So Now You're Back (17 page)

‘You're lying. I know you are. You never watched, because I waited and you never even looked.'

He had her there, but before she could think of a way out of the white lie, Trey knelt, dropping to Aldo's level. ‘I'm sorry, Aldo. I should have been keeping an eye on you, but that guy was saying mean things to your sister and I wanted to make him stop.'

‘Who cares if he said mean things to her? She always says mean things to me and you never do anything.'

Trey's chin dropped and he seemed unsure how to react. What could he say? When it was true?

Shame stabbed into Lizzie's chest. How hard had she made Aldo's life in the past few years, and Trey's in the past few months, with the endless sniping and needling?

‘I hate you,' Aldo shouted at Trey. ‘You don't like me. You only pretend to. Nobody likes me.' Tears mingled with the water on Aldo's face, his body shuddering with more than the cold. He didn't look explosive any more. He looked devastated.

‘I do like you, Aldo. You know that's true,' Trey said, but he sounded weary and tense. And not all that convincing.

Hug him, Trey, that's all you have to do to convince him.

She tried to transmit the suggestion telepathically while controlling her own urge to hug her brother. She wasn't the Aldo Whisperer any more. So she'd have to wait for Trey to figure out the obvious.

But Trey didn't budge, or say anything, clearly at a loss as he watched Aldo shiver.

So she knelt down herself and whispered, ‘We both like you, Aldo. How about I give you a hug to prove it?'

Her brother looked up, his wobbly chin a dead giveaway. But she could see the suspicion. She braced herself for the rejection she deserved.

She'd made fun of his ‘baby ways' so many times in the past few years he probably didn't trust her. The guilt over each one of those throwaway barbs jabbed into her as her brother's gaze rose to Trey, his chin still quivering alarmingly.

The knowledge it was Trey whom he wanted a hug from hurt. Trey, who in the space of three months had made an effort to become Aldo's friend, his confidant, the guy Aldo looked up to like a big brother. Instead of his real big sister.

But Trey stood up and then remained standing, stiff and distant by her side.

Eventually, Aldo's gaze slid back to her. And he dipped his chin. It wasn't a proper nod. She guessed he didn't want
to risk one, in case she was only joking and used this moment to mock him.

The urge to apologise for all the mean things she'd said to her brother over the past few years was swift and fairly agonising. But she didn't give in to it. Because for once she realised this wasn't actually about her.

Standing, too, she took the towel from Trey, swept it round her brother's shoulders and tugged him into her arms. He stood stiffly. His head was nearly to her chin now. He'd gotten so much bigger than the last time she'd done this. But still his body felt achingly familiar. The smell of kid sweat and the brackish scent of the Serpentine fresh on his skin triggered the phantom hint of the baby smell she had once adored. She remembered the weight of him on her tummy in their old flat in Hackney, the squelching sound as he chewed on his bottle and tugged on her hair, totally absorbed while she read
Harry Potter
—even though he was way too little to tell the difference between a Horcrux and a Muggle.

‘I like you, Aldo. I like you a lot,' she whispered into his wet hair.

She wasn't sure he'd heard her, until his body softened and his shoulders dropped. The guilt slammed into her, like a gigantic wave knocking her off her feet. But then Aldo's hands settled on the small of her back, chilly despite the warm day. And the wave receded, tugging her back onto dry land. She tightened her arms round her brother's shoulders, silently thanking him for being brave enough to risk ridicule. And hug her back.

Trey cleared his throat. He was staring at them both, his face clouded by an emotion she couldn't read. But one thing was definite, he didn't look anywhere near as confident as usual.

He mouthed the word ‘thanks'.

She nodded, wondering what the no-hugging thing was all about, then jotted it down on her ever-growing list of Trey enigmas to investigate at a later date.

‘W
hy not admit it, we're hopelessly lost.'

‘We are not lost, oh voice of doom.' Luke pointed vaguely across the stream that ran alongside the dusty former logging track and adjusted the map. ‘I think it's this way.'

