Second Chance Summer, page 22
It seemed strange to see Lily’s face on posters all over Bryher, advertising the craft fair. It reinforced the fact that she was a minor celebrity and brought home to him how impossible it would be that a mere mortal like himself could ever make her happy.
Every time he was tempted to open up, to tell her he’d started to have feelings for her that went way beyond host for guest, the scars of the past yanked him back to reality: a woman from such a different world, only here for a matter of days … He cared too much for her to start a passing fling. It was for the best that he keep his distance entirely.
‘Wait. I’m coming back to Stark with you.’
He’d been so lost in thought, he hadn’t noticed Morven arrive.
‘You want to come over?’ he said, setting down a crate of beer and wine on the stones of the quay. ‘Haven’t you spent enough time on Stark recently?’ He couldn’t resist it.
‘Ha ha! Soo funny, Uncle Sam.’ Morven curled her lip. ‘I said I’d help with the cleaning and changeovers, which is why I’m here.’
‘I thought you went off the idea when Lily turned up?’
‘Yeah. But her family are coming so you’ll need the extra help. Besides …’ Morven looked sheepish. ‘I thought she’d be a pain but she’s not as horrible as she first seemed.’
‘Thanks. I’ll pass on your compliment to our guest.’
‘She’s not a guest though, is she?’ Morven said. ‘She’s kind of …’
‘A friend,’ Sam supplied.
Morven snorted. ‘Yeah. Sure she’s your friend.’
‘I meant your friend.’
‘Stop winding me up!’ Morven cried in frustration. ‘Now the cottages are ready, we’ll have real guests soon plus her family. You’ll need help with the cleaning and making the beds so I’m offering again.’
Sam relented. Morven had stood enough teasing. ‘That would be great but are you absolutely sure? I have advertised for a housekeeper but they’ll need an extra pair of hands too. They can’t be expected to deal with everything.’
‘Yeah. I’ll do it because as a cleaner I won’t have to see the guests and I need to save up some money. And you need the help while I’m here on the islands for the summer … and maybe next year until I start university next September. If I do go,’ she said, deflating suddenly. ‘Because I might be somewhere else.’
Sam folded his arms. ‘Wow. That’s the best job application I’ve ever heard.’
Morven pointed her finger at him. ‘Don’t push it, Uncle Sam.’
‘OK. Yes, please, I’d appreciate your help,’ he said, touched by her plan to save up for uni. Nate had to realise how badly his daughter wanted to study Fine Art but the decision was out of Sam’s hands. ‘But please try not to call me uncle. It makes me feel old.’
Morven smirked. ‘You’re old enough.’
Sam rolled his eyes, quietly glad she was her cheeky self again.
‘Oh, look, here she is.’ Morven flipped a thumb in the direction of the café where Lily was walking through the tea garden, laptop bag over her shoulder and a box in her arms. On this fine midsummer day, the sun was hot on any bare skin and Lily’s cheeks had turned a nice shade of pink, not that he’d tell her. In a white vest top and her denim shorts, she looked as if she belonged on Bryher.
‘Hello!’ she said, breathing hard. ‘Elspeth insisted on us having these sandwiches for lunch. Bruce made me have this cauliflower – don’t ask me why – and Ivanka kind of strong-armed me into buying a jar of greengage jam from the shop. I don’t even like jam …’
‘I do,’ Morven said, swiping the jar from Lily’s box.
‘That’s lucky,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ Sam said, taking the box from Lily, thinking that she’d become part of island life faster than he would if he’d been a stranger. From initially loathing the place, she was now living the dream … the fantasy. It was hard to believe he only had a few more days left with her. How long would it take for this escape from reality – this retreat from her real life – to wear off?
Morven climbed aboard after them.
Sam reversed away from the jetty. ‘Will you want a lift home after you’ve helped or are you staying on Stark in Samphire?’ he asked his niece, who was lounging on the rear seat.
‘God, I’m not staying with you two. It’s Nazim’s birthday and I’m going to her party at the Tresco Inn. And before you ask, her mum has booked a jet boat to take everyone from Bryher there and back and she’s going to drive me home to Hell Bay House after. Auntie Elspeth knows all about it in case you want to double-check my alibi.’
