Summer at the Lake (18 page)

‘I’d figured you for the mad woman in the attic,’ he’d said with a sardonic lifting of an eyebrow.

‘Watch it, mister,’ she’d laughed. ‘Come the next lot of snow, I’ll have my revenge.’

With no heating in the property, they hadn’t lingered for long and had quickly retreated to the warmth of Trinity House where Esme had treated them to tea and crumpets. After some surreptitious questioning from Esme, Adam had admitted that he’d cut short the month-long break with Jesse and ended things himself. ‘And, please, no more on the subject,’ he’d said, raising a warning hand. ‘Certainly no platitudes.’

‘As you wish,’ Esme had said quietly, exchanging a look with Floriana.

It had been the first time they had managed to get together again since the lunch Floriana had cooked for them. To her surprise, there had been no disasters and her first attempt at cooking a turkey had been declared a triumph, and in the way that Adam always managed to come up trumps, he’d not only supplied the wine for the meal but the table and chairs – something she had completely overlooked in her haste to host the lunch. He’d offered the furniture for her to keep but as she’d pointed out, there just wasn’t room for it on a permanent basis.

Outside the office on the High now, Floriana was all set to launch into what she always said at this point – a thank you to the customer for choosing Dreaming Spires Tours – when Mr Zhukova moved in alarmingly close and thrust something small and hard into her gloved hand. For a crazy moment she thought it was a gun.

‘For you, Miss Day,’ he said gruffly. ‘You need better coat to keep you warm and proper fur hat, that silly knitted thing you wear is best only for English teapot.’

It wasn’t until the Zhukovas were installed in the back of the black Mercedes and she’d waved them off that Floriana checked what was in her hand. She was shocked to see it was a roll of cash, and by all appearances a considerable amount. Amazed at the generosity of the tip, she stuffed it quickly into her coat pocket, turned away from the kerb and pushed open the door to the office.

It was there that she received her second surprise of the day.

‘When I didn’t hear back from you, I knew there was only one thing to do – I had to come to Oxford and do this face to face.’

‘And what exactly is it you want to do face to face?’ Floriana asked, playing for time. She was miserably on edge, struggling to think straight, struggling even to sit still after being press-ganged into agreeing to have lunch in Quods. How could he do this to her? How could he just turn up out of the blue like this?

Opposite, the cause of her anguish was looking her unnervingly square in the eye. It was more than two years since she’d last seen Seb and he looked transformed. Gone was the trademark shaggy hair of old that had made him seem just a bit out of kilter, now his hair was closely cropped, giving him an oddly vulnerable appearance. But then there had always been something vulnerable about Seb beneath the outward show of confidence and swagger.

‘I want to know that you’ll be at my wedding,’ he said.

She gave a tense little laugh. ‘You came all the way from London to do that?’

‘Oxford isn’t exactly at the far ends of the earth.’

‘But you took the day off work to come and all on a wing and a prayer that I’d be here. I could have been anywhere.’

He shrugged. ‘Not exactly. I phoned your office yesterday to check you’d be working today and simply lay in wait.’

‘No one in the office would give out personal information like that,’ she said. But then she remembered Damian Webb had been working yesterday. Spin the right line to him and he’d probably give out her bank details if he had them to hand!

‘I pretended to be a potential customer, gave some story about you being personally recommended to me,’ Seb said. He suddenly smiled. ‘I’m sure you can remember how persuasive I can be.’ But then the smile dropped and his expression was serious and she knew the awkward exchange of polite query and response was over and it was to the heart of the matter. ‘Don’t you think this silliness has gone on for long enough?’ he said, matter-of-factly.

Stirred by a flash of irritation Floriana sat up straight – twice now in less than thirty minutes the word silly had been applied to her: first Mr Zhukova and now Seb. ‘Is that what you’d call it?’ she said as a jumble of emotions and memories raced chaotically through her head . . . angry words exchanged . . . accusations made . . . love declared . . . love rejected . . . humiliation complete . . . a friendship lost.

Without answering her question, Seb said: ‘Why didn’t you reply to my card? And please don’t say “what card?”, that would not just insult my intelligence, but yours.’

