Never Too Late (65 page)

towards Evie but, before he could catch her eye, she

immediately turned to Helene and muttered something

inane about the weather.

Everyone was too busy to notice Mia and Max move

into the hallway, Mia’s tanned and slender arm wrapping

itself possessively around his. But Evie noticed.

The meal continued, with applause for Luisa’s cooking

and even more applause when Franz brought out a bottle

of Sambucca and a box of matches to go with the

enormous fruit salad everyone was having for dessert.

Evie was on autopilot, wondering how long she’d be able

to cope with this. It bad been a huge mistake to come here.

She couldn’t bear the sadness inside her at the thought

that Max was involved with Mia after all the things he’d

said to her.

When Max and Mia arrived on the balcony half an hour

later, Evie stiffened. Mia’s face was happy, her mouth curved

into a wonderful smile. She slid into Max’s vacant seat

beside Franz, leaving Max to search for a spare chair. He

dragged it to the table and looked up as if to figure out

where he’d position it, when Mia pulled his sleeve and made

him sit beside her. She leaned forward, murmured something

into his ear and then brushed her mouth against his

cheek. He smiled. Evie watched, jealousy rattling inside her.

Helene laid a soft hand on Evie’s arm. ‘Mia flirts,’ she

said simply. ‘It is her way.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me what Mia does,’ Evie said,

with a false laugh.

Helene shrugged. ‘I think Max would want you to

understand Mia. She and he were … involved,’ Helene

said with a Gallic raising of eyebrows to imply that the

involvement was more than just meetings to discuss production

values. ‘It is over but now Mia wants it back. She is

bored and is used to having her own way.’

‘I can see that,’ Evie said drily, as Max obediently held a

lighter up to Mia’s cigarette. ‘If she wants him, she can

have him.’

Helene leaned closer. ‘I know him a long time,’ she

whispered. ‘He doesn’t want her but he is kind. He lets her

down easily, as you say. It is you his eyes follow all the time.’

Stirring sugar into her cooling coffee, Evie spoke bitterly:

‘Max is a man, Helene. His eyes follow anything female

with a pulse, and as it happens I’m getting married next

month. So I really don’t care whether he and Mia rekindle

their fling or not.’

She pushed back her chair and rushed inside, desperate

to find the loo before she started to blub again. The third

door she opened led her into a small cloakroom decorated

with French lithographs of semi-nude Edwardian girls

advertising beauty soap. She stayed there, sitting on the

toilet lid until Luisa knocked gently on the door and asked

if she was unwell.

‘Yes,’ Evie said truthfully, opening the door. She was sick

with despair, after all. ‘Could you ring a taxi for me, Luisa?’

she begged. ‘I want to go home but I don’t want to break

up the party. I just want to slip away. Will you get Vida to

bring me my handbag so I can tell her? Rut don’t tell

anyone else.’

Luisa’s kind, understanding face nearly made her cry. ‘I

will do it,’ she said.

Vida wanted to drive her home but Evie was firm. ‘It’s

just a migraine,’ she said. ‘Please don’t come, it’s too early

to break up the party on the last night of the holiday. I’ll

be fine. Don’t say anything to anyone, please,’ she

implored.

The taxi cost practically all the money she had with her,

but she was so grateful to the driver for getting her away

from the party that she’d have paid him double. At the

villa she roamed around downstairs for ages, tidying up the

kitchen, wiping down surfaces with a cloth and sweeping

the marble floors. When she heard the wooden gates being

opened, she ran upstairs, left her bedroom light off as she

pulled off her clothes and threw herself into bed. Her

breathing had only just got back to normal after her dash

upstairs, when she heard the bedroom door open.

‘Evie,’ said Max in a low voice.

Clutching the bedclothes tightly, she kept her eyes glued

shut and didn’t move.

‘Evie,’ he said again.

When he still received no reply, the door shut again

quietly. She cried herself to sleep.