‘I think
isn't specific enough.' Halle trudged on, ignoring her companion's latest stupid suggestion. She slapped at her neck, not sure whether the sting was another trickle of sweat or the carnivorous insect that had already feasted on her and was now coming back for dessert.

The jet lag had slammed into her like an eighteen-wheeler yesterday afternoon at approximately three p.m.—for the third day running. So she'd left Luke typing away industriously on his laptop and crashed out. Only to wake up at precisely 4.10 a.m. this morning. It was now eleven. And she was ready to face-plant again. Unfortunately, that was impossible because she appeared to be on a ten-hour scenic hike to nowhere. With a man who didn't know how to read a map.

So far their ‘extreme bonding experiences' had been fairly harmless, but just strenuous enough to get her sleeping like the dead—until she woke up before dawn. But she should have asked their perky ‘personal concierge', Bill, a
lot more questions when he had said the word ‘hike' this morning. Unfortunately, she'd gotten completely fixated on the word ‘bears' instead in his opening spiel.

He'd led them to a brand-new SUV and then spent the next half hour droning on about the fascinating culture of the Appalachians and the wide variety of flora and fauna in the Smoky Mountains National Park while driving them thirty miles up Old State Highway 73. During the journey, she'd simply assumed ‘hike' in the US vernacular probably translated as a long drive and a very short walk. Turned out it meant a longish drive and an even longer walk. In baking-hot weather, with only a backpack full of supplies and an idiot for company.

‘Wait for me, dammit,' she shouted as Luke disappeared into the overgrown trail ahead. ‘What makes you think it's this way?' she demanded as he stopped ahead of her.

Time to be proactive. Clearly, slavishly following Luke isn't working.

‘Because I am the keeper of the map.' The dappled sunlight cast his face into harsh relief as she drew level, breathing heavily. ‘Why didn't you tell them you were so unfit?' he murmured. ‘They would have organised something less strenuous.'

His T-shirt stuck to his chest in damp patches, emphasising the sculpted contours of muscle and bone.

Well, that's distracting.

‘I am fit.'
Kind of.
‘I'm just not into walking around in circles for no good reason. In five-hundred-degree heat in the middle of the day.'

‘Then let's go cool off.' He flung out his arm to indicate the ominous trail ahead. ‘According to the map, there's a waterfall this way.'

‘The map you can't read?'

‘Yup, that's the one.' He waved the map in front of her face, in a gesture just guaranteed to piss her off. ‘I have it right here.'

She didn't need to cool off. She just needed to get this over with so she could go back to the privacy of her bedroom, where the firmness of his pectoral muscles would be a lot less distracting and the word ‘bears' would not have the same significance. ‘Having the map and reading the map correctly are not the same thing.'

‘I know how to read a map. I've hiked in the goddamn Hindu Kush for five days embedded with US Special Forces.'

‘I don't care if you're a paid-up member of the Taliban, I'm not going into the woods. It's dangerous. There are bears and rattlesnakes and God knows what else out there,' she huffed, scoping out the mile-high forest of mostly coniferous trees that stretched away up the mountainside, the dense vegetation broken up only by the occasional rock escarpment—which probably housed a multitude of bear caves.

‘It's not dangerous. It's a marked hiking trail. And, anyway, the snakes and bears will be staying the hell out of our way with the amount of noise you're making.' Luke dragged a bandana out of his back pocket to mop his brow. ‘Now stop moaning and look around you.' He spread his arms. ‘This place is amazing. Let's go and explore.'

She unlocked her jaw. ‘We're not exploring. We're lost. There's a difference.'

He tucked the bandana back into the pocket of his hiking shorts. ‘I told you, we're not lost. And, even if you don't trust me—' the thin smile was caustic ‘—Bill gave me a two-way radio.' He patted his backpack. ‘So you can trust that.'

Her weeping thigh muscles disagreed. ‘What if we're trespassing?'

‘We're in a national park.'

