by Liz Fielding
Her lips did part, as if she might say something, but all that emerged was a little quiver of breath, warm, faintly chocolatey, mingling with his own. Fizzing through his blood, intoxicating as vintage champagne, and he was within a hair’s breadth of going to hell in a handcart when a crunch on the gravel, a loud, ‘It’s still here!’ warned them that they were no longer alone.
‘Geli…’
The blush was in full working order and he didn’t need to send frantic instructions to his legs to move before he did something stupid. Elle did it for him, springing back as if she’d been caught with her hand in the till.
‘I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,’ she said to her sister.
‘Obviously.’
Sarcasm as only a teenager could do it.
Elle shut the serving window, not looking at Sean as she jumped down, her wobbly legs buckling as she hit the gravel in her eagerness to put some distance between herself and temptation.
As she put some stiffeners into her knees, she couldn’t decide whether she was furious with her sister for turning up just as she was about to taste heaven, or grateful that she’d been saved from the biggest mistake in her life.
A quick tutorial…
What had she been thinking?
Thinking? That was joke.
For a moment back there it had been the gallopers, the waltzer, the big wheel, all the fun of the fair rolled into one and she’d been gone, with only one thought in her head. The one that confirmed she was her mother’s daughter.
Wham, bang, thank you, ma’am.
‘So are you going to tell me why we have an ice cream van parked in the drive?’ Geli demanded.
Her youngest sister was definitely not going to be impressed by anything so defiantly pink and white invading her space. And, having glared at Rosie, she turned her attention to Sean.
‘And who is he?’
Beneath the aggression, Elle recognised fear. Geli’s body was maturing but, despite the emerging curves, she was still a child who’d never had a father and had lost her mother at a tragically early age.
Before she could reassure her, Sorrel walked through the gate, their grandmother at her side.
For a moment Elle held her breath, but her grandmother just smiled. ‘Are we going to have ice cream?’ she asked. ‘How lovely. Can I have chocolate sauce?’
Sean glanced at her, clearly surprised that her grandmother hadn’t recognised him, unfamiliar with Lally’s ability to completely block out anything she didn’t want to remember.
‘Not just now, Gran. Sean is busy and I have to go to work.’
‘Sean?’
‘Sean McElroy,’ he said, going with it and introducing himself before turning to her sisters. ‘And you must be Sorrel?’
Sorrel threw Elle an amused look of approval. ‘I’m Sorrel Amery, and this is Geli,’ she said, hand outstretched. Despite being five years younger than Elle, Sorrel had the galling ability to appear the most adult of all of them. She was taking a degree in business studies and it was her stated intention to be a millionaire by the time she was twenty-five. She already acted and dressed the part.
Geli glared at Sorrel. ‘My name is Angelica,’ she said, which wasn’t promising. She only ever used her full name when she was in the kind of mood that meant trouble. ‘And we’ve already met.’
‘How was church this morning?’ Elle asked quickly before this conversation could develop into something her grandmother couldn’t deal with.
‘Oh, the sermon just went on and on so I left the vicar to it and went to find Sorrel,’ Gran said.
‘But she was supposed to be working!’ Elle tried not to sound as exasperated as she felt. Freddy had given Sorrel permission to use the free Wi-Fi provided for the bed and breakfast businessmen but only at the weekend when they weren’t busy. He certainly wouldn’t appreciate her family turning up en masse.
‘I didn’t get in her way. I just sat and read all the lovely free newspapers in the lounge while she downloaded stuff from the Internet.’
Elle groaned. ‘You’ll get me the sack.’
‘Oh, please.’ Sorrel rolled her eyes. ‘Freddy is never going to fire you; he’s too desperate to get into your knickers.’
‘No, no, no!’ Geli declared, covering her ears with her hands. ‘I’m too young to have that picture in my head.’
‘Quite right, Geli. Don’t be vulgar, Sorrel.’ Gran patted her hair. ‘Mr Frederickson was very kind. He brought us coffee and muffins and stayed to chat with me while Sorrel was busy. He’s very fond of you, Elle.’
