Just Say Yes (19 page)

“Not right now, surely?” He leaned closer and she almost passed out with the fumes. “You know, Lucy, I don’t say this to all the girls, but as soon as I met you I felt as if I’d known you for years. Spooky, eh?”

Her heart beat a little faster. “Very.”

“It must be that de-jay, dee-ja vue whatsit.”

“
Déjà-vu?
”

“That’s it.”
Hic.
“Definitely seen you somewhere before.”

Lucy edged toward the staircase down to the ground floor, keeping her voice light. “You met me on the beach after you’d been sailing that day. Remember?”

“Oh, no! No, it’s more, much more than that. I feel a connection with you. Ever since I saw you, it’s been bugging me like a thorn up my arse.”

“I guess I just have one of those faces.”

“That launched a thousand ships! Haw!” He squinted hard at her and then looked down. “And the view looks bloody good from here.”

His pint glass wobbled, sending Guinness sloshing down her cleavage. He reached out a hand to wipe her clean and she smacked him away.

“Gideon,” said Lucy sweetly, trying to close her nostrils, “I can assure you we’ve never met before last week and I’m afraid that if you don’t take your nose out of my tits, I’m going to have to slap you very hard.”

Pulling back an inch, he tried to focus on her face, his eyes crossing. Then to her horror he winked and gave a little growl, almost Hengist-like but not half so appealing.

“Slap me very hard? Why, Lucy, I didn’t know you were that kind of girl but
ding-dong
, your place or mine?”

“Gideon, will you just bugger off!”

“Even better. Haw.”

“You know, I’m going to get some fresh air,” she said, lifting her chin. “There’s a nasty smell in here.”

She headed down the steps, her wedges clumping on the wooden treads. She half ran, half stumbled down the slipway and onto the sand, then stopped, gulping in breaths of air, her heart pounding like surf. She wasn’t sure which had spooked her more, Gideon’s lecherousness or the fact that, even though he was completely out of his tree, he’d thought he recognized her. Had recognized her, in fact. Bugger…

On the beach, a half-naked couple was snogging in a catamaran and the smell of weed drifted into her nose from the dinghy pen. Lucy made for the white frill of surf breaking ahead of her. Just where the powdery sand turned damp, at the outer limit of the lights of the clubhouse, she sat down. Unlacing her wedges, she stretched out her legs, reveling in the feel of cool, damp sand between her toes.

“Hey.”

“Oh. You,” she said as Josh sat down beside her.

“Pleased to meet you too.”

“Sorry, I just needed some fresh air. There was a bad smell inside.”

“I know. I saw you with Gideon.”

“You saw?” So he’d watched and done nothing.

“Yeah, but you seemed to be handling it fine. I guessed you wouldn’t have thanked me if I’d stepped in.”

“I can fight my own battles,” she said perversely.

“I’m sure you can.”

Josh spread his legs wide. His Levis were so soft and worn that the knees had split, exposing slivers of golden skin.

“Where’s Sara?” asked Lucy, mentally trying to pour cold water on herself.

“I’m not sure where she is but, at a guess, I’d say schmoozing some financier bloke from Truro. He wants to invest some money in the club.”

“And you don’t approve?”

“I want what’s best for the club but it’s Sara’s call. I only have a part share in the place and if Sara wants to deal with it, it’s fine by me.”

She nodded vigorously. “I agree. All that finance and negotiating must be terribly boring.”

He allowed himself a smile. “Sorry, but I don’t buy that. You’re taking the piss out of me, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Lucy, don’t bullshit me. I know when I’m being taken for a ride.”

Her pulse quickened. She really didn’t want to lie to Josh. In fact, she had a horrible compulsion to tell him the whole truth right now, get the whole charade over with. And she wanted him to know her name—her real name, her real reason for being here, but she felt way too stupid to tell him. Either that or she was enjoying the attention too much to spoil it.

