Anything but Vanilla

chapter EIGHT



Ice cream is like medicine; the secret is in the dose.

—from Rosie’s ‘Little Book of Ice Cream’

Alexander, as a matter of instinct, absorbed the sounds around him. In the rain forest it was a lifesaver. Here it was only the hum of the freezers, the whirr of the churn, the street sounds filtering in from the front of the shop. They were safe noises that he could filter out, allowing him to focus all his attention on Sorrel.

Her urgency, the slightest hesitation as she assured ‘Elle’ that she was coping, her determination as she turned her back on him, lowering her voice as she told her sister that she was prepared to go to Wales and find Ria. Good luck with that one. He registered the warmth in her voice as she spoke to someone called Basil, the hint of a giggle that made him want to smile.

Just being in the same room as her made him want to smile. Something he hadn’t anticipated this morning when he’d discovered the extent of Ria’s problems.

‘Steak and ale pie?’ he asked, since he had obviously been meant to hear that last part.

‘Unless you’re a vegetarian like Ria,’ she said, ‘in which case you can share Geli’s tofu.’

‘Who or what is Geli?’

‘Angelica is my younger sister,’ she said, joining him at the business end of the kitchen to check the mix. ‘The animal lover.’

‘And Elle?’

‘That’s Elle for Lovage, Big Ears, although I’d advise you to stick to Elle when you meet her. She’s my older sister.’

‘The one with three little girls.’

‘All under the age of five.’

‘Good grief.’

‘She makes it look easy and her husband is a fully engaged father,’ she said. A shadow crossed her face so quickly that it would have been easy to miss. ‘He’s a dab hand with a nappy.’

‘Good for him.’

‘Yes...’ Again that shadow, before she shook it off, looked up. ‘Grandma is also called Lovage, but everyone calls her Lally.’

Sorrel, Angelica, Lovage, Basil; he was sensing a theme... ‘Steak pie is absolutely fine with me, I just didn’t expect to be having dinner with The Herbs.’

She pulled a face. ‘“And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.”’

The face was meant to be comic, but he sensed that it masked some more complicated emotion and that if he probed a little, this supremely assured young woman might just fall apart. ‘From the ease with which you trotted out the quotation, I’m sensing a lack of originality,’ he said, sticking with the superficial. Ria was emotion enough for any man.

‘A teacher who thought she was being particularly clever gave us that nickname when I was at primary school. My mother’s name was Lavender.’

Was... He noted the past tense but didn’t comment. He already knew more than enough about Sorrel Amery.

‘The full set, then. So Fenny is presumably Fennel...’

‘Just Fenny, actually. No one would call a little girl Fennel. But you’ve got the general idea. Her sisters are Tara and Marji.’

‘Tarragon and marjoram? What would the baby have been called if she’d been a boy?’

‘Henry.’

He grinned. ‘Good King Henry?’

‘You certainly know your herbs, although actually it’s a family name on her father’s side. Look, I’m sorry I can’t offer you something more exciting by way of dinner, but I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and you’re not dressed for any restaurant I’d care to be seen in. It’s The Herbs or nothing.’ Then, as he shrugged, ‘Do. Not. Do. That!’ She turned away before he could respond and he glanced down at his shoulder where the gap in the seam had widened noticeably.

‘I could take my T-shirt off if it bothers you so much,’ he offered, barely able to suppress a grin.

‘No!’ she said, with more vehemence than entirely necessary. ‘Forget the T-shirt. Here, taste...’ She stopped the machine, took two plastic spoons from the pot, tasted the mixture, then handed the second spoon to him. ‘What do you think?’

As he bent to dip into the mix his gaze intersected the point where the top of the silky thing she was wearing skimmed the top of her breasts and the last thing on his mind was sorbet.

He had absolutely no argument with her front. Or her rear...

‘Well?’ she demanded, when he took his time over filling the spoon, tasting the sorbet.

‘It sort of sparkles on the tongue.’

‘Right answer,’ she said, briskly.

She was a little underdressed for the part but she was back in Businesswoman of the Year mode. It should have been off-putting. On his brief trips home his chosen partners were party girls who expected nothing more than a good time for as long as he was around.

Having kissed her, he thought perhaps he was missing out. Maybe he should widen his horizons...

‘Is it sweet enough?’ she asked. ‘Bearing in mind that it’s served with a touch of cassis in the bottom of the glass to add sweetness and colour, and berries threaded onto a cocktail stick.’

‘I have to imagine all that?’ He managed to imply that it was a foreign concept, but the truth was that his imagination was focused on other things. What her hair would look like loose about her shoulders, how it would feel, sliding against his skin... ‘What kind of berries?’

