Page 11 of All Summer Long

‘It’s quite the place.’

‘It is,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘You’ll find it’s a great place to relax.’

He looked at her steadily. ‘Is that what you think I’m doing here?’

The directness of his question took her by surprise, although the mild tone of his voice took any sting from his words.

She studied him for a second. ‘Sorry. That sounded like I was prying and I really wasn’t.’

‘You weren’t all that far from the truth,’ he conceded, rolling his glass between his palms, his eyes fixed on the swirling liquid. ‘Not to my mind, anyway. My sister on the other hand called it escaping, my record label called it reckless, and my ex-wife called it running away. Take your pick.’

Wow. Sothatwas an unexpected information dump. An opinionated sister and an annoyed ex-wife, not to mention a record company chasing his tail. No wonder he looked ragged around the edges. She should have given him a bigger measure of rum.

‘That’s quite a list,’ she said, keeping it simple.

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

Uh oh. That sounded ominous.

‘I’m not going to have to beat them all off with a big stick, am I?’ Alice remembered back to the days of being hounded by paparazzi around Brad’s affair, of how much more difficult they’d made her life just when it was falling to pieces anyway. She looked back now and wished she’d been strong enough at the time to get rid of them, trampling her gardens and invading her privacy. She wouldn’t let that sort of thing ever happen here again, even if it wasn’t strictly her own privacy that she’d be protecting this time around.

He shook his head, a complicated look in his eyes as he huffed softly. ‘I don’t suppose this place has a drawbridge hidden around somewhere to pull up in case of emergency?’

‘’Fraid not, cowboy. No moat, either.’ Alice silently questioned her own words. Cowboy? Just because she called him that in her head, it didn’t mean she should have ever let it out of her mouth. If it surprised him, he didn’t say.

‘Figures. We could always dig one?’

Something in the way he said we rather than I unsettled her, bringing with it an image of being holed up against the world with Robinson in Borne Manor.

‘There’s a trowel around somewhere if you get desperate.’ God knew she’d reached the point of desperation herself a few times recently. ‘There’s one or two people I’d like to throw in it,’ she muttered, unguarded.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ll buy another spade, in that case.’

Alice traced the frilled edge of her slip with her finger against her skin. ‘Deal,’ she said, softly.

They sat in companionable silence for a couple of minutes, an owl hooting somewhere in the trees ahead.

‘Cowboy?’ he said eventually, favouring her with a speculative sideways look that said her nickname hadn’t passed him by.

‘Am I wrong?’

He raised one shoulder, a half shrug, an acknowledgement. ‘I own a ranch and I sang country, so I guess you could call that cowboy.’

She noticed the way he’d used past tense to refer to singing.

‘You don’t sing any more?’

The pretty glow of the fairy lights picked out his profile, pastel hues illuminating the unmistakable twist of his mouth. He looked as if he’d swallowed something bitter. Was it pain, or distaste? It was hard to tell.

‘I kind of lost my love for it.’

For the second time that evening Alice felt as if she’d spoken out of turn. It was clearly not a subject he wanted to get into.

‘I’m prying again. Ignore me.’

He drained his glass. ‘I’ll make you a deal, Goldilocks. You don’t mention my singing and I won’t mention your absent husband. How does that sound?’

Ah. So she hadn’t got away with her borderline nutcase behaviour up at the manor that afternoon, then.

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