeen and utterly besotted.’

‘Lucky guy.’

‘I thought I was the lucky one. He was captain of rugby, had a place at Oxford and he’d chosen to take me to the end-of-year school party.’ She was going to be his summer girl, the envy of every other girl in village... ‘He’d got hold of the key to the mat store at the back of the gym, but he was a little...over-eager. And then someone was tapping on the door. Apparently he wasn’t the only one with ambitions that night.’

‘Are you saying that your disappointment was so intense that you didn’t bother again?’

‘Well, it wasn’t quite what the romance novels I’d read had led me to imagine. Awkward, fumbling...’ Not like this. ‘But I imagine, given the chance to practise, we’d have got our act together.’

‘No doubt.’ He smoothed a damp strand of hair from her forehead. ‘Believe me, if that was your first effort, I can’t wait to see what you’ll do when you’ve hit your stride.’

She grinned. ‘Maybe we should...’ she danced her fingers down his breastbone ‘...you know. Just to make sure?’

He clamped his hand over hers, holding it where it was. ‘You’re not sure?’

She could feel his heart beating beneath her palm. A solid, regular thump that her own racing pulse picked up. It steadied.

There was going to be a next time. There was no rush...

‘You can’t blame a girl for trying,’ she said, blowing on his sweat-slicked skin. ‘I’ve got a lot of time to make up.’

‘Quality, not quantity is the way to go. Tell me why it’s taken you so long to try again?’

‘Do I have to?’

She didn’t want to talk about the past. She’d been clinging to it like a drowning woman to driftwood for too long but, having cast adrift so spectacularly, she wanted it done with. If she told Alexander now, she would never have to think about it again. Never look back, only forward.

‘I’ve told you mine. It’s your turn.’

She twitched her shoulders. What did it matter? She’d never told anyone, not even her sisters, carrying the shame of it inside her, but it had all happened so long ago.

‘Okay. He’d been to a school disco, had a few swigs from a bottle of vodka someone had smuggled in and, when he got home a little bit high on mission accomplished, he did what any eighteen-year-old boy would do.’

He frowned, clearly not getting it.

‘He dumped his clothes on the floor for his mother to pick up and wash.’ Something Alexander wouldn’t know about, she realised. ‘I don’t suppose you did that at boarding school.’

‘No, but I’m getting the picture. She found a packet of condoms?’

‘With one missing.’

‘So? She had to assume that at his age he’d be trying to get into some girl’s knickers. At least he was taking precautions.’

‘It wasn’t what he was doing, Alexander, it was who he was doing it with. My mother had three children by three different men. I look a lot like her except for my hair. She was blonde...’

‘She assumed you were going to follow in her footsteps?’

‘Three girls without a father to their name, living on their own with only a slightly dotty grandmother who’d lost all her money to a con man? Her imagination was working overtime and she packed him straight off to his uncle in America for the summer.’

‘Presumably he could have said no.’

‘Me, or the summer at Cape Cod with hundreds of girls who would fall for his...’ she adopted an American accent ‘...“cute” English accent.’ At the time it had felt like a knife being stuck into her heart, but it had happened a long time ago. ‘Which would you have chosen at eighteen?’ She didn’t wait for his answer. ‘I might have been besotted, Alexander, but I imagine he thought much the same as his mother.’

‘Oh? And what was that?’

Exactly what his mother had thought was made very plain when she’d turned up at his house the following morning.

‘That I was a little tart who’d lumber her son with an unwanted baby. Presumably that’s why he’d picked me as his date in the first place. The tart bit...not the baby. He was smarter than that.’

‘Well, you certainly showed them. Or did the rest of the village mothers keep their sons on leading strings?’

‘If they did, it backfired. I could have dated any boy in the school that last year.’ She could laugh about it now, but at the time she had just felt dirty... ‘I finally understood why Elle didn’t date.’

‘She didn’t?’

‘We have a family song...
“Oh tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you? There are a few, kind sir, But simple girls, and proper too...”’
She began cheerfully enough, but then her voice faltered... ‘Our family attracts scandal like wasps to a picnic.’

‘There’s more?’

She shrugged. ‘Basil ran off with his girlfriend’s brother and was written out of the family history by his father and brother. Grandma realised too late that she didn’t like the man she was about to marry...’

‘Too late? It isn’t too late until the vows are made.’ The teasing look vanished and there was an edge to his voice.

She raised her hand to his cheek, turned his face towards hers.

‘Better to admit the mistake before the wedding,’ she said.

For a moment he resisted, but then raised a wry smile. ‘You’re absolutely right. You can’t expect a woman to hang around waiting for months, years...’

He will leave...

‘What was her name?’ she asked.

The only sound was that of a blackbird in the lilac below her window, the catch of her breath in her throat, and it seemed like for ever before he said, ‘Julia. Her name was Julia. She decided my best man was a better bet.’

His bride and his best friend. Could it be any worse?

‘I left him to help her organise the wedding. He was there with her, talking to the vicar, choosing the venue, doing all the stuff I should have been doing instead of being on the other side of the world playing Tarzan.’

‘She said that?’ she asked, shocked.

‘She was angry. She had every right to be. And maybe a touch defensive.’

‘More than a touch, I’d say. She must have known what you were doing when she agreed to marry you.’

‘She’d assumed that I’d stop. Join the board of WPG. I may have given her that impression. I may even have believed it.’ He glanced at her. ‘It’s not a mistake I’d make again.’

‘No.’

Message received and understood.

He would leave...

A long peal on the door bell broke the tension.