‘Raspberries and blueberries.’

‘Pretty,’ he said, putting the spoon in his mouth and sucking it clean. ‘And—bearing in mind that I’m using my imagination regarding the liqueur and berries—there’s nothing I’d add, although...’

‘What?’ she demanded after a long, thoughtful pause, clearly anticipating another ‘eureka’ moment involving some magic ingredient.

‘I’m prepared to bet you a week’s rent that it’ll go long before the cucumber ice cream.’

‘You really need to get over your hang-up about savoury ice cream,’ she said crossly, switching the churn back on to freeze the sorbet. ‘Look at the whole picture, the combination of tastes. Too much sweetness is cloying.’

‘No danger of that with you, is there?’ he said, leaning back against the work unit.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorrel—genus Rumex—used for medicinal and culinary purposes, is characterised by a bitter taste whereas...’ Sorrel, torn between relief and annoyance that Alexander had teased her about the taste, paused in the act of dumping her spoon in the sink and turned to look at him ‘...lovage, pungent and aromatic, is used in herbal love baths and Angelica archangelica...’ He paused. ‘Is your sister angelic?’

‘Only if you’re an abandoned dog.’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘Of course, you’re a botanist.’

‘Only by accident. I’m actually a pharmacologist, but I specialise in medicinal plants.’

‘Which include herbs.’ She frowned. ‘Ria is incredibly knowledgeable about herbs. She makes a wonderful healing cream using lavender.’

‘I never leave home without it. We’ve a lot to learn from the past as well as primitive societies.’

‘And that’s what you do?’ she asked. ‘Find the plants that people have been using for centuries and bring them home to find out what it is that makes them so special?’

‘We’re losing them at a frightening rate. Losing them before we even know they exist. It’s a race against time.’

‘They’re a lot more important than rare orchids, I guess.’

‘More important,’ he agreed, but then his face creased in a broad grin. ‘But nowhere near as erotic.’

* * *

‘No one is going to miss you driving down the High Street in that,’ Alexander said a couple of hours later as Sorrel opened the rear doors of her van so that he could load up the ices.

‘That’s the general idea,’ she said, pausing momentarily to admire Geli’s artwork. The van was black, with Scoop! drawn in loops of vanilla ice along each side and with a celebratory firework explosion of multicolour sprinkles, bursting in a head-turning display from the exclamation point to splatter the roof and the doors. It never failed to make her smile. ‘And it means that you won’t have any trouble following me,’ she said, going back inside to fetch more ices.

‘Following you?’ he asked, doing just that and reaching to take big cooler containers she was carrying.

‘Home...’ They were both hanging on to the container and much too close. ‘For supper?’ They were much too close. If she moved her fingers an inch their hands would be touching. If she touched him he would kiss her again...

She surrendered the load to him, turned and grabbed another container from the freezer, letting her face cool before following him to the van. He’d pushed his load deep inside and took hers and did the same with that.

‘How are we doing?’ he asked.

We. He was saying it now...

‘Um... A couple more trips should do it.’ He took the last load out to the van while she collected her bag, double checked that everything was switched off and set the alarm. ‘Where are you parked?’ she asked.

‘I’m not. Ria took the car and I was too bushed to go home last night. I walked in.’

‘You walked?’ It was the best part of two miles from Ria’s cottage and lesser mortals would have called a taxi.

‘I needed to stretch my legs.’

‘Obviously. No more than a gentle stroll in the park for a man who spends his days hacking through the jungle.’ The tension that had gripped her throughout the day had eased now that everything was ready and she couldn’t resist teasing him a little.

‘I took the short cut along the towpath. A walk along the river at dawn is a good start to any day.’

‘And no bats or mosquitoes to spoil the pleasure.’ Only the newly hatched ducklings and cygnets being shepherded along the bank by their parents, the white lacy froth of cow parsley billowing over the path and blackbirds giving it their all.

‘You have to walk along there in the evening if you want to see bats,’ he said. ‘Pipistrelles dipping and diving as they chase the insects.’

‘Yes...’ How long since she’d done that? Taken a run along the towpath in the morning before the day was properly awake. Walked along it in the evening, not thinking, not planning, not doing anything but absorbing the scents, the sounds around her? ‘We get them in the garden at dusk.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky this evening.’

‘Will I?’

Alexander saw the touch of colour heat her cheeks as she realised what she’d said and he felt an answering heat low in his groin. For a moment neither of them moved, then Sorrel looked away, took her jacket from a hanger and slipped it over the silky top.

It should have made concentrating a whole lot easier but the image was imprinted on his mind and if she’d been wearing a sack he’d still see a tendril of escaped hair curling against her neck, her smooth shoulders, the silk clinging to her breasts.