She swallowed and looked around for their waitress. How long did it take to make a cup of coffee and pour out a beer? Seb had suggested tequilas for old times’ sake, but she’d refused – no way was she going to consume any alcohol when she needed all her faculties in full working order to survive this ordeal. ‘I just didn’t get around to replying,’ she said blandly. ‘I was busy in the run-up to Christmas.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘You’re such a bad liar, Florrie.’

‘Don’t call me Florrie!’ she snapped.

The pained expression on his face was so acute she might well have slapped him. Silence weighed heavily between them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally. ‘Sorry for many things. But chiefly for what happened to us. I always believed we were invincible, that nothing could ever come between us. I still believe it.’ He glanced over her shoulder, distracted by something. ‘Ah, at last, our drinks, which I know you were anxiously awaiting in the hope they would provide you with a convenient distraction.’

She gritted her teeth.

‘Don’t grit your teeth,’ he said, when the waitress had left them, ‘the wind will change and they’ll all drop out. Or something equally hideous will happen to you.’

‘Something hideous will happen to you if you don’t be quiet,’ she said, picking up her cup and taking a sip. Annoyingly it wasn’t as hot as she’d like.

The corners of his mouth tilted up into a cautious smile. ‘That’s more like it, that’s the Florrie – I mean, that’s the Floriana I know and love. Come on, let’s put all that . . . all that stuff behind us. Let’s be friends again.’

Classic Seb, she thought, trust him to dismiss the single biggest heartbreaking event in her life merely as ‘stuff’.

‘I’ll beg if I have to,’ he said when she didn’t reply.

There was a tenderness to his voice that made her heart turn over and she felt the carefully constructed defences she had worked so hard to put in place begin to weaken. ‘Are you sure you need an old friend like me in your life?’ she asked.

‘What you’re really asking is will Imogen mind me having you as a friend again, isn’t it?’

‘And will she?’

‘She knows that you’re my oldest friend and that I’ve missed you these last two years. She’s made it very clear that what went on before is all in the past and she’s . . .’

‘She’s what?’ Floriana asked, leaping on his hesitation. She knew Seb well enough to know that he didn’t hesitate without good reason.

‘She’s forgiven you.’

It took all of Floriana’s will power to refrain from saying,
That’s bloody big of her!
but tipping her cup up so she was virtually hiding behind it, she drank the rest of her lukewarm coffee in one long swallow.

When she put the cup down, she found Seb’s dark contemplative eyes fixed on her. Oh, how well she remembered those eyes, the deep intensity of them, the little flecks of amber that had always fascinated her and which could make his eyes literally glitter. He had once convinced a gullible girl at school that staring at the sun when he’d been a baby had caused the flecks.

As a teenager, and in the way that close friends can be wholly objective, she had always considered Seb to be good-looking, but if she had been asked to describe him back then she would have failed to do so, because his features, so very familiar to her, had been as good as invisible to her, in the same way the faces of her sister or parents were. But sitting here across the table from him, seeing him anew and taking in the clean, sharply defined features of his face, the smoothness of his skin that gave him a forever-young appearance, and experiencing the way he could fix his unblinking gaze on her and make her feel he could read her mind, it was a stark and painful reminder of when she had realised that her feelings for him had changed from friendship to love. The realisation had hit her so suddenly and with such force it had turned her world upside down and then the day had come when she could bear it no more and she had been compelled to tell him that she loved him. But it had been a disaster, the very worst mistake of her life.

Now, against all the odds, she was sitting close enough to reach across the table and kiss him, just as she had wanted to do the last time they’d spoken. But there had been no kiss, just a terrible argument and the shattering suggestion from Seb that perhaps it would be better if they never saw one another again.

Remembering that day, she felt her throat constrict with a sadness that made her want to run far away from him. She didn’t think she would ever forget the pain of being banished from the world they had once shared, and all because she had spoken the truth. But it was a truth he hadn’t wanted to hear, let alone believe.

‘What about you?’ he said now, his gaze fixed on her with unblinking intensity. ‘Have you forgiven me for falling in love with Imogen?’