Geli snorted.
‘He appreciates how hard you work, and wants to promote you to assistant manager,’ Gran told her gleefully.
‘I know, but I can’t take the job.’ A promotion would mean long hours with no chance to switch and swap shifts. And while the money would be more, she’d lose her tips. ‘Now, if he offered me an extra fifty pence an hour,’ she said, determined to turn the conversation away from any interest Freddy had in her knickers. Like Geli, the image was not something she wanted in her head. ‘Well, that would be very welcome.’
‘No such luck,’ Sorrel said. ‘He was just trying to make me feel guilty before he offered me a job.’
He certainly hadn’t wasted any time. ‘You don’t need a job. I want you to stick to your college work so that you can keep me in my old age,’ Elle said lightly.
‘No nuts with the ice cream, young man,’ her grandmother said, so quickly that if Elle didn’t know better she might have imagined Gran was feeling guilty about Elle’s lost opportunities. Then, taking Sorrel’s arm, ‘Let’s go and have another cup of coffee. Elle never makes any these days. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.’
Unfortunately, Geli didn’t follow them.
‘You know that Freddy was just plying Gran with coffee and cake so that he could pump her about what you do in your spare time?’
‘Geli—’
‘He wants to be sure you aren’t spending it with some fit bloke. If he hears that you’ve been flirting with the ice cream man,’ she said, giving Sean a flint-eyed stare, ‘you can kiss your job goodbye.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Elle said uncomfortably, unwilling to get into any conversation that involved the word kissing—not when she could almost taste Sean on her lips. ‘I thought you were meeting up with some friends from school and going into Maybridge this morning,’ she said, dragging her mind back to reality.
‘They decided to go to the multiplex in Melchester. Apparently, they’ve opened a new burger bar. Yuck, yuck, yuck.’
‘Geli…Angelica…is a vegetarian.’ Elle finally risked a glance at Sean.
‘Really? It’s a good thing you abandoned the crushed beetles option, then,’ he said, his face perfectly straight.
Geli looked at him, looked at her, then said, ‘Too weird. I’m going to get something to eat.’
‘Geli—’
‘What!’
‘There’s no milk,’ Elle reminded her.
‘Don’t blame me!’
‘Or bread.’
She sighed dramatically, then flounced off towards the village.
‘Is it always like this?’ Sean asked.
‘Just an average day at Gable End.’ Apart from Rosie. Long lost uncles. And a kiss that was no more than a breath on her lips.
‘I’d better go,’ Sean said. ‘I’ve already got you into enough trouble without making you late for work.’
‘Don’t take any notice of Geli. I’ve worked for Freddy for seven years.’
‘He’s a patient man.’
‘Patient?’
‘Although you would have been rather young for him when you first started. What is he? Forty? Forty-five?’
Her cheeks heated up as she realised what he meant. ‘No, Freddy’s not interested in me in that way. It’s just Sorrel’s idea of a joke.’
His eyebrows barely moved. ‘If you say so,’ he said, looking not at her, but at Rosie. ‘I never did get around to sh
owing you how the ice cream machine works.’
Maybe not, but he’d come very close to showing her plenty of other things. With her whole-hearted co-operation.
Not that he seemed in any great hurry to resume the lesson where they’d left off—touching close, lips a murmur apart. And that was a Good Thing, she told herself.
She might not have entirely escaped her mother’s live-now pay-later nature, but that didn’t mean she had to follow her example and lose her head over the first man to make her heart, and just about everything else, go boom.
‘There’s no time now. Save it for Saturday,’ she said.
‘Saturday?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, arranging her face in a faintly puzzled frown, ‘but didn’t you volunteer to be in charge of the sprinkles?’
‘Did I?’ And there it was again. The barely-there smile that went straight to her knees.
‘And afterwards you can take Rosie back to Haughton Manor and tuck her up in your barn until Basil turns up,’ she added, making an effort to be sensible.