That colour should have looked all wrong with her hair, but it was as spectacularly head-turning as the van. As spectacularly head-turning as the view of her legs as she slid behind the wheel.

When he didn’t walk around and climb in beside her, she peered up at him. ‘What’s up, Doc? Don’t tell me that you have a problem with women drivers?’

‘If I said yes, would you let me drive?’

She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

Women drivers in general didn’t bother him. It was this woman driver in particular that had him breaking out in a sweat.

This morning he’d had a clear vision of what he was going to do. Close down the ice-cream parlour and, once that was done, go and find Ria, reassure her that everything was sorted. She could stay and spend the summer with her friends if she wanted, or come home. No worries.

He’d spend a few days dealing with the paperwork that piled up in his absence but, that done, he could return to Pantabalik and continue the search for an elusive plant he’d been hunting down for months. The one that the local people sang about, that he was beginning to think might simply be a myth. Or that they were deliberately hiding from him, afraid that he would steal it, robbing them of its power.

An hour or two in Sorrel’s company had not just diverted him from his purpose, it had completely trashed it. Tired as he was, she had filled him with her scent, with colour, with her enthusiasm and distracted him with a straight-to-hell smile. Touched him with a look that had been filled with yearning for something lost. A memory that he had inadvertently stirred. He was good at that...

‘Don’t be such a macho grouch,’ she said, laughing at his apparent reluctance to surrender himself to her unknown skill behind the wheel. ‘I promise you, I didn’t get my driving licence from the back of a cornflake packet.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ he replied. ‘Everyone knows that women get their driving licences with coupons they save up from the top of soap-powder boxes.’

That provoked a snort of laughter. ‘You are outrageous, Alexander West,’ she said.

‘Am I? What are you going to do about it?’

‘Me?’ She was looking up at him, her eyes dark and lustrous in the shade of the yard.

‘There’s only you and me here,’ he said.

‘Oh...’ Her mouth pouted around the sound, invitingly soft. All he had to do was lean in and kiss her. Rekindle the fizz of heat that had continued to tingle through his veins all day. Take her up on the invitation to sit in a darkening garden with the scent of wallflowers filling the air, listening to the last lingering notes of a blackbird, watching for the first swooping flights of the bats.

How lucky could one man get?

Even from this distance he knew the answer. He didn’t just want to kiss her. He wanted to draw her close, curl up somewhere quiet with her and go to sleep with the weight of her body against him. Wake up with her still there and see her looking at him just like that.

‘One of these days, Alexander West, someone will take you seriously and you will be in such big trouble,’ she said.

‘You think?’ He thought he was already in more trouble than he could handle. He would have happily fallen into bed with her, giving and receiving a few nights of no-commitment pleasure before kissing her goodbye and returning to work. But those sorts of relationships had rules. No eating with the family. Meeting grandparents, sisters. No getting involved.

Too late...

Time to bail before this got even more complicated and he did something really stupid that would end in a world of regret.

He dragged his hands over his face in a gesture of weariness that was not entirely faked. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m already in trouble,’ he said. ‘The day has caught up with me and I’m going to fall asleep with my face in your grandmother’s pie.’

Sorrel’s shiver as she slid the key into the ignition, started the engine, had nothing to do with the fact that she’d been digging out her ices from the depths of Ria’s freezers. It had everything to with the way that Alexander had been looking at her. A look that had bloomed, warm and low in her belly, and sent shivers of anticipation racing down her thighs. Shivers that every shred of sense told her were wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why did it feel so right?

‘You have to eat,’ she said, tugging on her seat belt, knowing that she was playing with fire, but unable to stop herself from striking the matches. ‘A good meal is the least I owe you for rescuing my cucumber ice cream. And saving my nails.’ She looked up and in that moment she knew exactly what he was doing. His reluctance had nothing to do with tiredness, or being driven by a woman. He was simply trying to find a polite way to excuse himself from the invitation that she’d thrown at him, and hadn’t given him a chance to refuse.

That was her. Organising, a bit bossy... Well, she had to be if she wanted to get anything done. But this was different.

All day they’d been fencing with one another, touching close, kissing close. They weren’t kids. They both understood how easy it would be to step over a line that should not, must not be crossed.

There was her life plan to consider and he probably had someone, somewhere waiting for him. He’d been kind, more helpful than she’d had any right to expect, but that was all. The kiss had meant nothing.

Ignoring a sharp little tug of disappointment, she said, ‘On the other hand, gravy in the eyebrows is never a good look and, although I wouldn’t have said anything, it’s obvious that you’re in desperate need of some beauty sleep.’

That provoked a wry smile. ‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it. Get in. I’ll drop you at Ria’s.’

