At the saturated T-shirt that had turned transparent in the rain.
Slowly, she put her hands over her eyes. Oh no. Martyn’s OCD had been Openly Chest Distracted.
Chapter Four
Luckily, she need never see Martyn Mayfair again. Nor the schoolboys on the hill or the drivers whose keen gazes she’d assumed to be cheerful English sympathy at her poor, saturated state. But who had actually been ogling her boobs.
Because she could always jump over the cliff.
Or move right back to Connecticut.
But that would mean giving up on her big idea for the summer. Honor eased off her sodden T-shirt and flung it to the floor. She had to stay. Which meant she’d probably have to face Martyn Mayfair again because his sister obviously gave him tasks connected with her rental property.
She set the shower at a notch above lukewarm, which she could take now without setting her sunburn pulsing, stepped under the water and closed her eyes in misery.
The fabulous smile that had half-blinded her had actually been a lascivious grin, the light in his burning dark eyes had been laughter. Savagely, she scrubbed shampoo into her hair. Tomorrow, she planned to find a temp agency. But first, she’d buy a big umbrella against the English weather that suddenly threw in a storm in the middle of a heatwave.
* * *
Unable to resist the draw of the rolling ocean, Honor began the next day by strolling along the great concrete walkway called the Undercliff Walk to Rottingdean, a popular route, judging by the walkers, runners, mothers with buggies and owners with dogs all enjoying the return of the sun, albeit accompanied by a horizontal breeze.
The cliffs, rising up on her right, were white. She’d never seen chalk cliffs close up before and it was like walking beside an enormous, badly cut cake — complete with falling crumbs,judging from the chunks of chalk littering the ground. The scale and grandeur took her breath away.
To her left, over great bulwarks built as protection from the incoming tide, the beach was made of rocks, from breakwaters of great boulders to millions and trillions of pebbles, which every wave rattled like a moment of applause. As she walked, she took deep breaths of the salty wind that whipped her hair and filled her ears. It tasted like freedom.
She loved, loved,lovedEngland.
She resisted the temptation to wander into Rottingdean village which, yesterday, she’d half-explored, cute and quirky and anything but rotting. Instead, she took one of the cream-and-red buses from the shelter outside the White Horse Hotel, a typically English bus with two decks stacked on top of each other. The ‘double decker’ reminded her of all those summers spent in London and, as then, she climbed the steep spiral stairs. Why would anybody travel downstairs when they could look into gardens and over roofs?
Much of her sunburn recovery time had been spent with her guidebook, learning that the city of Brighton and Hove — ‘London-by-the-sea’ — was made up of Brighton, Hove, and over thirty other areas, including Rottingdean, Saltdean and Eastingdean on its edge. But it felt like no other city, with the waves down below the cliff as they stopped-and-started their way along the coast road.
Then came Brighton Marina, with twinkling rows of boats and cubed apartment buildings and beyond it shone a great white structure, projecting into the waves and bearing a huge sign,Brighton Pier. Ringing the bell for the driver to stop, she scooted down the twisting metal stairs and jumped from the bus.
Her guidebook’s glossy photographs of the pier hadn’t prepared her for its size, running out to sea like an ornately fenced runway decorated with a series of white-iced cakes andsilver pepper pots and, bizarrely, a colourful, full-sized, fun fair of carousels and roller coasters perched on the end. Skittish green waves slapped and tickled the great legs. For several minutes she held back her hair in the breeze and drank in the grandeur, and the confusion of people, laughing, calling, shading their eyes, streaming in and streaming out.
But her severance pay was going to melt like the ice cream clutched by the nearby squealing children if she didn’t earn something to help it along, and so she turned her back and took out her map.
She was unprepared for the number ofpeoplein Brighton, surging away from the shore across the coast road under strings of lights and old-fashioned lampposts, jostling along the sidewalks — pavements, she must remember. The bustling streets of fabulous white Regency buildings, cheek-by-jowl with art-deco architecture and modern shopping centres, climbing inland from the sea, were a lot different to the sedate streets of Hamilton Drives.
She bought a cheap, plasticky, non-contract cell phone with £20 of air time, then followed her map to the first employment agency on her list, taking only minutes to establish it as the wrong kind of agency — no fun, temp jobs there, just a condescending woman who didn’t understand why Honor wouldn’t want to use her degree or her qualifications as a financial advisor.
After eating a sandwich and drinking English tea — hotter and stronger than she remembered — by the statue of naked children cavorting with dolphins in Brighton Square, she allowed her feet to wander into the Lanes, part of the original village of Brighton left standing when the French burned the rest down in a raid in 1514. The streets were only a few feet across and, despite the milling tourists shouting to one another and taking photos with their phones, Honor could imagine herselfback in the sixteenth century, when the walls had never seen their current bright white coats and the air was redolent of horse, hawkers and whores.
But, brought back to her twenty-first century self by her reflection in the window of a shop full of bright, stretchy dresses and glittery tops, she frowned to see that her grey T-shirt and blue jeans made her stand out in the throng of summer tourists like a pigeon in a city full of parrots.
Twenty minutes later she emerged from the shop, not so much a parrot as a glorious bird of paradise in a short, black, stretchy dress shot with gold, a rainbow-striped shrug tied between her breasts — loosely in deference to the remains of her sunburn — and gold gladiator sandals. Her hair swung from a band of multi-coloured sequins and mini chandeliers of black iridescent beads hung from each ear.
Jeans and T-shirt crammed into her backpack, she swung along to the next agency and in through the glass doors, talking brightly, as she approached a man with curly hair and blue eyes. ‘Hi! I’m looking for temp work. Clubs, restaurants or shops would be good. Offices and boring stuff — bad.’
He invited her to the seat in front of his desk. ‘I’m Aaron. I can help you. We have temp jobs opening all the time.’
‘That’s great. I’m depending on you.’
‘Then I’d better not let you down.’ Responding to her flirtatiousness by giving her his full attention, he whizzed through her details, hopping his cursor about his computer screen. ‘Qualifications?’
Honor shrugged. ‘I dropped out.’
He looked unsure. ‘So . . . none?’