She was saved from answering by the arrival of their lunch – pumpkin ravioli for her and steak and fries for Seb. The disruption in the conversation gave her the chance to change the subject when the waitress had left them.

‘So where are you getting married?’ she asked brightly.

There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he knew she had refused to answer his question and what that meant. But either deciding to come back to it later or forget it altogether, he said, ‘Lake Como.’

Her first thought was, Oh, what a coincidence! On Sunday, while they’d been enjoying tea and crumpets at Trinity House, Esme had told Floriana and Adam about her trip to Italy with her father when she’d been a young girl and how they’d gone to Lake Como to spend the summer there. But as Esme always did whenever she shared anything with them, she had brought the story to an abrupt stop just at a tantalising point in the tale.

However, Floriana’s second thought was one of relief. Because right there was her cast-iron excuse for not putting herself through the agony of watching Seb marry Imogen. No way would she be able to afford to go. She was off the hook.
Three cheers for being a lowly, cash-strapped tour guide!
In an instant her mood lightened and she said, ‘A fancy-schmancy wedding, I should have expected nothing less.’ What she really meant was that she would expect nothing less of Imogen. The girl’s class and moneyed background made Floriana look like trailer trash.

‘Not that fancy,’ Seb said. ‘It’ll be fairly low-key. Just three hundred close friends and family.’

‘
Three hundred!
’

He smiled. ‘I’m joking. It’ll be about seventy or eighty guests.’

‘Still, that’s quite a big do.’

‘You will come, won’t you?’

‘Seb, you don’t want riff-raff like me there. I’ll only get horribly drunk and let the side down.’

He frowned. ‘Since when did you become riff-raff?’

Since you got involved with Imogen and her super-rich family, she thought. ‘Well, we do move in slightly different circles these days, don’t we?’ she said. ‘There’s you, the top-flight ad exec living in high-achieving splendour in Belsize Park, and there’s me slumming it in Oxford.’

‘Hardly that,’ he said tersely.

‘You know what I mean.’

She watched him chew thoughtfully on a piece of steak, then reach for his beer. ‘Money isn’t the issue here, though, is it?’ he said when he set the glass down.

‘That, my friend, just goes to show that you know nothing; it’s
all
about the ker-ching. It always is when you don’t have much of it. Those chips looks good.’

He moved the salt and pepper pots out of the way so she could reach. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

She did, offering him some of her ravioli in return.

He scooped up a piece with his fork. ‘Mm . . . not bad.’

And magically, as if they had somehow negotiated the rocky terrain and dangerous precipice of the last two years and were now on safer ground, they embarked on the process of catching up properly. She told him that her parents had sold the shop and were away on a world cruise. ‘They’ve been gone since the end of November and are due home next week.’

‘And Christmas, what did you do in their absence?’

Remembering how he and his mother had once spent Christmas with them, and how his mother had got embarrassingly drunk and they’d had to put her to bed in the spare room while they opened their presents downstairs, she told him about going to Ann’s. It was when she was fully engrossed in hamming up her story of the Christmas from hell and was pushing a hand through her hair, that he noticed the scar, which was still quite livid in colour. ‘How’d you get that?’ he asked with a frown. ‘Looks like it must have been painful.’

So out came the story of her accident. ‘I blame you unreservedly,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t sent me that blasted invitation I wouldn’t have got knocked over.’

‘On the upside, if I hadn’t sent that
blasted
invitation we wouldn’t be having lunch. God, it’s bloody good to see you. I’ve missed you.’

When she didn’t say anything, he said, ‘That’s your cue to say you’ve missed me. You have, haven’t you?’

She nodded, not trusting herself to answer.

There was an awkward silence while they concentrated on eating. ‘Will you promise me something?’ he said at length.

‘Depends what it is.’

‘Please don’t say you won’t come to my wedding because you can’t afford it.’

She put down her knife and fork. ‘Seb, the truth is, I don’t have the money. Just about everything I earn goes on my mortgage. Trips abroad are a luxury I can’t afford.’

As if missing the point of what she’d just told him, he said, ‘You got around to buying something, then?’