Page 43 of All Summer Long

‘For a girl with such slender shoulders, you sure have a lot resting on them,’ he said, when she finally finished speaking and looked at him for his reaction. She didn’t know why she’d kept her plans from him. Or she did, but she didn’t know how to put her feelings into words. The thing she had with Robinson was … it was other, separate, just for them. Letting reality into it was a risk. They worked because of the strict rules they’d applied to their relationship upfront, namely that it wasn’t a relationship, or even a friendship, really. It wasn’t set up for them to share worries, or plans, or find pathways into each other’s heart. They were each other’s holding bay, each other’s ‘get your breath back’ safety net. It wasn’t supposed to be touched by reality, and by sharing her hopes, dreams and fears she’d blurred all of those lines. And then he went and said things like that. Simple insights that said I see you, I see who you really are, and in moments like those he stole her breath.

‘I’m stronger than I look,’ she said, and he just nodded and put his head back again.

‘There’s something else,’ she said, unburdening herself even more than she’d planned on. ‘Brad wants the manor back. It’s only the fact that it’s rented out that’s holding him off.’

Slowly, Robinson raised his head again and looked her in the eyes.

‘Sounds like it might be easier all round if I just went and shot him,’ he said, and Alice loved the way he managed to make light of it whilst also offering his protection should she ever need it. She knew that she had it without question for as long as Robinson was in Borne.

‘I think I need to be the one who fires the shots,’ she said.

His eyes told her that he understood. ‘At least let me load the gun and teach you how to handle it,’ he said, his hand warm and reassuring on the curve of her neck. ‘By the time I leave here you’ll be a sure shot.’

‘He won’t know what has hit him.’

Robinson smiled, kissing her shoulder. ‘Atta girl.’ He turned her jaw to his with his fingertips, kissing her lips slow and searching.

‘Don’t worry about biting off more than you can chew, Alice,’ he said, as he pulled her on top of him and held her hair back from her face. ‘Your mouth is probably a whole lot bigger than you think.’

She smiled against his lips. ‘Cowboy wisdom, eh?’ she said, really quite distracted by his hand sliding up her thigh.

‘There’s a whole lot more where that came from.’

There was a whole lot more that Alice needed to say too, but he blew all of those thoughts from her mind like confetti with his hot kisses and cowboy moves. It’d keep for a while. She really ought to test out that bed anyway.

In the early hours of the morning Alice awoke and looked at Robinson sleeping, all tanned skin against white cotton sheets, so very unexpected in her life. It was as if he’d been sent to her just at the time she needed him most, and she hoped she offered him that same sense of shelter in return.

Moonlight bathed the whole tree house in a pale silvery wash, picking out the outlines of the furniture, the gleam of their used glasses, their hastily discarded clothes on the sofa. His guitar still stood where he’d left it when he came in earlier, untouched and unreferenced over the course of the evening. Beside it on the low side table sat her camera. Not her father’s beloved Nikon, but her own top-of-the-range kit that she’d left at the manor, until recently, ignored. Brad had seemed oblivious at the time that he’d chosen her a gift she neither wanted, appreciated, nor used. He’d just given her the camera as it was something she didn’t already own and because it made for a substantial, showy gift.

Getting to grips with it in recent weeks had, however, been a guilty pleasure for Alice. She intended on cataloguing the glampsite as it developed in order to commission a website when she was a bit closer to being ready, and already she’d bagged some beautiful images of the various stages of the tree house renovation. It was another integral piece of her gossamer-thin spider-web plan to keep hold of the things she loved. Looking at Robinson’s guitar for a few long minutes, she pulled her courage together and touched his shoulder to wake him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Play for me?’

Robinson opened one eye and found Alice lying on her side in bed beside him, all naked curves and wild blonde curls, the most heaven-sent woodland nymph ever. The words coming from her mouth, however, were nowhere near as heavenly.

‘Go to sleep, Goldilocks,’ he whispered, reaching for her, hoping to pull her in and make her forget. She resisted, putting her palm flat against his chest, the resolute look in her eyes clear even in the pale, moonlit cabin.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Play your guitar for me.’

‘I can think of plenty of better ways to help you sleep, baby,’ he tried again, smoothing his fingers over the rose tip of her breast. It hardened, and her lips parted slightly, but still she held him back.

‘Afterwards,’ she murmured, and his body was already awake enough and reacting to hers to find her promise encouraging.

‘Anything else, Alice. Ask me for anything but that and it’s yours.’

‘I don’t want anything else,’ she said. ‘Robinson, I watched you walk over from the house earlier with your guitar on your back and you looked … I don’t know … more complete? I know you as a man, not a musician, but even I could seethatmuch. I only know half of you, and I’d love to know the other half too, if you’ll let me.’

‘Alice, I know you think you’re helping me here, but you’re really not,’ he said. ‘I’m not hiding half of myself. I’m changing. It’s different.’

‘Yet you still went to the trouble of bringing your guitar with you when you came over here,’ she said. He had to give it to the girl, she was as stubborn as a goddamn ox when she wanted to be.

‘Habit. Pure and simple. I’ve travelled with my guitar since I was fifteen years old,’ he countered, even though the decision to bring his guitar to England hadn’t been anywhere near that clean cut in reality. He’d left home without it, driven twenty miles out towards the airport, and then turned back around to fetch it, his heart pounding out of his chest. But just because he had it close by didn’t mean he necessarily had to play it. It just meant that he had the choice, and right now he was choosing not to.

Alice stroked his fingers. ‘I’d love to hear you. I’m not asking you to sing. Just play for me?’

He knew what she was doing. Little by little. Bit by bit. Piece by piece. Crumb by crumb.

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