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‘But—I have to explain—We need to talk—’ she called after him.
‘No, we don’t. There’s nothing you could say that I want to hear. Anyway, they say actions speak louder than words.’
And with that he walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
KATE was building a sandcastle on the beach when the little girl whose lopsided lump she was busy turning into a fairy-tale structure complete with flying flags of fuzzy pussy willow grass suddenly popped her thumb out of her mouth and extended it in a skywards spike.
‘Man!’
Kneeling in the hard-packed sand just below the high-water line, Kate squinted against the low angle of the sun in the direction indicated by the moppet’s soggy salute and sat back on her bare heels with a little breathless grunt of shock.
Drake was back!
Her sandy fingers unknowingly clenched, scrunching a hole in the side of a tower and endangering the route of the heroic fairy prince she had been explaining to the child was about to clamber up to rescue the enchanted maiden, aka a pod of seaweed whose green hair owed its inspiration to Rapunzel.
‘Hah!’ Her little companion seemed to think it was all part of a new game, and cheerfully bashed down another of Kate’s painstakingly crafted towers with its pretty mosaic of shells.
‘Oh, no, darling, we’re building them up, not pushing them down,’ choked Kate, hastily blinking away the tears she blamed on the needle-sharp jab of the sun and spreading out her hands to protect the flank of her castle from an enthusiastic little fist.
The man, who had been padding steadily along the beach towards them, came to a halt at the edge of the shallow moat on the seaward side of the castle, crouching down to survey the damage, his knees splayed, the dark trousers that had been rolled up to his calves pulling tight across the tops of his thighs, his long bare fe
et melting into the wet sand.
‘Looks like you could do with some help,’ he said, pushing up the sleeves of his pale grey knitted-silk sweater, revealing the golden brown hair on his tanned forearms.
‘No, thanks, we’re doing fine without you,’ said Kate, just as another tower got a smashing makeover, sending a spray of damp sand into her mouth and down the top of her scoop-necked top.
‘Hey, sweetheart, how about you and I fill this bucket with some more sand?’ said Drake, picking up the bright plastic pail with its turret-shaped base lying by his feet and holding out the matching spade.
To Kate’s disgust the little girl trotted obediently over to his side and began digging, while Drake scooped up mounds of sand with his cupped hands and rapidly filled the pail.
‘You’ll get your clothes dirty,’ said Kate sourly, wiping the grit from her mouth with her arm, noting that it definitely wasn’t beachwear he was sporting. Who had he dressed to impress? she wondered.
‘Like yours?’ he said, his mouth curving as he looked at her sand-clogged striped top and water-stained shorts.
When she didn’t smile back, his own faded, his brown eyes unflinching as he weathered her wintry stare.
‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ he commented, sinking down onto his knees and turning his attention back to his task, smoothing over the compacted sand in the bucket and inverting it to produce a smooth-sided release from the bucket with a sharp rap on the top, far more perfect than Kate had obtained.
The little girl clapped her hands.
‘More!’
Drake obliged until there was another square of perfect towers, which he joined up with mounded walls. Kate doggedly worked on the original castle as he and his helper dug a moat and filled it with buckets of sea water.
‘I think I need to hire a decorator,’ he said to Kate, noticing her sneaking sidelong glances at the expansive grey walls. ‘Would you like to help?’ He picked up a single strand of pussy willow from the bunch of grasses she had gathered in the sand-dunes earlier and held it out to her, the delicate, pale golden catkin at the end of the stalk quivering and dancing in the gentle sea breeze.
It was too reminiscent of an extended olive branch and she opened her mouth to coldly refuse, but then she saw the girl’s innocent blue eyes, alight with eagerness, fixed on her face.
She reached out to reluctantly accept the offering.
‘I suppose I could.’ Her voice was like broken glass but the little girl listened to the words, not the jagged tone, and as Kate poked the stalk into the top of one of the new towers she began pulling her precious collection of shells from the sagging pocket of her shorts and handing them over one by one for Kate to press into the base of the walls.
Watching her crawling around on her hands and knees, Drake said with a curious edge, ‘Should you be doing that? What about your pulled muscle?’
She didn’t understand his concern. After all, he had been the one to turn his back on her grief-stricken admission. He must have realised how shocked and upset she was, how devastated by her humiliating mistake. He hadn’t cared then what she was going through.