‘So what? Everyone in this country has a gun. Some of them even have automatic weapons, ready to shoot down anyone who strays into their path. Especially unsuspecting English people on extreme rambling expeditions,' she added, thinking of the bumper stickers in the convenience store they'd stopped at on their way to the resort four days ago. And the unpleasant illustration of the large, deadly-looking firearm accompanied by the slogan ‘come and take it'.

‘Most Americans do not own an AK-47,' Luke said. ‘Round here they probably only own the odd hunting rifle. We're not in the hood.'

‘Personally I don't care if I get accidentally shot by a deer hunter or a gang-banger. I'd still be dead. I think we should stay on the bigger track. Just in case.'

Luke counted down his straining temper.

Humour her. You've handled NATO generals with secrets to hide and Washington socialites with dementia. You can handle one knackered celebrity chef from Notting Hill.

He attemped to analyse Halle's pinched expression. It was hard to tell whether she was generally concerned about rogue gun nuts combing the woods or just trying to avoid exerting herself more. But they needed to get out of the sun. The red patch on the bridge of her nose was evidence of that.

Only one way to find out. Go on the offensive.

‘When did you become such a wimp?'

Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘You really don't want me to answer that when I'm boiling hot, jet-lagged and being eaten alive by mosquitos.'

‘Actually, I really do.' He was so over the hands-off approach. After three days of giving her space, he felt as if
he'd been tap-dancing on eggshells for days. She scuttled out of the kitchen every time he entered it. Spent most of the time in the cabin in her bedroom and had barely spoken to him during any of their bonding exercises so far. Remembering her panic attack on the plane, he decided to up the stakes. ‘You had a lot more guts as a teenager.'

The blood flowed into her cheeks, pinkening the burned patch on her nose even more. He'd seen Halle lose it before. Not heeding those burning cheeks and furious scowl would be the equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade. He'd once been prepared to do anything to avoid the explosion. Including lying through his teeth about how excited he was to become an accidental dad at nineteen. But he wasn't that cowardly kid any more. Because he yanked the pin out anyway. ‘I guess having Lizzie made you lose your nerve. But I never noticed that before now.'

The blood surged up to her hairline and her hand whacked across his cheek with a resounding crack. Pain exploded in his face, the force of the blow snapping his head back, and popping the muscles in his neck.

He swore and cupped his cheek to contain the fiery heat, vaguely wondering if she'd given him whiplash.

Who knew a celebrity chef could pack a bigger punch than Mike Tyson?

‘You unbelievable shit.' The shout ricocheted off the surrounding landscape, echoing like a thunder crack. ‘It wasn't Lizzie. It was you.'

The sheen of unshed tears added a golden sparkle to her whisky-brown eyes. Tendrils of sweat-damp hair clung to her forehead, the pale skin above the round neck of her T-shirt had gone blotchy with temper and her chest heaved as if she had just run the London Marathon.

Maybe it was a cliché, but she was even more of a stunner when she was mad.

‘I trusted you. I relied on you. And you buggered off and left me when I needed you the most, you bastard.' Her breath huffed out and he saw her exhaustion, not just from the plane journey, or the hike, or the jet lag.

This was bone-weary emotional exhaustion.

The realisation brought with it the memory of their squalid eighth-floor council flat in Hackney. The unreliable lift that stank of piss and the half-hearted use of cheap disinfectant. The gang of teenage boys who hung around the stairwell and sucked their teeth when he struggled up the stairs with Lizzie's buggy. The broken fluorescent light in the bathroom he'd never gotten round to fixing. Lizzie squalling as if she'd been scalded at two in the morning, in the cot from the charity shop they'd jammed up against the dresser in the corner of their bedroom.

Remorse flowed through him, radiating out from the stinging pain in his jaw.

He opened his mouth, but the apology died on his tongue. There was nothing he could say to take that exhaustion away. Nothing he could do to make it better now. And nothing he would have done not to escape then, so giving in to the urge to say sorry sixteen years too late would just be so much self-serving bullshit.

So he said nothing and waited for her to say her piece, each word scoring his conscience.

