Page 10 of Dear Daisy

I was slightly embarrassed when he looked up, across the lorry, and caught me staring at him. I tried to do an expression of surprise, as though my eyes had been wandering around and had only recently settled on him, rather than having been running over his bare midriff for what felt like hours. He grinned and gave me a double thumbs-up, then one of the other men helping unload tapped him on the shoulder and he bent low to hear what they were saying, so I figured this was a good time to stop staring and find out where Scarlet was. Possibly rescue her from that coffee machine, which looked more than capable of holding a child to ransom.

She was waiting for me in the big atrium. ‘Up here.’

‘I’m not sure.’ My brief had been to bring her home, not go through his CD collection. But I can’t just leave her, can I? Alex is busy, what if she falls down or the coffee machine gets her? ‘Okay. But I can’t stay long, just until Alex finishes.’

‘I want to show you my bedroom.’

It was a flat on the top floor of the mill. One wall still had the door I’d noticed from the outside, for hauling grain in, and the roof was all beams and hooks, high above our heads. Open plan, one end was a swish kitchen, the rest filled with sofas, a TV, and more shelves of pony books than anyone outside The British Horse Society could live with. Scarlet opened a door and ran through into a corridor, charging on down to the end and giving me not much choice but to follow her, staring around me all the time at the Farrow & Ball paint choices and the framed pencil sketches on the walls. It was all so nicely done that I wondered if Alex was secretly an interior designer.

Such a contrast to Dan’s flat which was all windows. Where we stood and looked at the view over the park as the sun flowed across us like a river of light. One huge couch and a rug, all scattered with papers, the smell of age-old dog fur and cigarette smoke from previous inhabitants layered through the rooms. Casual, unstudied, like Dan himself. And on one wall, the hand-drawn sketches for the tattoo he bore on his wrist, a design he’d created and immortalised on his own body. ‘Chaos,’ he’d said when I looked. ‘The secret of the universe.’

‘Here!’ Triumphantly Scarlet threw open the door at the end of the passage to reveal . . . well. To say she had an obsession with ponies would be to underplay the decor to quite an extreme level. There were posters of ponies. Pony wallpaper. Model ponies. Pony duvet set, pony curtains and a pony rug beside the pony slippers. Too long in that room and you’d slip species. ‘And this is Light Bulb’s stable.’ A walk-in wardrobe, possibly, on the architect’s plans, its polished wooden floor strewn with straw, an old orange-net filled with hay tied to a beam, a plastic tub of water in the corner. On a shelf stood an old hairbrush and plastic dog comb.

My heart ached.

Scarlet propped Light Bulb against the wall, removed his plastic bridle and began brushing his wooden stick body with the hairbrush. ‘He gets a bit sweaty when he’s excited,’ she explained. ‘I should have made him walk home, but he loves to canter.’ Oh, Winter, you should have stuck to the dead people. You know where you are with them.

‘Did,’ I began, carefully, watching her start to brush out the string tail, ‘did your mummy give you Light Bulb?’

She didn’t even hesitate in the brushing. ‘It was my birthday two days before she died. I was five and Light Bulb was my present.’ Now she’d got a swathe of fabric, something like a piece of old fleece. ‘You’ll have to wear your rug until you stop being sweaty, or you might catch a cold,’ she advised the horse-designate.

‘Don’t leave his rug on,’ I found myself saying.

‘What?’

‘When you’re hot you don’t put something on, do you? Let him cool down first, then rug him up.’ What am I doing? He’s a broomhandle with a stupid face!

Slowly Scarlet peeled the fleece off. ‘It says in my horse book that they have to cool down slowly,’ she said, somewhat sulkily.

‘But I bet your horse books are aimed at . . . ummm . . . little children? Not the sort of grown up books that you need now.’ An idea. Sudden, not all that welcome, and not sure where it came from, unless it was kicked into being by those eyes, so much like her uncle’s. ‘Look. Next weekend, if Alex says it’s okay, why don’t we go into’ — I mentally blundered through the local map in my head — ‘York, and look for some new books on horse care?’ Winter, Winter, you don’t even like children! You’ve never even thought about children! Actually, that’s not quite true, is it? With Dan, just that once, when you lay looking at him sleeping and you imagined that jawline, that curve of nose, those beautiful eyes transposed onto a child, your child. Yours and his. That one moment, before you thought about sleepless nights, where you’d live, how you’d be able to write and research with a baby, but in that one, breathless moment you thought about having Dan’s baby.

Scarlet was rotating with delight. ‘Alex will let me! Can we go to McDonald’s too?’

Oh, the privations of a small town life, which make McDonald’s look like a treat. I was floundering my way around a reply when Alex came into the room, still shirtless but now minus the safety helmet. From the way Scarlet launched herself at him, armed with a stream of words about how much she wanted me to take her to York and how Light Bulb had behaved that day and how she’d got a list of spellings to learn, I think he wished he’d left the helmet on.

‘I’d better go. Got some stuff to get on with.’ I didn’t really, such work as I’d done was backed up for the day and all that remained to do was to eat something, watch the tiny television and go to bed, but I needed some space. Eight-year-old enthusiasm and energy made me want to lie very still for a while.

‘I . . .’ Alex waved a hand to indicate the still-talking Scarlet, ‘I’ll m-message you. Th-thank you, Winter, you’ve been g-great.’

As I walked out of the room I had to move past him, still standing in the doorway with Scarlet doing her impression of a small moon orbiting a gas giant. He flashed me that smile, and I could feel the heat from his body, smell the dust and timber on his skin giving my libido a good kicking. Even the sight of a Fiat 500 driving into the yard with Lucy Charlton at the wheel and skidding to a halt that Schumacher would have regarded as a bit reckless didn’t kill it. In fact, the feeling stayed with me all the way back to the cottage, a feeling that had been in abeyance since Dan and I split up.

I needed to talk to Daisy.

Chapter Six

‘There’s this bloke,’ I started carefully. ‘He seems sweet, he’s nice and cute and available, but I have absolutely no idea if I fancy him or not. Or if he fancies me. Or if it’s even a good idea.’

Daisy sounded slightly distracted. ‘I don’t think you should. You’ve still got issues, haven’t you? With Dan?’

I flinched. ‘No. Have I? Maybe. But can’t I just ignore those and go straight for the kill with Alex? Honestly, it’s a waste of a terrific body, having it hanging round on a building site like that when it could be . . .’ My imagination supplied a couple of the things it could have been doing and I felt my cheeks fire up.

‘But it’s not just him though, is it? He’s got a little girl to think of too.’

‘I hate your advice. You should be telling me to go and rip this man’s clothes off with my teeth. Honestly. He’s got the full set, you know, gorgeous eyes, a fantastic torso and thighs like . . .’ I tailed off again. ‘He’s pretty ripped, Daze. Even the stammer is cute.’

‘So it’s purely a physical thing then. You’ve never been one for the muscles and the action before, Win. What’s made you suddenly come over all Thor fangirl?’

‘Look, he might have biceps like a bouncy castle, but he’s bringing up his niece. She’s got a bedroom that looks like a show room in World of Pony, he doesn’t say a word about her going round on a hobby horse that has its own stable in the house, it would be hard for him to be any sweeter without producing a diabetic coma in susceptible onlookers!’

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