“I might know a thing or two about business but, right now, funnily enough, none of it seems relevant.” Not bad, she thought proudly, not bad at all.

“Why not?”

“Who cares about profit and loss, bears and bonds, and um… bulls when they’ve got all this.”
Bulls? Bonds?
Surely he’d know she was talking twaddle, thought Lucy, but Josh seemed to be busy squiggling in the sand between his legs. “At the end of the day you don’t really need that much.”

“Nope. Not much at all. I’ve got a place to live, the sailing, friends, the cottages. That’s enough for me. I’ve got all I need, more than I need, in fact.”

“And Sara?”

“Yes, and Sara.” Then he turned his eyes on her and smiled. “And Tally of course.”

Lucy laughed. “Now you’re taking the piss out of
me
.”

“No.”

“My incisive business brain tells me you are, in fact, winding me up.”

“If your incisive business brain tells you, then it must be right. When are you planning on going back to London?”

“Oh, I’m not sure…” She stopped. “Actually, that’s not quite true. I’m supposed to be back in the office next Monday. They gave me a month. My time is up on Friday.”

“Right.”

Lucy swallowed, waiting for more. Then cursed herself. What was it to Josh if she stayed or went?

“Are you ready to go back to your job in London? Are you… er, sure you’re well enough?”

She squirmed with guilt. What had at first seemed a harmless lie was now developing into a very big one. Almost without realizing it, she had woven a tangled web of deceit that was going to be very difficult to unravel.

“Yes. I’m well enough,” she said.

“But not ready?” replied Josh, twisting the beer bottle from the sand and bringing it to his lips.

Lucy thought about her answer, but not for more than a second or two, and when it came, it was as honest as anything she’d ever said. “I don’t know. But who can say they’re ever ready for anything? I can only do my best and if it’s the wrong choice, then I’ll have to live with it. I have to go back to my old life sometime. I can’t stay here forever.”

He lowered the bottle and rested it casually against his inner thigh. The wear on his jeans was visible here too, and between his legs, around the seam that stretched taut over the patently obvious bulge.

Lucy’s throat was dry. “I’ve got things to do, places to go…”

He turned and she snapped her eyes away from his impressive assets and on to his face.

“People to meet?” he offered. “Maybe one person in particular?”

“No. No one person in particular. Not now.”

“Mortgage to pay on the loft apartment in Canary Wharf?”

She thought of her rented ex-council flat in Kentish Town and bit her lip. “Slightly farther north. And… um… a little farther west.”

“Ah, but what about the Ferrari in the underground garage?”

“Think smaller and you’d be warm… oh, there’s no point keeping a flashy car in London, as you know, if you’re from the Big Smoke,” she said, desperately trying to switch the conversation round to him.

“Yes, but it’s been a long time since I lived in London.”

“How long?”

“Twenty years, give or take.”

“So that makes you?”

“Thirty-two.”

Lucy laughed. “Really? I’d have put you at all of thirty-three.”

The few tiny lines he did have crinkled his eyes at the corners. “I’ve had a hard life and spent a lot of it outside.”

“I’ve had an easy life and spent most of it in Starbucks.”

“I can think of worse places to spend your time, but not much,” laughed Josh, then stopped and frowned.

Lucy held her breath. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

His face slid from puzzlement to mild amusement again. “Nothing. Just for a moment there, you reminded me of someone, but I must be imagining things.”

She clamped her legs together and hugged her knees, feeling the chill of the night air. “Tell me more about when you used to live in London,” she said quickly.

“Well, there’s not that much to tell, really, and most of it is stuff I’m not proud of.”

“It can’t be that bad. I’ve done things that I’m not proud of too.”

He gave a wry smile and shook his head. “Like what? Fiddling your income tax? Parking on a double yellow line? Lucy, I don’t think you understand.”

“I could try,” said Lucy softly.

As they sat on the beach, a firework exploded above the clubhouse, arcing upwards in a shower of magnesium-white sparks.

