Which she didn’t. Not really.
Slipping her feet into the gaudily decorated flip-flops she had bought at the airport at great expense, Alice bent to adjust one of the straps and let her straight brown hair swing forward to cover her face.
‘You know, Will and I went out for a while,’ she said as casually as she could.
‘No!’ Beth’s jaw dropped. ‘You and Will?’ she said, suitably astounded. ‘Roger never told me that!’ she added accusingly.
‘We’d split up long before he met you.’ Alice gave a would-be careless shrug. ‘It was old news by then. Roger probably never gave it a thought.’
‘But you were both at our wedding,’ Beth remembered. ‘I do think Roger might have mentioned it in case I put you on the same table or something. I had no idea!’ She leant forward. ‘Wasn’t it awkward?’
Unable to spend any more time fiddling with her shoe, Alice groped around beneath her lounger for the hair clip she had put there earlier.
‘It was fine,’ she said, making a big thing of shaking back her hair and twisting it carelessly up to secure it with the clip, all of which gave her the perfect excuse to avoid Beth’s eye.
Because it hadn’t been fine at all. There would have been no way she’d have missed Roger’s wedding, and she had known that Will would be there. It had been two years since they had split up, and Alice had hoped that the two of them would be able to meet as friends.
It had been a short-lived hope. Alice had been aware of him from the moment she’d walked into the church and saw the back of his head. Her heart had jerked uncomfortably at the sight of him, and she had felt ridiculously glad that he was wedged into a pew between friends so that she wouldn’t have to sit next to him straight away.
She had been going out with someone from work then. Clive, his name had been. And, yes, maybe he had been a bit of a stuffed shirt, but there had been no call for Will to talk about him that way. They had met, inevitably, at the reception after the service, and Alice had done her best to keep up a flow of increasingly desperate chit-chat as Will had eyed Clive and made absolutely no attempt to hide his contempt.
‘You’ve sold out, Alice,’ he told her later. ‘Clive is boring, pretentious and self-obsessed, and that’s putting it kindly! He’s not the man for you.’
They argued, Alice remembered, in the hotel grounds, away from the lights and the music, as the reception wore on into the night. Clive had too much to drink, and to Alice’s embarrassment was holding forth about his car and his clients and his bonuses. Depressed at her lack of judgement when it came to men, she slipped away, but, if she had known that she would encounter Will out in the dark gardens, she would have stuck with Clive showing off.
Will was the last person she wanted to witness Clive at his worst. She had been hoping to convince him that her life had been one long, upward curve since they had agreed to go their separate ways and that she was happily settled with a satisfying career, a stable home and a fulfilling relationship. No chance of him thinking that, when he had endured Clive’s boasting all evening.
Mortified by Clive’s behaviour, and tense from a day trying not to let Will realise just how aware she was of him still, Alice was in no mood for him to put her own thoughts into such brutal words.
‘What do you know about it?’ she fired back, glad of the dim light that hid her flush.
‘I know you, and I know there’s no way on earth a man like Clive could ever make you happy,’ said Will, so infuriatingly calm that Alice’s temper flared.
‘You didn’t make me happy, either!’ she snapped, but Will just shook his head, unfazed by her lie.
‘I did once,’ he said. ‘We made each other happy.’
Alice didn’t want to remember those times. She turned her head away. ‘That was then and this is now,’ she said.
‘We haven’t changed.’
‘I have,’ Alice insisted. ‘It’s been nearly two years, Will. I’m not the same person I was before. I’ve got a new life, the life I always wanted.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Maybe Clive gives me what I need now.’
‘Does he?’ Will took a step towards her, and instinctively Alice backed away until she found herself up against a tree.
‘Does he?’ Will asked again softly, taking her by the wrists and lifting her arms until she was pinned against the tree trunk. ‘Does he make you laugh, Alice? Do you lie in bed with him and talk and talk?’ he went on, in the same low voice that reverberated up and down Alice’s spine. ‘The way you did with me?’
Her heart was thumping and she could feel the rough bark digging into her back through the flimsy material of her dress. She tried to pull her wrists away, but Will held her in place with insulting ease. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but his spareness was deceptive, and his hands were much stronger than they looked.
And Alice, too, was conscious that she wasn’t fighting as hard as she could have done. She could feel her treacherous body responding to Will’s nearness. It had always been like that. Alice had used to lie awake sometimes, watching him while he slept, and wondering what it was about him that created such a powerful attraction.
It wasn’t as if he were especially good-looking. In many ways, he was quite ordinary, but there was something about him, something uniquely Will in the line of his jaw, in the set of his mouth and the feel of his hands, in all the lean, lovely planes and angles of him that made her senses tingle still.
Will’s voice dropped even further as he pressed her back against the tree. ‘Do you shiver when he kisses you here?’ he asked, dropping a light kiss on Alice’s bare shoulder where it curved into her throat, and in spite of herself Alice felt that familiar shudder of excitement spiral slowly down to the very centre of her, where it throbbed and ached with memories of all the times they had made love.
Closing her eyes, she sucked in her breath as Will pressed warm, slow kisses up the side of her throat. ‘That’s none of your business,’ she managed unsteadily.
‘Does he love you?’ Will whispered against her skin, and the brush of his lips made her shiver again.
She swallowed hard, her eyes still squeezed shut. ‘Yes,’ she said, but she knew it was a feeble effort. ‘Yes, he does,’ she tried again, although it sounded as if she was trying to convince herself.
Alice wanted to believe that Clive loved her, otherwise what was she doing with him?
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Will, and, although she couldn’t see him, she knew that he was shaking his head. ‘Clive doesn’t love anybody but himself.’
There was a long pause, then Alice opened her eyes and found herself staring up into Will’s face, the face that had once made her heart clench with the knowledge that she could touch it and kiss it and feel it whenever she wanted.
‘Do you love Clive, Alice?’ Will asked quietly.
Alice couldn’t answer. Her throat was so tight it was hard enough to breathe, and all she could do was stand there, her arms pinioned above her head, and look back at him while the world stopped turning, and there was only Will and the feel of his hands over her wrists.
To her horror, her eyes filled with tears, and Will bent with a muffled curse to kiss her, a fierce, hard kiss that seared Alice to the soul. Nearly two years since they had said goodbye, but her mouth remembered his instantly, and she found herself kissing him back, angrily, hungrily, until Will released her wrists at last and yanked her into him to kiss her again.
Instinctively Alice’s arms reached round him and she spread her hands over his back. It had been so long since she had held him, so long since she had felt the solidity and the hardness of the body she had once known as well as her own. She had