It was breathtakingly beautiful.
It wasn’t until Rocco set foot on the beach that he realised what Giselle had meant. ‘Are those shells?’ he asked, peering down for a closer look. The ‘sand’ consisted of broken shells, some of them quite large, others mere fragments, and was crunchy underfoot.
‘This place is called Coral Beach,’ Giselle said, kneeling and picking up a handful to show him. ‘But it’s not really coral. It’s the calcified remains of red coralline seaweed and millions of snail shells, crushed by wave action and bleached by sunlight. Legend has it that crofters used to use it to spread on their land to improve the soil.’ She allowed the fragments to trickle to the ground, then got to her feet and dusted her palm on the seat of her shorts.
Once again, his gaze was drawn to her legs, and once again he brushed the accompanying image away. ‘So, what are we looking for?’ he asked. ‘I know you showed me the blue glass you found, but what else should I be looking for?’
She gave him a quizzical look. ‘It was you who found the sea glass at the lighthouse on Murano.’
‘To be honest, I had no idea what it was. I just picked up some random stones because they looked nice.’
‘OK, let’s see if I can find some and I’ll show you, although we’ll probably have better luck among the rocks.’
Head down, eyes on the ground, he walked alongside her, so close they were almost touching, and instead of concentrating on what was underfoot, he found most of his attention was taken up with Giselle. She was engrossed, her gaze focused, and he kept shooting her little glances out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t seem to stop looking at her.
‘Here’s a piece,’ she said, stooping to pick up a small bit of what seemed, to his inexperienced eye, to be a frosted pebble. He’d found something similar all those years ago, he recalled, and a heart-shaped red one along with some others.
She handed it to him, and he tried not to react as her fingers brushed the palm of his hand. Her touch was electrifying.
‘I know it doesn’t look much on its own, but you’ve seen what happens when several pieces are arranged together.’
‘Magic,’ he breathed. ‘That’s what happens.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s awesome,’ he backtracked. ‘Do you ever use the coral itself?’
The bleached strands of hard seaweed looked remarkably like real coral, with their twiglet shapes, and amongst them were hundreds of tiny shells.
‘Never. Taking a handful mightn’t seem like much, but if everyone did it, there’d soon be none left. I don’t take any shells from here, either. I occasionally use them in my pictures, but I’m really careful about taking too many. Glass, on the other hand… It’s an endless supply.’
She removed the fragment of glass from his hand and popped it into her canvas bag, and they carried on walking, eyes on the beach.
Finally, after an hour and several more ‘finds’, one of them being a fragment of what Giselle thought was costume jewellery – not glass but paste maybe, perhaps from a brooch or an earring – she called a halt, saying, ‘I hope you’ve got breakfast in that rucksack.’
Rocco’s eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘Avril, via Cook. Otherwise, I’d have brought a snack myself. Cheese and pickle sandwiches?’
He nodded.
‘My favourite. Let’s eat it up there.’
Up therewas the impressive hill on the northern end of the beach.
He must have looked as apprehensive as he felt (that hill lookedsteep), because Giselle said, ‘Don’t worry; its bark is worse than its bite. It’ll only take five minutes to reach the top, but the view is so worth it.’
Not wanting to appear a wimp in her eyes, he agreed, but even though the hike to the top couldn’t have been more than thirty metres, he was puffing like a steam train by the time they got there. He clearly needed to do more work on the stepper next time he went to the gym.
But once again, the view was astounding, and Rocco couldn’t think of anywhere better to eat breakfast.
Hardly able to drag his eyes away, he unpacked the rucksack. Before he ate, he took a long drink of water. It had been thirsty work hauling his backside up that hill.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ he observed, unwrapping his sandwich.
‘Shh. What can you hear?’
‘Nothing, that’s what—’