Cara flopped down on the bar stool Rosie had been holding

for her, exhausted after boogying for half an hour with a

tall, slim Greek boy named Tim. Lean and hungry-looking,

he was one of the best dancers she’d ever met, with a pelvis

that swivelled like Elvis’s in Viva Las Vegas. He was proving

to be one of the best kissers too. The way he’d French

kissed her on the dance floor made her realise how much she missed the constant love making with Ewan.

When they’d been together, there’d never been a minute

when they weren’t touching, holding hands or giving each other small, affectionate kisses. It was that affection she missed, she thought, a shaft of misery piercing her. Why

was it that marvellous moments made her sad? Even when

she and Evie had been relaxing by the pool, in blissful

sunshine, she’d felt maudlin. Being happy was so bloody

bittersweet.

But despite thinking about times past, Cara was enjoying

herself. Feeling Tim’s mouth superglued to hers, his tongue

plunging excitingly down her throat, had made her feel sexy

for the first time since she and Ewan had split up-Maybe he

was the one, the all-important post-relationship bonk. He

was very charming and obviously fancied the knickers off

her. Cara grinned, glad she’d worn her clinging sharkskin

trousers, even though she was afraid she’d roast in them.

‘Talk about tonsil hockey,’ grinned Rosie, when she

turned around on her bar stool to talk to her aunt. ‘I was

afraid I’d have to send a search party down your throat

with a rope and crampons to haul him up.’

Cara erupted into laughter. ‘I was a bit worried myself,’

she said. ‘But he’s cute, isn’t he?’

‘Very cute,’ Rosie agreed, ‘and, boy, is he eager.’ She

leaned forward and whispered into Cara’s ear. ‘His friend

was just as eager but I told him I don’t rate a quick screw

outside a Spanish nightclub as the ideal way to lose my

virginity. That soon shut him up.’

Cara howled with laughter. ‘If your mother ever heard

you talk like that …’ she said.

‘She’d be pleased I wouldn’t dream of bonking some

complete stranger,’ Rosie pointed out. ‘I’m not throwing

myself away on someone who won’t remember my name

in the morning. My generation has a different attitude to

sex from yours,’ she added reprovingly. ‘Quick casual flings

aren’t true to the message of strong women. I have too

much respect for myself to do that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Cara, feeling chastened that her seventeen-year-old niece had her head screwed on more firmly than

she did when it came to sex. Lord knew what Rosie would

say if she knew Cara had bonked her company’s motorbike

courier thanks to nothing more than about a zillion Tequila

Slammers and a total lack of inhibition. Respect didn’t

even come into it.

‘It’s not a conservative morality thing,’ continued Rosie,

the stalwart of the debating society getting into full swing.

‘It’s about being strong and valuing yourself and your

body. We have discussions about this all the time. You

know, if Brad Pitt appeared and asked you to have sex,

you’d go mad for him, wouldn’t you? But,’ Rosie sipped

her beer thoughtfully, ‘you wouldn’t be doing yourself any

favours. You’d just be some old slag to him and you’d

never forgive yourself

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Cara murmured, thinking that if

Brad Pitt landed in her flat looking for sex, she, Phoebe and

Zoe would probably flatten each other in their attempts to

get to him first. If it was a generational thing, then Rosie’s

generation were so different from hers.

Cara’s peers thought it was a sign of equality to treat

men on their own terms, to be a lad, to have sex with

the thoughtlessness of men. Whereas Rosie’s generation

obviously thought that treating men with detachment

until it suited them to get close was the way forward.

Reflecting on the complete disaster she’d made of her

own personal life, Cara decided that her niece had it all

worked out.

‘Wanna dance, Rosie babes?’ said a voice. It was Gwynnie,

a blonde Australian girl, who, with her two pals, had

befriended Rosie while Cara had been off with Tim. ‘See ya

got rid of the geek!’

