Life's a Beach and Then... (The Liberty Sands Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

For the second night in a row Philippe had barely slept, not
wanting to miss a moment of his time with Holly, and now the first light of the
day was streaming in through the windows. His fingers toyed gently with the
dark unruly curls framing her face, tangled from their lovemaking. He smiled at
his choice of word. Philippe would normally have referred to it as sex but this
experience had been different. He had felt emotion, possibly even love, he
thought as he gazed down at her. She looked peaceful in sleep, vulnerable, and
at that moment his only thought was to protect her. Obviously losing her
husband had been devastating and he wondered if maybe in his desire to get to
know her physically he had rushed things emotionally. She had been a
responsive, willing sexual partner but she hadn’t uttered those three little
words that so many of his previous conquests had. He had wanted her to say it,
even though he was unsure how he would have responded, but she had remained
silent and then the moment was lost when he had mentioned her husband.

Philippe had noticed the look of panic in her eyes. Maybe
she thought she had betrayed her husband’s memory by mentioning his name while
lying naked in the arms of another man. He could understand that and it made
the powerful feelings he was experiencing towards her even stronger. What he
was finding harder to comprehend was her behaviour at the dinner table. Why had
Holly lied about being named after a character in a film? Although she had
explained her reasons he felt she was holding something back. And her
description of Holly Golightly as a high-class hooker. Was that accurate?
Philippe had never thought of Audrey Hepburn’s sensitive portrayal as that, and
he had watched
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
a dozen or more
times. She was just a young woman alone and vulnerable, not unlike my Holly, he
thought, still playing with her tousled curls.

He glanced past her to the clock on the bedside table and
knew that he needed to wake her if she was to keep her breakfast rendezvous
with Robert and Rosemary. He had already decided that he would say his goodbyes
and head back to Tamarina Bay to avoid any awkwardness with the hotel staff.
Dinner was one thing, breakfast something else entirely.

‘Holly,’ he said gently, ‘you need to wake up.’

Holly opened her eyes and focused on the man she had spent
the majority of the last two days with. It seemed longer, she thought, it feels
like I’ve known him for years. His slight physical resemblance to Gareth may
have been what had initially attracted her to Philippe, but Holly was sure that
the deepening feelings she had for him were nothing to do with Harry’s dad. She
flinched as she remembered the near miss she had had over the hair clip. It
would be so easy to simply tell Philippe the truth but there wasn’t time now,
she realised, as she caught sight of the clock. It was already seven thirty.

Philippe was stroking her arm, occasionally brushing her
right breast as he did so.

‘I don’t suppose we have time for an encore?’ he said, his
eyes twinkling.

‘Sadly not,’ she replied, removing his arm from around her
shoulders, but kissing the tips of his fingers as she did so. ‘We have a
breakfast appointment in thirty minutes.’

‘You have a breakfast appointment,’ he corrected.

Holly’s heart missed a beat. ‘Are you not coming?’

‘I think it’s better to say out goodbyes in private,’ he
said, then added, ‘and anyway it’s not really adieu it’s au revoir,’ and in
case she didn’t understand he translated, ‘until we meet again.’

Holly released the breath she hadn’t realised she had been
holding. ‘You do mean it Philippe? We will see each other when you come back to
England?’

‘I would fly back with you today if I could. You have given
me a reason to get my book finished as quickly as possible so we can spend time
getting to know each other properly.’

They kissed deeply but before it could lead to anything
Holly pulled away.

‘You take a shower first. I need to start throwing my
clothes into my suitcase.’

Reluctantly Philippe did as instructed leaving the water
running for Holly while he gathered his clothes from the floor by the window.
It’s a good job people expected linen to look crumpled, he thought, looking
down at the woeful state of his trousers. He sat on the bed buttoning his shirt
watching Holly through the shutters that divided the bathroom from the bedroom.
She had her head back allowing the warm water to rinse away the last remnants
of shampoo from her hair and all trace of him from her body. The temptation to
strip off and join her in the shower was almost irresistible but Philippe
stopped himself. There would be plenty more opportunities. Finally he had found
a woman he could love who would love him back.

Holly towel dried her hair and combed it through, then
slipped into her comfy trousers and loose-fitting tunic in preparation for the
twelve-hour flight home.

They didn’t speak, just held each other close, all the
communication they needed. Holly opened the door to her room and they walked along
the sandy path towards the main hotel building hand in hand. When they reached
the fork in the path, one direction leading to the restaurant and the other to
the front of the hotel, they stopped.

