“Is it? Well.” Juliet looked away. “You are my sister. The only one I’ve got.” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so terse, but Lucy didn’t seem to mind because she launched herself towards Juliet, and she jerked back in surprise, spilling her coffee as Lucy gave her a bone-crunching hug.
“Thank you, Juliet, for saying that. You’re the only sister I’ve got too.”
“No need to state the obvious,” Juliet muttered, and wiped ineffectually at the coffee stain on her jeans. Wiped at her eyes too, because it might be obvious now, but she didn’t think it always had been.
Chapter twenty-three
Lucy
Lying in bed on Sunday night after what had turned out to be a pretty fabulous day on the La’al Ratty with Juliet, Lucy turned her thoughts inexorably to Alex. She relived that delicious kiss the way you savored a gourmet chocolate, remembering just how deeply Alex had kissed her, with such raw, unbridled passion. She’d teased him that she hadn’t known he’d had it in him, and she really hadn’t.
Alex had kissed her like a man dying of thirst and she was water. It had felt fantastic to be kissed like that. To be so wanted and needed.
She stretched her toes towards the end of the bed. Moonlight spilled onto the floor; the wind started up, rattling the windowpanes and making the leaves rustle.
What was going to happen now, on Monday? She pictured Alex coming into school, giving her a secret smile, pulling her into his office for a quick—or not-so-quick—kiss. . . .
Although that last bit seemed unlikely. There had to be some policy about head teachers dating their staff. Temporary staff, inher case, but still . . . what if Alex regretted what in retrospect could very well be seen as a single moment of reckless passion?
Lucy turned on her side and tucked her knees up to her chest. That kisshadbeen reckless and a little bit wild . . . and perhaps totally unplanned. What if Alex came into school Monday morning and gave her the I’m-sorry-but-it-was-a-mistake talk?
And maybe it was a mistake. She’d been telling herself all along that she didn’t want a relationship, wasn’t ready. Maybe she’d been fooling herself on that score, but surely she’d learned to be a little cautious by now, to think about the consequences.
By Monday morning she’d thought so much about how Alex would or wouldn’t react when he saw her that she was annoyed with her endless navel-gazing, and almost with Alex simply for being so much in her thoughts.
She got to work early, flipped on the kettle for a much-needed cup of coffee, and began to open the reception area, switching on the computer and the photocopier, answering the first calls of the day, which were invariably about children who were missing school because of illness.
She kept glancing towards the school yard, waiting for Alex, her heart leaping every time a figure came up the steep little lane. Teachers arrived in a steady trickle, talking about their weekends, their lessons, the hope of half term, which was just two weeks away.
Diana stopped by the desk to tell her about the weekend she’d spent in Manchester. “Andrew asked us to go down there instead of him coming up here, which seemed fair enough. At least he wants to see us.”
“And how did it go?” Lucy asked, trying not to look too often for Alex.
“Fine, I suppose. The children loved it. They miss the city, their old life. We’ve only been here a year, you know.”
“Do you think they want to move back?”
Diana grimaced. “That isn’t really an option, with my mum.”
“No, but you could do a switch,” Lucy suggested, her elbows propped on the counter. “Why couldn’t Andrew have the kids during the week, and you have the bachelorette pad in the country? You could go to Manchester for the weekends.”
Diana gave a surprised guffaw of laughter. “I can’t see Andrew agreeing to that.”
“But your kids are in high school, right? So it’s not as if they’re toddlers. They can practically take care of themselves.”
“You’ve never lived with a teenager, have you?” Diana asked wryly.
“Well, no,” Lucy admitted, and Diana moved past her, down the hall towards the classrooms.
“Thanks for the laugh, anyway,” she called over her shoulder. “I might suggest it to Andrew, just to see the color drain from his face.”
The teachers had all arrived, and the pupils were starting to come up the lane, a bobbing sea of blue and gray. Still no Alex.
Lucy busied herself making coffee, and then putting up the new notices on the board. She told all the relevant teachers about the day’s absences, and then as the last pupils came up the hill, she saw Alex among them, holding Poppy by the hand, looking none too happy.
Lucy ducked out of the way, mindlessly feeding more paper into the photocopier. Not a good sign, that look on his face.
She heard the door open behind her and then Poppy’s sweet, piping voice.
