Page 31 of All Summer Long

‘I’m here, you know,’ she said. ‘If you ever need to get anything off your chest, you can talk to me.’

At that precise moment, he thought about how much he’d like to get his shirt off his chest and press Alice back against the cushions.

‘I mean it,’ she spoke again when he didn’t reply. ‘If anyone is going to understand what you’re going through, with your marriage at least, it’s me.’

Did he want to talk about Lena? ‘You know, Alice, I don’t think there’s much to say. I found one of my closest friends fucking my wife over our breakfast bar. It all went downhill pretty fast from there to here.’

‘Oh my god, Robinson! That’s bloody awful.’ Alice’s mouth twisted in disgust and she shook her head slowly, swirling her wine in her glass. ‘It’s bad enough with a stranger, but someone you loved and trusted? What’s wrong with people? You must have been … God, I don’t even want to imagine what you must have been.’

‘Furious enough to smack his head off that same breakfast bar so hard that Lena called him an ambulance,’ he supplied.

Alice didn’t flinch. ‘I don’t blame you.’ She swallowed a huge mouthful of wine. ‘In fact, in some ways I’m bloody jealous.’

Her reaction surprised him.

‘How so?’

‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fantasised about taking the bacon scissors to Felicity Shaw’s stupid rat-tail hair.’ She all but spat the woman’s name out. It seemed such an out of character thing to hear her say. Alice was an unlikely badass, but he knew exactly which part of her heart she spoke from.

‘I think that’s part of the reason I kissed you when your husband came by,’ Robinson confessed. ‘Somewhere in my head it was Lena standing on that step having to watch me kiss a beautiful woman.’

‘I get your need for revenge,’ she said, and he knew from her eyes that she absolutely did.

‘Is it such a bad thing if he thinks you and me are hitting the sheets?’ Robinson’s gaze slid unbidden to the bed that filled the other end of the Airstream.

Alice paused, most of the way down her second glass of wine. She upended the bottle between them.

‘I just didn’t want to play games with him. The moral high ground is just about all I’ve got left, you know?’

She was wrong, and it suddenly felt important to tell her so.

‘You have so much more than just that, Alice,’ he said. ‘You’re gorgeous. You’ve got this sweet, sexy thing going on, you’re blue skies and cotton candy. But then every now and then you’re not, and that just makes you all the more goddamn sexy.’

She stared at him, surprised, all tumbled curls and rosy cheeks, and then her lips parted a little to let out a tiny ‘oh’ that perfectly illustrated his point. He was hard just looking at her.

‘I’m willing to bet that right about now that ex of yours is burning up inside at the thought of us together,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t know we’re not really fucking.’

Jesus. What was in this wine? His words were tumbling out of his mouth like he’d just lost a game of truth or dare. Alice looked taken aback.

‘I guess he doesn’t. Serves him right.’ She stood up. ‘Want some rum?’

And there she was again, the unexpected bad girl. She went from bad to downright sinful when she moved around the table and stretched up on her tiptoes to reach into a cabinet over his head. Her hips were actually asking his hands to hold them, and he couldn’t say no.

She stilled and looked down, her arms still over her head.

His gaze slid up the length of her body to meet her kiss-me eyes.

‘Robinson …’ She breathed his name, and he did the only thing on his mind at that moment. He swayed her body gently towards him, close enough to be able to press his mouth against the slim strip of skin exposed by the hem of her shirt. She stared down at him, and he up at her, and then she seemed to forget all about getting the rum and swung her knee over his thighs instead. He wasn’t certain if she sat down or he pulled her down, but seconds later she was straddled over his lap, her breathing so shallow that he could see her breasts rising up and down beneath her fitted shirt and he was desperate to know how she’d look without it.

‘Alice,’ his voice came out hoarse, and he pushed her hair back and held her face between his hands. ‘We both know that this isn’t going anywhere, right?’ God, he hoped she knew what he meant.

‘Neither of us wants complicated,’ she said, and he gripped the top of her shirt with both hands and pulled the metal snaps open all in one go.

‘Jesus, Mary mother of God,’ he muttered, unable to take his eyes off the fullness of her breasts trying to escape from her black lace bra. ‘Do you always wear stuff like this underneath your work clothes?’

‘Always,’ she said, reaching for the bottom of his t-shirt and dragging it over his head.

‘You know I love someone else,’ he said.

---