One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December. Kat French
for a beer and a tour of his wig cupboard. Almost, but not quite. The damn rain had finally knocked off this morning, and when he’d opened the kitchen door and heard banging he’d followed the noise and found Alice playing girl scout in the garden. He’d spotted her red wellingtons first and had to look twice to check she really was dangling from the branches of a large old oak at the far end of the garden. Close up, she was clad in denim jeans that looked sprayed on from this angle and a black sweater that hugged her curves.
‘Probably,’ she responded cheerfully, peering over the edge of the tree house. Her blonde hair had been tamed into pigtails that swung in the breeze and her pretty face was free of make-up.
‘You look about thirteen years old. Are you playing house up there?’
‘Something like that,’ she grinned and then disappeared. ‘Come up.’
Robinson tested the bottom of the rickety planks that had been fashioned into steps that circled the broad tree trunk and, finding it sturdy enough to stand his weight, he made his way far enough up the tree for his torso to poke through into the house above. The floor was strewn with tools and nails and a hand saw leaned against the wall.
‘Should I even ask what you’re doing?’
Alice laid down the lethal-looking hammer in her hand and puffed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes.
‘Probably not.’
He nodded, glancing around the interior of the tree house.
‘Teddy bears’ picnic?’
Alice shook her head. ‘Better than that.’
‘Grown-up picnic?’ As Robinson’s mouth formed the words, his brain conjured up images of very adult picnics indeed. The kind where you might eat strawberries from the navel of your naked lover.
‘Not exactly,’ Alice hedged, rubbing the booted toe of one wellington behind the ankle of her other. Was he imagining things or did both her face and her body language say shifty? He hauled himself fully into the tree house and took in his surroundings.
As befitted the manor, the tree house was larger than your average kids’ hideout. He’d had a variation on the theme growing up back home in Tennessee, and once he was holed up in there with Fitz and Derren it was pretty much full. Not this place. You could have fit all of the kids from his elementary class up here with room to spare.
‘You’ve had enough of Airstream living and are moving house again?’
He wouldn’t put it past her. Alice reached for the latches on the inside of the shuttered window and flung them wide, letting in a stream of warmth and sunlight that from behind gave her an instant halo. She was kind of angelic to look at, all peaches and cream, and it only made him wonder what lay beneath. Lena, and pretty much most of the women in his life back home, were fiery and direct; you knew what they were thinking way before they decided to open their mouths and let you in on it. He didn’t find that with Alice. She held herself in a reserved way that made him itch to scratch the surface and see what lay beneath.
‘Pass me that saw?’ she said, gesturing behind him and not answering his question. He did as she’d asked and then watched as she held a length of wood against a gap in the side of the tree house and marked it with a pencil she pulled from behind her ear.
‘Tools of the trade,’ he murmured. He’d spent ten years fixing up houses with a pencil behind his ear before he’d accidentally hit the big time when the guy whose house he’d been working on turned out to be a manager from Music City. Robinson had sung to pass the time while he built Donald Marshall’s porch, and it turned out to be the last job he ever worked as a carpenter. Marsh, as he was known in the business, had gone on to become one of his closest friends and his biggest supporter. Right about now he was probably regretting ever hiring Robinson Duff, either to fix his porch or to pack out stadiums.
Alice took the piece of wood out onto the deck of the tree house and knelt down, lining up her pencil mark with the edge of the deck before setting about sawing it down to size. There were several things Robinson wanted to say. Your saw’s too blunt. You need a vice to cut wood properly. You’re going to cut your goddamn hand off doing it like that. Yet he said none of them, holding his tongue until she managed to get through the plank and the spare end fell down towards the ground. Belatedly Alice peered over the edge to make sure she didn’t have any concussed visitors and then straightened up and headed back inside with her freshly sawn wood.
‘Don’t tell me. You’re planning to get a really tall dog?’ He guessed again at Alice’s intentions for the future of the tree house.
‘Pluto wouldn’t like another dog in his garden,’ Alice said with difficulty as she held a nail between her teeth. God, she was a walking health and safety hazard.
‘My garden,’ Robinson said mildly, picking up the hammer and handing it to her. Alice raised her eyebrows as she positioned the wood over the gap in the wall.
‘My garden,’ she corrected, as he’d known she would.
‘But you can’t get to it without coming through mine,’ he countered, not at all bothered by the fact. In fact he’d made sure to move the hire car that had been delivered that morning over so she could easily get in and out.
Alice narrowed her eyes as she banged the first nail in to place and let the wood swing down while she dug another nail from her pocket. Christ. She couldn’t keep nails in the pockets of her jeans. She was giving him a heart attack.
‘If you wanted to be really bloody minded I could get to the Airstream from the farm behind the manor,’ she said. ‘I’d have to swim across the stream, but I could do it.’
‘Or you could just build yourself a bridge,’ he suggested. ‘You seem to have the determination, even if your skills could use work and your tools look like they belong in a museum.’
Her eyes opened a fraction wider. ‘Probably. They were here when we moved in. Brad wasn’t exactly what you’d call a DIY fan so we never bought new stuff.’
Robinson filed away that nugget of information about Alice’s husband along with the thing she’d said a while back about him owning a drum kit but never bothering to play it. He wasn’t finding much to admire about the man, besides his estranged wife.
‘And err, hello? My skills could use work?’ she said, seeming to suddenly hear what he’d said and fixing him with an appraising look. ‘And you’re qualified to judge me because …?’
‘I know enough to know you should be wearing eye defenders when you’re using the saw, even if it’s blunt, and the way you’re storing nails in your pockets is highly likely to result in your femoral artery being pierced.’
She looked unsure for a second, as if she recognised that he was right but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her pull those nails from her pocket.
Straightening her shoulders back a little, she said, ‘I should get on.’
‘Because you’re going to use the tree house for …’ he waited for her to supply the rest.
‘Yes,’ she said, without elaboration. ‘I am.’
If she was trying to be secretive to wind him up, it was working. He remembered the sophisticated camera he’d handed over to her last week and a horrible suspicion surfaced in his mind.
‘You’re not building a hide for the press to spy on me, are you?’
He knew he’d said the wrong thing instantly. Her face told him so, but she didn’t go off the deep end. She looked at him in silence for a few long moments and her eyes told him that he’d hit a nerve before she segued into cool, professional landlady mode.
‘Your privacy, or indeed your fame, is not my concern, Mr Duff, but you can rest assured that I have no affection for the press and I won’t permit them on my land.’
Mr Duff, huh? So they were back there again. She’d