Philippe leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. In
an attempt to keep the mood light he said, ‘You realise if the restaurant was
called Tiffany’s you’d be on your way to Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’

Even as he said it an idea started to form in his mind so he
was only half listening when Holly said, ‘Wrong Holly. I don’t own a cat and if
I did I’d think of a better name for it than Cat!’

The black limo pulled up outside the Plantation House hotel
at 9.25 a.m. and despite having Robert and Rosemary with her Holly felt alone
without Philippe at her side. She understood his reasoning about the hotel
staff and how awkward he would have felt going to breakfast with her but a
small part of her was hoping that he would arrive in his ageing BMW to drive
her to the airport because he wanted to be with her until the last possible
moment. There was no sign of him and, come to think of it, he had suddenly
become very distracted and positively rushed away from her towards the hotel
car park as she stood watching him before she took the other path to the restaurant
to meet her friends.

Neither of them had mentioned Philippe at breakfast, which
was a little odd as they must have realised the two of them had spent the night
together, until Rosemary, while checking that they had each other’s contact
details, phone, mobile phone and email address, asked if she had exchanged her
details with Philippe.

‘Just email at the moment,’ Holly had replied. ‘Phone calls
and text messages to Mauritius are expensive.’

That wasn’t the only reason. She didn’t want Philippe ringing
her mobile and getting a foreign ringtone when she was away on her next
assignment. There would be plenty of time to exchange phone numbers when he
finished writing his book and came home to England. There would also be plenty
of time to tell him the truth about her life, at least she hoped there would
be, and she hoped he would understand the reason she had needed to lie to him.

The driver, Sachin, was holding the car door open for her.

Holly hugged Robert first. ‘Look after your beautiful wife,
she’s a very special lady.’

‘You’re right she is,’ said Robert.

Then she held Rosemary for a long moment. ‘Keep in touch and
ring me the moment you get home so that we can meet up.’

‘I will,’ Rosemary promised, a promise tinged with sadness
as both women knew that the reason for Rosemary’s return to the UK would be
Rosemary’s failing health.

Sachin closed the car door, climbed into the driver’s seat
and the limousine pulled smoothly away with Holly biting her trembling lip and
unable to look back for fear of crying.

So much had happened to her in one short week and she knew
the impact would stay with her for the rest of her life.

All the way back to his rented house at Tamarina Bay Philippe
had been struggling with the urge to turn his car around and walk in through
the front of the hotel, witnessed by the staff who knew him well, so that he
could spend a little more time with Holly, maybe even breaking his own rules
about last-minute goodbyes by driving her to the airport. The only thing that stopped
him was the spark of an idea for his book that would turn it from a dull
‘travelogue’ to a romance with a twist. He was running out of time to deliver
the rewrite of his first draft as had been made crystal clear by the frosty
email from his publisher that had been waiting for him yesterday when he had
arrived home after his afternoon of lovemaking:

Phil,

You have two months to deliver before you are in breach of
contract, let me know if this is going to be a problem for you. My neck is on
the line too – you know how hard I worked to get you the three-book deal before
we knew if Maman would be the success it was.

KR

Jo

KR, he thought with annoyance. His editor, Jo, had
criticised his writing ability and she couldn’t even write ‘kind regards’. He could
feel a bubble of anger starting to swell but he quickly quashed it knowing,
despite his irritation, that she had a point.
Maman
had flowed easily but this latest book had lacked the same depth of emotion,
his fabricated characters feeling shallow and unrealistic. Even his English
teacher at his boarding school in Kent would have made him go back to the
drawing board to flesh out his characters until they felt like real people that
you believed in and cared about. That’s the secret, he thought, my characters
have to be based on real people and now I know who ‘Tiffany’ is.

He turned the key in the lock of his front door and headed
straight for his desk and laptop impatient to get started on the rewrite. There
would be plenty of time to spend with Holly once his book was finished and he
was back in England. As he had reassured Holly, it was
au
revoir
not
adieu
.

Holly stood on the station platform at Gatwick airport
waiting for the next train to Clapham Junction from where she could catch a train
home to Reading. Soleil Resorts footed the bill for everything while she was on
location but travel arrangements in the UK were her own responsibility. She
allowed herself a wry smile. It was a very different journey in prospect from
her arrival at Dubai International airport in the back of a black stretch
limousine for her flight home, some seven hours earlier.