Lily hid a giggle. Sam rolled his eyes. ‘OK. I’ll bring you home for five, if that suits you?’
‘I suppose that’ll be OK. I’ll need to get changed after helping with the cottages.’
On the way to Stark, above the engine noise, he caught snatches of conversation between Morven and Lily. They were talking about collaging, though much of it was lost on him.
He didn’t see himself as creative unless you counted building walls and installing roofs. The construction part of his job was a means to an end, until he could reach the woodwork part of the project. It gave him deep satisfaction to design the built-in window seats and find the perfect pieces of timber for the shelves. He could lose himself while he carved and planed and fitted.
He wasn’t about to have a stall at the craft fair, however.
His main pleasure on this trip was to see Morven engaging with him and Lily. He just hoped Nate didn’t let her down. He wasn’t sure how she’d react if his brother announced he was taking her off to LA to live with him and Grady. Sam couldn’t get that video call out of his mind: Nate’s shock, his tears and Grady’s reaction: ‘What the actual fuck has she done now?’ As if Morven was only an irritation to be borne, not a potential step-daughter.
When they reached Stark, she was still talking happily to Lily.
‘I could show you where I find the pebbles and shells. I know all the best beachcombing spots on Bryher and Stark.’
He winced. No wonder Morven knew Stark intimately after her antics … yet Lily answered her without apparent irony.
‘OK. I’d like that.’
Sam sighed. He wasn’t sure how much cleaning and bed changing would be done, though he supposed he should be grateful that the two of them were bonding over something rather than sparring with each other.
Sam spent the afternoon varnishing the woodwork in Starfish. Contrary to his expectations, Morven had helped clean the cottage, then she and Lily styled the bed with cushions and added a vase of fresh flowers grown in the garden at Hell Bay House.
‘Is cauliflower cheese OK for dinner?’ Lily asked when Sam walked into reception after dropping Morven back home. ‘Hope so, ’cos I’ve already made it.’
She showed him a dish with the veg smothered in a cheese sauce.
‘Er … yes,’ Sam said, hoping his stomach wouldn’t rumble too loudly. ‘I could do some steak to go with it. There are some in the fridge.’
‘I spotted them.’ She chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, I need more than cauliflower cheese too.’
He exhaled. ‘I’m very glad you said that. You don’t have to cook everything though.’
‘I know I don’t have to, but I want to. My recipe portfolio is expanding. I might book myself on a cookery course when I get home. You could offer courses here too. I’ve been thinking about it. Cookery, foraging, yoga, creative writing. There are so many talented people on the islands who could be tutors and you could charge a premium to the guests who attend.’
‘That is a very good idea,’ Sam said, feeling so comfortable in her presence that she could be his business partner – more even? What was happening here? Lily cooking for him and him cooking for her … her waiting at home for him as if they were living together.
He was thinking back to Aaron’s comments and a veiled remark from the pub landlady, and to a conversation he’d had with Elspeth that morning.
‘People are bound to gossip. You’re alone on that island with her every night. Be careful, love. I like Lily a lot but don’t get your heart broken again.’
‘There’s zero danger of that.’
Sam snapped back to the present. ‘Let’s get these steaks going,’ he said more gruffly than he’d intended.
By dinnertime, a mizzle had blown in so they ate inside.
‘I hope it clears up for Saturday. I checked the forecast and it’s looking dry.’
He smiled. ‘The forecasts don’t mean much here. It was supposed to be sunny today but Elspeth’s seaweed was damp this morning and she reckons she knew the rain was coming.’
‘That doesn’t give me a great deal of faith to be honest.’
He laid his knife and fork down. ‘Rory said the Met Office long-range predicted a dry weekend.’
‘Now that I can buy into. Penny has every eventuality covered but I so want the girls to see Stark at its best.’
‘As opposed to not being able to see it at all?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it was crap when you arrived. No wonder you were pissed off.’