Something else he’d volunteered to do before they’d both forgotten about Rosie, ice cream, Basil…
‘Oh, no! The letter!’
Sean should have been feeling only one emotion as he watched Elle race back down the path, long legs, long hair flying, to retrieve Basil’s letter before her grandmother picked it up and read it.
Relief.
He’d come within a gnat’s whisker of losing control, but Elle had just given him a get-out-of-jail-free card and it was long past time to remove himself from the temptation of those luscious lips, the danger of entanglement in a situation that should have a dedicated commitment-phobe running a mile.
‘Saturday it is, then,’ he said to no one in particular as he shut Rosie’s door, locked up, gave her a little pat. ‘I’ll come over early and make sure you behave yourself.’
And he tried not to think about spending an afternoon in close confinement with Elle. The quick tutorial he’d promised her. Or the possessive way the guy who ran the Blue Boar had touched her arm.
Elle skidded to a stop in the doorway. Sorrel was standing by the table reading Basil’s letter.
‘Where’s Gran?’ Elle asked.
‘Washing her hands. Tidying her hair. Getting ready for that “nice young man with the ice cream”,’ Sorrel added, patting her hair, mimicking her grandmother perfectly.
‘There is no ice cream. At least not today.’ She had half expected Sean to follow her, but she was the one who’d said there was no time. ‘Sean’s gone.’
‘Shame. I hoped you were getting serious attention from someone a little more appealing than Freddy,’ her sister teased.
‘I’ve locked up.’
Elle had sensed Sean’s presence a fraction of a second before he spoke. A subtle change in the light, the widening in Sorrel’s eyes, a charge in the air that had the fine hairs on her skin springing to attention…
Sean put Rosie’s keys on the kitchen table. ‘I’ll come back later with the trailer and pick up the car.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ She forgotten all about his promise to take their car to the scrapyard. ‘I won’t be here, but Sorrel…’ her beautiful, elegant sister, the one in control of her hair, her figure, her life, if not her tongue ‘…will be here if you need a hand.’
‘If you give me the keys, I won’t have to bother anyone,’ he said.
‘Of course.’ Elle took them from the key cupboard and dropped them into his palm, taking care not to touch him. ‘I’ll leave the garage door unlocked.’
‘I’m not sure how much I can get for it,’ he warned.
‘Get for it? I was told I’d have to pay to have it towed to the scrapyard.’
‘When you need towing you’re in a buyer’s market. I’ll take a look at what needs doing, make a few calls. It’s possible you’d do better advertising it on the Internet,’ he told her.
‘I didn’t expect you to go to all that trouble,’ Elle protested.
‘Who’d buy it?’ Sorrel asked at the same time.
He looked up. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, answering her sister. Then, in the slightly awkward silence that followed, ‘I’ll be here at about eleven on Saturday, if that’s okay? It should give us plenty of time to run through everything before we go.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Tell your grandmother she can have all the ice cream she can eat then.’
‘She’ll enjoy that,’ Elle said.
He nodded and was gone.
Elle turned on her sister, hands to her cheeks. ‘Did he hear?’
‘Does it matter?’ she asked.
‘“Getting serious attention?” Could you have made me sound more desperate?’
‘Elle, you are desperate. If you’re not careful, you’ll succumb to Freddy out of sheer frustration.’
‘Don’t…’ She took a deep breath. ‘Just don’t…’
‘Only saying. You need to grab that one while he’s available.’
‘He’s not,’ she said shortly. He might have come close to kissing her just now but he’d been firmly attached to the linen-clad blonde last night. Or she’d been firmly attached to him. Which amounted to the same thing. She should be grateful to Geli for turning up when she had.
Give her a little time and she would be.
‘But—’
‘The subject is closed,’ Elle announced firmly.
‘Okay. But you could have cut the tension in here just now with a knife,’ Sorrel remarked. ‘C-L-O-S-’
‘Okay, okay, okay.’ Her sister held up the letter. ‘Tell me about Basil.’