It had been a crazy eight weeks. She had arrived home from
Mauritius to find a manuscript requiring her copy-editing attention. It was a
second book from a former daytime television presenter and sadly it was no
better written than his first. He had particularly requested Holly as she had
‘licked his first book into shape’.

That was one way of putting it, Holly thought, but a more
accurate description might have been that I totally re-wrote it. Holly had not
only corrected the punctuation and grammar, but also made dialogue suggestions
as the writer in question seemed to have his characters speaking in language
more relevant to the early twentieth century rather than a hundred years later.
Even the plot had been too straightforward with no twists and turns and little
to keep the reader interested, so Holly had tweaked that too. The resulting
book had been well received but even with her changes Holly doubted that it
would have made the Bestseller List if it hadn’t been bought by all his adoring
female fans.

Instead of the ‘light touch’ instruction she usually
received from the publishing company, meaning let the author’s voice be heard,
the accompanying note had said:

Hi Hols

Another hatchet job required to make this fit to publish I’m
afraid. Do exactly as you did with his last masterpiece please and can I have
it by the end of next week?

Cheers

DD

PS I keep telling you that you should write a book of your own
instead of making other people believe they can write xx

How many times had Holly thought of doing just that over the
years she had been working as a freelance for DD, a nickname they used that had
nothing to do with her friend’s real name. It had been her bra cup size when
they had met in their first year at university and instantly become friends but
was now a bit of a misnomer as DD was constantly on the latest fad diet.

When Holly had failed to return to university for her second
year DD had tried phoning and even writing to Holly’s home address anxious to
find out what had happened that had caused her talented friend to abandon her
degree and her friends. Holly’s embarrassment at the situation she found
herself in had prevented her from responding to either. Several years later,
after completing her English degree with the Open University and having been
rejected from most of the publishing companies she had approached for freelance
work, she had read that her former friend, Joanna Thomas, had been promoted to
editor at Ripped Publishing, a company she had already been rejected from. She
had re-sent her CV and a covering letter and a couple of days later DD had
called her. Holly wasn’t sure whether her vague explanation of family issues
had satisfied DD’s curiosity but she had been prepared to give her friend a
chance. Holly didn’t let her friend down. She always did a thorough job and met
the deadline, even if it meant staying up late into the night, and she never
turned down work, regardless of how badly written it was because, as a
freelancer, you have to take what you are given. Through her work for Ripped
she had built a good reputation and other companies began to use her too.

It had taken her the best part of two weeks to finish
A Perfect Swine
and she had changed almost everything apart
from the dreadful title which unfortunately was beyond her remit.

With the manuscript out of the way Holly had gone to visit
Harry in Bath. She had been itching to tell her son about Philippe but she
wanted to tell him face to face.

‘Have you heard from him since you got back?’ was his first
question.

Typical Harry, always trying to protect her. He had done it
all his life even getting into fights with the boys at his school if they ever
made nasty remarks about his mum not being married to his dad.

‘We’ve been in touch by email several times,’ Holly replied,
although in truth she was a little disappointed at both the length and the
infrequency of the emails.

Philippe had apologised, explaining that he had been tied to
his computer as he was ‘on a roll’ with his book which he had virtually
entirely rewritten. Holly had smiled as she imagined them both feverishly
tapping the computer keys on book rewrites.

In the last email she had received from him a few days
previously he said that he was almost ready to send the rewritten version to
his editor and if approved he could start to pack up the house in Mauritius and
be home within a fortnight. He had added that he couldn’t wait to see her again
and just reading that had made Holly go weak at the knees.

Harry had also asked if she had been in touch with the older
couple she had mentioned meeting.

Rosemary had emailed a few times, mainly to say that they
hadn’t seen much of Philippe since she had left as he was holed up writing his
latest book.

‘I hope it’s as good as his first one,’ Rosemary had written
on one email.

Holly had replied, ‘Which destination did he write about in
his first book?’

She hadn’t heard from Rosemary for a couple of days after that
and when she did there was no mention of either Philippe or his first book.

It had been such a joy to spend time with Harry and she left
Bath feeling proud of the young man she had single-handedly guided through his
early life. As they hugged he had asked where she was off to next for Soleil
Resorts, and when she answered Cuba followed by Dubai he had laughed and said,
‘I’ve created a jet-setter.’

Jet-setter, Holly thought, climbing aboard the Gatwick
Express, jet-lagged more like. She settled in her seat and closed her eyes for
a power nap.