One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December

Her new nickname had never sounded so sexy. ‘What about me?’

He shrugged. ‘If I was to guess, I’d say you and I have something in common.’

‘You would? What would that be?’ Alice wasn’t entirely sure it was good for her to know.

‘Feel free to tell me to shut up anytime you like, because I know I said I wouldn’t mention this again, but your wedding band is only just as faded as mine.’

He looked at her left hand, and she looked at the telltale band of paler skin on his ring finger. She had no clue what to say next, so kept her eyes on his hands rather than look him in the eyes. He had good hands. The kind of hands your body might feel sexy in, and your heart might feel safe in. But then Brad had nice hands too, and he’d used them to twist her heart so badly that she wasn’t sure it would ever go back to its original shape again.

‘Almost six months,’ she said softly. The time had gone by in a strange mix of lightning fast and torturously slow, and it was only in the last month that she’d finally removed her wedding ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewellery box.

‘Ten for me,’ he said, and she finally looked up and saw her own broken heart reflected there in his eyes.

‘Are you going to tell me it gets easier?’ she said. Just about everyone else did.

‘Only if you want me to lie to you.’

She shook her head and sighed hard. ‘I’ve had enough of lies to last me a lifetime.’

He clinked his bottleneck against hers and huffed in understanding, the way that only someone else who’s been pissed on from a great height by the person they love best can. She wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned so intimate, but she knew that she needed to steer it back towards less shark-infested waters because talking about Brad always left her feeling bitten raw. Robinson seemed to sense it too, because he suddenly slid from the stool.

‘Before I forget,’ he said, disappearing into the lounge and returning with his hands full of the expensive camera Brad had given her a year or two back for her birthday, even though she’d never expressed even the briefest of interest in photography to him. ‘This was on the side. I figured you’d put it out and then forgotten to take it with you.’

Alice looked at the camera, debating whether to be honest and say she’d never even used it and had put it out to give away or to just take it from him and hide beneath his cover story. Seeing it there in Robinson’s hands, Alice had the most peculiar feeling of a plaster being ripped from a wound only to find the wound hadn’t healed at all and it would have been better left out in the open.

‘Do you mind if I grab something from the cellar?’

Robinson laid the camera down on the breakfast bar. ‘Go for your life, as long as you’re not planning to start playing the drums in the garden.’

Alice threw her empty beer bottle in the bin and headed for the cellar door. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just something I should have done a long time ago.’

Robinson listened to the sounds of Alice dragging things around noisily in the cellar beneath him, cursing every now and then and huffing out of breath. He’d checked a second time if he could help and received a polite but firm refusal, and he sensed that whatever it was that she was looking for down there, she wanted to find it on her own. She was a difficult woman to read. On the surface she was fragile, coltish and bambi-like, in a way that brought out his protective instinct. But she was also funny, and in turn feisty, and he’d glimpsed steel in her eyes too when she was pushed. If she was his sister, he’d be ready to punch the man who’d broken her heart. But she wasn’t his sister, and she had a physical effect on him that was anything but brotherly. He’d screwed a couple of women since Lena had left him, both brunettes with hard bodies and hot tempers, both pseudo replacements of the woman he really wanted, the one who now slept in the bed of his best friend. Alice was the polar opposite of Lena. Was that what he found attractive about her, that she held none of his wife’s Latino appeal and therefore posed no threat to his heart? He knew he was doing the woman in the cellar a disservice by thinking such thoughts, but they were the only ones that made any sense of the way his body reacted to hers.

Back in the sanctuary of the Airstream, Alice warmed soup and toasted bread, consciously avoiding looking at the sizeable dark purple leather case on the table. It had taken some effort to lug it back across the garden; she’d shrugged off Robinson’s repeated attempts to help.

She ate standing at the work surface looking out of the window, the case behind her out of sight.

Washing up stretched things out for another ten minutes, and she swept each rug on the floor individually until the whole place was spick and span. A quick glance at her watch told her it had just turned nine in the evening; she could always just go to bed. She could fill up her water bottles and have a luxuriously early night, read until her eyelids drooped and she nodded off, leave the case unopened until morning. Everything was easier in the morning, right? She got as far as filling the kettle for her bottles before she sighed and placed it down without lighting the gas beneath it. Even if she warmed the bed, there was no way she’d be able to sleep without at least opening the case. It might as well have had a huge red flashing light on the lid or a high-pitched alarm strapped to it for all the rest she’d get with it sitting there like an unexploded bomb.

