The impact.
The impact?
He opened his eyes again.
Ah.
That exhaustion-fueled hallucination of slow motion was no hallucination. The car was still coming, crawling around the gentle curve of the roadway in front of the entrance. It rolled to a stop ten feet before Andrew and a head leaned out of the window.
“Out the fucking way, mate. Two in here with a plane to catch.”
Andrew jumped onto the pavement, almost knocking Alice over as she ran to him. He threw down his bag. The kiss, when it came, was the most nervous, inept, nose-bashing, teeth-clashing of his life, but he drank deep, and Alice put her tongue in his mouth and then astonished him by grabbing his buttocks and pulling him into her.
“I’m coming with you,” he said, gulping for breath.
“You’ll . . . never . . . get . . . a . . . ticket . . . you . . . idiot.”
“I will.”
“You won’t. Kiss me some more.”
“I need to get my ticket.”
“Kiss me some more.”
“I’m kissing you.”
“Kiss me some more.”
“I’m kissing you.”
“Kiss me some more.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
REBECCA CAMPBELL was born in London in 1967. She went to the London School of Economics and then spent a miserable year in a Japanese merchant bank, failing to impress anyone. After studying design at the London College of Fashion, she joined her mother, who started the fashion company Paddy Campbell. Rebecca and Paddy still design all the collections. Rebecca is the author of Slave to Fashion, the wife of Anthony McGowan, and the mother of Gabriel and Rose.
ALSO BY REBECCA CAMPBELL
Slave to Fashion
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Rebecca Campbell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint
of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
VILLARD and “V” CIRCLED Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
This book was originally published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins Publishers in 2003 as Alice’s Secret Garden.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Campbell, Rebecca.
[Alice’s secret garden]
Slave to love : a novel / Rebecca Campbell.
p. cm.
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Women zoologists—Fiction.
3. Book collectors—Fiction. 4. Book auctions—Fiction.
5. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6103.A56A79 2004
823′.92—dc22
2003069052
Villard Books website address: www.villard.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-403-6
v3.0
Slave to Love Page 31