“What have you done? Confess,” said Lucy, looking at Josh intently, relieved that the focus of the conversation was back on him again.

“Enough,” he said. A rocket crackling above made her flinch. “Enough to have a record. Petty theft, a bit of criminal damage, assorted bad stuff with cars that weren’t mine.”

“Oh. I see. Well…”

“So it’s a bit more serious than parking on a double yellow, but it was a long time ago. My mother couldn’t look after us and we never had a dad, so we ended up in kids’ homes until I was eleven and Luke was thirteen. We tried a couple of foster homes but didn’t get on with the people.”

“So how did you end up down here in Cornwall?”

“Marnie saw us in a fostering newspaper—one of those papers where kids in care are advertised to people wanting families. We must have represented the worst proposition in the whole of social services, but for some reason, she was insane enough to take us on.”

“Had she got her own family?”

He shook his head. “No. She was already widowed by then. Her husband died in a trawler accident. She was on her own but they’d fostered teenagers before. I guess social services probably couldn’t believe their luck when she brought us down here to Tresco.”

“That must have been a culture shock after London.”

“I don’t think either of us would know what culture was if we’d been hit over the head with it, but Marnie must have hoped we’d change our ways once we were out of the reach of bad influences.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“For a while, it did. Until Luke found his feet with the locals and decided to make a name for himself. I tagged along a few times, so I can’t blame him; I knew what I was doing. We got caught a few times—got away with a lot more. Petty vandalism, graffiti, shoplifting, that kind of stuff. I got into a couple of fights with local lads. God knows what we put Marnie through.”

“Drugs?”

He shook his head. “A bit of weed, once or twice.”

She raised her eyebrows and he smiled wryly.

“OK, maybe slightly more than once or twice but it usually made me puke and I looked a right twat so I didn’t bother after that. I don’t know whether Luke did stuff. No, that’s wrong. I guess I know he did, but I just don’t want to admit it.”

“So how come you ended up as a fully paid-up member of the community? Youth clubs, bird-watching, sailing club… you seem to be a good boy now.”

“Then you don’t know me, Lucy. And as for the bird-watching, I’ll admit it. I don’t really do any. Remember that morning when you chucked me out of the cottage because you thought I was a pervert?”

“Well, you might have been. I was only being careful being from London and all that.”

He shot her a stern look then shrugged his shoulders. “Fair enough. Let’s agree to disagree that you’re paranoid.”

“You were saying about the birds…” hinted Lucy, before they started another argument.

“Oh. Right. I’d been having a quiet word with some blokes trying to steal chough eggs from the cliffs. They’re endangered, you see.”

“What, the guys trying to steal the eggs or the birds?”

He smiled, drained his beer. “Maybe both for a while but after a little gentle persuasion, the humans were persuaded to see the error of their ways.”

Lucy dreaded to think what Josh had done—or threatened to do—to the egg stealers. “But I thought you said you’d reformed from your days as a bad boy.”

“I have, largely, but it took a shock. After a few too many cautions, and a couple of fines which Marnie paid, of course, we finally took it into our heads to take a couple of the local farmer’s quad bikes for a test drive round the village. We ended up in the local magistrate’s front garden, having demolished his wishing well and crushed his gnomes.”

Lucy was glad it was dark. She was trying not to smile at the idea of a teenage Josh and his brother, lying amidst a gaggle of gnomes, the irate magistrate shaking his fist over them. Yet it wasn’t funny because it had earned Josh a record that must have made his tough life even harder.

“Sounds funny now, eh? I suppose we thought it was at the time. I was fifteen by then and threatened with detention myself if I did anything again. I kidded myself I didn’t give a toss and I certainly told everyone I didn’t give a toss. Underneath I was scared shitless. When Marnie took me back again, I didn’t exactly turn into a model student but I sorted myself out, and eventually went away to college. When she fell ill I came back to help with the business.”