Grateful for the change of subject, Elle took the letter from her, giving her a quick rundown on the story so far as she folded it up and put it back in the brown envelope, along with the documents and diary.
‘I’ll do some digging on the ‘net. See what I can find out,’ Sorrel said, beating her to the top of the range cellphone and switching it on.
‘I think you should stay away from the Blue Boar for a while. Freddy wasn’t joking about offering you a job,’ Elle warned.
‘I know. He gave me the whole fitting-around-college-work, great-tips hard sell this morning. I told him I’d think about it. I could do with a new laptop,’ she mused. No…
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Elle said. Maybe there was something in the attic that had been overlooked. That she could sell. ‘Just concentrate on college, get a good degree. When you’re a millionaire you can run this family. Meanwhile, will you turn off that phone and give it to me?’
‘I’m sorry?’
Not half as sorry as she was, Elle thought, holding out her hand. Sorrel did not hand over the phone. ‘What?’ Elle asked.
‘I’m eighteen, Elle. An adult.’
‘You’re a student—’
‘I’m old enough to vote, fight for my country, buy a bottle of wine and drink it if I want to. I don’t want to “run this family”, but I will run my own life,’ Sorrel insisted.
‘How?’ Elle demanded. ‘You don’t even know how to use an iron!’
‘It’s not rocket science.’
For a moment the room silently vibrated with years of unspoken resentment. Elle’s dreams and thwarted ambitions, pushed aside while she stepped up to keep them together. A family.
‘No…’ Elle took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want you to be…’
‘What? Like you?’
‘That would be a woman with no qualifications, no career.’ No dream to inspire her. Just living from week to week, from hand to mouth, holding everything together. ‘Point made, I think.’
‘Elle…’ Sorrel shook her head. ‘I could never be you. You saved us from being put into care, saved Gran from completely losing her marbles. But maybe it’s time to think about saving yourself now.’
‘I don’t need saving,’ she insisted. Perhaps a little bit too fiercely, too defensively. ‘But I’ll think about it. If you
’ll forget about working at the Blue Boar.’
‘Oh, please. If I want a job, I can do better than skivvying for Freddy.’ Elle was still struggling to catch her breath when she added, ‘In fact, with a phone like this, I’d never have to go near the place again. And you read Basil’s letter. He’s handed everything over to us. Asked us to take care of things’
‘Sorrel…’
‘He’s got messages. Mostly people asking him to give them a ring,’ she said, flicking through them. ‘You can’t ignore them.’
‘Can’t I?’ Elle said dryly.
‘Oh, no, this is different. “Change in schedule.”’ she read. ‘“Need van on Tuesday. Upper Haughton location. Eight a.m. Confirm. KS.”’ She looked up. ‘What do you think that means?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I could call him and find out?’ she offered.
‘If you want to be useful, Sorrel,’ Elle snapped, taking the phone out of her hand and switching it off, ‘prove how adult you are, you can start by organising some lunch for Geli and Gran.’
Sean wasted no time going back with the trailer to pick up Elle’s old crock while she was at work.
Geli came out, standing pointedly, arms crossed, keeping an eye on him. A couple of neighbours walked slowly past, lingering by the gate. He kept his head down, his mouth shut and wished he’d waited until later. When Elle was home.
What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than making ice cream? Maybe he could have persuaded her to take a walk by the river. They could have had a drink at the pub down by the lock. They might even have finished that kiss…
‘Do you want me to drive Rosie into the garage?’ he asked Geli.
‘Did Elle ask you to?’
‘No.’
She shrugged, walked away.
He took a deep breath and told himself that Saturday was quite soon enough.
CHAPTER SEVEN
If your ice cream melts, you’re eating it too slowly.
—Rosie’s Diary
ELLE found Monday a mixed sort of day. It was her day off, which meant she didn’t have to be on her feet for hours, a smile on her face no matter what.