rocks, no doubt – and chatting away. She was wearing a black bikini, her wet dark hair slicked back. Her body looked soft, relaxed, in the sunshine but he still remembered the way she had tensed like a stray cat as she talked about her dead fiancé . . . It was a strange thing to know something so intimate about a near-stranger, to see a beautiful woman in a bikini, a child by her side, and to understand that despite this distant image of seemingly perfect happiness, she was hollow inside too. Like him.
He watched them jump together, heels kicking back, arms outstretched, hair flying upwards, their shrieks carrying over to him. They were everything he wanted to be, everything he wanted . . .
But no. That evening with her had been but a glancing flash of light in both their lives. Though it had held a quiet importance for him – reminding him he was alive, that he was a flesh-and-blood man, still – she could never know it. They must remain, fundamentally, strangers who had once shared a night under the midnight sun. Nothing more. She could never be more than that. Now, she was just the nanny.
‘Did you get it?’ Linus yelled, triumph in his still-high voice.
Emil caught his breath, realizing he had forgotten to click.
Chapter Eighteen
‘So what shall we do today?’ Emil asked as they finished breakfast. It had mostly been taken in silence, the overnight sleep somehow setting them all back a step from yesterday’s adventures, formality restored again.
Bell inwardly groaned, feeling like she was trapped in a groundhog day. Was it going to be like this every day for the rest of the summer? Did she have to plan every step of Emil getting to know his son? She had expected he would take the lead yesterday but he had seemed reluctant to get into the water, in spite of the fact it had been his idea. He had seemed almost shy. He had eventually done a few jumps with Linus (although they hadn’t held hands on the rocks. Perhaps he thought it wasn’t acceptable for a ten-year-old boy to hold hands with his father?), but she must have scrambled up and jumped off that rock with Linus thirty times. Each time she had felt a spike of fear at the drop below her feet; she had never been good with heights, and it had taken all her courage to make herself do it, for Linus’s sake. Her body was complaining today, though. She was stiff, and had a few scrapes and bruises from where she’d knocked herself on the rocks.
She looked at Linus, trying to gauge his mood. He had bags under his eyes, and she could tell from his sullen silence that he hadn’t slept well, that he didn’t want to be here. Was this going to be groundhog day for him too? Would Linus reset every morning to his default resentment at being made to be here, no matter how fun or exciting the day before?
She felt exhausted, caught between them both. ‘Fancy a kayak?’ she asked as brightly as she could manage.
‘No,’ Linus muttered.
‘We could go fishing?’
He shook his head.
‘Cycling? We could go to Sandhamn and you could take your board instead if you like?’
‘No!’
She was shocked by the suddenness of his snap. ‘But Linus, you love—’
‘I don’t want to!’ he cried. ‘I’m tired, why can’t you just let me be?’ She knew it wasn’t the activities he was resisting, but the person he had to do them with. His plea to her to be left alone was, in fact, a plea to Emil. She glanced over at him to see whether he understood that, but on the contrary, he seemed almost pleased by Linus’s bad mood, because it was ostensibly being directed towards her.
‘Well, we could just chill out and watch a film,’ Emil suggested, playing the good cop to her bad.
Bell arched an eyebrow. She had seen his DVD collection, and The Flight of the Condor and Dambusters weren’t going to cut it. Linus had never even seen an actual DVD before, much less those films.
‘We can go over to Sandhamn,’ he shrugged, seeming to get her point.
‘There isn’t a cinema there, is there?’ she puzzled.
‘No. But there’s a screen at the hotel, in the conference room. I can get them to set it up for us.’
‘Just the three of us?’ she queried.
‘Well, is there anyone else you’d like to bring?’
She and Linus swapped hopeful glances. It