Page 25 of Not in a Million Years

He hesitated, then shook his head. He was close enough for me to feel his hair brush against my cheek; close enough for a whisper of a different, more lemony fragrance to reach me.

‘It’s pretty warm. Sure you don’t need a hat?’

As if I was going to trot off to my room and fetch one on his instructions, like a compliant child. ‘I’ll be fine. It’s not exactly the middle of summer.’

‘Even so. There’s a heatwave, apparently. My weather app said it’s going to be unseasonably hot – pushing thirty degrees. I guess that’s global warming for you.’

‘Global warming or not, I still don’t need a hat.’

He shrugged. ’Right. I’ll get the map up on my phone and we’ll get cracking.’

But we couldn’t get cracking right away, because the list of hotels was in alphabetical order, not in order of their proximity to our own hotel. After much frowning and tapping at his screen, Daniel disappeared inside again and came out with a pencil. He took the list from me and placed ticks alongside a dozen or so of the names.

‘Those ones are closest,’ he said.

‘Turquoise Villas looks like it’s right round the corner.’

‘We may as well walk – it hardly seems worth taking the car.’

‘Good shout. I could do without being terrified by your driving again.’

‘What the hell’s wrong with my driving?’

I looked up at his furious scowl, trying not to let the smile that was threatening to crack my face open show. I’d definitely found a vulnerability there, and I was going to have fun exploiting it.

‘Evidently you think something is,’ I said, ‘or you wouldn’t be so defensive about it.’

‘Just as well you’re so keen on walking,’ he countered, ‘because you’re going to be doing a lot of it.’

He led the way down the stairs into the street. The day was hot already – I could feel the heat of the pavement coming through the thin soles of my shoes and the sun prickling the back of my neck.

But by midday, it was even hotter. We’d visited fourteen hotels and drawn fourteen blanks. Fourteen smiling faces had dropped into seriousness when they heard our request; fourteen heads had shaken sadly. One guy had gone off to find his colleague, and my heart had leaped with hope, but then it was the colleague who did the face-falling and head-shaking.

I couldn’t help noticing that when it was Daniel holding out his phone with the message and picture on it, rather than me, there was a lot more smiling and the head-shaking looked genuinely regretful. I remembered Daniel’s easy charm from back in the day, before it had well and truly stopped working on me, and it was disconcerting to see it in action again. It made me feel – not resentful, exactly, but… well, resentful. Although I couldn’t quite explain to myself why that might be.

We’d seen rustic hotels and luxurious ones, large ones and small. We’d walked through paved side streets and along the main waterfront promenade. We’d passed shops selling yacht paraphernalia and shops selling groceries and shops selling Turkish delight.

And we’d passed more cats than I’d ever seen in my life: tabby ones, black ones, ginger ones, white ones and ones that were a mixture of all those colours. Short-haired ones and fluffy ones. Timid ones and friendly ones. And every time Daniel saw one, he insisted on stopping, talking to it, making clicking noises with his tongue to encourage it to approach him and fussing it if it did.

If it hadn’t been for the cats, I reckoned we’d have got through at least half a dozen more hotels.

‘Do you have to?’ I asked as Daniel squatted down, holding out a hand towards a scrawny ginger cat he’d spotted reclining in the shade of a parked car.

He looked up at me in surprise. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘The cats. Every single one, every single time.’

The ginger cat stood up, stretching languorously, and strolled towards him, taking its time.

‘Do you not like cats?’ he asked, letting it sniff his fingers before he embarked on an extensive ear-scratching session.

‘I mean, I don’t mind cats. I’m not an animal hater.’

The cat flopped onto its side, then rolled over on its back, and Daniel stroked its belly, talking nonsense to it.

‘We should buy some treats for them,’ he said. ‘They’re all pretty thin, but they’re clearly well looked after.’

‘Really? What’s wrong with that one’s ear then?’

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