‘You couldn’t help the weather.’ Her eyes gleamed with mischief. ‘Though you weren’t exactly a ray of sunshine yourself.’
Sam remembered how tense and nervous he’d felt at taking in a guest when the retreat wasn’t ready.
‘I suppose I know you well enough now to admit I regretted accepting the booking pretty much from the moment I put the phone down.’
She rested her hand on her chin. ‘Why did you, then?’
‘Richie said you’d had a horrible time and were desperate for a break and I was gung-ho enough to think I could pull it off. I always think I can get more done than I have time for.’
‘You’re as bad as me, trying to do everything yourself. No man is an island …’
He’d cut himself off since Rhiannon had left. ‘No, and I think I’ve realised that lately.’
He hovered on the verge of telling Lily that she was the reason he’d looked up at the sky again, instead of living inside the walls of his darkest thoughts. He’d realised that he’d been through a bereavement – a double one.
‘After the kayak thing, you talked about loss.’
Lily’s lips parted in surprise.
‘I said I hadn’t lost anyone, not in the same way as you, but perhaps that’s not quite true.’ The words froze in his throat, words he’d never said to anyone.
‘Rhiannon was pregnant, but she had a miscarriage. The baby – our baby – died.’
‘Oh, Sam.’ Lily spoke softly. ‘I am so very sorry. Truly.’
Her sympathy brought a lump to his throat. ‘No one else knows she was ever pregnant.’ Even as he spoke, he felt astonished that he was pouring out the most painful details of his life to someone he’d known for mere weeks, when he couldn’t tell the loved ones he’d known for years.
‘I’m here to listen,’ she said. ‘If you want to talk.’
His stomach flipped. In Lily’s eyes, he glimpsed the good, kind person beneath the hard exterior shining through. She’d already shown him so much of her true self, she deserved some honesty from him.
‘Rhiannon was about eight weeks gone and on a training course in Truro so I wasn’t even with her when she lost the baby,’ he said, remembering the sense of helplessness that had added to his agony. ‘The weather was bad – thick fog for days – so it was a while before she could fly home. She went through that on her own, apart from her colleagues being with her.’
‘When was this?’
‘First week of January last year. Not being able to get to her, to comfort her, was … awful.’
Sam looked down. He hadn’t realised that Lily was holding his hand. He didn’t let hers go.
‘It must have been absolutely terrible for you,’ she said.
‘It was bad.’ Torture, he remembered, to be trapped and unable to reach her. ‘To be honest, I’d never felt more like leaving the islands forever.’ He’d met her afterwards at St Mary’s airport on a raw grey day when you could barely tell where the sea and sky met.
‘She wanted a child so much. I did too, but it had taken longer than either of us had expected and Rhiannon blamed herself. When she finally conceived and then we lost the baby, it felt doubly cruel.’
‘Life can be so cruel, without reason …’
Lily understood, Sam knew it. ‘When we got home to Hell Bay, I told Rhiannon that we still had each other. I reassured her that the two of us would always be enough if we weren’t able to have kids in the future. We were enough … enough for me.’
The pain of what happened next returned, almost as sharp as when Rhiannon had first delivered the news that had landed like a bomb in his life.
‘A few days later, she told me that just us wasn’t enough for her. She said that she’d been having second thoughts about our relationship for a while and the baby had masked her doubts. She’d swept them aside when she thought we’d be a family, hoping that they’d go away once the child was born, but with only the two of us to focus on again …’
Sam broke off, to compose himself for a moment. ‘So,’ he managed, ‘we split up.’
‘Oh, Sam, that must have been so tough while you were still coming to terms with losing the baby.’
‘It was very hard, I’ll admit. I wasn’t enough for her on my own and to realise she’d been having doubts for a while … I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt like I was drowning, not knowing which way up I was, how to get through each day.’
‘All of those feelings are completely understandable.’
Comforted by Lily’s empathy, he took a breath and then went on. ‘So she left. While she’d been away on the course, a friend of hers had taken a job in Adelaide and mentioned how badly they needed more nurses. Rhiannon decided to leave too. Nothing I could do would change her mind and she asked me to respect her decision so I stopped trying. Three weeks later she was on her way to Australia.’
