‘Me neither,’ she said shyly, smiling back, realising that she had found her true-life hero.
But after that she rarely saw him—their lives diverged and the age-gap was all wrong. Seven years could seem like a generation gap. She knew that he had done well in his school exams, and knew that his teachers had been disappointed when he became an apprentice carpenter. Everyone thought that he’d go away to college.
‘It’s because he’s good at making things,’ his mother explained to Shelley on the way back from the shops one day. ‘Good with his hands. And he likes the open air—says he doesn’t want to be cooped up inside in an office all day. Good luck to him, I say!’
Shelley saw him on the day he left school, with the best grades of his year, and it took every bit of courage she possessed to go up to him and congratulate him. ‘I hear you’re going to be a carpenter?’
He narrowed his blue eyes at her assessingly. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley—don’t you think I’m aiming high enough?’
She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly. She was only eleven—so what did she know? ‘It’s not that,’ she lied.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No. I just thought that you’d be—’
‘A pilot?’ he grinned. ‘Or a doctor?’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s an insecure world, kitten—and people always need houses.’
‘I guess they do.’ And she blushed with pleasure to hear him call her ‘kitten’.
Sometimes, when Shelley was up in her bedroom reading, she used to glimpse him wandering home, stripped to the waist, all honed muscle and bronzed perfection. And the words used to dance like hieroglyphics on the page in front of her.
She was seventeen when he went travelling, originally for a year, but the wanderlust caught him and he was gone for much longer.
She remembered one of the last times she had seen him before he’d left. She’d gone sunbathing further up the bay with a couple of schoolfriends—hidden, they thought, by a large screen of rocks. Feeling liberated and daring, they had removed their bikini tops. But Drew had been out running along the beach, and had seen them. He had gone absolutely ballistic, with Shelley in particular, and her friends had teased her afterwards and said that must mean that he fancied her. And she’d told them that of course he didn’t fancy her, because he had barely spoken to her again after that.
And suddenly he had gone.
Shelley had missed him. Missed him like mad. Sometimes she used to go out with his sister Jennie, on Saturday nights. They would go to the Smugglers pub or occasionally to one of the dances at the village hall, or get the bus into Southchester. She’d look at every man and find him wanting, by simple virtue of the fact that he wasn’t Drew.
‘Has your brother mentioned anything about coming home?’ she asked Jennie casually one evening.
Jennie grinned. She was used to women asking her questions about her handsome big brother.
‘Nope. Shall I write and say you were asking?’
‘Just you dare!’
He came back three years later, just before Christmas—when the fairy lights in the pubs twinkled like rainbow drops, reminding him of everything he had missed about England.
Shelley was on her way home from her job as receptionist in Milmouth’s upmarket car showroom when she saw him, and had to bite back her pleasure, because she didn’t want to gush all over him like a silly little girl.
‘Hello, Drew,’ she said softly. ‘Jennie said you were coming home.’
‘Is that really you, Shelley Turner?’ he enquired, almost groaning when he realised that this tousled-haired stunner from next door was even more gorgeous than when he’d left. He hadn’t thought that was possible. But some time in the last three years she had developed the kind of figure that drove men to sin, and her hair was a glossy sheet—the colour of caramel. And he’d forgotten how delicate her skin was and how pale the aquamarine of her eyes.
‘Of course it’s me!’ she giggled. ‘Who else did you think it was?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he answered slowly, his blue eyes looking dazzling in his tanned face. ‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘Just try and stop me! It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ she confided. ‘And a whole gang of us are meeting up in the Smugglers.’
‘Your birthday?’ He frowned as alarm bells rang loudly in his brain. ‘How old are you?’
She was slightly disappointed that he couldn’t remember, but clever enough not to show it. ‘I’ll be twenty.’
‘Wow! You’ll be twenty? Well, isn’t that just dandy!’ His grin showed his relief. ‘Mind if I join you?’