‘I had to pick up and carry on and build something from absolutely nothing, because I had a child who needed me.' She thrust a thumb into her sternum, punctuating the hot air with the rasping breaths of her outrage. ‘And I learned not to trust every snake oil salesman who came along, because
I had to. Don't talk to me about guts when you didn't even have the guts to stick around.'

Halle clenched her fingers into a fist to ease the blazing pain in her palm. She wasn't sure where the sudden burst of emotion had come from. But his smug words had been the trigger. That and the fact she'd been on a knife-edge of spiralling tension for days now.

Something that's also his fault, because he's the one who insisted on us sharing a bloody cabin.

She shook her hand trying to ease the sting. Who knew slapping someone in the face made your palm feel as if it had been branded? Maybe she should have taken into account his rock-solid jaw, and that day-old stubble that had the consistency of sandpaper. But for once there had been no forethought. Only reaction. The volcano, which had been bubbling under her breastbone, had erupted, spewing out her emnity towards him like molten lava detonating through a rock fissure.

He manipulated his jaw, as if checking she hadn't dislocated it. ‘I guess I had that one coming,' he said. As always, a master of understatement.

The red stain where her hand had connected with his cheek bloomed under the skin.

The lava turned to ash in her mouth, and her knees trembled, the rawness in her throat making it hard to swallow. ‘Ya think?'

She scrubbed her upper arm across her face, brushing away the salty sweat making her eyes sting.

‘I didn't stick around because I couldn't,' he said, his tone soft in the still air. ‘You have no idea how monumentally screwed up I was back then,' he added. ‘All thanks to stuff in my life that had nothing to do with you.'

She guessed he was talking about his family. The dysfunctional, screwed-up family, full of underwear thieves, whom he had always refused to talk about and had avoided introducing her to. She'd accepted his explanation then—that she wouldn't understand, that she was better off not knowing them because ‘they're all arseholes'—but now she wondered. Why had she always let him decide what she was strong enough to know about, what she had the maturity to understand—and all the things she didn't?

But did she really want to go there? Now, after all these years? The slap had been a simple knee-jerk reaction to his dumb comment—and the frustration of the past few days. Why would she want to open up old wounds that had taken such a long time to heal?

He brushed his thumb across the hollow under her eye and let it linger for a second too long, before digging his hand into the pocket of his hiking shorts.

Once upon a time—maybe even yesterday—she would have apologised for hitting him so hard. Physical violence had never been her style. But he didn't look as if he was expecting an apology. And if she was being entirely honest, she didn't really think he deserved one.

He repositioned the backpack on his shoulders. ‘Let's go find that waterfall. Looks like we could both do with some cooling off.'

‘Only if you're absolutely sure it's safe.'

His lips quirked, the grin impossibly sexy. The bastard. ‘Don't worry, I'll keep an eye out for Uzi-toting grizzlies.'

Woods in rural England, on the rare occasions when Halle had been called upon to walk through them, were comforting ancient places, scattered with wild flowers, the tree bark musty with moss, the wildlife never much bigger than a bee.
Woods in Tennessee weren't woods at all, but wild untamed forests, both predatory and provocative—with a spectacular and arresting other-worldly beauty she hadn't expected. And which she hadn't taken the chance to appreciate until now.

As they ventured off the sun-brightened logging trail, Luke pointed out a sign, looking like a Disneyland prop, which directed them the 3.2 miles to Cherokee Creek Falls, but had the good grace not to gloat.

Despite the sign, Halle remained vigilant for the first ten minutes, scanning the dense forest of firs and oaks and pine trees, in case a black bear should pop out, eager to bite their heads off. Gradually, though, she relaxed and began to marvel at her surroundings.

The delicious quiet—punctuated only by the intermittent sounds of buzzing insects or distant water—beat with the rhythm of her own footfalls and the patient plod of Luke's hiking boots ahead. Her palm stopped stinging where she'd sandpapered it on Luke's jawline, and her heartbeat finally tracked back to the familiar thump-thump of her normal pulse rate.