Jessica Hart - Barefoot Bride

But she wasn’t the Alice he had loved. That Alice had been a vivid, astringent presence, prickly and insecure at times-but who wasn’t, when they were young? When she’d talked, her whole body had become animated, and she would lean forward and gesticulate, her small hands swooping and darting in the air to emphasise her point, making the bangles she wore chink and jingle, or shaking her head so that her earrings swung wildly and caught the light.

Will had loved just to watch the way the expressions had chased themselves across her transparent face. It had always been easy to tell what Alice had been feeling. No one could look crosser than Alice when she was angry; no one else’s face lit like hers when she was happy. And when she was amused, she would throw back her head and laugh that uninhibited, unexpectedly dirty laugh, the mere memory of which was enough to make his groin tighten.

Ironically, the very things that Will had treasured about her had been the things Alice was desperate to change. She hadn’t wanted to be unconventional. She hadn’t wanted to be different. She’d wanted to be like everyone else.

And now it looked as if she had got her wish. All that fire, all that quirkiness, all that personality…all gone. Firmly suppressed and locked away until she was as bland as the rest of the world.

It made Will very sad to realise that the Alice who had haunted him all these years didn’t exist any more. In her place was just a smart, rather tense woman with unusual-coloured eyes and inappropriate shoes.

‘How are you, Alice?’ he managed after a moment.

Alice’s feet were killing her, and her heart was thumping and thudding so painfully in her chest that it was making her feel quite sick, but she produced a brilliant smile.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘Great, in fact. And you?’

‘I’m OK,’ said Will, who was, in fact, feeling very strange. He had been pitched from shock to joy to bitter disappointment in the space of little more than a minute, and he was finding it hard to keep up with the rapid change of emotions.

‘Quite a surprise bumping into you here,’ Alice persevered in the same brittle style, and he eyed her with dismay. When had the fiery, intent Alice learnt to do meaningless chit-chat? She was treating him as if he were some slight acquaintance, not a man she had lived with and laughed with and loved with.

‘Yes,’ he agreed slowly, thinking that ‘surprise’ wasn’t quite the word for it. ‘Beth didn’t tell me that you were here.’

‘I don’t think she made any connection between us,’ said Alice carelessly. ‘It wouldn’t have occurred to Beth to mention me to you. She didn’t know that we’d been…’

‘Lovers?’ suggested Will with a sardonic look when she trailed off.

A slight flush rose in Alice’s cheeks. ‘I didn’t put it quite like that,’ she said repressively. ‘I just said that we had been close when we were students together.’

‘It’s not like you to be coy, Alice.’

She looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You and Roger were close ,’ said Will. ‘You and I were in love.’

Alice’s eyes slid away from his. She didn’t want to be reminded of how much she had loved him. She certainly didn’t want a discussion of how in love they had been. No way could she cope with that right now.

‘Whatever,’ she said as carelessly as she could. ‘Beth got the point, anyway.’

He had changed, she thought, unaccountably disconsolate. Of course, she had known in her head that he wasn’t going to be the same. Ten years, marriage and children were bound to have had an effect on him.

But in her heart she had imagined him still the Will she had known. The Will she had loved.

This Will seemed taller than she remembered, taller and tougher. His neck had thickened slightly and his chest had filled out, and the air of calm competence she had always associated with him had solidified. He still had those big, capable hands, but there was none of the amusement she remembered in his face, no familiar ironic gleam in the grey eyes. Instead, there were lines around his eyes and deeper grooves carved on either side of his mouth, which was set in a new, hard line.

It was strange, talking to someone at once so familiar and so much a stranger. Meeting Will like that was even worse than Alice had expected. She had planned to be friendly to him, charming to his wife and engaging to his child, so that they would all go away convinced that she had no regrets and without the slightest idea that her life wasn’t quite the glittering success she had so confidently expected it to be.

She might as well have spared herself the effort, Alice thought ruefully. In spite of all her careful preparations, her confidence had evaporated the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and she was as shaken and jittery as if Will had turned up without a moment’s warning. She knew that she was coming over as brittle, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

‘Beth said that you were working out here,’ she said, opting to stick with her social manner, no matter how uncomfortable it felt. It was easier than looking into his eyes and asking him if he had missed her at all, if he had wondered, as she had done, whether life would have been different if she had said yes instead of no that day.

Will nodded, apparently willing to follow her lead and stick to polite superficialities. ‘I’m coordinating a major project on sustainable tourism,’ he said, and Alice raised her brows.

‘You’re not a marine ecologist any more?’ she asked, surprised. Will had always been so passionate about the ocean, she couldn’t imagine him giving up diving in favour of paperwork.

‘I am, of course,’ he corrected her. ‘But I don’t do straight research anymore. A lot of our work is assessing the environmental impact of major development projects on the sea.’

Alice frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with tourism?’

‘Tourism has a huge effect on the environment,’ said Will. ‘The economy here desperately needs the income tourists can bring, but tourists won’t come unless there’s an international airport, roads, hotels, restaurants and leisure facilities…all of which use up precious natural resources and add to the weight of pollution, which in turn affects the delicate balance of the environment.’

Will gestured around him. ‘St Bonaventure is a paradise in lots of ways. It’s everyone’s idea of a tropical island, and it’s still unspoilt. Its reef is one of the great undiscovered diving spots in the world. That makes it the kind of place tourists want to visit, but they won’t come all this way if the development ends up destroying the very things that makes this place so special.

‘The government here needs to balance their need to get the money to improve the living standards of the people here with the risk to the reef,’ he went on. ‘If the reef is damaged, it will not only destroy the potential revenue from tourism, it’ll also leave the island itself at risk. The reef is the most effective protection St Bonaventure has against the power of the ocean.’

Will stopped, hearing himself in lecture mode. The old Alice might have been interested, but this one certainly wasn’t. Instead of leaning forward intently and asking awkward questions, the way she would have done before, she wore an expression of interest that was little more than polite.

‘Anyway, the project I’m coordinating is about balancing the needs of the reef with the needs of the economy before tourism is developed to any great extent,’ he finished lamely.

‘Sounds important,’ Alice commented.

He glanced at her, as if suspecting mockery. ‘It is,’ he said.

Alice had deliberately kept her voice light to disguise the pang inside. For a moment there he had been the Will she remembered, his face alight with enthusiasm, his eyes warm with commitment.