Page 71 of Hot Greek Summer

‘Will you come on a date with me on Saturday?’

Bloody hell! Hot and cold didn’t come close to covering the man.

‘God, Jesse. Make your mind up,’ she said, nervous now even if she hadn’t been before. ‘You pretty much knocked me back two minutes ago. Besides, I’m pretty sure bohemian artists don’t do anything as pedestrian as date.’

‘There’s a drive-in cinema on the beach at the weekend,’ he said, ignoring her comment. ‘Over on Moonlight Bay. I thought it might be your kind of thing.’

‘Is it really called Moonlight Bay?’ she asked, attracted despite herself.

He nodded. ‘They have the open-air cinema there a couple of times a year. English movies usually, with Greek subtitles. I thought we could take your car, being rag-top.’

Her car. The drive-in movies. He sounded like he’d thought this out.‘Oh! Eugh. Well, we could, but the last owner keeled over in the car at the same drive-in movie because his wife touched his … er, his knee.’

‘I’ll control myself if you can,’ he said, making light of what had happened between them, retreating behind his favourite safety net, sarcasm.’Can you?’ He watched her face over his sunnies.

She looked him in the eye, intending to say something sarcastic, but ‘Not sure’ came out regardless.

‘Saturday it is then.’ He kissed her then, hard and out of the blue, taking a second to cup the back of her head in his hand and slide his tongue over hers before he broke away and stood up. ‘Oh, and Winnie? Bad news. You’re going to need to keep your clothes on this time.’

Jesse let himself into the house and grabbed a beer before heading outside again to his studio. What the fuck had hebeen thinking of, taking that picture over? What hadhe expected to happen? He’d wrestled with the idea of asking Winnie to the movies for the exact reason that she’d given when he’d mentioned it: it felt too traditionally date-like, at odds with his no-strings mantra, especially given the charged atmosphere in her bedroom earlier.

But he’d realised something; Winnie wasn’t just blowing in and out of his life like a leaf in autumn. He couldn’t treat her the way he had up to now because she wasn’t one-night-stand material. He’d handled his instant attraction to her badly thus far; he’d allowed her fleeting resemblance to Erin to seduce him into stupidity because he was clearly a lifelong screw-up over leggy, artistic blondes. He’d erotically supercharged his relationship with Winnie on sight because of something and someone she wasn’t even aware of, and he’d been cowardly enough to try to flip it back on Winnie, making her feel that her lack of experience was something that she had to remedy for a happier, more fulfilled life.

Who was he to tell people how to live? Just because he thought sentimental romance was a crock of shit, it didn’t mean everyone else around him had to subscribe to his viewpoint too.

He’d put all of these thoughts together, and alighted on the realisation that he needed to knock his connection with Winnie back down the scale again towards platonic. Going somewhere public together, getting to know each other properly, was all part of his grand plan to press reset on their relationship, step one in his grand plan to see her less as a desirable woman and more as an islander, as his neighbour, as part of the landscape of his life on Skelidos. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings or damage her fragile pride, but little by little he was determined to reverse their relationship down the gears to something altogether less sensual and a damn sight easier to live with.

If he were to give himself marks out of ten for his efforts that afternoon to implement this plan, he’d score himself a three at best. He hadn’t planned all of that stuff up in her room; he was supposed to deliver the gift and ask her to the movies. Simple. He should have said no to going upstairs; he could blame only the gin and the fact that the sun had turned her eyes to clear shards of blue-green glass and she’d been so close that he could taste the sweetness of rosemary on her breath. Please, he thought. Please, at some point let me stop being a weak man. It was a work in progress.

Winnie was his neighbour. She was too soft and sentimental for his easy come, easy go attitude to sex; she wasn’t on the same page, or even in the same book. She was a sappy romance novel with a happy ever after and he was a top-shelf-magazine man, happy for five minutes then even happier to flip the page to the next girl. It had been easy to be lovers, but he suspected that it was going to be a whole lot more difficult to be what he needed to be with Winnie.

Just friends.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘I weighed out the remaining arbutus berries in the cellar. We’ve got enough to make about one hundred and fifty bottles, so a three-month supply going on Ajax’s figures,’ Frankie said, kneading a ball of dough on the kitchen table a couple of mornings later. ‘Add that to the bottles already down there, and I reckon we’re likely to run out of gin just in time for Christmas.’

Winnie loaded the sink with breakfast plates from the guests and started to run the hot water. ‘Well, that’s going to make us about as popular as the Devil at midnight mass,’ she sighed. So far, their attempts to source a new arbutus bush on the Internet had come up with a big fat zero, and trying to buy pre-dried berries seemed to be like searching for hens’ teeth. Frankie was in the process of drying out a batch of strawberries to test them as an alternative, but none of them were holding out much hope.

‘Umm, Frank?’ Stella said, looking up from her laptop to watch her friend sprinkle the dough with cinnamon and fresh lemon rind. ‘You do know that you’ve baked enough stuff over the last couple of days to feed a small army, right?’

Frankie paused, her hands covered in flour. ‘Just say what you really mean, Stell. You think I’m hiding in the kitchen.’

‘I think you’re hiding away from Gavin and Seth in the kitchen,’ Stella said.

Frankie looked at Winnie. ‘Am I?’

Winnie shrugged, unwilling to commit. ‘Maybe a bit? Not that I’d blame you.’ She dried her hands and picked up a fresh-from-the-oven cheese and rosemary scone. ‘Not that I’m –we’re – complaining. We’re just a bit worried about you, that’s all.’ She broke the end off the crumbly scone and sat down. ‘Do you want me to send Gavin away for you? I can be tactful if you need me to.’

‘Meaning I can’t?’ Stella said archly.

‘Er, yes?’ Winnie laughed, catching Stella’s eye with a wink. ‘You’re brilliant at just about everything you do, Stell, but tact has never been your strong point.’

‘No,’ Frankie sighed, rolling the dough up like a Swiss roll and then slicing it through into fat swirls. ‘He can stay a while longer. I’m still not even sure why he’s really here yet.’

‘Free holiday? Because he wants to get back into your knickers?’ Stella reeled off, idly Googling Angelo.

‘Don’t be mean, Stell,’ Frankie chided. ‘He’s the father of my kids.’

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