‘Yeah, he obviously thought he was a customs officer,’

Rosie joked, ‘hands all over the place. I told him to shove

off. Let’s dance.’

Cara watched the younger girls head for the cramped

dance floor where they danced with abandon, hair and

arms flying rhythmically, definitely not requiring any guys

to make their evening go with a bang.

‘You kept me a seat,’ said Tim, appearing miraculously

with a bottle of beer.

‘Oh, er, yeah,’ said Cara, not sure what to do with him

after Rosie’s sobering denunciation of casual sex. Perhaps

that post-relationship bonk was a bad idea after all. But

Tim, high on strong Spanish beer and turned on by

dancing with this Amazonian beauty of a girl, was in the

mood for lurve.

He sat close to Cara, nuzzling her neck and whispering

sweet nothings in her ear in Greek. At least she hoped they

were sweet nothings - he could have been reciting her

extracts from the chemical engineering textbooks he was

studying in college for all she knew.

It had sounded lovely earlier, when they’d been lulled by

sexy music throbbing out an erotic beat. Now, with Rosie’s

condemnation of laddishness ringing in her ears, Tim’s

murmurings were decidedly less erotic.

It was after twelve, the club was growing hotter and it

was jammed. There were people crowded around them,

crushing Tim closer to Cara as they tried to get to the bar.

Sweat glistened on his forehead and Cara could feel the

back of her thighs growing damper by the minute in her

sharkskin trousers. She took a cooling sip of mineral water

but that only helped for a moment. It was so hot and

sticky. What she really wanted was to get outside and feel a

refreshing breeze on her face.

‘I need some air,’ she gasped to Tim. ‘I’ll be back in a

minute.’

Smirking, he followed her through the throng and past

the loos until they reached a small dark courtyard at the

back of the club where heaving bodies swayed in the

moonlight. The music was muffled out here but it was

wonderfully cool after the volcanic temperature inside.

Cara flapped her crimson shirt around her body to cool

herself and found herself jammed up against the wall by an

eager Tim. The whitewashed plaster was uneven and

ground into her back as Tim ground himself into her front,

tongue on overdrive and hands body-searching madly. Like

Rosie’s would-be customs officer, Cara thought in shock.

Frozen in surprise, she said and did nothing. She could

hardly complain, could she? They had been glued to each

other all evening and he’d evidently assumed her desire for

a little night air was a coded message of desire for him. The

Greek sweet nothings had dried up as Tim buried his head

in her chest, moving downwards.

Cara felt suddenly weary. She didn’t want this, she

wanted to go home and climb into bed between cool, clean

sheets to read her book. But it was all her own fault. She’d

led him on and now he wanted to collect. It was always her

own fault: a couple of drinks and she felt happy, confident

and capable of flirting. The only problem was, flirting was

only permissible when you were able to head the flirter off

at the pass.

The way she handled it, they took her lack of resistance

to mean all systems go and railroaded their way on

through. Tim was groaning, frantically trying to open the

button to her trousers. The waistband was tight after six

days of glorious Spanish food and opening the button

almost impossible, even when you wanted to. Cara didn’t.

What the hell was she letting this drunken kid unbutton

her trousers for? What the hell was she doing out here?

She didn’t want to be here and she was going inside, now!

‘Tim!’ she barked, shoving him and his burrowing hands

away from her with all her considerable strength. ‘Whaddya

think you’re doing?’

‘What we both want,’ he said, smirking.

‘I came out here because I wanted air, not you!’ she said

fiercely.

Stunned, his face like a spoiled child told he’s not

getting the latest Sony PlayStation for his birthday, he

gazed at her. ‘But you came outside …’ he stammered.

‘For air, Tim!’ she yelled. “I said I wanted air and that’s

what I meant. I told you I’d come back.’

Eyes flashing, he shrugged. ‘Women never say what they

mean.’ he said dismissively.

Cara drew herself up to her full height, gave him a