Finally, when she could stall no longer, she took out a soft cloth from beneath the sink, slid into the padded banquette and drew the box slowly towards her. Over eight years had passed since she’d last snapped open its silver clasps. She rubbed the cloth over the cracked leather lid, taking the time to run her index finger over the metallic embossed initials inlaid there. B.A.C. Benjamin Alan Collins. Her father. The box had been his long before it had been Alice’s. He’d given it to her on her twenty-first birthday, as it had been given to him by his own father on his twenty-first. A tradition, he’d smiled, knowing just how much the gesture would mean to Alice. She’d been nervous at first about telling her dad she’d decided to follow in his footsteps as a professional photographer. As a multi-award-winning photojournalist known for his specialist work in war zones, Ben Collins was internationally renowned as one of the best in the business until he’d lost his life during an especially dangerous assignment out in Afghanistan. His posthumous award for bravery had been a fitting tribute for a man who knew the dangers of his work but still threw himself in whole-heartedly because he also knew a powerful image could speak a thousand words. He believed he could make a difference, and he had, both to the world and to Alice, his only child, the little girl he’d raised single handedly when her mother left them before Alice could even walk. Because of his unerring love and attention, Alice had never missed the mum she had no memory of. When Ben was away working he made sure she was safe, sharing her care with his parents who adored having such a hands-on role in their granddaughter’s life. It had worked well, right up to the moment Ben Collins took a bullet through his heart, breaking Alice’s at the same time. She’d closed the lid on the leather case two months after her father’s funeral and from that day to this it had remained sealed. Today was as good a day as any to open it again.

Alice slid her thumbs over the catches, closing her eyes as she lifted them. They were stiffer than they used to be from lack of use, and the lid didn’t release easily from its resting place. She gripped the top corners and gave it a shake to free it, and finally it unglued itself and came free. Alice paused, pulled in a deep breath, and then opened the lid.

As she’d known it would, a rush of sensation hit her. The smell of her childhood, the reverence of handling her dad’s most prized cameras, photographs, of course, alongside the thick wedge of sympathy cards and the medal in its case. There was a unique scent to the box that time hadn’t diminished, something woody and intangible, a mix of the box itself, the possessions it held, and the man who’d owned and loved it. Alice vividly remembered countless occasions sitting alongside her dad, the box open on the floor in front of them. He’d allowed her to handle his cameras even when her hands were too small and clumsy to take the necessary care, and he’d made her the proudest kid in junior school when he’d given a talk to her class and allowed her to show her friends inside the box too. He’d taught her how to handle a camera, the intricacies of lens selection, how to best work with the light. He’d gifted her his practical knowledge, but far more than that, he’d given her his passion for capturing a moment forever on film, a fleeting expression, an undeniable emotion.

This wasn’t just a box. It was the next best thing to sitting alongside her dad again. Alice reached in and touched her fingers against the leather tan slipcase of her father’s Nikon, and automatically ran her nail around the serrated edge of the lens casing as she had as a little girl.

She’d shut all of her memories inside the purple leather box, and along with it she’d sealed any of her own aspirations to wield a camera for a living. Over the six months after her father’s death she’d spent less and less time at class, until it reached a point where her tutors could only despair at the fact that such a naturally talented student had turned her back on her vocation. She couldn’t separate her love for photography from the loss of her father, one tainted the other, and the only way she found to handle her grief was to reinvent herself. Being someone else had helped, in a way; at least it had allowed Alice to move on. Meeting Brad had inadvertently cemented Alice in her new role, because they needed her wage to support his acting classes and low-paid between-jobs. Somewhere along the way she’d allowed herself to believe her own spin, to forget how much she loved everything about the world she and her father had shared. She’d stopped constantly viewing the world through a thumb and finger viewfinder to find the best angle, so much so that she’d never felt able to tell Brad about her long-cherished dreams of a life in her father’s footsteps. Life was duller, but kind of easier. Well, no more. Having her world tipped upside down and shaken like a snow globe had left her sitting all alone on her backside in the snow without any footsteps beside her. Not her father, nor Brad. For the first time in her memory she was on her own, and the only set of footprints in the snow were her own. It was time to stand on her own two feet.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_f0d1f9b8-9f5d-52cd-923f-5c9566d70444)

‘You’re going to break your neck up there.’