‘No need. It’s out of your way and I need to loosen up. I’m not used to sitting at a desk all day.’

It wasn’t—out of her way—but despite an almost overwhelming desire to drag him home, feed him and tuck him up beneath her duck-down duvet so that he could sleep the clock round in comfort, she could see that he meant it and she kept her mouth shut as he took a step back.

She should be grateful.

She wasn’t the mother-earth type, brewing up herbs, making her own bread, creating out-of-this-world ices like Ria. Her world involved spreadsheets and cost accounting and a five-year plan that would put her name alongside the legendary local businesswomen Amaryllis Jones, Willow Armstrong, Veronica Kavanagh, who’d paved the way, who were her inspiration.

Besides, any man who travelled in places where there was no mail service had to be capable of taking care of himself. Meanwhile, she had worlds to conquer, millions to make. Falling in lust with a man on the move was absolutely the last thing in the entire world she was ever going to do.

She shut the van door, lowered the window. ‘You’re quite sure? About the lift? I wouldn’t want you passing out on the footpath.’

‘Quite sure. Please give my apologies to your grandmother. I have no doubt that her pie will be wonderful, but I wouldn’t do it justice.’

‘Actually, when I said a good meal, I had my fingers crossed. Dinner with The Herbs tends to be a bit of a gamble. You may have had a lucky escape,’ she said as she put the van into gear. ‘Thanks for your help, today, Alexander. I really appreciate it and if you do hear from Ria will you ask her to call me?’

‘Give me your number.’ He took out his phone and programmed it into the memory, then nodded briefly, stepped back.

She sat for a moment, just looking at him until she realised that he was waiting for her to leave. He still had his phone in his hand and was probably going to call a taxi the minute she’d gone.

She gave him a little toot and eased out into the traffic. It was slow moving and Alexander passed her while she was waiting for the traffic lights to change.

He must have seen the van but he didn’t slow or look around. She, on the other hand, watched him, a rather large lump in her throat, as he ate up the distance with a long, effortless stride. Then an impatient toot from behind warned her that the lights had changed and she was forced to turn with the one-way flow of traffic that would take her home.

It was only when she was pulling into the drive that the ‘out of your way’ penny dropped. He hadn’t asked for Scoop!’s address, but it was on the sub-lease he’d prepared. He must have Googled Scoop! at some point during the day—she’d have done the same thing in his place—and, having discovered that the office was on the Haughton Manor estate, he’d assumed that she lived there, too.

‘Wrong sister, Mr West,’ she murmured, feeling just a touch smug. ‘Not quite as smart as you think you are.’

* * *

Alexander headed for the river, stopping only to pick up fish and chips that he took to a bench beside the water, tossing more to the ducks than he ate himself. Wishing that he’d gone with Sorrel to share a family supper. It had been a very long time since he’d eaten home cooking.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been the pie that he’d wanted to taste.

Either the jet lag was worse than usual or he’d been in the jungle too long. Without a woman for too long. The heat had been there from the moment she’d turned around. A two-way glow that should have made it one easy step to the kind of brief fling that, when all the stars lined up, he indulged in on his flying trips home.

This morning the stars had appeared to be in perfect alignment but he’d known from the moment his lips touched hers that he’d made a mistake.

There had been nothing bold about her response to his kiss. Her lips had trembled beneath his tongue, her response a melting sigh, rather than a bold welcome. He’d known enough women to recognise that she was not the ‘brief fling’ type and brief was the only kind he could offer. A relationship conducted by satellite was never going to work. He’d tried it and had the returned engagement ring and Dear John letter to prove it.

He’d done his best to turn the kiss into an insult, hoping to send her running, but she’d had too much to lose and now his head was filled with the image of a body a man could lose himself in, a wayward curl that would not lie down, a soft giggle that made him hard just thinking about it.

He balled the paper, tossed it into a bin and set off along the towpath, walking the long day at a desk out of his bones. Walking off the restless energy of a libido on the rampage. Already missing her quick smile, her eagerness, her passion.

How many times today had he come close to repeating that kiss?

In his head he’d taken her on Ria’s desk, against the freezer, his ice-cold lips against hot, hard nipples.

Maybe, he thought as he strode out in the gathering dusk, he’d misread the signals. Maybe if he went to Cranbrook Park tomorrow she’d repeat the invitation. Except that she didn’t expect him to turn up to lend a hand at the Jefferson event. He’d seen the exact moment when she’d got the message, taken a mental step back and let him off the hook with her graceful exit.

A wise fish would ignore the siren voice whispering ‘This one...’ in his ear and swim away while he had the chance and, kicking his shoes off, he plunged into the river.