and blue wooden chairs that lined the Explanada), and not allowing myself to feel anything other than a feeling of relief when, on the way back to my apartment, I strolled along the Calle Gerona which housed some of Alicante’s most luxurious designer wedding dress shops. Whenever I stopped outside the windows and looked at the extravagantly elegant dresses I wished only good things for the girls who wore them and I didn’t think of a wedding for myself any more.
It was at the end of a busy November that Gabriella made an unexpected visit to the office and gave me the tickets for the Caribbean.
‘You don’t take holidays,’ she told me. ‘You go back to Ireland for a week or so. You take a day off from time to time. But you don’t take proper holidays and you should, Isobel.’
I tried to protest that I wasn’t a holiday kind of person. That working in a country where the sun shines and the weather is balmy (Alicante didn’t suffer the same bitingly cold winters as Madrid; in a lot of ways I preferred it there in the winter when the tourist hordes had gone and the locals reclaimed the streets) was as good as being on a permanent holiday.
Gabriella was having none of it. She handed me the tickets for a week’s stay in the five-star, all-inclusive, ultra-luxurious White Sands Hotel, and told me to go and have a good time.
Which was why I found myself standing on the balcony of Room 608, musing on the day’s cancelled wedding, remembering my own, thinking that Spain was a beautiful country and I now regarded it as home, but that the Caribbean was probably the most idyllic place on earth. You couldn’t actually live here, I thought, as I gazed at the setting sun disappearing into the silk-blue sea in a ripple of pink and gold. It was far too beautiful for everyday life!
I sat down in the plump cushioned recliner, stretched my lightly tanned legs out in front of me so that they caught the final rays of the sun and flicked through a copy of Hola! to catch up on the Spanish gossip.
It was because I was reading in Spanish that I didn’t at first realise that the people on the balcony next to me (who I couldn’t see properly but could make out as blurred images because all of the balconies were separated by walls of glass blocks) were talking in Spanish too. And it was the Spanish of Madrid – Castellano – not Latin American Spanish which might have been less unusual in this part of the world. It was strange to hear Spanish at all; most of the guests at White Sands were American or British, with one or two Germans; and so, when I heard my second language I tuned in to what they were saying.
It was a woman’s voice speaking, bright and cheerful, bubbling with enthusiasm.
‘We are so lucky!’ she was exclaiming. ‘Seems we got the right end of the deal for once.’
Her companion, a man, was obviously still in the room because I didn’t catch his reply though I could hear the timbre of his voice.
‘. . . and this is so great,’ she continued. ‘Look at the views. Much, much better than the other place.’
I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. She was hanging precariously out over the balcony, peering down into the colourful tropical gardens below. I could see her profile as she swept her long dark hair from her face – a perfect face, with smooth olive skin, long dark eyelashes and high cheekbones. She reminded me of Letizia Ortez, the elegant and ever more glamorous woman who’d married the Crown Prince of Spain and who was a regular cover girl for all of the gossip magazines. The woman next door caught sight of me and grinned. Her lips were rose-bud pink, her mouth wide and generous and her eyes chocolate brown. Then she drew back and called to her companion again.
‘Do we have time before going out, Nico?’ she asked.
Nico. My heart hammered in my chest at the familiar name. Nico.
Well, obviously not my Nico. Nicolas Juan Carlos Alvarez, who had told me he loved me and
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