‘That’s a huge change to deal with. So sudden, two losses on top of each other,’ Lily said. ‘You must have felt helpless and abandoned.’
‘Both. I offered to go to Australia with her so we could give things another shot but she insisted I mustn’t try to go after her.’ Rhiannon’s words came back to him again – he saw her face, tender and sad but resolute.
‘Please don’t. I need to make a fresh start on my own, far away from here. I could never rip you out of the place you belong to. You’re as much a part of the landscape as the granite or the sand on the beach, Sam.’
‘I am so sorry.’ Lily squeezed his hand.
‘I’ve been grieving, I suppose,’ he said, still amazed he’d told her so much. ‘And I let it go on too long.’ He thought again of the flowers he kept in his room, ones he’d picked from a small meadow on Bryher to honour the loss of his child. A lump formed in his throat.
‘Sam, if I can tell you one thing, it’s that there’s no time limit on grief. Be kinder to yourself.’ She smiled briefly. ‘Oh, no, listen to me acting like a self-help guru. Next thing you know, I’ll be writing a book about how a near-death experience helped me to live again. Actually,’ she said, tapping her finger against her lips and musing, ‘that’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had.’
Lily drew a smile from him, like water from a dry well. In the midst of wallowing in his misery, she’d turned on the sunshine.
‘I’m joking,’ she said, suddenly serious again and no longer holding his hand. ‘You did all you could. You said you’d have been ready to leave Scilly if Rhiannon had asked you to.’
‘I was desperate. I have travelled and worked abroad. It was a fantastic experience but I love it here. Rhiannon was right, she was the wise one. I am part of the landscape. I would never have been happy to live away from here.’ Even as he said it, he realised he was sabotaging any possibility of a relationship with Lily, however remote that had been before he’d told her about the baby.
‘I now understand why,’ she said. ‘It’s very beautiful. More than that, it’s extraordinary. Unlike any place I’ve ever seen – not that I’ve seen that much of the world outside airports or hotel rooms.’
‘Is that one more thing on the agenda for Project New Lily?’ he asked, glad to shift the focus to her again. He felt wrung out.
Her eyes lit up. ‘Yes, it is and the list is growing longer every day. Learning to cook, spending more time with the family, going to the gym, travelling the world, running the business. I can’t do it all …’
‘I think you could do anything you wanted.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘You’re an extraordinary person, Lily. Unlike anyone I’ve ever met.’
He was no longer holding her hand. He was holding her in his arms and kissing her. Not a brush of the lips, a ‘did-that-really-happen’ moment – a deep kiss that made his spine tingle and wiped away every resolution he’d made not to reveal his feelings for her.
He took her hand and she seemed to know exactly what he wanted without him speaking. As the soft rain fell, he led her out of the door and to her cottage.
She stopped at the door.
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What is this, Sam?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You tell me?’
‘It’s … risky. Believe me, I want to walk through that door with you and stay in your bed all night. I want to wake up with you.’
His heart sank. ‘But … there’s a “but” waiting, isn’t there?’
‘I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt either of us.’
His stomach knotted with dread. It was a little too late for this. He didn’t want her to be kind to him. He’d already decided that he would take the consequences of stepping closer, of putting his hand near the fire again.
‘You had your heart broken when Rhiannon left the islands,’ Lily said. ‘I’ll be doing the same thing come Monday. I care too much for you to let this become something that would hurt you all over again. It’s better if we leave it like this before the same thing happens again.’
‘So, it’s me you’re thinking of?’ he said, feeling numb with shock. ‘Just my heart?’
‘I don’t want either of us to end up with a broken heart. We’ve both been through so much, I don’t think I could take any more pain. You’re not going to leave the retreat you’ve put so much into building. I’m not going to leave the business I’ve put so much into building.’ She stopped to draw breath then went on, ‘Please understand that doesn’t mean we don’t care for each other, but we also don’t want to give up on our personal passions – and neither of us should. That’s not a good basis for any relationship.’