Robinson stood at the base of the tree and craned his neck to look up at the tree house above. He hadn’t seen much of Alice since she’d lugged her mysterious cargo out of the cellar a week or so ago, and it had seemed to rain incessantly in between. He’d spent his days watching god-awful daytime TV, and his nights trying out the various bedrooms in the manor in the hope of a decent night’s sleep. So far, he’d yet to find any real peace here. Maybe it was the drab, grey weather, maybe it was the otherworldliness of the manor, and maybe it was the fact that he was so far away from his real life that he felt completely alien. He’d almost reached the point of knocking on Stewie’s door for a beer and a tour of his wig cupboard. Almost, but not quite. The damn rain had finally knocked off this morning, and when he’d opened the kitchen door and heard banging he’d followed the noise and found Alice playing girl scout in the garden. He’d spotted her red wellingtons first and had to look twice to check she really was dangling from the branches of a large old oak at the far end of the garden. Close up, she was clad in denim jeans that looked sprayed on from this angle and a black sweater that hugged her curves.

‘Probably,’ she responded cheerfully, peering over the edge of the tree house. Her blonde hair had been tamed into pigtails that swung in the breeze and her pretty face was free of make-up.

‘You look about thirteen years old. Are you playing house up there?’

‘Something like that,’ she grinned and then disappeared. ‘Come up.’

Robinson tested the bottom of the rickety planks that had been fashioned into steps that circled the broad tree trunk and, finding it sturdy enough to stand his weight, he made his way far enough up the tree for his torso to poke through into the house above. The floor was strewn with tools and nails and a hand saw leaned against the wall.

‘Should I even ask what you’re doing?’

Alice laid down the lethal-looking hammer in her hand and puffed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes.

‘Probably not.’

He nodded, glancing around the interior of the tree house.

‘Teddy bears’ picnic?’

Alice shook her head. ‘Better than that.’

‘Grown-up picnic?’ As Robinson’s mouth formed the words, his brain conjured up images of very adult picnics indeed. The kind where you might eat strawberries from the navel of your naked lover.

‘Not exactly,’ Alice hedged, rubbing the booted toe of one wellington behind the ankle of her other. Was he imagining things or did both her face and her body language say shifty? He hauled himself fully into the tree house and took in his surroundings.

As befitted the manor, the tree house was larger than your average kids’ hideout. He’d had a variation on the theme growing up back home in Tennessee, and once he was holed up in there with Fitz and Derren it was pretty much full. Not this place. You could have fit all of the kids from his elementary class up here with room to spare.

‘You’ve had enough of Airstream living and are moving house again?’

He wouldn’t put it past her. Alice reached for the latches on the inside of the shuttered window and flung them wide, letting in a stream of warmth and sunlight that from behind gave her an instant halo. She was kind of angelic to look at, all peaches and cream, and it only made him wonder what lay beneath. Lena, and pretty much most of the women in his life back home, were fiery and direct; you knew what they were thinking way before they decided to open their mouths and let you in on it. He didn’t find that with Alice. She held herself in a reserved way that made him itch to scratch the surface and see what lay beneath.

‘Pass me that saw?’ she said, gesturing behind him and not answering his question. He did as she’d asked and then watched as she held a length of wood against a gap in the side of the tree house and marked it with a pencil she pulled from behind her ear.

‘Tools of the trade,’ he murmured. He’d spent ten years fixing up houses with a pencil behind his ear before he’d accidentally hit the big time when the guy whose house he’d been working on turned out to be a manager from Music City. Robinson had sung to pass the time while he built Donald Marshall’s porch, and it turned out to be the last job he ever worked as a carpenter. Marsh, as he was known in the business, had gone on to become one of his closest friends and his biggest supporter. Right about now he was probably regretting ever hiring Robinson Duff, either to fix his porch or to pack out stadiums.

Alice took the piece of wood out onto the deck of the tree house and knelt down, lining up her pencil mark with the edge of the deck before setting about sawing it down to size. There were several things Robinson wanted to say. Your saw’s too blunt. You need a vice to cut wood properly. You’re going to cut your goddamn hand off doing it like that. Yet he said none of them, holding his tongue until she managed to get through the plank and the spare end fell down towards the ground. Belatedly Alice peered over the edge to make sure she didn’t have any concussed visitors and then straightened up and headed back inside with her freshly sawn wood.

‘Don’t tell me. You’re planning to get a really tall dog?’ He guessed again at Alice’s intentions for the future of the tree house.

‘Pluto wouldn’t like another dog in his garden,’ Alice said with difficulty as she held a nail between her teeth. God, she was a walking health and safety hazard.

‘My garden,’ Robinson said mildly, picking up the hammer and handing it to her. Alice raised her eyebrows as she positioned the wood over the gap in the wall.

‘My garden,’ she corrected, as he’d known she would.