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When Hazel took the keys, she looked closer at Lucy’s drawing. ‘You’re seriously good at this.’
‘I loved every minute. It really looks like him, doesn’t it?’
Hazel cleared her throat as she brought her mind to the picture rather than her vision of the man who’d just posed for it. ‘It really does.’
‘If Daniel asks,’ said Lucy, ‘we drew an eighty-year-old man. I don’t want to make him jealous.’
Lucy’s boyfriend Daniel didn’t strike Hazel as the jealous type at all. He ran the Little Waffle Shack in Heritage Cove and he was all heart, just like his brother Harvey, who was married to another local friend, Melissa. ‘I won’t lie to him, but he’ll take one look at your drawing and know full well that the man is nowhere near old age.’
Hazel left Lucy to talk with the tutor while she headed out of the shadows from the back door to the church hall and into the evening sunshine. Lucy had driven them both over from the Cove and they’d dropped in on her parents first for tea and scones, which was lovely but made Hazel miss her own parents all the more. Her mum and dad, Thomas and Sally, had retired to the West Country. It had been their dream for many years, despite their lives and their business in the Cove. Hazel and her brother Arnold had known the change was coming, they’d both wanted to take over the business since they were younger, but it still took some getting used to. But she was getting there. And she loved her home at Heritage View House which, along with Heritage View Stables, was situated down a lane leading from the village’s main street.
Hazel inhaled the rich scent of the brightly coloured rhododendrons on the summer evening air as she reached the end of the path and opened the gate. At least the fresh breeze kept the temperature more bearable after the heatwave that had hit the country last week. It was the one time of the year when Hazel welcomed her early starts at the stables – it was an excuse to get up and get on.
She followed the pavement along, taking out her sunglasses to put on, ready to intercept any traffic warden about to pounce. At the start of July, the weather was gorgeous, and the birds in the trees twittered above her as she walked as though they were as much in support of the season as Hazel was.
She’d almost reached the car when she heard a commotion coming from the other side of the road. With parking fines on her mind, she expected it to be someone fighting their corner and pleading with a traffic warden to be let off with a warning. But it wasn’t.
‘It’s him,’ she said under her breath, because looking across the road, she instantly recognised the man who’d just modelled for them, despite him wearing clothes now – jeans that hugged his buttocks, a T-shirt that clung just enough to be able to see the outline of his torso and strong shoulders. His light-brown hair was cut short but had waves in it she could imagine being sketched out by pencil – obviously by someone with more artistic talent than herself.
Hazel had seen the physical details of this man – she couldn’t remember his name, even though the tutor had introduced him to the group – but what she hadn’t seen inside that church hall was any hint of his personality besides the confidence to sit there in the nude in front of a bunch of strangers. Now, she could see his shoulders were tense as he confronted a group of teenagers a fraction of his age.
Should she call the police?
His anger was evident. Had those teens been hanging around his car, trying to steal it or vandalise it? But if that was the case, surely they would have run off.
It turned her stomach when Hazel saw how scared those teenagers were, frozen to the spot. She’d witnessed that kind of stance before and it had been terrifying. She’d never forget it. The man before her now had a tightness in his expression that she zoned in on: his clenched jaw, the jerky head movements as he said his piece. He got right up in the face of one of the boys to make whatever point he was trying to get across, and Hazel knew if that were her standing before him, she’d be petrified.
Hazel had her hand on her phone, about to call the police, when the boys ran off and the man didn’t give chase. She reached Lucy’s car, the next one up, unlocked it, and climbed in, sinking down in the seat, praying that the man hadn’t spotted her.
She didn’t look up until Lucy got back into the car.
‘You okay there?’ Lucy, in the driver’s seat, wound the window down for air.
Hazel sat up straighter, cautiously looking in the wing mirror to check the man had gone. When she saw that he had, she opened her own window. ‘You owe me a drink.’
‘I haven’t forgotten. The Copper Plough?’ Lucy looked at her after mentioning their local pub. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, just still in shock at what you made me do, that’s all,’ she laughed, although the laughter was forced. She didn’t want to admit that what she’d just seen was a stark reminder of something she’d been trying to forget for a long time. Her way of coping was to stop her thoughts from ever travelling in that direction again. And it worked, kind of.
‘Parking police,’ Lucy announced and wasted no time pulling out of the space.
Hazel was more than happy to get well away from here in case she saw that man again. Good looking he might be, particularly naked, but behind that exterior was a whole lot of anger and she never wanted to be on the receiving end of that kind of fury again.
* * *
‘Tell Barney why you owe me,’ Hazel laughed as they stood at the bar in the Copper Plough some thirty minutes later, Lucy paying for the round of drinks with her card. ‘Tell him what you had me do.’
Barney, in his seventies and a man who had the community’s interests at heart, loved nothing more than a good story. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘You’re making out I tortured you,’ Lucy tutted. ‘She enjoyed it,’ she winked at Barney, before filling him in on exactly where they’d been.
Barney, pint in hand, chuckled away. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t expect that, Hazel.’
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I could draw, but I couldn’t even stare as I was too embarrassed every time the guy looked up.’
‘At least it made for a fun time, you young girls need to get out and about a bit. It can’t be all business.’
Lois, love of Barney’s life, came over and hooked her arm into his. ‘Did I hear something about a naked man?’
